Improved customer service by Ltljtlj at Wikipedia Commons
Improve Your Creative Business’ Customer Service Ratings
The dictionary defines customer service as “assistance and other resources that a company provides to the people who buy or use its products or services.” Although you and your employees can attend trainings provided by organizations like the International Customer Service Association or the Customer Service Benchmarking Association, you don’t need to create a separate customer service department to improve your company’s customer service ratings.
As of 2008 there were nearly 2.3 million customer service jobs in the United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Not only is the customer service occupation one of the largest in the country, jobs in the field are expected to grow by approximately 18 percent from 2008 through 2018. Generally a high school diploma is all that’s required to land a customer service job as many creative business leaders provide on-site training to new hires.
Customer Service is Not Always a Cake Walk
The job might look easy but it’s not always a cake walk. Angry customers shouting through the telephone about a product that arrived late in the mail or customers showing up at the office pounding the front counter because they were charged a fee they don’t understand. Good customer service skills can help you and your employees to manage through these and other tight spots with honesty and integrity . . . and, one more thing – a cool head. So how can you improve your customer service as a creative business leader? Consider:
- Approaching customer complaints as an opportunity to use your problem solving skills (After all, the customer wants the problem to go away; if she didn’t trust your company she probably wouldn’t have spent her hard earned money on your products or services to start with.)
- Reducing the background noise at your customer service call centers
- Hiring additional customer service representatives during peak seasons (e.g. holidays, special sales)
- Limiting the amount of time customers spend waiting to reach a representative on the telephone, via email, an online chat, etc. to two minutes or less
- Informing customers of the approximate amount of time they have remaining before a customer service representative picks up
- Directing customer service representatives to call customers back immediately should they accidentally get disconnected
- Providing customer service representatives at your creative business with headsets so they don’t run the risk of dropping hand-held telephones in the event they have to search through customer files, etc.
- Creating employee awards or certificates for customer service representatives who exceed customer expectations
- Offering ongoing training to customer service representatives
- Taking a few customer service complaint calls so you get a firsthand feel for what your representatives deal with during the day
Earn Higher Customer Service Marks in the Minds of Your Clients
Whether you’re a customer service professional or creative business leader seeking to earn higher customer service marks in the minds of your clients, help is available. For example, you can contact licensed learning and development professionals and partner with them to create in-house customer service training modules specific to the types of services your creative business provides. You can also join professional customer service associations and attend training conferences. Whichever learning path you choose to take as a creative business leader remember to measure the results of changes you make to your customer service programs. Take the right steps and you should see an increase in the numbers of returning customers and word-of-mouth sales.
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Check out Long Walk Up online at: https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000531/Long-Walk-Up.html
Sources:
http://icsatoday.org (International Customer Service Association)
http://csbenchmarking.com (Customer Service Benchmarking Association)
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos280.htm (United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics: Customer Service Representatives)
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