Modern businesses can’t afford for customer service to be an afterthought.
Why? Because bad customer service is bad for your reputation.
Happy customers are less likely to talk about their experiences, while unhappy customers are more likely to vent to a wider group of people. A study by American Express found that satisfied customers tell around 8 people about their positive experience, while unsatisfied customers complain to 21 different people.
Not only that, but consumers don’t always stick around to give a business a second chance after one bad experience. In fact, 86% of consumers have stopped buying from a company after a negative experience.
How to Create a Kickass Customer Service Strategy
1. Develop a Customer Service Vision
The idea of putting your customers first isn’t just something your customer-facing employees need to think about. It should stem from management and flow down to every role in your organization. Otherwise, company policies, training, and quotas will be created to serve the company, rather than its customers.
If there’s too much emphasis on increasing profits or upselling products that customers don’t necessarily want or need, the company is valuing itself over its customer base. Of course, looking for ways to expand your margins is important, but it should not be done at the expense of your customers.
"Satisfied customers tell around 8 people about their positive experience, while unsatisfied customers complain to 21 different people."
Your customers’ needs, wants, and concerns should inform your company policy, offerings, and how you provide support.
2. Set Clear, Attainable Goals
Once management and team leaders understand the newly-defined customer service vision, it’s time to communicate it to the rest of the team. The best way to do this is by setting attainable goals that reflect your vision.
You might start by outlining your goals and plan for how to prioritize customer support. Then, consider how individual employees can contribute to achieving these goals.
Create guidelines to ensure all team members provide the same level of thoughtful, reliable customer service. Introduce these guidelines when onboarding new employees and ensure current employees have an opportunity to ask clarifying questions.
3. Start Building Your Dream Team
To make sure your customer service strategy is implemented effectively, you need to find the right type of people to join your team. Even if someone looks great on paper and has the technical skills you’re looking for, they might not be the right candidate for an open position if they clash with your company culture or ideals.
Every candidate should be tested for cultural fit during the interview process – involve HR in coming up with relevant questions or benchmarks. Then, once you decide on who to hire, provide them with the right training to bring out their full potential. This should include helping them understand how their role intersects with your big-picture focus on customer service.
Make it clear that everyone is working to support the same set of values. Put every new team member, regardless of title or rank, through the same customer service training program to ensure you provide a consistent experience.
4. Incentivize a Customer-First Mindset
Another way to encourage your team to actively improve customer experiences is to reward any employee behavior you want others to model. Your reward doesn’t need to be monetary; in fact, it can be just about anything that reinforces the type of behavior you want to see more of.
For example, if a customer sends an email praising a support agent by name, forward it to the entire team with a congratulatory message. If your team uses Slack to communicate, use the ‘Hey Taco!’ plugin to send fun taco-themed rewards to show employee appreciation.
You could also give out a monthly or quarterly award for anyone who provides exceptional customer service. Maybe even allow employees to nominate their peers to inspire comradery and a healthy sense of competition.
5. Empower Employees to Be Customer Service Superheroes
The more difficult it is for your employees to go out on a limb to make a customer happy, the more frustrating the situation is for everyone involved.
Unfortunately, there are a number of ways businesses prevent their customer service agents from providing the best service possible. Whether it’s a complex approval process, an inability to offer discounts, or a general lack of authority, if a policy hinders employee performance in any way, it likely needs to be revisited.
In many cases, the solution is to institute a more flexible policy or revise the existing one to support your customer-oriented goals.
Above all, aim to empower your support agents. Create policies that enable them to solve issues creatively so they’re capable of rising to meet the unique needs of every customer.
6. Be True to Your Word
It can take years to build a strong brand for your business, but it only takes one broken promise to shatter a customer’s perception of it.
As a general rule, try to under-promise and over-deliver. This means no one on your team should make impossible promises, like telling a customer that they’ll never experience a software bug again.
Encourage your customer service agents to be honest when something is beyond their control or when an issue is taking longer than predicted to resolve. Honesty builds trust, and trust builds customer loyalty.
7. Reply to All Customer Comments – the Good and the Bad
Done right, publicly responding to a negative review or customer complaint is one of the best things a business can do for its reputation. Not only does it allow you to defuse a potential PR disaster on social media or a review site, but it also allows you to address the concerns of the individual customer.
That said, you should still try to respond to all customer comments – or at least as many as possible. Even if it’s someone congratulating you on a new launch or a positive review of your latest product, it is important to engage with your customers in both positive and negative contexts.
Measuring Your Customer Service Success
Regardless of the specifics of your customer service strategy, the only way to know if it’s providing the type of support your customers want is to quantify your success. There are a few ways you can approach this, including tracking these common customer service metrics.
What Is a Service Dispatcher?
A service dispatcher takes incoming customer calls and creates a dispatch ticket for each service call. Your responsibilities in this career include keeping organized and updated customer files in a database and creating contract proposals if relevant. Other duties include assisting with marketing as needed and keeping hard copies of customer files and billing. As a service dispatcher, you can work in a variety of industries, such as automotive, HVAC, emergency services, and more. In HVAC positions, you maintain technician schedules and dispatch technicians as service calls come in from customers. As an emergency service dispatcher, you answer emergency calls, collect vital information, and alert the necessary response team quickly and calmly. In the automotive industry, you also answer customer service calls, schedule service tickets for technicians, order special parts as needed, and invoice customers.
How to Become a Service Dispatcher
The qualifications needed to become a service dispatcher include a high school diploma or GED certificate and two years of experience in customer service or dispatching. You must have advanced customer service skills and a positive and friendly attitude when speaking with customers. Employers also expect you to have the ability to multitask. You should be detail-oriented, able to work on a team in a fast-paced environment, and able to use a computer to maintain accurate records in a database.
Service Dispatcher Job Description Sample
With this Service Dispatcher job description sample, you can get a good idea of what employers are looking for when hiring for this position. Remember though, every employer is different and each will have unique qualifications when they hire for their Service Dispatcher position.
Summary
Our company is looking for a Service Dispatcher to take incoming calls and help facilitate the dispatch of our service professionals to people in need. In this role, it’s your responsibility to carefully listen to each caller, obtain vital information over the phone, take note of the schedules of technicians and other service professionals, and swiftly respond to the request. You must ensure that a service team attends to each customer, and you must keep organized notes or records of these calls in our database. Aside from dispatching, your other duties may include invoicing customers, making purchase orders for supplies, and organizing our file system of service calls.
Duties and Responsibilities
Answer a high volume of calls, listening intently to the caller’s information
Dispatch the appropriate service professionals to the job site
Schedule service appointments as neededInvoice customers and help keep track of billing information
Organize our file systems
Make purchase orders for supplies as needed
Requirements and Qualifications
High school diploma or GED certificate
Experience in a similar role
Strong organizational, multitasking, and communication skillsExcellent listening, customer service, and phone skills
Basic computer proficiency
Experience using Microsoft Outlook for vendor management.
So, gear up for building a sustainable relationship with prospects, get a healthy sales pipeline and close more deals. Contact us today! Get in touch with us at randy.mebs@gmail.com
For more details, feel free to visit www.mebsph.com/ or contact our company at +1 (917) 725 2180. Check out Mancao E-connect Business Solutions (MEBS) and learn about their top-rated Customer Service Representatives, Lead Generators, Appointment Setters, Virtual Assistants, Cold Callers, and Telemarketers perfect for your business in cities like Tampa, Beverly Hills, Orlando, Los Angeles, and many more.