There are many names for it – customer service, customer satisfaction, customer support, and, more recently, customer success. But whatever your company terminology, ensuring that your customers have a positive experience when interacting with your organization should be a strategic facet of company culture. The best and most successful brands have customer service as a foundation. What does customer service mean to your business?
Providing excellent customer service enhances your brand, boosts your bottom line, and creates loyal customers. High levels of customer satisfaction will help your company to stand out and rise above the competition. With that in mind, here are some expert tips for developing a powerful customer service ethos in your business.
- Create a trustworthy culture: All healthy relationships are based on trust, whether personally or in business. How company leadership establishes trust from the top will provide the basis for all company interactions. Experts agree that trust is developed when a culture of honest interaction and transparency is relentlessly pursued – from leadership to employees to customers.
- Develop company values: The most successful customer-centric companies emphasize customer service in their core values. But these values should not simply exist on the pages of a handbook. They should be taught, shared, and practiced in such a way that they inspire employees to be their best. When employees are motivated, customer interactions are organically improved.
- Hire like-minded people: To build a solid customer-centric organization, leadership must hire the right people to represent core values to their clients. During the recruitment and hiring process, ask open-ended questions regarding customer service situations that commonly arise at the company and ensure that their core values align with yours. The company can teach specifics, but basic principles are often personally inherent.
- Educate and empower employees: Engaged and knowledgeable employees drive customer satisfaction, and happy customers raise corporate profit. Employees are more empowered when they are given opportunities to learn, grow and develop new skills and the tools they need to perform their job well. Allowing employees to become experts in their roles will enhance customer experience significantly.
- Think beyond customer issues: Once employees are educated and empowered, they can serve customers beyond solving their immediate problems. Train teams to provide next-level tips, best practices, and trends to establish trust and build relationships. Further educating customers regarding products and services makes the business sticky and enhances customer retention.
- Emphasize honesty in all customer interactions: Honesty at all levels is vital, as no one wants to provide business to an untrustworthy organization. Honesty regarding the customer experience means owning and acknowledging if a problem occurred rather than trying to cover an issue up. Customer service representatives should be trained to take personal responsibility for the issue and be genuine in their responses. If the business understands that everyone makes mistakes – and communicates that to their employees – they will feel comfortable being honest and transparent with customers, creating genuinely authentic customer interactions.
It All Starts with Knowledge
Whether educating employees on company culture or providing valuable insights to clients, the ability to effectively communicate information is vital for solid customer service policies.
When properly utilized, the tacit knowledge captured by an organization is a valuable tool to ensure that all aspects of the customer experience are optimized. The KLONE Organizer gives companies a robust platform to aggregate and disseminate mission-critical information throughout the organization without requiring management to respond constantly to inquiries.
If you have ever wondered, “how can we clone our best people?”, contact us. KLONE provides the tools and strategies companies need to streamline information and achieve success.