Confidence Counts: Boosting the Morale of your Customer Service Representatives

What is crucial to maximizing effectiveness in a customer service job? Treat others as you would expect to be treated yourself. A cliche, far from profound, yet the solutions to the most impactful problems can often be pared down to understanding the truth in a simple saying.

You’ll see complaints and quibbles with customer service experiences galore being shared online. The consumers’ ability to voice their concerns is not limited to the duration of a phone call. Pertinently, a significant portion of the feedback on PissedConsumer.com relates to customer service skills and customer/company communication-related issues.

In fact, a double-blind survey conducted from July 16 to August 18, 2020 of over 15,000 consumers and business buyers across 27 countries, revealed that 79% of consumers and 85% of business buyers feel that a company’s customer experience is at least equal in importance to its products or services.

Is customer service a skill? Absolutely. Customer experience, customer care, and customer satisfaction are vital factors in customer retention and reputation building, and all hinge on the customer service skills of your business.

High expectations to deliver

Product and quality attract and retain customers. Yet, time and trust is often valued higher than cost, and from the perspective of the consumer, every minute taken out of their normal schedule to deal with a company to resolve an issue accrues a debt.

The pressure on customer service staff to solve any issues that a customer brings to them is therefore very high, and arriving at a solution promptly, efficiently, and with as little back and forth as possible is the ideal.

Pair this expectation with the absolute necessity to remain calm and composed when on the receiving end of emotionally charged customers, and it becomes clear that it benefits no one to place staff in a customer service job without adequately preparing them with targeted training and briefing on likely scenarios.

Neglected staff and the impact on your business

The consequences of poor customer service performance are far from negligible, and the impact of such a weak link can rear its head in many ways.

Loss of repeat custom and a hit to growth are significant eventualities. Those that make the effort to contact customer service are more likely to vent dissatisfaction publicly if they feel their concerns have not been sufficiently addressed.

Negative online reviews, a poor at a glance overall score on consumer feedback websites, and a hit to your company’s reputation can all ensue as your customer service setup is tested and the cracks become more and more apparent.

It’s hard to retain good CS representatives as it is, hence, we should not add more stress to their workload. What can be done? We can reduce the stress on Customer Service representatives by changing the internal processes of the business.

Reducing the pressure on customer service representatives

Customer service training and oversight via an experienced customer service manager are the clear paths to success in this area.

A confident, effective customer service manager will be resourceful and proactive, backed up with a tool kit of thorough product knowledge, answers, and applicable techniques to help them guide a call away from escalation and towards resolution.

A system incorporating easily navigable product, process, and service information will simplify the work of a customer service representative, and not only enable more tailored engagement with the customer, but also reduce call and waiting times.

Furthermore, such streamlining of processes will bolster an agent’s ability to deal with an inquiry single-handedly. In a survey of 1046 consumers who had a recent experience with a customer service organization, 72% stated their poor experience was based on having to explain their issue to multiple people.

Seriously consider the difficulties involved in a customer service job. The companies that take customer experience and customer service skills seriously will focus on this key aspect as crucial to improvement and long-term success.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.