Customer Service: Tips to teach employees to Improve their communication skills

Once you have created a great product or service and put it out there into the marketplace, you want to make sure you have hired and prepared a great customer support team to service your customers. These days your team can be virtual, in house, or both.

Nevertheless, all employees must master certain communication skills to interact with customers proficiently. Without those communication skills, the risk of embarrassment or customer loss is high, and as your service continues to let people down, you’ll experience customer attrition and develop a poor product or service reputation.

Fortunately, there are some universal skills that are helpful for employees in this regard. And by mastering those skills, they will improve their conversations with customers dramatically.

Following are some tips to improve employee and customer communication:

Teach employees to be patient

Patience is important to customers who reach out to you when they are frustrated or confused. It is also important to the business overall. Teach your employees to be patient with customers when they come to them frustrated and stumped. However, they should not use patience as an excuse for slothful service.

It is important to take the time and figure out what customers really want. They want a competent customer service instead of being rushed out the door.

Attentiveness

For providing a great customer service, your employees should have the ability to actually listen to customers. Attentiveness is essential for a number of reasons. Paying attention to each customer interaction (such as watching the terms/language they use to explain their problems) as well as being attentive and mindful to their feedback is very important.

Through attentiveness, you can figure out what your customers want to say but not saying it outright. It helps understand what the customers want to tell you without saying it.

Clear Communication Skills

Clear communication allows you to quickly get to the problem. You don’t have to tell your customers your life story or how your day is going. You have to be careful about how your communication habits translate to your customers. When communicating, it’s best to leave nothing to doubt and keep it simple in addition to relaying clearly to customers.

Ability to Use “Positive Language”

Your employees should be capable of making minor changes in their conversational patterns if they are to satisfy customers. For persuasion, language is a very important aspect, and customers often make perceptions about you and your business on the basis of the language you use. Using positive language affects greatly on how your customers hear your response.

Acting Skills

There are some situations in which you can’t make a customer happy. For example, situations that are out of your control (customer is a natural-born complainer, or simply having a bad day) can disturb your usual support routine. In this case, you will have to use your necessary “acting skills” to maintain your routine cheerful persona regardless of dealing with such customer.

Did you get a chance to catch my guest spot on the Navigating the Customer Experience Podcast?

Using Communication to Build Customer Relationships

http://yaniquegrant.com/using-communication-build-relationships-ellie-parvin/