Regardless of the customer support agent who is representing your business, the level of support & quality standards which is provided should be consistently good.
To make sure that this happens, don’t start from the beginning. This is a common mistake and can cause a lot of issues. Instead, work backwards and train your employees to do this too. This makes sure that they have a clear image of what the goal is and gives them a better idea how they can reach that goal. It also pushes your employees to be more creative and insightful when helping customers and provided that the same positive result is achieved, don’t go against them finding their ways to help your customers.
Training Your Employees and Repetitiveness
When it comes to business and running a successful one, inconsistency should be avoided at all costs. This includes customer service quality & experience. Regardless of who is assisting a customer, the same result should be achieved, and a consistent level of support should be provided. Hotels are a perfect example for this. A lot of the tasks which employees have to take care of are repetitive, and so they get into a routine of sorts when undergoing these tasks. It’s very rare that in a situation like this, the employee will be inconsistent; their routine would prevent this from happening.
When you are having your employees trained to follow your standards, make sure that there is a keen focus on the repetitiveness which we mentioned above. Getting your employees into the mind-set of “if the customer needs this, then I’ll do this” will better help them to provide a consistent level of customer service. This also helps to save time with future customer encounters as your employees won’t have to think about the different directions which they can take.
All employees must be properly trained for their job. If they aren’t trained for all areas of their job then they’ll have gaps in their knowledge and won’t be able to help a customer with all of their needs; often leading to your customers being disappointed.
Providing Additional Services
If a regular customer inquiries about a service which you don’t publicly provide, don’t worry, you are allowed to help them out by providing that service to them exclusively (provided that you’re capable of doing so).
Not only should you make sure that you’re capable of providing it from a business perspective, but consider whether you have employees who are capable of providing it. If you can’t fulfil the customer’s request, there’s no shame in speaking up and telling them that it isn’t something that you can help them with.
If you don’t own up and you continue, you’ll provide them with a bad customer experience which they won’t forget, and you may even lose a customer. Don’t waste your own time and above all, don’t waste your customers time.
Individual Employees
After you’ve established the quality of service which you expect from your employees, give it a few days before individually assessing each of them. By doing this, you’ll be able to see how each employee personally approaches a task, how they can improve themselves, and also see what else they are capable of.
If they’re more than capable of what their job is, perhaps they are suited for a higher up job. If not, further training may be the best thing.
When you are assessing an employee, don’t make them feel pressured and don’t get angry at them. Doing this will reduce their self-esteem and will make them perform worse. Instead, help them to improve upon their weaknesses so that they can provide a better standard of customer experiences.
They’ll appreciate the time you spend to help them and will strive to get better. This will show through their work and any regular customers who your employee's encounter will notice an improvement over time.
To Conclude…
There are a number of benefits when it comes to developing great quality standards & customer experience for your business. The thing is, developing these standards won’t happen overnight. You have to plan everything out, set it in place, provide the appropriate training for your employees (should it be necessary), and give it time to play out. If all goes well, you’ll see nothing but positive feedback from your customers.