One of the commonest complaints in any industry is about customer service. Many clients complain that the customer service staff simply don’t understand their needs, don’t listen to their problems, and don’t provide anything like good enough service. There’s a reason for that. Those staff aren’t trained.
Customer service training is absolutely critical to good business.
The plain truth about customer service
The complaints have direct applications on business. The quickest, surest way to lose customers is bad service. Despite all the emphasis in business management training and best practice seminars and workshops, some people simply don’t get the message.
Repeat business is the basis of any commercial operation. That repeat business only happens if people are happy with the service they receive. Customer loyalty is a basic principle of modern marketing, and has been for decades. Customer loyalty, too, is based on good service. Many people are customers of businesses specifically because the service is helpful and provides good value.
What’s truly astonishing is that such well known, fundamental skills often seem to be left to chance. Customer service staff are usually trained carefully and well in business procedures, but the service component often seems to be left out. Some customer service staff don’t even seem to know they’re supposed to be helping customers.
This abysmal level of service inevitably rebounds on businesses, usually disastrously. If a business has 2000 clients, and loses 500 of them through bad service and customer dissatisfaction, that’s a potential signal the business is going under, fast. No business can afford to lose 25% of its customers. This is a recipe for destroying revenue, based entirely on bad customer service.
Customer service training- The safe bet for businesses
Customer service training, like sales training, is core business training.
This training must be conducted to achieve business goals. Customer service people can’t be “thrown in off the deep end”, any more than salespeople. Skills must be learned, and a knowledge base created.
Customer service training starts with the basics:
- How to address a customer
- Learning to understand customer issues
- Assessing customer needs
- Problem solving
- Client relationships
- How to manage customer issues
These are things customer service staff do every day, with every customer. Every single basic interaction is directly related to business. All of these things are conducted on a person-to-person basis. They’re communications exercises, and they’re also the basis of sales.
Customer service and the business image
Customer service is also a matter of presentation. A business that presents itself well, with helpful, knowledgeable staff and good service, will always be competitive. If a business doesn’t present itself well to customers, sales resistance is the natural, automatic response.
Quality of service is also directly linked to business reputation. Customers don’t have to tolerate bad service. Quite the opposite, they’ll actively retaliate. If they get bad service, you can be absolutely certain they’ll tell everyone they know about it.
Customer service training also provides another priceless dimension to business skills- Professionalism. That’s the image of a successful business, and it’s no coincidence. These are the critical business skills customer service training provides. No business can exist without them.