Growth isn’t always defined by an upward trend. Businesses can face a variety of challenges that can lead towards setbacks. Maintaining the status quo can be immensely challenging, especially during these periods of growth. Quality can deteriorate leading to a domino effect of headaches. For example, a lack of internal training will often lead to mistakes while lacking the correct tools and solutions will lead to continued problems that customers will be unable to resolve. Consistency is key, even if it means just maintaining the status quo, which will lead to fostering a sense of loyalty and trust from your customers. In doing so, you can worry less about having to sacrifice aspects of your business and instead focus on the growth potential of your favourable tailwinds. Here are tips on how to maintain customer service excellence when the lightning strikes twice.
The top reason why customer service will decline is a lack of consistent training. Company front-facing representatives who have just received and passed their training will consistently perform better in the first year or so. As time goes on, they are prone to forget procedures or get careless and cause mishaps. The important part here is creating a training plan that keeps team members aligned with company values and service expectations. There’s nothing wrong with retraining your employees for the sake of consistency. This training represents your baseline for customer service quality. Excellence only arrives once everyone is at this starting line. Once everyone is at this starting point, you can elevate this training plan towards a newer baseline that has taken into consideration new problems within the recent time period.
Alternatively, if the business scales rapidly without being able to properly train its internal team members. It is possible to instead rely on an answering service for small businesses. These types of customer support services go around the clock so that you never have to worry about missing a call. They handle the matters of answering inquiries in place of your team members. This type of solution is popular because of its scalability. These services are designed in a way that can configure the right solution plan for your specific business. Finding the right service plan is important in order to find the right features that suit your business and its level of growth.
Image is just as important when it comes to proving excellence. During your growth period, maintaining the image of the company is essential for the success of the brand. Customers will greatly appreciate a unified and easily recognizable team member when they are aiding with customer service. Consider custom t-shirts to use as uniforms, adding a flavor of personal attire can allow customers to connect with your customer service team. Overall this also improves brand consistency and establishes an iconic image that further develops the overall brand during this period of growth. It’s through the uniform that the business can slowly build a brand that customers will know at a glance and be fully comfortable with as their trust builds over time.
Be serious about customer feedback. Collect data through customer surveys to see what needs improvement. This step is the start of an entire review process that seeks to improve customer satisfaction by directly addressing personal feedback.
Feedback here is important as a means of reference. It can be used as a tool to gather information and hypothesize the best course of action for the direction of your business’ growth. Along with the pillars of your growth plan, customer feedback
The human element is the most volatile aspect in any organization. Consider as well that part of managing and maintaining customer service excellence is also in developing a healthy internal culture and uplifting team morale. It should come as no surprise that a team that finds no purpose in their work quickly becomes inefficient and apathetic. While there are many ways to supplement team morale, the most effective method has been to build a company culture in which they as employees can thrive. The culture will look different depending on the values that the business upholds the most but ultimately, the culture should be a source of inspiration and right conduct.
The last tip in regards to customer service is that proactivity and initiative are what build reputable and trusted customer relations. It’s a matter of showing effort towards customers at the right place and the right time. Consider expanding your support beyond your current means in order to be present when the customer requires your aid. Instead of waiting for customers to seek you out, build channels in which your team can take the initiative to ask if the customer requires assistance. Whether it's through online channels like email, live chat or social media, or direct in-person conversations, service quality can also be defined not just by how good it is but also by how wide it can cover.
In essence, growth that will arrive must be prepared for. Not being ready for when the storm hits will lead to disaster. In the same way, being able to fully utilize potential any time lightning strikes can propel your business further and further.
Growth covers a wide range of parameters and figuring out how you can best serve your customer takes the shape of many forms. Moving forward, the image of excellence is what you picture it to be and will ultimately reflect accordingly onto your business entirely. These tips at their core are about knowing how to be prepared for any situation and how to best utilize opportunities when the moment hits.
From here, the road to success only trails further and further.
