Here are ways to avoid common customer service mistakes and fortify your position in the industry.
- Don't always assign your best resources to managerial positions in the back-end. Remember that your front-end customer service staff is dealing directly with the most important person in your organization — the customer. Encourage your service staff to perform better through attractive incentives instead of promoting them to back-end positions.
- Incorrect information and rude behavior severely put off customers. Customer service managers should not neglect to train and update their customer service team regularly. This keeps their confidence high and also keeps them updated on the latest products or service upgrades and enables them to pass on accurate information to customers.
- Never argue with your customer. This is simply not allowed when you are servicing your customer, even if you know that he or she is wrong.
- Make sure you are easily available to customers. If reaching your customer service staff requires significant effort, customers will not come to you. They would rather go to someone who is easy to approach, which may mean your competitors.
- Ensure that your customers are not passed on from one representative to another, but are able to speak to the right person soon after dialing your customer service number.
- An incorrect customer record can be disastrous for your relationship with the customer. The customer may feel less valued if you address him or her by an incorrect name or with faulty information.
- Promise what you intend to deliver, or don't promise at all. Customers may easily lose trust not just in the customer service representative but in the organization as a whole if they receive promises from a representative that go unfulfilled.
- Not listening to the customer or giving standard replies that do not address a customer's problem makes the whole exercise of serving the customer a huge waste. Customer service representatives must attentively listen to customers first before offering any help.
- Simple courtesies like ''thank-you,'' ''please,'' and ''sorry'' should not be forgotten while talking to the customer.
- Lack of follow-up can frustrate the customer. If the customer was not satisfied with the help he or she received from your customer service representative, the matter needs to be accelerated to the next level. However, this can only happen if you follow up with the customer to know whether he or she was satisfied with your help at the first level.
Customer service managers must realize that it costs ten times more to win a new customer than to keep an old one. Managers should invest time and money in training their representatives so as to avoid mistakes while helping the customer.
