Customer Service for Small Businesses – Part 2
By Debbie Gregory.
Train Employees to Provide Excellent Service
Part 2 of 3 of Customer Service Series
Many small business owners are still making basic customer service mistakes that are easy to fix. Taking the time to learn, think, invest in your people, and improve on your service delivery will place you ahead of your competition.
Start by Learn the Ins and Outs of Customer Service Yourself:
-Training Courses
As stated in part 1 of this post, the U.S. Small Business Administration offers quite a lot of free online resources and training materials to help boost your business’s customer service – you take a look at what they offer here:
https://www.sba.gov/course/customer-service/
There are quite a lot of other organizations that offer free training, resources, and mentoring for small business owners. For example, SCORE offers business workshops on a number of topics, including customer service, both in-person and online, with recorded versions available to view at any time.
-Get A Mentor
Consider pairing with a volunteer small business mentor who can answer questions and coach you.
-Continuously Listen & Read
There are so many experts out there that offer other free resources that can be of value to you and your business. Take the time to find and to read blogs and books and listen to podcasts to continue learning.
Train Your Employees to Provide Excellent Service:
For excellent service every employee needs to be trained on what to do and what not to do.
-Hire the Right People
Start by recognizing that all of your employees are actually salespeople and that you need to hire the kind of people who can provide great service regardless of their position. Your entire company culture should revolve around helping your customers. Take your time to choose candidates who have a caring attitude, patience, and the ability to listen, empathize, ask questions, and solve problems. Hire positive people!
-Coach Employees on How To Talk to Customers
Employees need to know how to truly listen to a customer as well as speak to them. A casual-yet-professional style of speaking with a light tone of voice can warm up an interaction with a customer and help your company build a relationship, especially if the customer has a question or minor concern that your staff can easily fix. If there is a problem they need to know how to quickly empathize, apologize, and defuse the situation when dealing with a customer who is upset. Put together a training plan for all employees on the best way to interact with customers and make sure that they practice these skills.
The Telephone Doctor offers customer service training and recommends using the “ASAP” approach to diffuse a problem. ASAP stands for:
- Apologizing immediately,
- Sympathizing with the customer’s situation,
- Accepting responsibility,
- Preparing to help solve the problem.
-Consider Outside Training for Employees
There are quite a lot of organizations and companies that offer customer service training to help take your business to the next level. Consider sending key employees, such as your customer service manager, to an in-person seminar or bringing in a pro to train your whole team.
-Model Good Customer Service
Make it a point to solve customer problems in front of your employees so they can see how you want it done.
-Watch and Offer Feedback
Make it a point to work near your customer service employees occasionally and offer on-the-spot assistance by making suggestions for alternate ways to deal with customer issues.
-Create a Library of Customer Service Resources
A great resource to have for your employees on how to deliver exceptional customer service is to build a library of frequent customer issues and questions as well as their solutions. Make sure to keep adding to the library as new issues and solutions arise. This is particularly helpful for new employees who can learn how to best resolve common issues that come up.
Exceptional customer service may not come naturally to you, your employees, or your business. Train yourself and your employees to look at things from the customer’s point of view. This is a crucial to creating a culture of excellent customer. Training can help you identify simple mistakes, help develop ways to combat or solve potential problems, and turn your employees into customer service superstars.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this Customer Service for Small Businesses.
