This post was originally published by Mitch Causey on lessonly.com
Today, we hear a lot about empowering customer service representatives, and while we agree, we cannot overlook the importance of a customer service policy. If your employees are completely empowered, you may not think that your company needs this kind of policy. It’s important to remember that, although your representatives are in complete control, you want to offer your customers consistent service across all representatives.
Imagine if the phone line is struck by lightning, resulting in a classic body-swap of a customer and a representative. Your interim representative would be lost without a customer service policy. Of course, they may initially have bigger concerns than providing great customer service, but in the meantime, they should be able to look over a customer service policy and give satisfactory customer service. They would just need to survive in customer service until the next lightning storm.
That might be a stretch, but offering a repository resource for your customer service reps is a great way to refresh on policies they may have forgotten.
Consistency
If your customer service representative team is empowered, you want them to be able to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. But, you don’t want the customer’s happiness to come at the expense of the business. Decisions must weigh out customer loyalty versus immediate impact.
A decision to make a customer happy one instance is great if it will keep them around for a while. But, you don’t want a representative giving lifetime discounts to a customer if it is only to resolve the particular issue.
Instead, keep your customer service representatives at the same level. Provide them with a list of offers to incentivize customers. If a representative is always going to the top level of perks, your company could be missing out on revenue. Contrarily, if a representative is only willing to go to the first perk, your company could be missing out on the satisfaction of a customer.
Refresh
Remembering is hard. With a customer service training software, your team can easily review the policies whether they are stagnant or ever-changing. If your company bumps up the first discount offering from 10% to 15% if the purchase was no earlier than 90 days ago, it’s easy to get confused. You don’t want someone offering a 90% discount to a customer that is thinking about buying in 10 days.
A refresher course is also a nice way to pass along new additions to the customer service policy. If your company is quickly growing, the chances are you’ll find things that work better than others. New employees may have suggestions about what to change. Changing those things in a meeting or presentation setting can be a hassle. “Was everyone at the meeting?” “Was everyone paying attention?”
With eLearning, you can easily assign out a refresher course or let your employees review it when they need to recall the new policies.
Interested in starting a draft of your own customer service policy? Click here.
Interested in building your own refresher course for your customer service team? We know a great place to start training here.
