Great Customer Service Takes a Little Work
One of the biggest predictors of whether or not your employees will give your customers great service is how happy the employees are with the company they work for and they job that they do. Employee moral is a big part of customer service. Underpaid abused employees are not going to care about your customers and may actually go out of their way to make the customers unhappy. You have to look for ways to make the employees feel valued and look for signs that an employee is disgruntled. One way to do this is to talk to your employees on a regular basis. Try to get a feel for how they are feeling about the job they are doing. Give at least as much, if not more, positive feedback than negative feedback about an employee’s performance. If the employee only receives negative feedback the likely result will be an unhappy worker and even worse, unhappy customers. This may sound like common sense, but you might be surprised by how many managers ignore this simple advice. Make sure you have an open door policy in your organization and that the employees are made to feel comfortable coming to your for advice.
Another way to help your employees deliver the customer service you expect is to train, train, train. Make sure they know what you expect. Don’t just assume that customer service is common sense. It may seem like it to you, but to someone who has never worked in customer service little things like thanking the customer may not happen. Watch your employees’ interactions with your customers and give them immediate feedback on what was right about the interaction as well as what was wrong. Give them tips on how to fix what they may have missed so they can do it right the next time. Make the criticism positive and they will be more willing to listen. A well trained employee is one of the keys to great customer service. Most employees want to do a good job, but they must have all the tools available to make them a success.
Besides training your employees on how to effectively give great customer service, make sure they understand the essential functions of their job. It does no good to have a happy friendly employee who doesn’t know how to do the job. If the employee is a cashier, for instance, make sure they understand how to work the cash register and all the functions of the cash register before leaving them alone to work with the customers. If the employee does not know how to perform the essential functions of the job then the customer will not walk away from your business with good feelings and the employee may quit out of frustration, leaving you with a higher turnover and more challenges with customer services.
Sometimes it may be fun to give your employees an incentive for good customer service. This can work if you make it the exception not the rule. The bottom line is the employee’s job is to help the customer, so the incentive should be for behavior above and beyond their job. Incentives such as a free day off or free lunch can help raise your customer service levels, as well as make the job more fun for your employees. A fun, professional work environment can only help your customer service levels.
You may consider performing surveys of your customers to get their feedback on how they specifically feel about the customer service levels of your business. They and only they can tell you the real story behind the customer service being offered by your employees, and many of them would be happy to tell you. As a manager or business owner, you will probably hear about a large portion of the customer service issues in your business through customer complaints, but, unfortunately, the happy customers will not often seek you out to give you the feedback, so seek them out, ask, they will help you see what is right about your service, and you can use that information as a tool to help you train in the future.
Ultimately the success of your business depends on how well you keep your customers happy. Happy customers come back; unhappy customers not only don’t come back they let everyone they know hear about their bad experience, further damaging your reputation. If you have trained, happy employees, great customer service will follow.
