The ongoing commitment to your customer experience strategy is an important element of how to improve your service interactions with customers and prospects. Your thoughtful and respectful dialogue with customers, whether through email, telephone or in person, plays an important role in setting and understanding your customer’s expectations.
A key to earning your customer’s trust is delivering consistent and memorable service. Providing consistent service will give your customers confidence that they will receive the same or better level of service in the future, which will make them stay longer, buy more and positively refer others. Every front-line employee’s focus should be on becoming a customer advocate and helping customers solve problems, get answers, and when necessary, recover to ensure they create high levels of customer loyalty.
As a leader, it is critical that you provide your employees with the training and development so that they have the proper skills and competencies to serve your customer effectively at every touch point, including when they are in service recovery. Training your employees for better customer retention and recovery can create millions in ROI for your organization. For example, GES created a custom customer retention learning suite for a Fortune 50 insurance company, in 7 global markets that produced over $300 million worth of bottom line impact!
The way you personally handle customer problem solving is a moment of truth for your company and the customer. The way that you respond and recover will affect how your customers perceive your company and directly impacts their loyalty in the future. Listening is the purest way you can show an intense focus on the customer. Good listening skills are especially critical when a customer is trying to communicate their problem or issue.
The top service organizations in the world are all exceptional when it comes to service recovery. Remember, service recovery means that you need to take personal action to listen, problem solve and respond to the customer issue or complaint. This provides you and your company an opportunity to recover in such a way that you exceed expectations and create a memorable service experience.
When it comes to service recovery, your company will get the most positive impact if you are able to resolve the issue and recover immediately. As a leader, making sure your employees have a clear understanding of the service boundaries and recovery guidelines is a key step in being able to recover quickly. It is important to review and understand the amount of autonomy and authority they can use when engaged in a service recovery process. If they have the authority and ability to resolve the issue, they should do so immediately! Remember, often acknowledging the issue and apologizing is all the recovery that is required.
One thing we know for sure, is the longer the recovery process takes and the higher up in the organization the customer must go for resolution, the greater the “financial concessions” it takes to satisfy the customer. By being proactive in your recovery, you will continue to exceed your customer’s expectations and maintain their loyalty.
For more information on how you can train and develop your employees to have exceptional service and service recovery, get in touch for a 15-minute demo to see GES’s custom learning solutions in action!