Customer service is at the core of a good customer experience. As customer expectations continue to rise, your employees hold the key to customer service success.
Investing to market your brand and assess customer experience may offer valuable insights.
But converting these insights into actions is a more significant challenge. But harnessed in the right way, your employees are the most effective resource on your hands. All you need to do is empower your people to improve customer retention, brand differentiation and cultivate a healthy bottom line.
Empowering your customer service executives may be easier than you think. Customer service executives who remain confined to a strict process are usually afraid to make their own decisions. They fear criticism from their seniors and tend to be unhappy in their jobs.
On the other hand, customer service executives who have the freedom to make decisions based on their common sense rather than relying on manager approval are bold. And therefore, more productive.
Here’s a list of seven simple steps that you can take to empower your Customer Service Team –
1. Design an Employee Engagement Plan
Employee engagement refers to the emotional connection that an employee has with their job. Employees should not engage with their job just because they are paid to do so; it is also essential for your employees to feel valued and appreciated at the workplace. Here are some tips for developing a good employee engagement plan.
- Work on developing a pleasant work environment
- Strengthen employee value by giving them a sense of entitlement
- Allow independent working, such as work from home.
- Avoid micromanagement
2. Empower Technicians with the Best Technology & Tools
As every industry becomes more customer-oriented, field service management teams are now stepping up to contribute to customer satisfaction. Empower your technicians with efficient field management software that optimizes efficiency with automated scheduling, improves service quality, and boosts customer satisfaction.
3. Educate Your Employees about the Customer’s Point of View
Sometimes putting your employees in your customer’s shoes helps bring them closer to a customer’s mindset. It can help your employees understand the struggles your customer goes through and how they can help. Reinforce the notion that every employee’s action impacts a customer’s experience. This exercise deepens your employees’ empathy towards your customers.
4. Recognize and Incentivize Employees Appropriately for Customer Outcomes
Make your employees sufficiently aware of the impact their efforts make on customer satisfaction and how they can improve a customer’s experience. After that, you may reinforce positive behaviors by rewarding successes and sharing positive stories of excellent customer experience across the board. It will inspire other employees to step up and support customers in need.
5. Measure Your Employee Performance
Introduce concrete KPIs into your customer service roles to measure your employee’s performance levels. The aspects of customer service that you wish to monitor may differ based on the nature of your product or service. However, here are some general performance indicators you can consider –
- Response Time – How quickly do your employees respond to a customer in need?
- Chat Surveys – Chat surveys are a quick assessment of your employee’s performance to identify any issues.
- Average Resolution Time – The average time taken to fix the issue raised by a customer.
- Total Resolved Conversations -The number of conversations resolved by an executive.
6. Training
Repeated training serves to refresh your employees’ memories about the product understanding, emotional intelligence, and time management skills they need on the job. Provide fresh customer service training tips to your employees and encourage experience sharing among peers.
7. Encouragement Through Experimentation
Customer service executives experience the problems on-ground, enabling them to find fascinating insights into the customer experience. They may have new ideas for improving customer experience and unique solutions.
Being open to new ideas and suggestions from your team can significantly improve employee empowerment. Encourage your managers to listen to recommendations from their team members and work to implement some of them.
Building a reputation for excellent customer service is a long-term process. If you wish to improve customer experience in your company, the first step should be to empower your customer service executives. Empowered and happy employees are capable of delivering better customer service and boosting customer experience.
Providing good customer service tools and maintaining transparency about company goals and critical information gives employees ownership of their projects. Ultimately, your employees should feel motivated to give a delightful customer experience!
