Tag: supportbench-02

Customer Service Automation: Why It’s the Future of Enterprise Service Automation

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Delivering continuous quality customer service is always an ambitious task, but if up to the challenge, you can thrive, with some automation. Our team of professionals at Supportbench, experienced in helping organizations and teams deliver high quality customer support through the Supportbench platform, can help you with your journey ahead.

From defining service terms to dealing with the sales process, even just up front, big changes happen as soon as a service agent is onboarded and starts working. Data management, document sharing, processing transaction information, and coding processes come into focus, contributing to an enhanced level of performance and efficiency. These changes often help simplify the customer experience and drive increased sales of your products and services.

To assist you as you turn customer experience into profit, we’ve put together a list of benefits and features that help your customer service operations go from bad to best. Check it out below.

One of Supportbench’s core market benefits is the power of unification. Using our extensive experience, our dedicated service team designs and builds customer service applications to suit our clients’ unique needs. These solutions can and often do take a few months to complete, but you’ll be able to turn on the tools to perform routine tasks and scale up your expertise as needed.

Attention to Content Retention

The value of the ability to gather your customers’ content right away during an interaction creates a tremendous leverage point with a potential new client. They’ll start a project with minimal knowledge about your offering, but it will develop over time, eventually leading to a long-term relationship where they understand how your business operates and how to use it in order to meet their needs.

Simplified Workflows & Processes

Being a team of realists, we’re tempted to think that customers aren’t going to grasp how tedious and time-consuming it is to do customer service. By implementing workflows and strategically thinking through the onboarding process, you can help drive adoption, retention, as well as the added bonus of decreased influx of new customer inquiries on how to use specific features.

Timeline Automation

Timeline automation makes operations easier at all times. It saves time and helps with analytics, both in terms of identifying risks and gaining insights as you head into a new conversation. One key grievance that customers will often express when dealing with customer service is how they feel like they’re being tossed around and dealing with so many different people or repeating the same information over and over.

By taking advantage of Supportbench’s synchronized and unified Customer Support platform, any agent who is working with a new customer inquiry, or even an existing one, can easily get insights immediately into the case history and how to pick things up where they were left off.

However, it’s important to note that the process of training customer support agents to be diligent about reviewing previous information prior to engagement is up to the policies and guidelines set by your company. Make sure that your agents take advantage of the tools available to them.

An automation-driven customer experience increases productivity and consistency, which brings increased likelihood of winning new customers. This is true regardless of whether your solution is fully automated or you use onboarding activation.

Whether you’re providing an on-premise software like DocuSign or providing a hosted solution like Sendler, you can improve the customer experience by strategically building out processes that are supported by automation.

This allows you to bypass expensive personnel by using proactive tools to help the agents get into the mindset of their customers. It’s also scalable, helping you with low or remote locations while not compromising the quality of the experience.

DocuSign Case Study: Optimized Onboarding

When we launched a product, we wanted it to be incredibly easy to use, and to be easy to use. Once we were able to achieve this through automation, we saw a real lift in customer satisfaction. “We used DocuSign to sign our SaaS, and it was so much easier than other ways. We’re now going to use the system more,” shared Georgia, an early adopter.

What’s more, DocuSign has solid compliance policies in place that clients are able to implement to complement them. There are simple things that we like to d on for GDPR compliance, such as credit reporting and certifications. While some of this can be done manually, there’s value in automation so you can carry out these tasks entirely online or even at an offline location, like a service center.

Notifications and tracking

Checking the status of your new customer is critical to the customer service process, but it’s also a challenge, since it can vary greatly across a variety of companies. In addition to hardware, everything from good and bad CRM integration to documentation must be considered. Our consulting team performs custom deep dives to see how well a firm’s platform-based offering compares with other providers, but we also run a competitive analysis and download data from multiple vendors and proprietary tools, such as Hubspot, to help with training and scheduling and the ability to notifies your customers. We also work with companies on how they can manage the assets that customers have digitally and automate this process.

Right at the start of the journey we develop a comprehensive call center workflow plan, such as a Sales Stage Plan, an onboarding stage plan, a service recovery plan and an activation stage plan, which lets us start configuring a strategy that enables our first responders to carry out the audit promptly.

Software-as-a-Service

The beauty of web-based CRM is that it’s easy to get the engine to run. In addition to the onboarding stage, we use the sales platform or platform to sign new customers. By doing so we can come up with a more personalized onboarding process, such as adding the customer’s relationship on their social channels, justing their identity on the platform and tracking their assets and contacts. It’s also a great way to introduce the customer to your tech stack.

Overnight response times and expertise

With DocuSign, we get to measure improvements very quickly in terms of the time between activation and the first calls to our site, including:

  • Time between the activation and the first call to the call center
  • Time to the first call to the first rep
  • Response time
  • Simplification

Service teams are busy and while there are sometimes difficulties, we see a clear lift in customer satisfaction when they’re able to serve our customers all night long with data, documents and signage—just in the time it would take them to craft it with pen and paper.

Industry best practices

A little-known fact is that DocuSign’s goal is to drive all of the various service worksite processes on line, while simultaneously making it easier to focus on re-training and repairs. New employees benefit, as well, as it helps them understand the what, why and how, for making any system-based services better. These systems include comprehensive onboarding, which is much easier to run than manual processes.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience

Ultimately, delivering an exemplary customer experience means providing exceptional service to your customers—as a human should. The customer service team is the emotional catalyst of an organization, but without what we call the “customer experience continuum,” it cannot deliver an exceptional service. Meaning, if the experience from the very beginning is a cultural and non-verbal power trip, then your great customer service team is likely falling short. If a customer service rep is universally ignored when they ask for a technician, then you’re serving your customer poorly and the relationship is likely to suffer. Doing a good job of training, mentoring and improving in numbers can certainly give your customer service team the ability to improve the customer experience, but doing it right requires the right tools, too.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

7 Steps to Drive Real Customer Support Improvement

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Many businesses have the same goals: to restore and improve customers’ trust and improve their bottom line. However, restoring trust, as well as increasing the revenue stream, for some businesses seems impossible.

In such cases, customer service can be the solution. Without customer service, consumers will search online, calling, emailing, (after all these tools are very expensive) or even post on social media. A simple Google search for customer service help or case studies can lead you to hundreds of examples.

We have examined thousands of case studies and hundreds of case studies that both gave an overall assessment of customer service initiatives as well as how to verify and audit the actual data, as well as how to differentiate it. The key takeaways for managers are:

1. Customer service takes years to build trust with customers

A company provides outstanding service but two out of three customers never know about it. This may be the reason why only 37% of US businesses are serving their customers as they should. As you can imagine, this can have a very significant impact on your bottom line as 70% of customers form their opinions about you based on customer service.

In fact, 90% of consumers will simply stop buying from you if you don’t fix your service issues. The customer journey begins with a business statement describing what your organization does. This is vital because, in the post-internet age, your competitors have so much more control over customer perception and opinions.

2. It’s not a minor issue

Your customers need your help to validate their opinions because trust is a priceless asset. Without this, your real value proposition becomes blurred as to who are really accountable for your customers’ experience and therefore how much they’re going to take your word for it.

In the absence of security for your data, your competitors become better at collecting information than you. This gives them a competitive vantage over you and can present the most severe problem to the rest of the field as well.

3. Customer service dominates the top five business top trends for 2020

Over 80% of businesses which have successful customer service overall will increase their market share.

Today’s automation plays a major role in customer service and this makes up for most of the mistakes, as well as in the inability to build an excellent customer service culture.

Despite it, there are certain lessons companies can take away by looking at both case studies and performance metrics in finance, healthcare, insurance, government, etc. They can easily check if their strategies are working out in practice and simply using additional variables like agents’ response time, how they’re training them, the amount of advertising dollars they’re spending on customer service (both online and offline) etc. can also provide valuable insights into the real performance of customer service.

4. Conduct an audit of the customer data

Let’s say you own a software company. Your next step is to visit the website of your top competitors and see what they can tell you about your customers. Additionally, using sites like G2.com that provide aggregated reviews from customers of rival products can show what customers are finding to be valuable and where there may be potential missteps. Using this data, you can get access to valuable customer data points of competitors that you may use to improve your customer support, positioning, and also for better understanding of market dynamics.

Furthermore, if you’re already a leer in customer service, we recommend making sure you make a point of having several performance audits and reviews along the way. Having multiple auditing sessions along the line might have a huge impact on your bottom line and this certainly helps you save yourself time, energy and money on the process.

5. Know how to answer every question

Back to customer support solutions, the most important aspect of a successful customer-service process is being able to answer every question. In order to avoid questions, the rest of your communication should be about what you can do to fix it and how you’re going to do it.

In many cases, your customers prefer email and you try to answer some questions manually, like who can they call, how, what kind of questions or how they should respond to some specific questions.

By knowing and working through the questions and answers, you can then start compiling and building an internal knowledge base to help support your team. Furthermore, you can even use this to build a public facing self-service knowledge base that allows your customers to find the answers before contacting you, offloading common questions from your customer support team.

The key is to make sure that you also have a customer support solution such as Supportbench that will allow you to respond instantly and actually even facilitate some better answers.

6. Identify the key factors on customer satisfaction

The ability to enhance your customers’ health score is what’s defined as your company’s ability to live up to your customers’ expectation for what your company is best known to do. There are many different issues, like tracking your customers after getting an order, direct communication and change, resolving issues, or providing more coverage in the event of a claim. That’s why it’s important to look at a customer’s journey from the beginning and measure how you can help your customers. As part of doing so, it’s crucial to understand their pain points and understand what you can do to identify problems, tackle questions, and adjust your service.

Additionally, it is vital to view potential customer service challenges in perspective of your company and get your KPIs on a weekly basis. And before you can start looking at customer satisfaction, you have to see these issues as a business opportunity. So the first step of identifying problems is taking an eye-opening look at your customer satisfaction overall.

Business logic is at the root of every problem, and that’s how you first get to know your customers. It’s important to know what their feedback is and how you could be improving the way you engage with them. Without taking those first steps, you might fail to see the big picture and miss a great idea of how to take action.

Most industries today would be shocked by the fact that attention to customer retention is incredibly poor. According to the Customer Service World, more than 55% of Americans were unsatisfied with their customer experience in 2017.

And the fact that US customers use 27 customer service agencies because they aren’t getting the help they need has also skyrocketed. That’s why it’s vital to prioritize fixing those issues. What started as a mistake can really negatively impact the entire customer experience. It’s important to develop systems that match each and every employee’s needs so that you are doing everything possible to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.

7. Get real on leading change

When it comes to effective customer service, leadership skills are a powerful part of it. Every time there is an issue with your business, it’s the responsibility of the business leadership to lead. You need to help shape the organization and help redefine the way customers interact with your company. Without change, you will continue to miss opportunities to build on your customer’s experience.

Customer satisfaction is the core of every relationship and for many consumers, that’s the number one touch point with your company. And in fact, even though those are two words that most companies don’t use in their daily messaging, people do use them.

Influencers are great to engage with your audience and you want to make sure they see value in your company. You must be there when customers want you to be there. And if you aren’t there, well that doesn’t translate to customer retention. It also means that you aren’t helping your customers get the service they need. They may be experiencing problems, but without knowing what you are doing, your next steps in communication may not lead anywhere good.

Once you know that 80% of all social media users dislike passive interaction and 85% of them are looking for engagement, you should be doing everything you can to satisfy that need. That is why being active with social media is crucial to customer satisfaction in 2020.

In some ways, a basic and simple guide to getting on social media that could improve your business. If you want to be there when people want you to be there, then you need to be there by listening to your customers and acting accordingly.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How to build a customer-service culture in your company

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Hiring a customer-service manager is the first step in bringing customer-service practices in your organization up to snuff.

But you don’t have to go through the trouble of hiring a consultant to make it happen; you can institute successful customer-service practices in your company by investing in everything from cultural training to customer service development. And to make sure you’re focused on developing the team, take the following steps to ensure you have a strong customer-service culture in your organization:

1. Work with an Experienced Customer-Service Trainer

Having an internal member of your team sit down and teach people at their pace is like watching paint dry: it takes time to get everyone on the same page. That’s why it makes sense to find a customer-service expert who can help companies across the country teach and train employees.

If your company doesn’t have one available, go to the experts at Glassdoor Workforce Solutions for the full list of best customer-service consultants.

2. Audit The Employees

If you want to build a winning customer-service culture in your company, you need to uncover where they’re finding themselves stumbling down the road and how can you help them realize success.

If you can’t find a way to upgrade their learning, look into how you can improve their job role or employee compensation package. This will give you a better idea of how to get them where they want to go.

If you have a company that’s growing and needs more new hires, find a way to attract and engage this new talent to your company. This can either mean investing more in their package or investing in training them on their chosen paths so that they can succeed.

3. Deliver on your Company Values

While it’s encouraging to see a company working on the right values, it’s even more important that a company follow through on them. This means having policies in place that ensure that the team understands and upholds the company’s values.

At the end of the day, your employees aren’t interested in joining your company just because you have policies that say so. They’re looking for a company that believes in them. For example, a company that won’t charge its employees fees for programs and training that would make the employee more productive and the company more money is more than likely going to keep them happy.

4. Stay Alert And Proactive

Regardless of what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, if you’re not doing what you need to do, you can’t expect your team to fall in line. Instead, you’re going to need to be constantly active in your company.

For example, look into how you can train your employees and how your company can attract new talent to get better at what it does. Then, stay on top of it, stay aware, and always be proactive.

If you were able to outline all of the steps mentioned above in this guide, you’ll have a strong foundation in place to meet all of your company’s needs.

4. Delivering On Service To The Benefits Of A Great Brand

Your best customers are a reflection of the brand that you’re representing. If your organization isn’t known for communicating with its customers, and if you’re not known for its exceptional customer service, then your business will die. Because today, quality Customer Service is an expectation, not a nice to have.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to build a great brand. Namely, you can work on building a strong reputation of customer service.

If you’re already known for outstanding customer service, then this will make you a well-respected leader in your field. Then, with a solid reputation, you’ll be able to maintain it. Therefore, as they say, the more customers you have, the more profitable you’ll be.

But that’s not the only thing you can do to build a great brand. In fact, it’s more important than that. If you have a strong brand, you should be able to implement it in every aspect of your business.

5. Expand The Road Map For Your Brand

Another way that you can build a great brand is to look at where your brand is and where it could be going.

For example, a great brand is recognized, people will remember it, and what brand owners want their business to be known for is easily identifiable. However, if you haven’t been the best customer service leader in your organization, your competitors will be—and this will lead to lost business and losses of money.

Therefore, your best bet is to make all of your social media, press, and advertising platforms more visible to everyone. This will expose your brand to the widest audience possible, and when people know about your brand, they’ll be more likely to share it.

This will also allow you to create a strategy that will allow your brand to become a well-known brand: Maybe they’ll want to know the competition is coming after them. Or maybe they’ll notice that you’re a customer centric brand instead of a brand that doesn’t care about their customers.

The goal of this exercise is to give you an overview of where your brand is, as well as where it could be going.

No matter how you look at it, people judge companies by how well they treat their customers. If you don’t make an effort to go out of your way to do that, then your business will fail. Everyone will not only know that you don’t care about your customers, but that you consider it beneath you to even exist there.

But it’s not always about treating your customers well. The other key to building a winning customer service culture is a culture of integrity. This kind of attitude will set your brand apart from the rest of the crowd.

But isn’t it also all about keeping the fans happy? Sure, but loyalty doesn’t just happen. You need to keep them happy so that they come back time and time again to do business with you. And this is where an active, competitive customer service culture comes in. If you don’t really care about people, then you’ll lose customers – and you’ll lose money.

If you’re serious about establishing a winning customer service culture, you need to make sure that every department is following that example.

Internal

Your HR department will build its employees’ skills and habits and train them on how to handle every issue. It’s up to you to make sure that your customer service is the one under your control, and if that’s not the case, then you need to reinforce it with the people you’re using it for.

Your employees are the future leaders of your company, and since customers will be under their influence, they should set up an environment that makes them feel valued and respected. Just being friendly to your customers will start to rub off on employees, and a good customer service culture will then draw them in further.

There’s one position within your company that should be given maximum priority. This is your customer service director. That’s the person responsible for ensuring that every customer is met with the most positive experience possible. They need to make sure that all the guys behind the scenes have the skills they need to carry out that job effectively. It may sound like an easy task to make sure your employees are well-trained in responding to every customer request, but it’s actually really hard.

Over all, it’s important to make sure that your employees are treated as equals, and that there’s a well-informed and supportive culture. As part of that, the culture of every team must play an important role. Everyone will be expected to come up with solutions, and in doing so, they need to train one another to do the same.

That kind of high-quality culture can attract customers and improve retention, all while ensuring that your employees feel like they’re their partner in success.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How do we get more out of our customer support team?

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.Because of the ease of reaching out through the internet and social media, there is continually an enormous number of customers looking for assistance.

If you want effective customer support for your business it is helpful to have dedicated staff and officers who are always ready and willing to help. If you operate a manufacturing business, you may have someone on staff to help service suppliers, if your company is a consumer business like grocery and clothing stores, you need employees who can take care of questions from their customers.

Getting employees properly trained and equipped to assist their customers and how to use the right information to deliver the best answer to their questions is key to success. As the manager of a customer support company, you should also be knowledgeable about customer service matters and think of ways to strengthen your support team. Provide your employees with training and access to best practices that they can follow so they can develop positive traits of customer service that you want to instill in them.

Set Limits and Expectations

As with any aspect of business, it is important to create limitations and expectations for your customer support team. You need to give your staff some parameters in which they are to operate and you have to maintain clear lines of communication with your employees to ensure that the topics that you want discussed are handled properly.

Miscommunication is a major reason why a customer support team fails. Mistakes such as the failure to send an invoice or not following through on a refund, can cause you loss of revenue and unsatisfied customers.

Delegate tasks properly and let them know that you expect them to fulfill all the tasks that you or the team manager assigns to them. Keeping the team up to speed on their duties would help your company avoid mistakes caused by miscommunication.

Apologize and Move On

At one time or another, mistakes will happen but at the end of the day your customer support team will perform better if they feel supported.

Do not dwell on their mistakes and put them in a position where they are embarrassed or put on the spot for their error. Encourage them to acknowledge their error, apologize, and that should be the end of the conversation.

Equip them with proper training to avoid committing the same mistake. Supporting your customer service team’s growth will allow you gain their trust.

Train More Get More

It is good if your team feels comfortable enough to approach you and ask for help, however, you may not always have the time to answer their questions and give them support. As the customer service team that supposedly has the answers to customers’ concerns, shouldn’t they be more educated?

You might have to spend for training and education, but that would be a wise investment. A customer service team could not be unfamiliar with customer concern solutions. They need to be trustworthy and reliable and that would only happen if they are properly trained and armed with an updated knowledge base that would act as an encyclopedia of answers.

Equipped with all the necessary skills and information, your customer service team will help you retain your customers and keep them happy resulting in good feedback, referrals, and increased business.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Building a Customer Support Engagement

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Bad customer support can mean bad customer satisfaction. When a company can’t keep customers coming back and keep them satisfied, it can damage its long-term business.

Manpower shortages or lack of employee engagement are often what causes bad customer support.

One solution to this is to challenge all your employees to become more resourceful. That’s easy enough to say but learning how to do it is definitely harder. As the leader of a customer service team you need to learn how to steer your employees so that they can get more done.

Understanding at which level of responsibility staff members should be held is important. From the manager, to employees working directly with customers, you need to know their roles, responsibilities, and how they should be performing them to produce desired results. That way, you can really drive toward results and fix problems efficiently.

Realizing that a strong business support service requires the cooperation of the whole team, involve all staff members in setting up your team rules and structure. They should not only be part of a committee, but should also be directly part of the business and responsibilities.

Being a part of a customer service team, it is your role to hear and address the concerns of your customers however it’s not enough to just be their advocate. You should foster an environment where they feel heard, understood, but also provide with the capacity to handle their issues by themselves.

That’s a big start. To get started with this, you will need to establish a little platform for customers to share their issues with you, have such conversations regularly – not just with customers, but also with your employees, vendors, clients, new partners, customers, and even other members of your staff (even the ones not connected to customer service).

This is how you can gather data to begin compiling an encyclopedia of answers and solutions to whatever questions and problems your customers may have regarding your products or your service.

We know that businesses, who are just starting, out may find that building an engagement system may be overwhelming at first but there are customer service software like CRMs that would make it easier to communicate with your customers. Some of them would allow your staff to communicate with multiple customers at the same time and even have the capability to capture the customer’s email and reference number making further conversations easier, uncomplicating the process of registering and reminding your staff of what their issue is.

Customer service systems make it easy to establish a relationship with every customer and keep them pleased. If you’re building out an innovative new system, then that new system needs to facilitate an ongoing dialog with the customers. It is important to have a conversation that’s completely functional, yet something that can foster a relationship with customers.

Customer service communication technology has evolved tremendously making it more convenient for your organization to respond to the feedback of the customers. Your ability to do so will define how successful you will be.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Your Customer’s Areas of Difficulty

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

A simple test to discover how well your support team is performing is by identifying their areas of greatest difficulty.

“Let’s do it! is a universal mantra. It may sound encouraging but this piece of motivational prodding may urge many sales people to make superficial changes to their products without grasping the real root cause of problems. This could be effective at first but might cause the

Every business that has something to sell should be able to identify these four areas of difficulty:

Problem 1 – Why are you selling what you’re selling? Problem 2 – How do your customers make their decisions? Problems 3 – What are their expectations? 4 – Where do they need help?

All of these areas have a significant impact on business, so the first thing salespeople and support professionals need to do is determine the root cause of customer struggles and design or package a solution.

Determining the issue

Solution 1

It’s no secret that customers are always seeking better products and services. To answer this, businesses try to offer an ever-improving quality of service and maintain a competitive position within the market.

Knowing the specific reason for our customers’ issues can go a long way in determining how to design a different message that will help customers solve their dilemma. Before a salesperson or support professional should try to address issues with a new product or service, it’s important to first eliminate the root cause of those problems. In other words, before you dive in, determine the “why” of your product or service and design a product to address that issue.

Solution 2

To determine how your customers come to a decision to take action or make a purchase, take a look at their problems and observe how they impact their business.

There are different factors why our customers decide to make changes or consider a purchase. A customer experiencing change at work, for example, will find that making new changes to his job will have a negative impact on his performance. Knowing all the factors for decision making will allow you and your team to formulate a solution around that type of impact.

Problem 3

Some customers expect you to have all the answers to their problems, others want to solve their issues on their own and merely ask for support or instructions. For this to be clear, do not hesitate to ask your customers what level of service and kind of assistance that they expect from your customer service team. Knowing this will help you and the customer to be on the same page and come to a solution the easiest way possible.

Solution 4

Perhaps your company doesn’t know what’s bugging customers? How about trying to find out? Of course, it doesn’t hurt to talk to customers about their problems in depth to get a better handle on it and which programs you can use to help fix them. These conversations are useful to your sales and support team to help them recognize the real issues and find the solutions that customers really need.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How Can You Build A Customer Service Culture?

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Customer service is arguably one of the most underrated areas of leadership and management. It is an area of sales and service that is often overlooked when starting a company. But building a customer service culture within your organization will ultimately increase profits by improving customer service and enhancing a brand.

But how do you create a customer service culture? And are there specific things to do to build a successful one?

Collaborate with the rest of the organization

Being part of an organization can help build your customer service culture. People may think that management is where the best customer service ideas emerge. But one area where it can feel like an outsider is the place where you place your own initiatives. But at some point in every company, the likes of staff and the rest of the team must show interest in doing better customer service. People must see that they have the power to make their employer and colleagues more responsive to them. Where senior personnel are happy, it means that the rest of the team feels comfortable making recommendations. These recommendations are built on a strong culture of collaboration, transparency, and a pro-active approach to resolving problems that may arise.

Building a customer service culture is one thing, but getting everyone on board is another thing entirely. Of course, training and development should be a priority of every department of a company but the culture at your workplace must also be a part of this. It’s not enough for your employees to learn to provide customer service. You must demonstrate how you intend to put the training into effect. For example, do you go into them asking them to help with their daily tasks? Or, do you send a message to them that your department team members want to work alongside them? This will send a message that your company is serious about its customer service program. It demonstrates that if you invest in people that you care them. And employees won’t fully cooperate if they don’t feel cared for and appreciated.

Instead of assuming that employees are skilled at customer service, you should provide them with training and coaching. Give them the knowledge and ability to handle situations them give them a chance to handle those situations. Whether it’s taking order for a team on sales or as a customer service representative, employees in every department need to get hands on experience as best they can. You can arm them with proper training but good customer service is better learned through actual practice.

Establish a strong direction for your organization

You need to establish a strong direction if your organization wants your employees to have a winning customer service culture. Staking out a stand of strength and support for your employees should be your mission statement. That’s the first thing you can do to help your team ensure success.

Be clear in what your objective is. And having that clarity allows you to create your work environment in a way that enables that focus. If you have a clear goal for your role in the company, that makes it easy for your employees to fit around it. And it also allows you to have collaboration, as you create your success and you get to higher levels of your company.

Train your employees

Second, you need to find the resources to train your employees, including on-site courses or virtual training opportunities. You need to empower your employees with online learning capabilities – tools such as online training portals and a solid knowledge base. Don’t forget that training doesn’t have to come from a textbook – online lectures and interactive flashboards allow you to do this. It will make your job easier if these employees are constantly on the move learning new things and uncovering new techniques and know-how.

Give them the opportunity to grow

And third, you need to make sure your employees have the opportunities to learn and grow. They need the opportunity to practice their skills and the “chance” to improve the skills they are already proficient in.

When disseminating information to your employees, choose an easy, non-intrusive way to get the message out to them. Allow them to talk, ask questions, and provide feedback. This way, they can learn and grow.

Don’t expect them to be experts right away, don’t forget that your employees are just starting to learn. Encourage them to read articles that are relevant to your industry, to learn lots of new things. This lets them grow and advance their skills without the pressure of being judged on something they have not done before. And this is an active process, not a passive one where you only start training when you think they do.

When your employees get used to the process, they should initiate their improvement themselves. And once they demonstrate their ability for self-development, you should further encourage them and provide the coaching they need to expand further into the field. The goal is not to show the development, but to prepare an experience where you believe your customer will find useful. Your goal isn’t to create a wonder worker, but to empower them in a way that allows them to discover their gifts and use them to make your customers’ lives easier.

Wouldn’t you want your employees to be a part of the building of a great place where your customers thrive and grow? Does that appeal to you, too? Don’t leave the learning for your employees. Start your own learning collaboration. Help your employees get better. Connect with them, be a partner, and contribute to what they do. Connect with them and their opportunities, and join in on the learning together.

They will engage and grow as much as you and when that happens, there will be a lot to share with their customers. I think these are the three key things that you can do to unleash their potential.

Smart workers must have a purpose. Some companies create no purpose, and they leave an empty boardroom with no people.

Build a company culture. Anything outside of that purpose isn’t going to be going to make a difference to the company’s performance. People who are not bringing their vision and their purpose into the realm of life inside of the company, and uniting around that aspect, will be working up against that wall and not getting the growth or the success. Not all of the ideas have to create a big splash, but maybe they help a few customers, then they’re still ideas that can be considered for implementation. Your culture must have that purpose.

Let’s say you have a restaurant. Do you or your staff have a set of skills and talents that help you create that magic? Do you have any retail skills, or any type of front office experience that can help you make dining in your restaurant easier for your customers? Or do you have marketing skills and sales skills? Do you have anything else you can bring to the table? And would customers enjoy it and benefit from them? Are customers complaining, or are they saying there’s no reason to come to your restaurant? If your establishment does not have a customer service culture, you’re only going to get poor reviews and poor sentiment, and in the end, a failed business.

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