What happens when your frontline employees don’t seem to have customer service skills? Customer service is more than being polite and helpful. Service needs to begin the moment a customer steps foot in your business and carried throughout every interaction they have with your company. If you want to retain customers and build rapport, you need to build consistency in the service you provide throughout every level of the company.
Imagine a company that delivers different levels of service from frontline employees to support professionals. I had an experience once where the support professional advised me to avoid communicating with the frontline employees. Can you imagine that? This company has a problem on their hands. Have you encountered this experience or does this describe your company?
Don’t panic! Applying the following quick tips and providing training to all of your workers will improve your staff’s customer service skills and create support professionals in no time.
Why provide training to ALL of your workers? If you only train one department, your business will be described like the one mentioned above. Avoid this at all costs.
The following are three steps to help your staff improve their skills and become support professionals:
Step One: Meet Customer’s Expectations
Employees need to keep in mind they are striving to meet customer’s expectations, not their own. This can be hard, especially if the employee feels like they know what the customer needs. If workers keep the clients expectations in mind, they will have happier customers.
Step Two: Focus Your Attention
When communicating with customers, workers need to give their undivided attention. Seems like common sense, right? Wrong. Often times, workers feel like they know the answer to every buyers question and they forget to listen. Employees need to give each customer attention tailored to their needs. This can come from asking questions to guide the conversation or repeating the clients answer to show understanding.
Step Three: Emphasize the Positive
Workers need to understand the impact of a positive attitude. Learning how to phrase situations that arise in a positive manner can affect the way a customer sees the situation. This can take training and coaching for staff to grasp this customer service skill and how to switch what might seem like a negative situation into a positive.
These three tips will get your staff improve their customer service skills and move in the right direction to all becoming support professionals. Your employees have what it takes, so give it a shot. Your customers will thank you.
Hi Sarah,
Point one is key in customer service. I am sure most readers will remember this saying “Treat the customer the way you like to be treated”. Well some people don’t care or have very low expectations based on how they get treated by others.
Great customer service is treating the customer the way the customer likes to be treated.
Nik
Making sure frontline employees have a solid handle on service is a must. So, too, is ensuring they are backed by managers that get the value is also critical. This video explains why managers can break or make a service culture: http://www.upyourservice.com/video-theater/your-middle-managers-can-make-or-break-a-superior-service-culture