Employees who are not focused on delivering good customer service can cast a long shadow on your business

 

Understanding the impact of customer service on your business is critical

The behaviour of your employees towards your clients will leave a long lasting impact on your business. Every interaction is an opportunity to consolidate the client relationship or conversely a potentially destructive situation creating a long term impact on the perceived service integrity of the business. 

Companies must work much harder than before as customers now have an easy to deploy tool to try to make a situation right. No longer do they try to obtain an apology or a corrective action. In a way it is more convenient, more immediate and more gratifying to leave a bad review which there for all to see and which can severely impact a business. Every customer can cast a long shadow, make sure they are not tempted to do it.

All employee contributions make a real difference to customer service

Every single employee customer service contribution matters

In the field of customer service, most expectations are placed on those employees answering the phone or replying to messages via social media or email. Unfortunately, when customers reach out to them, it is often too late in the process, something has not gone according to plan. Whilst we do not dispute the valuable role that dedicated customer service executives have to play in ultimate customer satiffaction, companies must take a much more holistic view and involve everyone in the company to contribute to the delivery of a great customer experience. Every single contribution made by employees matters to customers: product design, manufacturing, packaging, delivery and even efforts made by the finance teams to keep costs under control. When all these contributions are pulled together, one can really achieve a dramatic result, resulting in a fantastic level of customer service.

Customer service: the path to nowhere?

Customer service career path

Is customer service a good career path for employees? Through the years of writing this blog, we have establish a (small) number of truth which could be hard to challenge. To name a couple, we have established that quality customer service is a key factor in the long term prosperity of an organisation and that employee satisfaction is a key success factor driving good customer service. Bringing the two together, it becomes clear that any organisation must be able to attract quality employees to its customer service teams and to make it attractive in the long run, convince employees that customer service offers a solid career path. To ensure their long term future companies must therefore make sure that enough attention is paid to the customer service career path, not only to allow development of individuals within the function but also to make sure that they can progress in others parts of the business, such as marketing for example, so that there customer interaction experience can be fully leveraged.

Customer service employees: have they come out of their shell?

Customer service employees

As your customer service employees return from their summer holidays, do make sure that the benefits of a relaxing time on the beach is being felt by your clients. Is the outlook of your customer service employees changing? Have they come out of their shell? They should be given more of a free rein to resolve customers issues and problems before they fall back into their well-worn customer service old habits. Whilst procedures and discipline should not be overlooked, an empowered customer service workforce is very likely to be more enthusiastic and able to deploy its skills more effectively.