Whether your service team performed exceptionally well or poorly last year, setting new goals at the start of a new year to elevate your customer service delivery is always a great strategy to increasing profits. Following are helpful hints to get you moving in the right direction.
Real World Story: No matter where your service team currently stands on the customer satisfaction spectrum, you always have room for improvement. For example, your service agents are incredibly dedicated to giving the best possible service, but your online star rating is 4 out of 5 stars and has been for quite some time. Or maybe your service agents suffer from taking ownership of their individual roles in adhering to your customer service standards and are consistently earning 2 out of 5 stars. In either case, what can you do to reach the goal of earning a 5-star customer rating by the end of 2022?
Strategies that Turn it Around:
- Set one big goal: Choose one goal and think big when setting it. It may be to reach a 5-star online rating, or it may be to win your industry’s coveted customer service award, or to end the year with zero customer complaints.
- Take small steps: In customer service, you have many moving parts that must work together to achieve great results: short wait times, knowledgeable and friendly staff, quick solution to a problem, follow through, and the list goes on. Carefully review your customers’ comments and feedback and choose a few problem areas and work on those first until you are able to incorporate new or updated procedures into your customer service standards that are achieving results toward your goal. Maybe your most common complaint is long wait times. Therefore, concentrate on lowering those times by looking at your internal data to see which times are you busiest. Then maybe schedule lunch breaks for staff around those heavy call times.
- Get buy-in: You must get everyone on your team to buy-in and understand why changes must be made. Nothing kills a good plan than just one employee who thinks a new change is stupid or unnecessary.
- Seek commitment: Make your goal official by having everyone on your team make a written commitment to reaching that goal. This makes every person accountable for his or her actions and behaviors. And don’t forget that accountability comes with rewards and reprimands.
- Reward incrementally: While you want to reach the big goal, don’t neglect rewarding your staff for small-step victories. For example, if scheduling team members around your busy hours is working to reduce wait times, then celebrate that small accomplishment.
- Learn as you go: Learn from every change you make, even if the change did not yield the results you wanted. Perhaps new schedules haven’t yet resulted in significantly reducing wait times, but reaching another small step in the process may give you the compound effects for achieving results. If you keep learning, you’ll keep growing, which will get you to your big goal.
- Give thanks: Whether or not your reach your 5-star goal, for example, give thanks for inching closer with a 4.5-star rating. No matter what, you’ve made progress!
Remember: Whether you have high- or low-performing team members, you always have room for improving your customer service delivery. Setting one big goal every year can elevate your customer service to the next level.
What big goal will you aim to achieve this year to elevate your customer service delivery?