Did you know that 89% of consumers who experience poor service with your brand will knock on your competitor’s door? This is what research conducted by Forrester revealed. Another study by McKinsey showed that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. So, the success of your business is in the hands of your customer service team.
Key to Driving Customer Engagement
Did you know that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience? And sometimes, the impact is irreversible. So make sure, your customer’s are delighted every time they reach out to you. Here are some tips to ensure just that:
1. Fortify your customer service skills:
Make sure your team has the right set of skills and attitude to serve your customers right, since your CRM software cannot compensate for shortcomings in this area. Here are the skills to look for while hiring:
- Empathy, consistency and patience. Some callers will be enraged while others can be curious or chatty. The rep should be able to provide high quality services, irrespective of the client’s reaction.
- Adaptability. The agent must be able to understand the different types of clients, their moods and their expectations from the company, and should be able to adapt to their style to offer better assistance.
- Clear communication. Make sure your agents clearly understand the company’s offering, terms and conditions and special offers, if any, and are able to convey the same in simple and precise language.
- Work ethics. Time management, loyalty to the organization and optimism are the keys to drive customer engagement. The agent must always strive for customer-satisfaction but the company’s interests should be the guiding light.
- Knowledge. Customers rely on the executives for their inquiries. Make sure the agents have detailed knowledge of your products and/or services and should handle at least 88% of the queries.
Make sure your agents have the required skills; you can check the same with the surveys, questionnaire, demo calls, live call recording and customer feedback.
2. Training your customer service team:
Once you hire the right set of people, it is important to train them and motivate them to enhance customer engagement and their productivity level. Here are the important considerations for your customer service team:
- Analyze the training need. Ask the supervisors to listen to and monitor agent calls and provide feedback on their performance, based on the call and on the client’s feedback. Mark the training requirements in three sections, soft skills, knowledge and technical skills.
- Arrange the training. Based on the reports submitted, arrange for a training session for each of the three sections. Thereafter, arrange for a demo session to understand the effectiveness of the training session. If a significant improvement is not visible, consider second and third sessions of training.
Learning is a continuous process, so make sure you arrange these sessions periodically to accelerate the rate of customer engagement. Also, make sure you incentivize your employees by recognizing their efforts. You can opt for monetary incentives like bonus, commission and so on, or social incentives like award for the best employee of the month and so on. Happy employees will lead to better customer engagement.