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Customer service is one of the main pillars of a good business. Offering good customer service is not as easy as it sounds because of the fact that it works kind of like a machine in that it will only function properly if all of the intricate cogs and parts move as one. Hence, if you want your company to start offering good customer service you should look into creating a culture of customer service within the company. Here is how you can do that.
#1 Hire the Right People
It is impossible to build a customer service culture with individuals that are not already dedicated to the field of customer service in every way possible. If you start your company with a hiring process that would weed out demotivated individuals, you will be able to rest assured that the company you are building will be more inclined toward a customer oriented approach from the ground up. It can be difficult to make sure that everyone is customer service oriented, but at the very least what you can do is try to make sure that the people in leadership positions will be of this mindset.
#2 Start With the Basics
Training is an essential part of inculcating a culture of customer service into your company. One mistake that a lot of people make with this particular aspect of the inculcation process is that they try to get too specialized from the get go. While specialized information is certainly going to be useful in the future, the basics are what will truly help you achieve your goal of developing a culture of customer service in your company. The great thing about basic training is that it teaches your CSRs to take the next steps on their own.
#3 Make the Job Easy
Being a customer service representative (CSR) is never going to be easy. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of roadblocks that would prevent your CSRs from feeling comfortable and at ease in the workplace, the customers being the biggest problem that people are going to have to face. If you use a ticket management system such as the one offered by Kayako, you will find that the job will become a lot easier for your CSRs to perform. This will make customer service orientation a less hostile proposition for your CSRs.
#4 Give CSRs Autonomy
A lot of people tend to micromanage when it comes to a lot of different aspects of their company. This is never a good thing, but this is particularly true for things like customer service. The fact of the matter is that in the field of customer service, time is money. The longer it takes for a customer to get what they want the less likely it will be that they are going to end up satisfied with the service you have provided. If your CSRs have the autonomy to make the right decision, they will be able to resolve things a lot quicker. The key is to train them to make the right decision without needing you to hold their hand.
#5 Create a Brand of Customer Service
Customer service is often a vague term. It can mean anything to anyone, so it is important that you get all of your CSRs as well as the various other people on your team on the same page. Create a singular vision that everyone has to follow, a brand of sorts that would allow the people that are on your team to get a sense of how they need to behave. Employees can often be very loyal to a company as long as it is good to them, so if you create the kind of singular vision for your team members here it will give them the motivation to stay committed to the task at hand and better understand how they can use the aforementioned autonomy that you have given them to ensure that all of your customers are given the kind of customer service that they deserve.
#6 Become a Role Model
You can’t reasonably expect your employees to give the job their all unless you are willing to do the same. If you inculcate a culture of customer satisfaction and service into your own behavior, you can rest assured that your employees are definitely going to end up doing the same as well. You need to lead by example because this is about more than just making your employees work harder. The goal here is to develop a specific kind of culture within a company, a specific kind of mindset. The fact of the matter is that it requires out of the box thinking if you truly want it to work out for you.
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