Not everyone has a great experience working in customer service. On the customers’ side, they often feel like they’re being played with, ignored, or that the customer service representative doesn’t want to attend to them.
And sadly, that does happen. However, customers are not the only ones who have bad experiences with customer service, the workers deal with a lot of stress too, and some of them have reached the point where they’ve lost sight of their goals and just work to fill in the hours.
And that’s when customers’ bad experiences begin to arise…
A way to avoid this happening is by hiring qualified workers firsthand, or you can also focus on properly training the team you actually have. If you’re considering one of these solutions we recommend you to check out: 5 Skills Your Customer Service Team Needs to Develop so that you know exactly what your team lacks and what is necessary to develop!
Another solution is to learn and grow from the situations you have already experienced. A bad experience with a customer can become a great lesson for the future in learning how to treat people better, which will not only help you grow as a worker but also as a person.
Unfortunately, while living those experiences you’re most likely to trip along the way until you stop falling again. And as a dedicated worker, we are sure that you would like to avoid any mistakes if possible.
That’s why we’ve asked our customer service team and cleared out 5 lessons learned while working in customer service that will help you to keep improving as a customer service representative.
Let’s check them out!
There’s no Limit for Gratitude
The way you respond to your customers’ gratitude could be the difference between a good experience and a regular one. The focus here is not letting the gratitude end with you.
A little trick that could help you ease your customers is to stop saying “you’re welcome” and start saying “thank you too”. That right there will be your magic phrases for instead of cutting out gratitude, amplify it.
By doing this, at the end of the call, the customers will not only be happy with your good assistance but just by saying thanks to them, you can make them leave the call with a smile on their faces.
Learn from Mistakes
Since most of the part of the customer service job is dealing with customers’ problems, you will be frequently dealing with failures. That means, flawed products, equipment shortcomings, delivery inefficiencies, miscommunication, human errors, imperfect policies, broken promises, and so on.
This is why customer service is not a job for everyone if you find yourself to be easily stressed out when dealing with these kinds of situations, and do not consider yourself to be capable of solving problems under pressure, there’s still a lot you should focus on before working on customer service.
Nevertheless, you can always learn from those situations because at the end of the day, the more problems you encounter, the more solutions you will find. Steadily you’ll learn to cope with challenges and recover at a faster pace.
Always keep in mind what you could do to solve any situation more efficiently and be prepared for when it happens again.
Learn when to Multitask
The ability to multitask is a must when working as a customer service representative. You’ll need to embrace a wide range of tasks and duties so it’s important to develop a high sense of organization to know when is the right time to multitask or when to focus solely on the task at hand.
Our advice is to familiarize yourself with your tasks in order to handle them correctly. And when it comes to any sort of communication with customers, be it a phone call, Live Chat session, face-to-face conversation, or email, give them your undivided attention.
Always Try to Defuse Tension
When dealing with complaints, the normal instinct is to quickly find the culprit and point out the root of the problem. However, when working in customer service, this is not the case.
You want to avoid pointing out fingers as much as possible, and in many cases, the customers will do that to you, the product, or the business. The solution lies in focusing on understanding rather than blaming.
Always try to figure out what went wrong, when, and why, and how it can be avoided in the future. But still, when facing angry customers this becomes a difficult task, so when you notice that the conversation starts to build up tension, always try to defuse it and sincerely apologize on behalf of the company.
You can Always Go a Little Further
When it comes to serving customers, there’s always the possibility to take that extra step in order to give them better solutions to their needs. You’ll realize it yourself when you start getting some experience that there’s more than just doing your job correctly (in accordance with internal rules, scripts, and policies).
Once in a while, you’ll be given the possibility to achieve a better and more effective result when handling the situation in a different way. This means you have a choice of doing merely what is expected of you or trying to excel at it.
Once you have enough time working as a customer service representative, you’ll know when it’s the right time to choose to take this extra step and trust us, having happy customers is totally worth it!
With this last lesson, we are finished for now. However, if you’re up for the task, there’s still a lot more to learn regarding customer service! We advise you to check out Customer Service vs. Customer Support next so you can keep learning more and more about the customer service position!
