By James A. Baker · Founder, Baker Communications
Too many customer service reps today secretly have the attitude that customer calls are an intrusion, an annoying interruption in their otherwise peaceful day. Instead of seeing calls as an opportunity to help people, they often view callers as unreasonable, irrational nuisances who just don’t get it. It should be no surprise when customers pick up on those attitudes and decide to take their business elsewhere. When they do, they take your future profits with them! What an unnecessary loss that is.
There are a number of things that companies can do to encourage a higher level of customer service. Bonuses and raises tied to great customer service performance provide a helpful incentive. Empowering employees to go out of their way to deal with customer concerns is also a great idea. However, for me there are two other factors that never fail to elevate the quality of customer service. First of all, hire great people. Pay attention to personality and people skills, and look for employees who seem to care about more than just getting a paycheck. Next, give them great training. For instance, our customer service training program focuses on being able to understand and listen for a person’s needs so that you can find ways to be constructive and responsive. If you spend as much time on training your employees to be caring as you do on how to run the software on your system, you will significantly improve your customer satisfaction rate. And keep their money in your pocket.
