Anyone who directly handles or deals with customers knows that it is not an easy job. Despite the common challenges faced by customer service professionals, there are ways you can position yourself for success.
The following 6 skills are necessary if you want to offer a great support experience to your customers.
Patience
When working in customer service, surprises (often unpleasant) and issues occur occasionally. However, without some level of patience, you’ll find it hard to keep customers happy or remain happy at work yourself.
You really have no idea when the next customer will get upset, or if your computer will crash in the next minute. Learning to always exude grace, confidence and patience in the face of any challenge or hurdles can make all the difference with your next customer. In fact, this is the reason why there is a demand in call center outsourcing to the Philippines. Agents are trained to be patient to angry customers and still deal with them in the most respectful manner.
Time Management Skills
It is important to be polite and to spend some extra time with customers attentively listening to their needs, complaints or concerns. You also need to limit the amount of time you can dedicate to each customer, however, so you need to work out how to answer and satisfy customers in a timely and efficient manner.
The trick here is to apply critical time management skills when you realise you simply cannot help a customer. If you don’t know the solution to a problem, the best kind of professional support will hand the customer over to someone who does.
Communicate Clearly
It’s important to be aware of how some of your communication patterns apply to customers or how they could interpret them, so it’s best to be careful when you’re asking questions about a situation.
Sound Product or Service Knowledge
The best customer service professionals have a great understanding of their products or services and how they work and can usually help the customer with a variety of issues. When you sell a product, you need to understand it inside out. Likewise, if your business provides software solutions, you should recognise the highest levels of their features.
Knowing the product inside and out will improve your customer service experience and will make sure your customers are happy and satisfied. After all, you won’t know how to help consumers in difficulty without fully understanding the product.
Customer Psychology
You won’t always be able to see customers face to face, however, that shouldn’t excuse you from having a basic understanding of buyer psychology and being able to read the customer’s true state of mind.
You certainly don’t want to misinterpret a customer and end up providing poor service or bad advice as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication with a client.
Use Positive Language
Good customer service means that you can make minor adjustments to your conversation patterns, which can really help to create happy customers.
Language is a key part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) build impressions of you and your business based on the kind of communication you use.
Responding to inquiries and complaints with positive language will greatly influence how the consumer receives your responses.
Protect Yourself
The last thing you want is a bad relationship with a customer to lead to legal issues and large financial costs which cause your business to really struggle. Protect yourself and your business with professional indemnity insurance which will cover the cost of compensation bills and legal fees.
