During the entire customer lifecycle, your company’s representatives come into contact with your customers several times on several different platforms. Each one of these incidents has its own significance whether you realize it or not. Each of those interactions was an opportunity for you to get to know about your customer’s mindset and their loyalty towards your company. A successful business is built on knowing where your product or service lags behind and trying to take corrective measures. This true knowledge of one’s strengths and weaknesses has to come from the customer itself.

Sometimes it is not your service the customers have an issue with, it is your customer support.  A big reason behind customers leaving a brand can have more to do with their negative impression of your customer service team rather than your service.

Here are six ways that you can raise the level of your customer interactions and your customer service team –

• Impart Empathy in your Team

Every single customer support team in the world is taught about the concept of empathy during their initial training. They are taught what empathy means and how they should show especially in the case of irate customers. However, so many companies have support teams that absolutely fail to implement this in their daily interactions with customers.

You need to re-train your agents periodically on how to use soothing tones with your customers when they are upset. They should learn to personalize the customer’s problems to really put themselves into their shoes. Psychology states that customers are more willing to listen to you if you take their first name in a conversation.

• Ask for In-Depth Feedback

Whenever you get a chance to take feedback from your customers, it has to be a well-detailed one. That feedback should tell you more than just where your customers rate you on a scale of 1 to 10. It should tell you about who your customers actually are. What they love about your service, what they hate, what they want to see an improvement in, how they think you should improve and as many other details as possible.

• Make Communication Crystal Clear

Your team needs to communicate with customers in a clear manner using language and terms that they can easily understand and relate to. For example, an IT help desk should avoid using technical jargon that only confuses customers. Judge the customer first and then communicate with them on a level where you can match their understanding. It is all about how the customer understands better and not about which way is easier for you to explain it.

• Don’t Remain Stuck to the Script

The times of those old timer customer care agents that remain stuck to the script are gone. Your agents need to be flexible and sometimes stray from the script in special cases where there is a need for it. Your company needs to remember that the important thing is delighting the customer and exceeding their expectations and not sticking to the process.

However, providing special treatment to the customer cannot become the norm or else it won’t be special anymore. The discretion should be in the hands of the support agents on when to stick to the script and which situation demands deviation from it.

• Don’t Fake It

Many times in order to seem knowledgeable, customer service agents tend to fake it with customers. If you don’t have a certain piece of information, it is better to just admit it to the customer and tell them “I am sorry I don’t have that information right now. If you can hold for a few minutes I can look into that for you”. There is no shame in saying that to a customer. However, if you do not know the answer to a question and you fake it and get caught in a lie, it’s going to break the customer’s trust with the organization. The old adage of “honesty is the best policy” rings true even today.

• Know Your Platforms

Your customers may like to use one platform to communicate their issues to you depending on which industry your company belongs to. By platforms I mean your website chat, your Facebook page, your Twitter page, Yelp etc. Once these platforms are identified by you, you need to make sure your team is available on all these platforms to provide a prompt response to the customers. When customers see you responding to their queries on the platform of their liking, it will make them realize that you actually care about their needs. If your company cannot run such a multichannel customer service operation in-house, you can outsource call center services to India.

Conclusion:

By following these above methods, not only will you come to know what your customers feel about your service but you will also ensure an increase in customer happiness and loyalty towards your brand. After all, in today’s competitive business world, that is what makes all the difference.