4 Reasons Your Customer Service Department Is Failing

Customer service is at the heart of any successful business. You can sell the best product in the world but if you aren’t giving a good customer experience, you won’t build a good customer base. So many companies think that they’re doing enough to give good customer service but often, they’re wrong. If you think you’re doing everything right but the reviews on your website don’t reflect that, you might be making one of these mistakes.

You Haven’t Defined What Good Customer Service Is

You can tell your employees that they need to give amazing customer service but that’s pretty vague. If you aren’t defining exactly what that customer service looks like, how can you expect your employees to deliver that? You need to work out exactly what kind of experience you want customers to have and what your focus should be. Is fast delivery a priority for you? Or perhaps you want to focus on a good complaints and replacement service. Whatever it is, you need to be clear about what service you’re trying to give and articulate this to your employees so they know exactly what is expected of them.

You Aren’t Training Staff Properly

Good customer service is a difficult thing to achieve and you need to have properly trained staff to deliver it for you. If you want a happy customer, you’ll need to teach your staff how to deal with them in an appropriate way. Give your staff regular training sessions to keep their skills up to date and make sure that you’re always letting them know if there are areas where they need to improve. It’s not enough to just give them a week’s training when they first start and then leave it.

You’re Treating Customer Service As A Department

This sounds a bit odd because customer service is a department. That is true but it’s important that you don’t just think of it as a separate department. If you do that, it’s only the employees that are working in the customer service department that will focus on keeping customers happy. Everybody in the company, no matter what their job role is, should be focussed on giving good customer service whenever they interact with somebody. By creating a culture of good service throughout the entire company, you can ensure that customers are always getting a good experience.  

You’ve Got People In The Wrong Jobs

Good customer service is all about the people and not everybody is suited to working in those roles. There are some people that might be great in an admin role but they don’t have the people skills to succeed in customer service. If you’re not putting the right people into your customer service roles, you won’t be giving good service no matter how well you’re training people. When you’re hiring for the customer service department, qualifications and experience are still important but you should try to get a sense of the person themselves and work out whether they’ve got the right personality for customer service.

These are the main reasons that your customer service department isn’t performing as it should be. Get it sorted right away, otherwise, it could really affect sales.

Image credit:  Flickr

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