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THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPATHY IN CUSTOMER SERVICE

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empathy in customer service

empathy in customer service

Customer service is the process of providing services to customers. In general, empathy improves the quality of customer service because it establishes a connection or bond between the customer and the employee.

Offering great customer service is no longer just a nice touch— it is fast becoming the key differentiator between business success and failure. Luckily, today’s companies can harness their power by developing one important trait – empathy.

Maintain this level of understanding for your customer and your chances of ending each conversation on a positive note will increase.

When you consider that 89% of companies compete on the quality of customer service alone, the impact of empathy becomes a clear differentiator. It can be the important difference between a positive and a negative peak; a loyal customer, or a competitor’s gain.

Empathy is Customer Service

You can spend all day talking with customers who have had problems with the company. Some of their problems may or may not have a resolution, but you can always show empathy. In doing so you:

  • Help the customer feel heard
  • Acknowledge their feelings
  • Provide a good experience

Without empathy, the interaction can be cold and off-putting to customers, thus increasing the conflict.

Think of frontline customer service teams. Even in the best of times, it’s hard to keep up the optimistic, empathetic, and professional tone customers expect. Customer service teams are called upon to communicate with empathy all day, every day.

Customer service challenges amplify during times of crisis or uncertainty, as customers may need payment grace periods or policy exceptions for returns. No matter their requests, customers are counting on empathy, and they reward personal interactions that help them feel respected and understood.

Customer empathy can make a real difference during difficult times

People yearn for their needs to be considered and understood, especially during times of upheaval like we’re experiencing now. Agents will be dealing with customers that have lost their jobs, businesses, and even their loved ones. In difficult circumstances, even minor situations carry a much heavier weight.

As a company, you have the power to make a positive difference in your customer’s day, and in turn, create a loyal customer for life. Remember that one small act of goodwill can start a movement. And all it takes is a little empathy.

Credits: Dixa; Study.com

Descriptive- showing a female employee attending to a young customer

How to Create a Team of Customer-Focused Employees

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customer-focused employee

customer-focused employee

There is no magic formula for creating a team of customer-focused employees. But one thing is certain: it’s the manager’s responsibility to create an environment that motivates employees to want to take care of customers. To create a team of employees that are personally committed to service excellence, managers may need a fresh point of view. One of the great problems in customer service is the reluctance of managers to view service as a marketing strategy. Too many see it as an after-sale service related to a previous sale, rather than ahead of the next one. Studies prove that great service is more effective at increasing profits than marketing or advertising.

The following conditions need to be met for creating customer-focused teams:

Management Commitment

Replace lip service with words and actions that consistently show employees that management is committed to the delivery of exceptional customer service. Staff meetings should focus more on meeting the needs of the customer than meeting the needs of the manager.

Employee Involvement

Listen to employee ideas. Sam Walton said, “Listen to everyone in your company, especially the ones who actually talk to customers. They know what’s going on out there.” Implement realistic, creative ideas that benefit the customer. No matter how far removed employees are from the front line, they need to believe that their work affects the customer perceptions of the company.

Policies That Benefit The Customer

Evaluate existing policies and rules to see if they are really necessary. Who benefits from them? How much do they damage customer relationships? How often are they bent or broken by managers?  If a policy needs to be in place, make sure that every employee on the team understands the reasons behind it. Trust employees. Give employees the ability and power to do the right thing for the customer–right away. Don’t undermine an employee by overriding their decision to help the customer.

Shared Customer Feedback

Everyone on the team needs to hear from the customers. Share customer satisfaction survey results. Read letters and comments from customers during staff meetings. Encourage the team to come up with a list of open-ended questions they can ask customers regularly to invite feedback and ideas for improving service. A quality service program will come to a screeching halt without management commitment, employee involvement and constant reinforcement. You know you’re part of a customer-focused team when the most important question on the mind of managers and employees alike is, “How can I do my work in a way that will delight the customer?”

Internal Customer Service

Create a “we’re in this together” environment. Help your employees to recognize that everyone in the company is one big team. Meet with other departments regularly to build understanding and collaboration between work teams. Set ground rules that simply do not tolerate gossip. Redirect employees who complain by challenging them to come up with solutions to problems.

Employee Training

View training as an investment, not a cost. This can be an investment in both customer and employee retention. Training employees is an investment in sales and marketing. It is also an investment in quality. Training must be a priority and an ongoing reinforcement of the customer focus. Provide training that equips employees with the skills and tools they need to deliver exceptional customer service.

Credit: Loyalty Leader® Inc

customer-data-analytics-02

How Bad Data Impact Customer Experience

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Bad Data Is Bad For Business

Customer data is used to create customer profiles, which can then be used to drive advertising, marketing, growth initiatives – even store locations, and in customer initiatives, to improve customer service or the overall customer experience. Customer data is gathered internally, or purchased from third-party providers. If bad data is used in the algorithm, insights generated are unreliable, and any actions taken based on that data can negatively impact the customer experience.

Data needs to be consistent, relevant, and have both accuracy and integrity. Data that fails on any of these measures can be considered bad data, and impact the methods by which enterprises create customer profiles – making those profiles at best, skewed and at worst, completely invalid.

Bad data impacts customer experience with brand interactions, including:

  1. Poor Customer Service:

Bad data used for customer service may result in frustrating experiences for both the customer, who may be asked to provide information more than once and the customer service representative that is attempting to provide an individualized, responsive customer experience. It is unlikely that the customer will be satisfied at the end if they have to constantly correct the erroneous demographic, personal, or prior purchase information in the course of a customer service interaction.

  1. Ineffective Marketing:

A recent survey of marketers showed that 21% of their budget was wasted on insights generated from bad data. This affects the customer experience, as brand interactions that are deemed irrelevant, or just plain wrong, erode the consumer-brand relationship. Personalized customer service, when accurate and timely, can boost sales, engagement, and customer retention. Inaccurate personalization can negate those results just as easily.

 

How to ensure data quality

To ensure that data used in analytics is of good quality – and therefore the customer insights drawn from it are good as well – a company should dedicate resources, including employee time and equipment, to ensure that data is accurate before being used in analytics.

Purchase Clean Data

To ensure that the data purchased from an outside party is high-quality, you should know the following:

  • Data methodology: How was the data collected?
  • Data source(s): Where did it come from?
  • Data scale: How large is the raw data set?
  • Data parameters: What are the guidelines for data verification and accuracy?
  • Data freshness: What is the lag time between occurrence and reporting?
  • Data type: Is it factual, or inferred?
  • Data privacy and security: Does the provider follow strict guidelines for protecting the security and privacy of personal information?

When this consumer data is inaccurate, inconsistent, or lacks integrity across data sets, the insights that are drawn from the data will be inaccurate as well.  This negatively impacts business outcomes, including providing a positive, unified customer experience. To optimize the customer experience and ensure customer satisfaction, and strong brand relationships, consumer data must be high-quality, accurate, and cleansed.

Conclusion

With 9 out of 10 businesses competing mainly on customer experience, it’s the organizations that take customer experience seriously that will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers over.

One thing is for sure, to deliver a positive experience, you have to know your customers better than ever before. This means creating complete customer profiles that help you understand and measure your customers’ behaviour at every touchpoint, and across multiple channels. Once you know your customers well enough, you can use that knowledge to personalize every interaction. Customers these days have more power and choices than ever before. Thus, you are responsible for understanding and acknowledging their needs.

If you make sure their interaction with your company is smooth, pleasant and continuously improving, you will drive brand loyalty. If not, you’ll give your competitors the best gift you can – your customers.

talking to a customer

HOW TO SELL TO A CUSTOMER

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on the phone with a customer

on the phone with a customer

Selling today is far different from those old days when the customer could only find out about a company’s products or services by being presented to by a slick salesperson, with a toothy grin and sharp intakes of breath!

Today’s salesmanship is identified by a professional approach, highly intelligent about their products, their market, their customers and their industry, and a keen desire to find out about their prospects’ business before presenting solutions.

So, how should you sell a product to a customer today?

One simple answer is ‘don’t try to sell’!

Yes, that seems contrary to everything we learned in sales, doesn’t it? Well, most salespeople still sell as if buyers were needing to know information. But most people will do a lot of research before contacting a salesperson to finalise their decision.

Many surveys show that the buyer is more than 70% along the buying process before they contact a company. What does this mean for a salesperson? How should we sell our product today, to a well-researched and highly knowledgeable prospect?

Here are some tips:

Approach the sale with an attitude of curiosity

Instead of approaching a prospect with the thought of telling them everything they need to know about your product, see it as a ‘knowledge extraction process.

You need to sell your products by not selling them first!

Imagine you’re a doctor. What would the doctor say to you when you went into his surgery?  Would he just give you a prescription straight away? No of course not. He would make enquiries as to what was wrong and ask you some deep questions to ascertain exactly which direction he should take the conversation.

See yourself as a doctor to your buyer being your patient. You need to ask a series of questions to determine the situation that your prospect is in.  Only after you have gained information and built up some kind of knowledge concerning their situation can you officially say you are in a position to make some kind of recommendations.

Confirm your understanding of the customer’s situation

You need to clarify your understanding so that the prospect appreciates you understand and have a clear picture of the situation that they are in. Only after you have done this have you earned the right to even contemplate what products or services might be right for their current situation.

Present your solution based on exactly what will solve their concerns

People don’t buy your products. Instead, they will buy whatever will solve the current situation that they are in. So, when you present your solution, make sure that you are talking about the results that they will get rather than the features and benefits of your product.

Gain commitment by ensuring your customer knows what the product will do for them or their business

Your prospect will only decide to go with you when they understand the short and long-term results that your product or service will bring to their business or themselves. By doing this you make it very clear to them how they will benefit from your products. Remember that the product itself is not as important as the short, medium and long-term results that they will achieve after using your product.

So, how do you sell a product to a customer today? By discussing their needs, gaining knowledge of their business, putting yourself in their position and proving that your products and services are going to provide a better future for them than anything else they currently experience.

Credit: MTD Sales Training

CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE – 5 Things Your Customers Deserve

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Think about this: Amazon, Uber, Zoom, and Tesla Motors, what do these brands have in common? They were each, not the first to do what they do, but they did the consumers’ job better than their competitors. And, they consistently give their customers the best service experience they deserve.

They are all disruptors. Walmart disrupted local retail businesses when they came into a community. Uber disrupted the taxi-cab industry. Amazon disrupted the entire retail world, Zoom disrupted physical meetings and office space. And, Tesla disrupted the automobile industry.

So, are you starting in a career or business and it looks like there is nothing new to do? Like everything that could be done has already been done? There is yet a way to disrupt your market. Make an exceptional customer experience your brand identity. Customer service is often overlooked in companies, and, this could be a big opportunity to differentiate your business and attract and retain loyal customers.

For The Best Customer Service Experience, Do These:

  1. Know Your Customers – Who is your ideal customer? What does your customer need? How can you meet that need? Do your research and analyze your target audience. Beyond the service, you want to provide, know enough about them to become a part of their lives.
  2. Design a customer-centered service experience – Your customers are at the centre of all you do, not you. Alongside the product or service you are offering, deliberately put your customers at the centre of your activities by designing a customized service experience. Therefore, if you know them as explained above, this should not be difficult to do.
  3. Respond quickly to every customer inquiry or comment – Know when to read the script and when to use your humanity. Do not ever keep your customers waiting. Never!
  4. Stay in Touch – Adequate use of social media will give you top-of-the-mind awareness with your customers. Be conveniently accessible to your customers and stay in touch. Social media is an extension of brand marketing for you, therefore, use it sufficiently. Something as simple as a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program can help you keep track of your customers, what they have bought in the past and any issues they have had.
  5. Celebrate them – Give a human touch to your brand by interacting with your customers’ experiences and achievements. Celebrate their moments with them, and, thank them for patronizing you.

In conclusion, let them know that you are not just after their money, you sincerely want to make their lives easier. 93% of customers are liekly to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.

The Quickest Magic in Service Recovery

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Acting quickly, taking responsibility, making an empowered decision, and compensating the customer will result in customer loyalty that will increase your sales and profits and help to ensure your success in an increasingly competitive world.
In today’s fast-paced world we are needing service recovery in almost everywhere we go from the grocery store, to our banks (everyone has had a problem here), to our cable (very frustrating), to service providers at home and so on and so on. It’s frustrating and customers can vent their problems and dissatisfaction in person, on the phone, on the internet, and to their friends and family.
But, the exact opposite is true also if the magic of Service Recovery is used. Service recovery can have a major impact on an organization’s bottom line with word-of-mouth advertising as customers tell their family, friends, and coworkers about the exceptional service they received from your company. Including compliments and “Atta-boys” up on the internet, they recognize you and call you by name.
Service recovery is putting a smile on a customer’s face after you’ve screwed up. Now it may not be your fault, but it is your problem. How you handle those mistakes is what separates you from the rest of the pack and…keeps customers for life.
We have developed the following techniques for providing quality service recovery:
Act quickly.You must acknowledge the mistake within 60 seconds. That’s when the magic happens. The employee at the point of contact is the person in the best position to successfully implement service recovery.
Front-line employees should have the power to resolve more than 95 per cent of customer issues without having to pass the customer on to another person
Take responsibility.No matter who is at fault, you must own the mistake and sincerely apologize. Don’t place the blame on someone else; the customer doesn’t care whose fault it was, he merely wants it rectified.
It’s also important to thank the customer for pointing out the problem and for giving you the opportunity to correct it. It works like magic.
Be empowered.Employees aren’t making empowered decisions mainly because they’re afraid they’re going to be reprimanded, fired, or have to pay for whatever they give the customer.

Empowerment is the backbone of service recovery, and organizations that truly want to serve the customers and retain their business must not only allow, but insist, that employees bend and break the rules in order to keep those customers coming back. They are your magicians.
Compensate.Give away something that has high value and low cost. You must give the customer something of value, something that will impress the customer and give them the feeling that you really do value their business. Every company has something that doesn’t cost a lot but has value in the eyes of the customer.

Practice the magic every day when customers confront you with a situation or problem. No business can afford to lose customers, if only because it costs much more to replace a customer than it does to retain one – five times more.
Those that go out of their way to please customers and correct problems or screw-ups will soon have more customers than their competition. 
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Five ways to eliminate customer service friction

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The biggest friction point of all with customers is making them wait and disrespecting their time. So the basic ways to eliminate frictions are as follows: 

  1. Duration: How long do we make customers wait? It could be on hold for customer support or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Waiting is friction. Wasting our customer’s time is friction. That little recording you hear when you’re on hold should say, “Your call is NOT really that important to us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t make you wait!”
  2. Memory: I’m always frustrated when I call a customer support number that I’ve called in the past and have to retell my story. Same goes for when I’m transferred to another person. There is no reason for this. Employees should be armed with information about the customer’s past calls, purchases, and any other interaction they have had with the company. Making a customer repeat their story is a waste of time. It’s friction!
  3. Consistency: Consistency isn’t the problem. It’s lack of consistency. Specifically, I’m referring to inconsistent information. One day I called my cellular provider with a question about an international calling plan. I didn’t like the answer I got, so I called back and a different agent gave me a different answer. My assistant asked me which plan I thought was correct. I jokingly said, “the one with the lower price.” Inconsistent information derails confidence and trust.
  4. Empowerment: When we talk about empowerment, we’re usually referring to empowering employees to take care of the customer. In this case, it’s empowering the customer to take control of their situation. Self-service tools are a powerful way to take care of the customer’s questions and problems quickly and efficiently. Customers like a good self-service solution.
  5. Proactiveness: With today’s technological capabilities, why should a customer have to reach out for help to begin with? In many instances, companies can know a customer is having problems before the customer does. Predictive support will soon become a customer expectation.

In truth, there are lots of ways we can eliminate friction for our customers. The above list is a reminder of the most painful points of friction, meant to give you an idea of where to start. So, take a look at your business. Listen to your employees and, most importantly, your customers. Where do they encounter friction? And what can you do to eliminate that? Give your customers the experience they expect and deserve—one that is easy, convenient, and friction-free.

Inexpensive Ways To Attract New Local Customers

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For a business to grow, it needs to attract new customers, while also maintaining the customers it already has. But many growing businesses don’t have a lot of marketing dollars to spread around in order to try and grow their presence. This can provide a conundrum for businesses. So how do companies work to resolve this conflict?

The answer is to work on finding inexpensive ways to attract new customers. These are just a few strategies that can help you find the customers you need and want to expand your audience.

Build social media presence

We often think that social media presence is something that only big companies need to worry about, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Even if your business only has a simple Facebook page and monitors its reviews on sites like Yelp and Google, that is a social media presence.

Keeping an eye on what’s happening in these locations can help you connect with local customers and niche buyers. These customers are the ones most likely to be your most loyal customers over time, so they’re important to cultivate.

Use physical advertising

Companies often focus on digital advertising, and with good reason. Building a social media presence, spreading word of mouth, and creating a high-quality website can all help customers find a business and trust the company to fulfill its promises.

But for companies that have brick and mortar businesses, there are more advertising options available. Physical advertising can be particularly important. When shopping offline, customers prefer to shop locally – in fact, some research has shown that the bulk of a business’s customers live just five miles away.

So making sure that customers can see that your business exists is key to bringing in new customers. Using signs, banners, and visual flags can help catch the eyes of potential customers and make them curious about what your business has to offer.

Support amazing service

Any business should offer great customer service, especially in a world where so many options are available for every purchase. Customers, especially younger customers, are looking for a great experience as much as they’re looking for a great product.

There are many ways to offer great service; your return policy should be simple and understandable, your in-store representatives should be knowledgeable, well trained, and friendly, and your pricing should be competitive.

CustomerThink

Internal Communication

Interact with your customers and keep them in the loop

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Providing good customer service isn’t rocket science – it comes down to a good support tool and remembering to keep the customer in the loop at all times.  Before you know it, you’re the customer’s service hero.

There are a number of reasons to shop with online retailers: to save time, avoid crowds, do comparison shopping… whatever the reason, nearly all consumers have purchased items on-line at one time or another.
The user (Jane) below had a great customer service experience with the on-line click & collect service from food retailer.


‘I recently filled out a customer service web form at an online food store, asking some questions about a new delicacy (cookies). Since it was an online form, I instantly got a tracking number and an email receipt (good).

However, after I had posted the inquiry, it took 5 days for them to get back to me. After 2 or 3 days without any response, I started getting furious, thinking I should take my order elsewhere.When I finally got a response, I received a long email explaining that they were sorry for the delay, and the reason was that, part of the cookies I ordered was no longer for sale, and also out of stock……. They had to make a special order of a replica from abroad to complete my order. Imagine that; they had gone out of their way to satisfy my order (it would have been cheaper for them to just cancel and refund me), but since they didn’t keep me in the loop, I was by now, a dissatisfied customer, until I got a message explaining the reason for the delay, which indeed impressed me. And guess what? They went an extra mile to deliver my cookies without a delivery fee’.

As she describes in her post, all she had to do was place her order on-line, select a time slot for pick-up, and then when she arrived, a customer service representative brought her order directly to her car. She was impressed, especially by the way the retailer handled the situation when they discovered that a few items she had ordered were out of stock. A friendly customer service representative gave her a call to let her know about the out-of-stock items, and suggested some possible alternatives.

 A key step in providing good customer service in retail starts with remembering that your customers are human and connecting with them… in a human way. This means that you listen to them. Only then can you truly understand what your customers want and begin to build relationships with them. 

When the time comes (and it will) and your company requires understanding and human compassion from your customers, just wait: their reactions and support will reflect the strength of your customer relationships and just how well you’ve been providing customer service all along.

Best you take Your Customer Service from Good to Great

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Very obvious that, we have all seen companies that are terrible at customer service.
The key to building a great company is discipline, consistency and building growth in daily increments.
Everything at every level within the organization is about servicing the customer the best way possible.

It isn’t that these organizations think the customer isn’t right. In some instances, it’s as if the customer doesn’t count.
To be great, customer service should be the defining and driving force within a business. It starts at the top and inculcates the organization from top to bottom and side to side

If you have ideas you feel like sharing that might be helpful to readers, share them in the comments section below. Thanks!

Below are ways to move your customer service from Good to Great

Step 1: Striving for Level 5 Leadership?

Step 2: Getting the right people on the bus

Step 3: Face up to the brutal facts

Step 4: Are you building a clock or just telling the time?

Step 5: Fire off small bullets before you launch a cannonball. This means you should Fire off some rounds, see where they land, and then adjust your aim.