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Why Unity is Crucial for a Successful Customer Service (and How to Achieve it)

During hectic times of the year, like the holiday shopping season that’s now behind us, it’s more important than ever to provide excellent customer service to prevent or help your customers reduce the stress and confusion. Many companies make the mistakes of providing customer service that’s disjointed and conflicted, leading to customer frustration. This, in turn, can lead to negative reviews and all around a negative image of your brand.

Success through unity

Successful companies with happy customers achieve unified customer service in order to optimize the customer experience. They often use remotely located customer service employees who give the right answers to customer inquiries so that customers can get things done.

While customer service technology available to companies can in many ways make things easier, it can also complicate customer service communications because representatives at one location might have different procedures from representatives in another.

Customers may give up on your company if they can’t get to the bottom of any issues they have with purchasing your products or services. This is why unity is so important among your customer service staff and offerings.

Streamlining your technologies for a better customer experience

The important thing is to create a customer experience that’s so streamlined and blends communications technologies together so well that customers won’t even notice when they’re having to talk to multiple representatives to get their issue taken care of.

If you’re worried that your customer service procedure lack unity and could lead to customer complications, keep the following five tips in mind to facilitate synergy and unify your diverse customer service staff so that every representative is giving the right message.

Foster feelings of empathy between representatives working at different locations

Your customer service staff will be more unified if they understand what it’s like to be in each other’s shoes. Representatives working in different departments or locations face a unique set of challenges, and it’s a good idea if you make your team members aware of the challenges others on your staff are facing.

Make sure that news is readily shared between different departments and locations. This will keep staff members aware of what’s going on and what challenges other representatives they work and communicate with have to deal with on a regular basis. Thanks to modern technology, businesses now have employees across different departments collaborating, sharing documents and easily communicating with their colleagues. Not only that, tech allows employees to work remotely. Mind you, without good leadership and effective communication methods, you can cause a confusion among your in-house employees across different departments. On top of that, your remote customer service representatives will be faced with the “feeling of not belonging to the team” which may lead to huge losses, so make sure you avoid that at all costs.

Make sure your representatives are aware of their part of the process

It’s a big mistakes if you keep training so limited for your representatives that they don’t really know their place in the big picture of your operation. Representatives should understand their role in the context of the entire organization. This will foster feelings of being part of a team. It could also help them gain valuable insights into how they should respond to various customers inquiries.

Train employees not only on their own role, but also on what representatives that they communicate with on a daily basis are responsible for. When representatives understand the big picture, they come across as more informed and consistent to customers who need to communicate with them.

Ensure different teams are using the same terminology

Sometimes, individual worksites develop their own unique jargon and terminology. This can make it difficult for them to communicate with those located at different sites.

Make sure your company is using a shared language. Put management staff in a position where they have to communicate with other work centers so that a common language has to develop across all locations. Make sure that you yourself are using the same terminology with all of your personnel and at all of your locations.

Crosstrain employees

It’s a good idea that you train your employees on as many processes as possible. Again, cross training employees is about keeping them as well informed as possible and making sure they know as much as possible about the big picture at your company.

Crosstraining is not only good for keeping employees informed, but it also gives employees a break from their everyday tasks and helps to renew their interest in their positions.

It’s inevitably going to happen that you customer service personnel will need to transfer a customer to another representative that is responsible for the task in question. However, it always helps if personnel understands the other representative’s job role before transferring them to make sure they’re sending the customer to the right place.

Keep team members in different locations in constant communication with each other

It’s a good idea to arrange for group video conferences. When you communicate with your entire customer service staff at once, you can be sure that they’re all receiving the same unified message.

Final Thoughts

Whenever possible, conduct group trainings. Also, try to conduct periodic group meetings so that you make sure everybody is receiving news and updates on protocol and procedures. This way, you can be sure that all your staff members will remain well informed of any new changes.

 

Jen McKenzie is a writer at UK Assignyourwriter and independent business consultant from New York. She writes extensively on business, education and human resource topics. When Jennifer is not at her desk working, you can usually find her hiking or taking a road trip with her two dogs. You can reach Jennifer @jenmcknzie