“To have a successful team every player must want the same thing and dream the same dream.” – Luke John Daly
News of shoddy customer service travels twice as fast and reaches many more people as compared to good or even great customer service. With access to so many platforms for discussion and spreading the word of mouth, customers have your fate in their ‘words’. It makes sense therefore to build a dream team to ensure your company’s customer service is always top notch and spoken about well consistently.
Customer service of the highest quality is possible only when the customer service representatives and teams treat the customers like stars and VIPs. When customers are treated well then long-term success, brand repute and sustainability come on their own. Shifting your company’s focus to unfailingly pleasing the customer makes your company more successful which in turn makes the employees more passionate, engaged and willing to do extra to keep the company successful. Build a dream team for customer service by appreciating the staff members and strive towards wowing them if you expect them to provide stellar customer service to your external customers. There must be a set of values that are core to the business that everyone practices and follows, starting from the top line. When these core values are sincerely followed, your employees would also work with you in building and maintaining a positive culture, within which everyone is happy to work. Inculcating core values and setting the base to build a dream team must start at the hiring and training stage. Hire for values and train for skills!
Your company must start inward first if external customers are to be treated well. Empower all employees and provide them with the tools to make appropriate, rational and win-win decisions. Empowerment builds trust both in the employees and in customers. When employees can confidently make a decision and take it through, customers know that the company is reliable and honest. Trust and empowerment also reduces customer wait time and effort drawing customers closer to your company. Provide an atmosphere for employees to display their ingenuity and passion for work – this will infuse the right attitude of wanting to do bigger and better things for the company and customers.
Build a dream team for your company by doing the right things.
– Making the right hires – employees who are motivated and share the core values of your company will be the most appropriate to hire. Skills and work responsibilities are qualities that are easily trained but the right attitude and customer service bent of mind are attributes that must be inherent. These are non-negotiable and must be present in the person you hire. During the hiring phase ascertain why the person is interested in and working in customer service. Resolving customer issues in a mechanical manner is not customer service, but rather wanting to make customers happy, ensuring they don’t face more problems and being motivated enough to encourage other team members to provide stellar service, is the core essence of customer service. Happy and cheerful people who are willing to put themselves in the customer’s shoes will be naturally helpful and genuinely empathetic towards customers.
– Ensure that the persons being hired are completely aware of your line of business, the products and or services and the kind of customers being served. They must be able to list out your company’s values and the kind of products you have and also provide some valuable insights in to what they perceive to be customer service. Give them real life situations and ask them to provide solutions that reflect customer centricity. A person with the right attitude and will to serve would provide some unfeigned and interesting insights would be useable in the daily work scenario. Test them to know how well they would fit in with the culture of the company and the existing teams. You are trying to build a dream team so it is all right if the interview is tough and has loads of open-ended questions.
To build a dream team and sustain it start with workers with ‘can do’ attitudes and have a genuine passion for customer service. Your dream team would have workers who:
– Have the will to do and are ready to learn a new skill. They see the culture of the organization and do their best to fit in and will go the extra mile to ensure that they deliver wow customer experiences each time. They would want to ensure that the customer service they deliver is talked about positively and that customers become brand advocates and attract more business for them. The members of the dream team will always check back with the customers not just to understand an issue but to create an opportunity to further the relationship. They would take time to actively listen to the customer to truly understand their needs from both a business and emotional level. Members of a dream team would work cohesively with other members of the team and encourage them to work better. Not only do such team members provide personalized service, they are also completely open and transparent in all dealings. They will always keep the customer informed and never over promise but always deliver on what was committed. The service they provide would be beneficial to the customer and the company and also be swift, effective and timely.
– Build a dream team and solidify it by making improvements through training and coaching. Update knowledge and upgrade technology to provide accurate tools for them to work better. Dedicated staff members will use the training and guidance positively and will make a genuine effort to improve and attempt to grow with the company. Go-getters are not afraid to ask questions and actively seek to receive answers or dig out the answers on their own. Getting accurate information is of prime importance to them as it serves to help customers better.
– When you build a dream team, the members will resolve customer issues in the least possible time, never be rude, will not shirk responsibility and will be helpful under all circumstances.
– To build a dream team and keep it that way, the company must also continually appreciate and accept the vital role the customer service representatives perform. Ensure that increments, benefits and other perks are in line with others in the organization and any exemplary customer service is duly recognized in a public forum. Celebrate big and small customer service achievements but also deal effectively with any inappropriate or unacceptable behaviour.
The fact is the customers are always going to expect and most often with stringent measures and deadlines. Since customer service representatives are the first and most regular interfaces with customers, it becomes their prime responsibility to ensure customers are happy and their problems resolved with the least possible waste of resources and customer effort. Both customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction affect the bottom line of a company – one positively and the other negatively. The job of the customer service representatives includes showing the customer that they are receiving more than their money’s worth and that your company will always make it easier for them to do business with your company. The greater the satisfaction, the more likely it is that the customer will not only return to do business, they would bring along their friends and associates too.
To build a dream team, ensure that the people managing the teams are strong and focused too. They must unfailingly guide and encourage the teams to do better and also have a sense of ownership and urgency in all they do. Keeping on top of the processes and functioning of their teams would allow them to do away with any problems or ambiguities that could potentially create friction and slow the teams down, which would reflect in the quality of customer service.
Team work, collaboration, cohesiveness, individual skills and talents and a sense of fun all are the pre-requisites to build a dream team and provide a level of service that makes your customers go ‘wow’. It may not be the easiest thing to build a dream team but the kind of phenomenal changes such a team can bring about will be well worth every minute and effort spent – translating to customer loyalty and profitability.
