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There’s literally no greater competitive advantage than improving the customer service and customer experience of your business. The good news is that according to Micah Solomon, a well-known customer service trainer and expert, achieving a level of customer service that will distinguish your business in today’s marketplace doesn’t have to be difficult at all.
Here are Solomon’s top-five secrets for taking your customer service to the next level.
1. Make the commitment to put the customer in the center.
Commitment is the most overlooked step in customer service and customer experience transformation, but it’s always where you should start. Commit right now to designing every interaction, every process—even the way you speak and dress—to have the customer in the center. Customers are already in the center of their own world, and they need to know they’re in the center of yours as well.
2. Focus on service recovery.
When everything goes smoothly, it’s pretty easy to deliver stellar service. But you also need a well-thought-out and rehearsed service recovery framework for working with customers who are unhappy, disappointed, even flat out angry. Solomon’s own service recovery approach is called the MAMA method:
• Make time to listen
• Acknowledge, and if appropriate, apologize
• (Have a) Meeting of Minds with the customer
• Act
3. Beware of the ‘cliff of dissatisfaction.’
This is the point at which your customers grow unhappy with the speed of your responses and your delivery of your product or service. Here’s a simple example: How fast do you answer your phones? Your standard should be three rings. Why? According to studies conducted by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, by that fourth ring, clients will start to doubt your service responsiveness.
4. Train your employees in situational empathy.
Situational empathy—the ability to respond to a specific situation with empathy—is a master skill in customer service delivery. Employees with this capability are able to meet customers where they are emotionally, creating an unbeatable competitive advantage in modern service environments.
5. Choose your words with care.
Do everything you can to exterminate words and phrases likely to set your customers’ teeth on edge. That includes statements such as:
• “No problem”
• “As I told you before“
• ‘You owe us X”
• “That’s not what happened”
• “I beg to differ”
• “I’m not going to argue with you”
Create a company lexicon of preferred customer service language that lists phrases to avoid, along with more effective and courteous phrases that put customers at ease and make them feel appreciated, such as “You’re welcome” and “My pleasure.”
You can’t move what you don’t measure
Now that you have taken the time to read this newsletter, and hopefully put these 5 tools in place, make sure to measure if they are being put into practice. As the old saying goes, “you can’t move what you don’t measure”. Mystery shopping is the best tool for measuring your required deliverables when it comes to the customer’s experience. It keep your team on their toes plus it’s a constant reminder for you to remember what’s important, the customer’s expereince. Give us a call, we can help.
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JESSICA STILLMAN AND CARL PHILLIPS
