Tag: Customer Service Training sydney

4 Tips To Drive Customer Service Excellence

Posted on | by Sienna
Customer Service Excellence - it's all about trust | Invest Northern Ireland

Customer Service Excellence does not just rely on your frontline staff. Although customers may be won or lost there. Therefore, it’s crucial that every staff member in your organisation works together to create the customer service journey.

That includes resolving issues and creating memorable moments for your customers. Additionally, you should empower your frontline staff to be as valuable to the customer as possible.

It could be the difference between the customer returning to your company or leaving for the competition. So how can you improve customer satisfaction in today’s customer-centric world?

Here are 4 tips to drive Customer Service Excellence

1. Collect Customer Feedback

42 Hilarious Customer Complaints That'll Make You Laugh | Bored Panda

Nothing proves to your customers their worth than asking questions and acting on it accordingly.

When asked for feedback your customers feel valued and treated almost like a part of your creative team. By asking for customer feedback you make them feel their opinions are truly valued.

Additionally, when customers feel they have been heard, they begin to have positive connotations with your brand. Consequently, they return their good experience back to you. This is either by returning as a loyal customer or spreading valuable positive word of mouth about your organisation. By using surveys, you can measure customer satisfaction and discover what product improvements your customers request.

2. Turn Customer Feedback into Action

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When the competition is just a few clicks away, it is crucial to address any customer service issues immediately.

Customers that are not happy and who provide feedback should be seen as an opportunity. They could simply write negative online reviews. That is, a public attack on your social media channels, or even worse, leave an anonymous comment on a forum.

Instead, they took the effort to contact your organisation and share their experiences, trusting that you can fix it.

Negative customer feedback should be valued even more than any other because it gives you the winning growth strategy on a silver plate!

For this reason, create a Customer Service Feedback Action Plan to tackle the unsatisfied customers’ issues straight away.

3. Improve your Product or Service

You should constantly strive to improve your product or service based on customer feedback. This will see you keep customer satisfaction levels high.

Product or service improvement often results in new customers or increased existing customer retention. The two most popular ways to make product and service improvements are to add new features or improve existing ones

4. Follow up with your Customers

Follow-Up in Customer Service: Importance, Tools, and Best Practices

Have you made an improvement based on what your customer has told you? Well then, follow up with the customer to let them know about it.

Keeping your customers in the loop shows that your business values customer feedback.

Intelligent follow-ups at the right times can have a very powerful impact on your customers. It also keeps you at the top of their mind when it comes to choosing different brands or providers.

ITSM Consulting – Building Service Excellence

Book your team on their Customer Service Excellence Training Workshop.

Gather the team and we will take care of the rest.

Call us at KONA on 1300 611 288 for a conversation, or email info@kona.com.au anytime.

LAURETTE WITH HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY ON IT FOR KONA GROUP SALES TRAINING SALES HEALTH CHECK

 

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Customer Service – The Cost of Mistakes

Posted on | by Sienna

 

Have you calculated how much your customer service costs you? Do your Customer Service Officers (CSOs) know how to make the best use of time?

The concept of sales coaching, in an effort to reinforce the information learned during training and facilitate changes in workplace behaviour, is gaining more momentum. And industry feedback reveals some businesses still need to do more.

In August 2020, the KONA and HBB Group coached over 500 salespeople virtually. However, it is important to understand that sales is not the only area where coaching has a key role to play.

In fact, coaching your staff in the art of customer service is every bit as important. Without doing so, you are unlikely to put together a truly customer-orientated workforce, increasing the likelihood of customers having bad experiences. That, in turn, can have some serious consequences for your business.

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CONSEQUENCES OF POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

Most businesses recognise that delivering good customer service is now a prerequisite for success.

Indeed, customers are more demanding than ever before in this area. Also, the level of customer service that would have once provided a competitive advantage is now considered to be the bare minimum expectation.

It is, therefore, best to assess the importance of customer service by looking at the cost of failure.

One of the KONA Groups clients – American Express, in a survey found: 78 percent of customers have backed out of an intended purchase.

Why? Due to poor customer service.

Meanwhile, 67 percent have hung up the phone because they could not reach a live agent.

Crucially, it is not just the affected customers that may be lost. Research published by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs states “news of negative customer service reaches twice as many people as news of positive customer service”. This means, failure in this area can do catastrophic damage to a company’s reputation.

WHAT CUSTOMERS ACTUALLY WANT

Good customer service need not be complicated. In truth, despite customers having higher expectations than in the past, their demands are still all perfectly reasonable and achievable.

For example, in 2019, a HBB Group global survey revealed the single most important quality was “competent CSOs who could listen and empathise”.

The other main trend revealed customers do not want to have to wait ages for help. Again, this is a reasonable expectation. But when we speak to our customers, there is one common issue. Three quarters of all customers believe it currently takes too long to reach a person capable of assisting them.

What does this mean? That the focus of your customer service development should be on providing your staff with a detailed product knowledge and ways to reduce waiting times. Add in personalisation, such as insisting that staff actually use customer’s names, and you are well on your way. 

Also, the cost to the organisation on not obtaining and recording accurate information can put undue pressure on the business. It also significantly heightens the customer’s frustration level. In a recent study conducted by The KONA Group while coaching 172 CSOs, it was found that one mistake caused 20 minutes to fix! If you amortise this – the time to the organisation is 1,964 days of productivity. That is an approximate cost of $765,000.

WHY CUSTOMER SERVICE COACHING MATTERS

Businesses that invest heavily in customer service training may wonder why ongoing coaching is required? The same answer applies to sales training and sales coaching. The role of a coach is to work with staff on a personal level, help them identify areas of weakness. Then, teach them to put their knowledge into action.

“Coaching is an interactive process that helps the other person improve, learn something new or take individual performance to the next level” explains Garret Norris, CEO of The KONA Group and author of “Build a Healthy Business”. “It is often an under-realised tool with which you can get the most out of your employees.”

In order to optimise your customer service, you are likely to have to need to make certain changes. That includes, reducing waiting times and personalising the customer experience. This requires staff to not only learn new ideas, but to actually use the information on a daily basis. Put simply, if you want to make improvements to your customer service, you cannot afford for them to revert back to old habits.

At The KONA Group, we offer a customer service coaching courses, learning how to develop talent and give feedback, with a view to improving performance and productivity, and in turn result in a strong ROI.

Contact KONA for Customised Customer Service Training 1300 611 288 | info@kona.com.au for a confidential conversation today.

Building Rapport helps deliver Exceptional Customer Service

Posted on | by Sienna
By Mary Morris, Customer Service Training specialist at the KONA Group. You may ask, “Why bother building rapport”? Well, building rapport is one of the foundations to delivering exceptional customer service. Our ability to influence customers with whom we have rapport is ten-fold. Rapport will bridge the gap between parties and pave the way for future business relationships. When we communicate with people that we admire, or share similar interests; our body language is mirrored with the person that you are speaking with. This mirroring action will result in both parties being relaxed and positive. – This is building rapport! It’s actually pretty easy to build rapport, if we just stop and think about what we do when we talk to our customers. Building rapport with our customers can occur when we listen openly to their comments, find some common ground and deliver upon expectations. Storing knowledge of our customers, where possible, such as birthdays, family members or hobbies as well as details on their organisation is critical when wanting to develop rapport. So, some easy tips on how to build rapport.
  1. Mirror/match body language, tone, verbal cues. Don’t copy! That looks contrived. If you are really listening this will happen naturally.
  2. Flowing on from the first tip, Listen. Listen with the intent to understand, not to be understood.
  3. Ask questions, this really shows you are listening and getting to know the client.
  4. Deliver upon expectations.
If you can follow these simple tips, rapport comes naturally. Our ultimate aim is to ensure our customers become advocates of our business and us as individuals. We can ensure this by building loyalty and rapport. You might look at the above tips and think, “yeah-I already do that “. Remember there is a difference between, knowing and doing. For more information on how Mary Morris can assist your sales team or call centre team please contact Mary on info@KONA.com.au or 1300 611288