Making Customer Service Personable
Customer service is an overlooked business practice
, but to be truly productive businesses need to make it a top priority. It is easy to get wrapped up in business strategies, and finding new ways to promote old ideas, but to be truly successful businesses need to remember the importance of high-quality customer service. Service is defined as a contribution to the welfare of others, or useful labor that does not produce a tangible commodity. Effective customer service is directly impacted by the employees who interact with customers.
Writer for the Harvard Business blog, Voices, Anthony Tjan writes, "The two best customer-service practices are sincere empathy over indifferent calmness, and common sense over standard operating procedure." Unsuspected hiccups will happen at some point or another and the way customer service employees handle those situations is what makes or breaks a company for a consumer.
Customers need to feel valuable to businesses. The quickest way to lose a customer is to convince them that their problem is one of many, and therefore unimportant. The last thing a distraught customer wants to hear is a forced apology and an automated response. Empathy is the solution to this problem.
Regardless of the situation, customers have a need to be recognized and understood. Even if a situation is beyond anyone's control, customers need to feel that employees identify with their frustration. Customer-facing employees who demonstrate empathy rather than a calm response are more likely to leave a positive impression on their customers. Businesses should understand that a customer will appreciate the business even more if it can help them in a time of need.
Everyone has suffered through automated voices directing them to push one, two, or three for additional automated instructions. When you finally get to an operator you wait even longer listening to cheesy commercials that promote products no one is interested in, and by the time the operator actually gets to the phone you feel frazzled, annoyed, and you just want your problem to be remedied. Automation, policies, and procedures stand in the way of truly effective customer service, because they inhibit employees from making genuine efforts to assist customers.
Leading department store Nordstrom is known for its exceptional customer service. Each employee will make an effort to greet with a smile, and assist in any way they can. Attention to detail is key at Nordstrom. Purchases are not merely handed over a counter in a shopping bag, they are treated like infants: carefully wrapped, tenderly placed, and then handed directly to customers. A Nordstrom employee will walk around their sales counter to hand a purchase to a customer to ensure a personal interaction has been established.
Nordstrom's service is so exceptional that the store has published a book called "The Nordstrom Way," a guide to customer service. Their rationale behind policies, is not to have any. The one customer service rule enforced is to use good judgment in all situations. Why only one rule instead of a list of policies, procedures, and fine lines? Patrick D. McCarthy writes, "Because we don't have many rules, we don't have to worry about breaking them. We're judged on performance, not on our obedience to orders."
When an employee is forced to follow a strict list of policies, they become robotic. A scripted customer service employee cannot cater to each customer's individual needs. Customer-facing employees should be instructed to treat each employee as unique, important, and different from every other customer. Policies inhibit this individualization of the consumer and therefore leave people feeling like a number instead of a customer. Such treatment can result in the loss of a customer, and the loss of a promising reputation.
Customer-facing employees need to consider using common sense over policy procedures. This does not mean that breaking company rules is a wise choice to make. It simply means that employees need to consider if the policy is helping or hurting customers. If it is the latter, employees should find ways to meet customer needs with logic. Companies would much rather meet the needs of a customer and keep business, than lose it.
Businesses involve multiple moving parts, which can sometimes cloud the perception of priority. Customer service should remain a constant priority if businesses are to continue to be successful. Even though the customer is not always right, they at least need to feel that they are understood and that their needs will not only be met, but exceeded. Customer-facing employees should be encouraged to use empathy and common sense in order to truly affect customers in a positive way. When people are treated like people instead of numbers, businesses can expect continued success.
by: Jim Sirbasku
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