Customer Service Skills

 Customer service skills are exactly what the phrase suggests: the skills required to provide a service to your customers. Customer service is an essential part—some would say the most important part—of delivering customer satisfaction.

There is a world of difference between good and bad customer service. Good customer service—whether before, during or after a sale—results in happy customers, or even, if you have done particularly well, delighted ones. This often translates into good reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations to other people, and repeat custom.

Bad customer service, on the other hand, results in unhappy customers, poor reviews, and lack of repeat custom. It is not hard to see why organisations strive for good customer service. This page provides an introduction to customer service, and the skills required to ensure that your organisation delivers good or excellent service to your customers.

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Understanding Customer Service

Customer service is all about delivering a service to customers.

Customer service is not about ‘after sales’ service, or sales, or marketing: it is all of them put together. It relates to every single ‘touch-point’ with your customers, that is, every time they make contact with the organisation in one form or another: website, phone, email, in person.

Who is Responsible for Customer Service?

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Your starter for ten: who in your organisation is responsible for customer service?

If you answered ‘nobody’ or ‘I don’t know’, score zero. If you answered ‘the customer service team’, score one out of ten. At least you know that you have a customer service team, and hopefully how to find them!

The real answer, however, is ‘everyone’.

Customer service starts when your customers first make contact with your organisation, whether face to face, or by looking at your website. It continues through any purchase and then beyond, as they use your product or service on an ongoing basis.

When you think about it like this, it is clear that everything that anyone in the organisation does may affect your customers’ experience of your organisation, and is therefore part of the customer service.

An Evolving Situation – Understanding How Customer Service is Changing

Ten or twenty years ago, most organisations had a defined ‘customer service’ department. Once customers had completed a purchase, responsibility for them was handed over from the ‘sales’ team—whether in store for retail, online, or sales reps for business-to-business sales—to the ‘customer service’ team. If they had a problem with the product, they picked up the phone and called the number for customer services.

This made delivering good customer service relatively straightforward: you trained your customer service team, and you made sure they knew how to respond to customers. Job done.

In the last twenty years or so, however, the number of ways in which customers can communicate with organisations has expanded hugely from letters and telephone calls to include email, instant messaging, social media, websites and discussion forums. These resources have also massively expanded the ways in which disgruntled customers can spread the word about poor treatment, and the speed with which they can do so.

This has therefore both made customer service more difficult, and made it more important to get it right.

This expansion in the number of ways in which customers can contact organisations has very much increased the potential workload for customer service teams. They have to keep track of far more options, including monitoring a range of social media sites. At the same time, however, many employees are also (and entirely independently of their job) on social media themselves as individuals.

The number of people available to interact with customers and advocate for the organisation has therefore also increased.

Organisations have not been slow to recognise the potential for this, encouraging employees to get onto social media and respond to customers directly when they have the necessary knowledge to help. This has, however, also meant that more people need to be trained in how to deal with customers.

Of course, organisations also need to be sure that employees will act as advocates, not simply agree with disgruntled customers about the awfulness of the organisation!

In other words, organisations now need to ensure that all staff—and not just the customer service team—are engaged and happy with the organisation, and understand how to interact with customers.

This is a potentially difficult situation for many organisations—but many have also got it right and are showing the benefits of engaged employees and improved customer satisfaction.

The Key to Delivering Good Customer Service

It is actually not particularly hard to deliver good customer service.

The key is to focus on the customer, and what they need and want from you, at all stages before, during and after purchase.

To achieve this, it is important to try to build a relationship with your customers.

Increasingly few of us are looking for a transactional relationship with any organisation. We no longer want to buy a single product and move on without further contact with a brand. Instead, we want to build a longer-lasting relationship with an organisation or brand that genuinely sees us as individuals and understands our needs. This goes as much for retail as for service providers like banks and insurance companies.

This is good news for organisations as well as customers, because it is much cheaper to retain a customer than to go and find a new one—and delighted customers may even go out and find new customers for you!

There are a number of things that you can do to ensure that customers are satisfied with your service. These include:

• Responding rapidly to customers, whether online, on social media or by phone. Especially electronically, and particularly by social media, customers expect a more-or-less instantaneous response, just as they expect an answer to a phone call within normal business hours. It is as well to respect this and respond quickly. If you don’t have a full response, at least reply to show that you have seen their message and are dealing with it. If the customer is complaining, a reply should probably steer them towards a private message, rather than continued interaction in public.
• Getting to know your customers by keeping records of your interactions. Nobody wants to repeat their story again when they call back, or have to provide more information if they call after emailing for a while. Having accurate records of conversations, email exchanges and so on, and, crucially, keeping them so that you can track by customer rather than separately by channel, means you will be able to respond to your customers as individuals, and in the full knowledge of their history.
• Acknowledging and fixing mistakes as quickly as possible. As often as not, all a disgruntled customer wants is an apology and a way to fix the issue when they make a complaint. Make sure that staff are empowered to provide both of those as quickly as possible.

An apology does not mean an admission of liability

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It is perfectly possible to apologise without admitting liability. Useful phrases include:

“I am so sorry that you have had this experience. It sounds really horrible.”

It is, however, important to acknowledge and validate your customer’s bad experience, and an apology for the experience is a good way to do this.

There is more about this on our pages Apologising and Crisis Communications.

• Going the extra mile. Going that little bit further can be the difference between ‘satisfied’ and ‘delighted’ customers, and it often takes very little additional effort. It is especially worthwhile for good and long-term customers. However, make sure that what you do will actually solve the customer’s issue: it is no good going above and beyond if what you do doesn’t actually help.

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