Customer service is something that is based on principles of providing excellent service to customers. Whether it is in a store, or over the phone, customer service is an important aspect of any business and any company worth its salt will put everything it can into providing quality customer service.
When creating a customer service department, there are several things a company can do, and those things are based on the principles of quality, customer satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness.
Let’s look at these four things.
First, there is the quality of the service that is being provided to customers. With high quality, comes a happy customer because they see the company doing everything they can to create the best product or service support that they can. As well, when a customer comes into a store and sees quality service from the employees there, they will feel that the customer service representatives are there to help them in any way that they can.
Second, customer satisfaction is crucial to maintain in any customer service environment. By making sure that customers are satisfied when they are in a store or speaking to a customer service representative over the phone will ensure that the company can maintain a large customer base over a long period of time. This is vitally important to the long-term survival of the company.
Next, efficiency is the principle that keeps customer satisfaction high. If a company calls the service line and gets someone who spends two hours helping them to no avail, then the efficiency of the company will be down, as will the customer satisfaction of the customer who just spent two hours on the phone for nothing. To keep a customer happy, as well as customer service managers, efficiency must be high on any interaction between a customer service representative and a customer.
Lastly, a company needs to have an effectiveness when it aids its customers. Being effective means the company will be able to provide solutions that work, not ones that do not, or work for awhile before failing again. For customers, having to call a help line on a regular basis is not something they want to do. As a result, it is important to be effective for any customer service department to survive.
Going into the future, for companies to maintain quality customer service departments, they are going to have to look at the principles of quality customer service and ensure that they provide exactly what customers are looking for. Satisfied customers are the lifeblood of companies and if there is any problem with customer service, a company is going to suffer for it in their sales, word of mouth and reputation. When you take away the revenue and everything else, reputation is all a company has to go on.
Sticking to the principles of customer service will ensure that the future will be much brighter for many of the companies out there who are trying to make headway in the game of business.
