How to make your customer service team skilled

Whether you already have a customer servicing pipeline in place or are looking for ways to integrate a support system into your business, training your staff to be as skilled and professional as possible is of utmost importance. According to 99 Firms, 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated by a company, with more than 85% of buyers being prepared to pay more for a great customer servicing experience. In addition, Finances Online published data which showcases that 52% of consumers around the world agree that businesses should act on customer feedback, with 54% saying that they have higher customer servicing expectations now compared to a year ago.

No matter the scale at which you operate or whether your business is cloud-based or retail, having a skilled customer servicing team on standby for support and brand representation can be highly advantageous for your reputation and revenue generation. That being said, let’s take a look at several ways in which you can ensure better performance and expertise from your customer service team in order to better accommodate the needs of your clients and consumers going forward.

Benefits of skilled customer service teams

Before we talk about how to improve your customer servicing team’s skill set, let’s discuss why you should do it in the first place. Companies which offer services or products to their customers, whether through one-time purchases or subscription models, are required to offer some form of support and servicing to their stakeholders.

While some companies tend to outsource their support outright, others prefer hosting their servicing teams in-house, allowing for a plethora of training and development opportunities for the team members. Customer servicing representatives who receive ongoing professional development curation and coaching are more likely to outperform their outsourced counterparts, leading to a plethora of benefits for your brand as a whole:

• Improved customer loyalty and brand reputation
• Increased customer satisfaction and positive word of mouth
• Fewer negative reviews, complaints and detractors across the web
• Increased servicing agent motivation, engagement and brand loyalty

Outline the perfect customer service skills

The first order of business in terms of optimizing your customer servicing team’s performance is to outline the values each support agent should showcase. Each customer service agent should exhibit certain traits and values when communicating with a client or customer on your brand’s behalf.

Combined with a marketing automation tool which allows for streamlined servicing, the mix of right soft skills will allow your brand’s support branch to grow and develop into something unique in your niche. With that, some of the most important customer servicing traits include but are not limited to:

• Clear and concise communication
• Empathy and patience
• Professional work ethics
• Stakeholder adaptability
• Back-end data research and analysis
• Brand’s portfolio familiarity

Native CRM utilization

Depending on the scale of your business and the size of your customer servicing team, no agent should ever service a customer by hand or without direct access to your CRM. This can lead to numerous issues in regards to data collection, customer purchase histories and other sales and support related problems for the support team.

Using a professional CRM platform which allows for process automation, interaction tracking and up-to-date access to relevant customer information is a must for any professional servicing team to perform at peak efficiency. Combined with an effort to localize your team’s servicing capabilities into other languages via platforms such as Pick Writers, both your customer’s satisfaction and global industry presence will continue to grow.

Coaching and workshops

One of the best ways for your customer service team to learn and adapt to stakeholders’ needs is by training and coaching each other in-house. Integrating whisper coaching, call monitoring and other internal systems by which experienced service agents can help onboard and train new arrivals to your company can be highly beneficial.

Additionally, mandatory workshops with outside consultants, trainers and B2B representatives can also help your customer service team become more versatile and up-to-date with current support trends and expectations. In doing so, you will enable coworkers within your company to familiarize themselves with each other, their strengths and weaknesses; as well as how they can best perform under your standards and industry requirements.

Seamless back-end integration

A company’s servicing capabilities are only as good as the information any customer servicing agent can work with at the moment a call takes place. Even though customer service representatives interact with the stakeholders first and foremost, their integration with back-end data and systems is highly recommended.

As such, allowing them full access to a centralized dashboard with information on current sales campaigns,servicing calls, company calendar and other back-end data can exponentially improve their productivity across the board. Once your support agents are used to pulling up data on-the-fly and during servicing calls, they will become efficient at solving customers’ issues, allowing for more tickets to be solved daily due to quicker reaction times.

Personalized customer servicing

As we’ve previously discussed, a customer service agent is far more than a metaphorical robot available for solving problems. Many customers reach out to a business’ support team even before they purchase a product or service in order to get the feel for their interest and engagement with customers’ needs. In order for your team to perform well with customers, who are as human as your employees, personalization should apply going forward.

Positive phrases such as “I’m here to help you” and “This is a minor issue, we’ll get right on it” can do wonders for your customers’ satisfaction with your brand. Furthermore, speaking to individual customers with empathy and a friendly tone of voice will do wonders for their brand advocacy, as well as allow your customer servicing team to build up a repository of expected, accepted and functional responses to different questions and issues.

In conclusion

As time goes on, customers’ expectations and needs shift just like marketing trends and industry developments.With the combination of a reliable CRM, as well as a humanized approach to customer servicing, your team will undoubtedly act admirably as a result of professional coaching and training. Take the initiative to optimize your customer service team’s skillset early on and your brand’s image and performance will improve over time.

——–

[Guest Post] Donald Fomby is a freelance writer for PickWriters, a website with reviews of professional Vietnamese translation services. He has written custom content for various websites and has worked in various marketing efforts and campaigns. Donald is also a regular writer at BestWritersOnline.