By Hazel Deller
You hear about this all the time. Customers switch from one service provider to the next looking for a better deal, and providers trying hard to make their rates more competitive.
The truth is, it’s not necessarily prices that are driving customers away from certain providers. More often than not, it’s the customers' experience with the brand.
In today's economy, keeping customers happy is one of the most profitable strategies businesses should follow. A great customer “journey” starts with a team of fantastic employees. Employing a customer service-oriented team may sound easy on paper, but building a team that will really please your customers isn’t quite as straightforward as you may think.
Traditionally, businesses will assign a great deal to technical abilities. While that should certainly be a priority if you're hiring for a technical position, it doesn’t necessarily take the top spot when it comes to developing a business that aims to keep customers happy.
Unfortunately, many companies do not take this into account.
Hiring the Right People
This is perhaps the most crucial stage of assembling your dream team. If you can look beyond credentials, you’ll actually be in a far better position to scout out the best candidates.
Instead of focusing too heavily on experience, try targeting a person's ability to react to specific situations. In interviews, ask candidates, “How would you handle X?” or “What would you say to a customer who asked you Y?” Answers to these questions will give you a far better gauge on person will fare on the job than you will get from reading their CV.
That being said, be sure to ask more personal questions, too. Find out who their favorite bands are, which films they’ve enjoyed recently; ask about their hobbies outside of work. A team needs to be able to embody the company’s culture, and since it’s difficult to train staff to carry these values when they’re on the job, you should make sure the people you hire already have these same ideals.
Ideal Values
It’s all very well promoting “values” -- it’s a great word that’s thrown around the public sector in quite a blasé manner -- but few companies take the idea seriously enough to actually solidly ground the values that are integral to everything they do.
If you want your team to really impress your customers, you need to clearly outline the values you want them to uphold, and -- most importantly -- lead by example.
Be sure you have a few of these on your checklist:
• Transparency: Make sure that your employees are not left in the dark. If you keep them updated on how the business is moving forward, not only will they be better equipped to deal with customer queries, but they’ll also feel valued and trusted. If your employees see that you value honesty, they’ll value it too, which is great news for your customers.
• Empathy: Staff who can put themselves in the customers' shoes generally do more to resolve problems with less prompting. Promoting customer empathy is as simple as taking the time to ask your staff how they are doing and offering help if there is a problem. By doing this, your employees will spend less time concerned about how they feel, and more time concerned with how your customers feel.
• Empowerment: Establish a level of trust between you and your employees by empowering them to deal with issues without needing to run them by you first. It really is a win-win situation: management's workload and stress is reduced, empowered employees deal with customers' problems on-the-spot, and above all, customers leave with smiles on their faces because their problems have been handled quickly.
Using Feedback Effectively
At the end of the day, the only way you’ll really know if you have built a team that is pleasing your customers is to ask the customers themselves. Customer feedback, when used properly, can prove integral to developing your team as your company grows.
It’s important that customer feedback is freely available directly from the source, especially if it is negative. Oftentimes, employees take criticism that has been passed on by managers with a pinch of salt, which reduces the long-term effectiveness of the feedback.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Sometimes, the most effective customer feedback comes from praise of an employee. Glowing reports from previous work completed by the employees themselves can provide them with more confidence in their abilities, allowing them to be more enthused about dealing with further inquiries.
All in all, the key is to keep your team happy, motivated, and effective. Once employees get used to making customers happy, they’ll get a taste for it. And that’s when your team becomes truly unstoppable.
