Customer Service Techniques
Having your own business is not a piece of cake, you have to take care of every detail, and more importantly, take care of your customers.
Customers want to feel like royalty, they wanted to be treated like royalty and you can only do so by choosing a qualified customer service team, who is able to deliver the best experience every time.
That’s why your customer service professionals need to master some customer service techniques, to be proactive, and engage in active listening with your customers through phone or email or even through chatting via social media.
In this article, we will discuss some of the customer service techniques that your customer service team member should have.
some of the customer service techniques
1. Listen To Your Customer And Be A Copy Cat
Listening to your customer is great but being a copycat is even greater. Being a mirror to your customer’s language and rephrasing whatever they are saying is an indicator that you totally understand what they are saying and acknowledge their issue.
Listening to your customer and being a copy cat helps to create mutual understanding and establishing a better relationship between you and your customers, which will make it easier for your agent and your customer to understand each other easily.
However, being a copycat is not just repeating whatever your customer is saying, you have to be using a considerate tone, as it is easy for tones to be lost over live chat or text and social media generally. Using a gentle, informative tone can greatly improve the customer experience.
2. Use templates, not boilerplates
What is worse than calling someone for help and you find out that it is not a human, it is a robot!
Customers will never have a conversation with you or your customer service agents if they acted and talked like robots.
Yes, you can have a phone script, but don’t be afraid to add some personality.
Using templates that include some pre-written text can work as guidelines for your agent during their conversation with the customers.
Templates can be a helpful structure for common responses (like a list for step-by-step responses), but they shouldn’t be overly rigid and unwavering.
Customer service employees should personalize their own answers before replying to customers. This leads to a more personal, improved interaction—and a more fulfilling customer service job.
3. Know Your Product Inside Out
The better your team knows about your product the better they are at helping others.
Customers nowadays are up to date with every little detail that a product development or service has to offer and they call the customer service center when they reach a dead end. Your customer service team member should have the guiding answer the customers are looking for.
Knowledge means power, and your team members can acquire knowledge through training, and training should be a key part of onboarding processes because updates and new releases happen.
4. Learn the customer service skills specific to each support channel
One of the best features that you should be looking for in your customer service agent is mastering soft skills, like showing empathy and reading the emotional state of the customer’s emotional state.
Good customer experiences involve much more than simply answering questions. With 67% of customers using channels like live chat, social media, and texting for support, good customer service now means being able to respond to queries through email, live chat, and social media.
Each customer service channel benefits from a unique approach to these skills. The following channel-specific customer service techniques should help support agents move easily between channels:
Over The Phone
Voice tone is one of the essential things that phone agents should be aware of. It is easy to convey emotions through your tone of voice whether it is for better or worse.
There are a few things that you should put on your mind while talking to a customer over the phone:
- Smiling over the phone can be contiguous
- Mirror whatever your customer is saying
- Listen first
- Summarize the problem
Sending Email
Providing email support means having good writing skills, sending emails can be crucial as they have to be personalized, yet structured and precise. Make sure that before sending your email that it’s grammatically correct and spellchecked as a part of the process.
To make your email support great here are some tips:
- Spellcheck
- Make templates
- Respond in a defined timeframe
Chat Support
Providing great live chat support requires a cross of the phone and email skills. Chat is conversational and real-time, just like customer service over the phone, but it also requires strong writing skills. Here’s what every great live chat agent needs to pay attention to:
- Use a gentle, informative tone
- Multitask—you can chat with more than one person at a time
Read customer cues, copy their phrasing
Social media
When live chat isn’t available, customers turn to social media for an exceptionally fast response. The customer service skills required to provide customer service on social media are generally advanced and often saved for senior or specialized customer service agents. Agents need to go the extra mile. The following skills are crucial for social media support:
- respond quickly
- Publicly acknowledge you’re following up with them
- React carefully to confrontation and use a gentle, informative tone
- Differentiate and create social media tickets to keep track of information
You can have customer service techniques on your own or you can ask an outsource company to handle this task for you. Asking an outsource company to handle this task for you can make it a lot easier for you, as you can focus on your business goals and leave this task for an outsource company
