Empower your team ahead of customer’s frustration

 Empowering team members: How can I help you?

Despite acknowledging the importance of good customer service, many businesses still subscribe to the opinion that service incurs business cost. However, what’s important here is to realize that good customer service is more like an investment that can help drive business growth. Hiring quality talent, and ensuring they have the right skills, training and tools enables them to empathize with customers and actively listen to them. This is the key to providing a consistently good service experiences.

Without proper tools and resources, your team may not feel empowered enough to effectively resolve customer queries or respond appropriately to their frustrations. As much as you want your teammates to empathize with your customers’ problems, you need to first look at serving your own team members and empathize with them.

Therefore, it’s a good practice to turn the tables on your teammates and ask them, whether in a group discussion or a while having a one-on-one conversation: “How can I help you?”

What’s also important, is to listen to their suggestions and then act on them. Have an in-depth discussion on every view of theirs, no matter how small you insignificant you feel they may be. If they want you to know about it, then it is a big deal to them. And if it’s a big deal to them, it ought to be a big deal to you!

Identify any training needs that your support members may have. There are well designed customer service training programs available out there that focus on improving communication, listening, problem solving and analytical skills. Training all your agents on a predetermined set of competencies equips them with the right mindset and a standard process to deal with customers and builds a sense of team spirit.