The staff in charge of customer relations may maximize their relational skills and complaints management, if their management is not up to the task, it is very likely that employees will not fully satisfy consumers. Employees need to be guided, referred and supported to give the best of themselves when they are in contact with customers.
- Offer quality training to its advisors
Customer service personnel are the front line of any business. It is therefore essential to ensure that he is fully operational in his post. To improve or upgrade their expertise, providing top-notch training to customer support employees is crucial. It is therefore necessary to implement means so that your employees feel confident, legitimate and understand very clearly what their role consists of.
This training can take place in several ways:
- a formal course organized internally,
- an easily accessible reference guide
- an e-learning platform
- a mentorship
- a meeting with a product manager
- ongoing coaching from more experienced team members
For a truly complete, successful and both theoretical and practical training, we advise you to combine several of the means listed above.
Consider conducting new training sessions when a significant change is carried out in the service. Finally, don’t hesitate to ask your advisers if they feel the need to learn more about a tool or technique for managing customer relations and calls.
Asking your employees if they think they need additional training shows them you’re listening and reinforces their commitment.
- Set high standards and clear best practice guides
Make sure your staff understands how important their role is in the company and show them that you take their job and their job very seriously.
To do this, establish clear standards and a quality charter that explain to customer service employees what you expect of them. Explain to them why it is essential that they always show courtesy towards customers and solidarity with other areas of the company.
Building clear standards that define the right behaviors and the right attitudes to adopt will allow employees to align themselves with your strategy and ensure that consumers receive the same quality of service regardless of who they are talking to.
The members of the customer relations services are also given confidence, which allows them to be more efficient and responsive in their work.
- Establish a comprehensive support scenario
Even by providing the best training to your customer care agents and making customer relationship support tools available to them, they will inevitably be confronted with questions or problems that they cannot solve on their own.
You must then prepare for this eventuality to allow them to react positively during an interaction with a buyer. Build a plan or scenario that lists the attitudes to have in this scenario:
- Who should your agent go to and ask for advice when needed?
- How to orient the consumer when your agent has no immediate answer to give him?
- How should an agent react to a buyer if he is unable to assist him?
By clearly defining everyone’s roles and building concrete scenarios for this type of situation, you increase your chances of answering customer questions adequately so that their experience is positive.
- Align the touchpoints of your customer journey
All contacts and interactions with consumer support are part of a larger customer journey.
This is because customer journeys can involve touchpoints from diverse and multiple channels prior to interaction with customer relationship advisors. An individual can call customer service before or after a purchase and their call can be about a complaint as well as a simple question related to the use of the product.
You must then consider your after-sales service, outsource to your contact center in a more global context and imagine the different paths that your buyers or prospects may have followed.
Through this work of researching and mapping the buyer’s journey, you will have a better idea of what customers know before contacting you, what their objectives are in contacting you and the interactions they have already had with your company. company or brand.
- Create a culture of excellence
Happy employees make happy customers. Put in place ways to optimize your employee experience (EX) and align this EX-strategy with your customer experience (CX) strategy to maximize your marketing performance.
By aligning these two strategies, you can begin to build a customer-centric corporate culture in which employees feel fully engaged.
Good consumer experiences should not simply reflect “what you do”, but also “who you are”. In other words, the power of your customer support in terms of CX also strengthens your brand reputation and your values.
