How average is your customer service?

“People won’t remember what you said or did... they will remember how you made them feel”

Can you think of a time you received exceptional customer service?

Can you think of a time you received poor customer service?

No one tends to remember the times that their customer experience was just average and at iNarrator we’re not fond of being mediocre.

We provide professional, clear and informative recordings to a wide variety of business types. No matter what sector you’re in it’s important to make a good first impression. Don’t mistake this for being the only important aspect of connecting with your customers. Coming across a helpful and friendly recorded message is only a tiny element of your customer’s overall experience.

Taking the time to prepare scripts and get your new recordings installed is time wasted, if once the phone is answered your caller receives poor customer service. Customer service is a talking point and we Brits love a good grumble, as the old saying goes news travels fast. The power of the internet has allowed us to see the good, the bad and the ugly of customer service go viral.

Poet Mary Angelou once said…

“People won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel”

This is the customer service mantra that we want your call handlers to adopt, the chances are that if they upset a customer that they won’t feel great themselves which could then have a further negative impact on their next few calls. Good customer service is underestimated, it doesn’t need to be a huge gesture to make someone feel that they’ve had a good experience with your company.

Your call handlers should strive to reflect the professionalism demonstrated in your IVR and In-Queue Messages. Mirroring and matching what your caller has been greeted with should be your standard. Customer’s expect to be met with a certain tone, manners and a handler who is adequately trained to assist them. Set the bar high and you’ll find callers are more satisfied, they may spend a little longer on the phone but this will help to build a positive relationship with your business and reassure them that they’re not just another number waiting in a long list of queries.

According to Walker Info by 2020 Customer Service and experience will be the leading brand differentiator, making how you treat your customers even more important than your pricing structure and products or services.  We take for granted how far a little empathy can go and the statistics below highlight the key skills that your customer service agents need to have in order to impress.

The research found that:

“71.5% of positive customer service experiences that people share in person or on social media began as negative experiences and in 82% of negative customer service stories employees were perceived as not caring.”

Training is vital in ensuring that your call handlers are able to deal with the kinds of requests and queries that they receive, there’s nothing wrong with going off script to make a call a little less robotic but the way agents handle calls should be monitored to ensure consistency, accuracy and professionalism.

If you don’t consider customer experience as something you need to be monitoring then you might want to read these statistics, consumers decide where their loyalties lie based on customer service so it’s important that you value them otherwise they won’t value you.

  •  88% of people have been influenced by online reviews while making their purchase decisions.  – Source:  Zendesk
  • 79% of high-income people, 51% of B2B clients, and 54% of Gen Xers will avoid your company for two years or more following one bad customer experience.  – Source:  Zendesk

If you've got the right team but you’re lacking the right first impression, that’s where we can help. Plug in and listen to our Case Studies to discover what a good first impression really sounds like.

 

Source of Statistics:
http://customerthink.com/customer-service-statistics-to-guide-you-for-2016/