This post was originally published on lessonly.com.
If someone ever asked you if you know what customer service is, you might scoff. Most everyone knows what customer service is and experiences it daily. I know when I end a transaction if it was bad customer service, good customer service, or excellent customer service. When I try to define it, however, I might come up with a vague explanation of how excellent customer service is an experience that leaves me wanting to come back to that business. Fortunately, when I asked the team to define excellent customer service, they came through.
Explaining customer service
Before we make the jump to excellent customer service, it’s important to understand what customer service is in the first place and how important it is to any business, B2B or B2C. Customer service is in any interaction between the business and the customer. Customer service can make or break any company through customer retention.
Sometimes, the company’s personnel are directly impacted by their customer service. When representatives are offering bad customer service the entire day, it can bring down their attitude. By offering excellent customer service, your representatives will want to stick around for longer. Take Zappos for example, they offer their customer service representatives bonuses to leave as a test to see how much they value their career at Zappos.
Finding your definition of excellent customer service
As a manager, you have to decide and form a strategy of how you want your customers feeling after they walk out your company doors, hang up the phone, or close the chat window. To do this successfully, you have to know what your customers truly expect from an interaction with your organization. Whether they are looking for just a simple, straight-forward transaction, or advice from someone who understands industry trends, your representatives should be able to handle either quickly.
Likely, you want your customers to feel like they should keep coming back. But, do you want your customer service to be good or great?
Customer service training to the rescue
When you invest in training your customer service representatives on policy, standards, product, and new feature updates regularly, you take your customer service to the next level. Simply hiring courteous people often isn’t enough. Customers return due to the experience of the representatives, and they even will pay more for a product expert.
By training representatives, you ensure that your customer service team stays sharp on every aspect of your product. If you are a large company, you might have to make a few transfers due to access control, but your customers won’t mind when every transaction is handled quickly and simply.
If you are looking for customer service training software, I know a pretty good one. Check out Lessonly here.
