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You may have great product offerings, but if you don’t care about your customers and offer poor customer support to them, your business will definitely not survive in the long run.
Now, here comes the good news. It’s possible to turn things around. Improving your customer service qualities from average to exceptional will not occur instantaneously, though. Achieving this transformation demands a significant dedication to substantive change, a group of highly skilled support specialists, and efforts from all areas of the organization.
You may have deployed the best customer support solutions and technologies, but without the right people to execute it, all your strategies can go to waste.
To offer the best-in-class customer service, you need a well-trained team of support representatives. But what are the top qualities to look for while hiring customer service agents for your dream team? Here in this blog, I will discuss what customer service actually is, its importance for your business, its principles, and top 8 must-have customer service qualities to die for.
When 86% of customers cease their dealings with a company because of a negative experience, it means that it’s high time that the business should view every customer support interaction as a potential chance to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, or increase sales.
Good customer service always generates revenues for your company. It provides customers with a seamless and consistent experience that is in line with an organization’s goals and objectives.
As per different studies, annually, U.S. businesses suffer a loss of over $62 billion due to inadequate customer service, and 7 consumers out of 10, report that they have chosen to spend more money with a company that offers exceptional service.
So, to stand steady in the long run, you have to understand that providing good customer support and experience shapes the overall experience of your customers and makes them loyal to your brand.
For providing exceptional customer service, there are 4 basic principles: proactive, personalized, competent, and convenient. All these factors together have a distinct influence on offering a great customer experience.
Don’t wait for your customers to get in touch with you to ask for help. Rather be proactive and personally reach out to make them understand that you are always there and ready to assist.
For example, if your website is having a downtime, proactively get in touch with your customers and inform them about your problem. They may not be happy but will be convinced to know that you at least kept your customers informed about it.
Add a human touch to your customer service strategies. Personalized experiences greatly enhance customer service and make your customers feel that your company values them and their concerns.
Don’t always think about earning money and sales conversions. Consider it as an opportunity to earn the good will of your customers and develop a strong and positive relationship with them.
Customers desire the flexibility to reach a customer service representative through their preferred communication channel for maximum convenience. So, always try to be available on the communication platforms your customers mostly use and make it easy for them to get in touch with you.
For example, we all use social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. So, make sure that you have teams to handle customers over there and offer personalized assistance over there as well.
To have competence, the customer support team has to be knowledgeable. Consumers have identified competence as the most significant factor in determining a positive customer experience.
The customer support team should have deep knowledge about the company and its product offerings as well as different smart techniques to handle customer issues. Always remember one thing, the more knowledge they will gain, the more competent they will become.
By constructing your customer service approach based on these four key principles, you will establish a positive and effortless customer experience for all individuals who interact with your company.
Although providing consistently excellent customer service involves effort and coordination throughout your entire organization, your support team can serve as a starting point for this endeavor. It’s important that you hire the right team that actually will help your customers to shine and be well skilled to offer the best service and experience.
Finding such a perfect team can be a tough job but not impossible at all. There is no such checklist for experiences or degrees, but the perfect candidates should have some inbuild excellent skills that cannot be taught. Above all, a team must know customer support vs customer service to do full justice to their role.
So, here let me list down the 8 best customer service qualities that your dream support team should have and that you should look for while appointing new members to the team.
Being empathetic will help in the long run. When a customer is already upset, giving excuses or being defensive instead of solving the issues will only worsen the situation.
Instead of that, a well-skilled customer service agent will make them feel that he understands the pain and will do everything possible to solve their problems. The same can be applied to customers who are confused, disheartened, or even happy. Empathy builds emotional connections.
Example: For example, a customer is arguing because of a sudden price increase in any of your offerings. Instead of telling him, “We can’t do anything about it”, being empathetic, the support agent can tell, “I understand the sudden price hike can be problematic for you but let me explain the reasons behind it” and then he can explain to him. It will definitely help the customer to calm down.
When a customer gets in touch with your support team, the last thing he will expect is not to wait in a long queue to get assistance. It’s possible that many times the support agents are busy assisting others and customers need to wait. But be transparent about it and let them know about their waiting time expectations.
Example: You can integrate live chat assistance on your website, mobile app, or other messaging platforms where customers reach the support team for getting assistance and let them know about their expected waiting time in the chat window itself.
You can also include a call-back option and inform customers about it, where support agents will call them back when they become available.
Listen to your customers. Active listening is a must-have quality in customer service to understand what they feel, want, and expect. To be an active listener, always be attentive and listen to what your customers are saying, try to understand their temperaments by closely monitoring their tone of speaking. Wait until they complete and then share your thoughts.
Example: Suppose a customer has called you to complain about his latest purchase from your brand. First, listen to what he wants to convey and try to figure out what his expectations are. It may be a replacement or a refund. After that only you can offer him the best advice and assist further.
If your customer support team provides assistance through live chat, they are supposed to provide help to multiple customers at a time efficiently. So, in such cases, they have to listen to each one of them carefully and at the same time deliver accurate solutions. For such deliverables, the agents need to be highly skilled. Multitaskers can do such jobs comfortably supporting multiple customers at a time and providing best-in-class experiences.
Example: Suppose, one agent is talking to two customers at a time. One has a query, while the other person has a complaint. Here, in such a scenario, the agent should not be distracted, and capable of providing separate solutions to both customers successfully.
The customer’s perception of events, regardless of whether it is accurate or not, plays a crucial role in determining their overall experience. Adopting a customer-focused approach encourages your agents to prioritize the customer’s experience and adjust their service to cater to each customer’s specific requirements. It also lets them be proactive and reach out to customers to ask if they need any assistance. Such initiatives make customers feel that they are actually very important to the company.
Example: While dealing with an irritated customer regarding a faulty order, the support agent should understand that he will demand a replacement. To meet his expectation, the agent should proactively check the inventory ensuring prompt dispatch of a replacement.
One of the most important qualities of a customer service agent is he should be exceptionally good with angry and dissatisfied customers. Handling general customer queries is easy but calming down a customer who is already pissed off will be tough.
Instead of feeling bad about the yelling, and bad words by customers, the agent should understand the situation and try to calm down the customer by offering the best solution to him as soon as possible.
Example: When a customer support representative shows genuine empathy towards a dissatisfied customer, for instance, by simply acknowledging their frustration, it can both calm the customer (by making them feel heard) and satisfy them (by validating their frustration).
Effective time management skills are crucial for customer service agents as they help to manage their workload, prioritize tasks, and provide prompt and efficient service to customers.
It’s great to be patient and spend some extra time with customers to serve them better, but a limited amount of time can be allocated to each customer. How to manage your time for each customer to serve them better? There are many time tracking software that can be helpful to manage your time better. In doing so, your team can strive to meet customer needs and deliver the desired outcome efficiently.
Example: Suppose a customer is having some issues with one of your products that will take time to resolve. The agent should understand this and escalate it to someone else who can assist in a better way.
Many job candidates tend to overlook the significant amount of stress that customer support agents face on a daily basis. The nature of the job, which involves dealing with complicated inquiries and a large volume of support tickets, can lead to high levels of stress and pressure in daily life.
If you find out that a job applicant appears to be unable to manage the demands of daily customer support work, he may not be suitable for a role in customer service. It is important to remember that ineffective stress management can result in subpar performance or even lead to employee burnout.
Example: Quickly assess and prioritize the most pressing inquiries and address them in a timely manner. Be organized and efficient, so that you can handle multiple tasks simultaneously while ensuring that each customer receives the necessary attention.
To offer best quality customer service, there are some tools available in the market that allow you to engage with your customers in real time and offer help whenever and wherever they need.
REVE Chat is one such omni-channel customer service solution that helps you to offer best quality customer service on website, mobile app and other social media platforms like Facebook, Viber, Instagram, telegram and WhatsApp.
It offers live chat, voice and video chat facilities for your customers to engage with your customer support team whenever required. Apart from that, its AI chatbot solution helps you to automate different business operations including customer service and lets you offer best quality automated support to your customers 24/7 and even when all of your support agents are busy with other tasks.
Automate your whole customer service operations with our AI-powered chatbot and provide instant assistance to customers when your team is not available.
Let your customers initiate live chat sessions to interact with your support team for instant assistance.
REVE Chat’s video chat feature allows customers to initiate video calls to your customer support agents through the chat interface.
View and control your customer’s screen during a live chat session for providing technical support, assisting with online purchases, or demonstrating a product or service.
With the ticketing system, track and manage customer queries and chat requests efficiently through the same interface.
Being a business owner, if you are looking for improved customer engagement or seeking to streamline the support process, opting for REVE Chat will be a great investment for improved customer service, lead generation, and great sales.
REVE Chat offers 14-day FREE TRIAL to try all its unique features. So, SIGN UP today and explore how it can benefit your business.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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