– Lucy Glennon specializes in customer service training and recruitment and hiring. She can be reached at 866-645-2047 or lucyg@hireguru.com. www.hireguru.ca.
CUSTOMER SERVICE – In many cases, frontline or customer service teams are the only contact point from your clients to your company. It is very important for your staff to develop and maintain a good relationship with your customers. So, how do we promote togetherness, and set our team up to deliver an excellent customer service experience?
One key element to maintain a good frontline to customer relationship is to set expectations, no matter if the results are in their favour or not. When setting expectations for a client, there are 3 key elements:
- Time: How long they are expected to wait to have their issue resolved?
- Action Items: What is the process that will take place while the customer is waiting?
- Outcome: What will happen after the action steps are taken, and what should the customer expect to walk away with.
Below is a hypothetical example of what does that sound like:
Frontline Representative: You mentioned that you would like to place an order for product XYZ is that correct?
Customer: Yes.
Frontline Representative: (TIME) “Ok. Thank you very much for your interest in XYZ product. So that you are aware, I will be putting you on hold here for no more than 10 minutes.”
(Action Items) “I’m going to process your order in our computer to make sure we have everything you need, once I do that I will confirm with you that we have your order in our system and ready to process.”
(Outcome) “If we have everything you are looking for in stock, you should expect product XYZ to be delivered to you by tomorrow. If we do not, I will order the product and it will be delivered to you by no later than Wednesday of next week. Does that work for you?”
It is important to promote togetherness in the customer experience. Typically, customers will ride with you no matter what the outcome if you keep them involved with every step of the process.