Everyone seems to agree customer service is critical but few practice what they preach.  The industry needs more than fancy rhetoric and catchy slogans to keep customers happy. What are needed is adequate service staffing, training, and supervision to make sure every effort is made to keep your customer’s satisfied.  If you fail to take care of your most precious asset – your customers – they will most certainly take care of you, by taking their business elsewhere.  It is absolutely critical for Call Centers and Help Desk to maintain their customer focus.  The more you can do to satisfy your customers’ needs, the more personally, professionally, and economically satisfying the relationships will be. It is therefore important to offer agents training in how to provide good customer service and to fine-tune existing skills to improve upon their level of accomplishment in this area.  Such training should be in the areas of coaching, communications, customer care, education, and process improvement.

The attributes needed to create a customer service include communication, responsiveness, empathy, accuracy, trust, education, solution-oriented, encouragement, respect, value-added, information, consistency, and excellence.

Creating Customer Service

There’s a lot of talk these days about customer service being the key to gaining and retaining business.  But with the massive corporate downsizing and a technological explosion going on, one can’t help but wonder if there’s been more talk than action on customer TLC.

Guaranteeing Good Customer Service

Everyone seems to agree customer service is critical but few practice what they preach.  The industry needs more than fancy rhetoric and catchy slogans to keep customers happy. What are needed is adequate service staffing, training, and supervision to make sure every effort is made to keep your customer’s satisfied.  If you fail to take care of your most precious asset – your customers – they will most certainly take care of you, by taking their business elsewhere.

Over the past several years, many industries have allowed customer service to take a back seat to expense control and cost cutting. It is absolutely critical for Call Centers and Help Desk to maintain their customer focus.  The more you can do to satisfy your customers’ needs, the more personally, professionally, and economically satisfying the relationships will be.

Fine Tuning Skills

Customer service is a constant challenge for any organization and a Call Center or Help Desk is no exception.  It is interesting to realize that if a customer has a bad experience with an agent, the entire organization is blamed. It is therefore important to offer agents training in how to provide good customer service and to fine tune existing skills to improve upon their level of accomplishment in this area.

Such training should be in the areas of coaching, communications, customer care, education, and process improvement.  Having constant training in these core competencies will go a long way to improving customer service.

Customer Service Elements

The key to long-term success in customer service is to create a mind-set of customer service.  To have the right mind-set, the Call Center must internalize the practices and attributes described in this paper.  Once these are internalized, the center can then identify obstacles to true customer service, and make the necessary changes.

A little-known article published anonymously in the December 2006, issue of Bank Marketing magazine.  In this article, the author presented what he feels is the best elements needed to create the optimum customer service mind set.  These attributes are as follows:

· Communication.  Management and employees should have opportunities to listen and discuss factors that affect service, to arrive at solutions, and to understand the implications of changes necessary to influence solutions.

· Responsiveness.  Be responsive to internal customers, and to those within the organization for whom you are a customer.

· Empathy.  Show empathy to customers’ problems, whether or not they are related to your particular Call Center.

· Accuracy.  While people want to do the right things right, recognize that new tasks require new critical thinking skills.  Employees need the skills and coaching support to make accurate decisions.

· Trust.  When employees are told to be more caring and responsive, and then watch as large numbers of co-workers are summarily dismissed as redundant, they see a corporation that is not caring and responsive.  The result is distrust.  Trust not distrust, is required for customer service changes to occur.

· Education.  Employers can tap into today’s well-educated and smart work force and help employees learn from each other.  Call Centers should be “learning organizations.”

· Solution-Oriented.  This is the fulcrum.  Give your employees a solution process.  Service is helping a person solve something.  If we have a process that resolves something, we have provided a service.

· Encouragement.  People need encouragement to continue to strive for right decisions and right actions.

· Respect.  Respect for and by employees and management is necessary for service to be delivered and accepted.

· Value-Added.  Tasks that don’t provide value shouldn’t be done.

· Information.  Instantly available information facilitates service.

· Consistency.  Call Centers must be consistent in treatment of employees, in rules, and in expectations for working with customers.

· Excellence.  Employees should be challenged to be excellent performers, not punished for falling short.

Once a Call Center understands and makes a commitment to each of these thirteen elements, it can answer the question of whether the organizational culture supports each one.  By identifying and correcting any barriers, all employees can begin delivering top-
notch customer service.

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