All good leaders know that finding the right staff and looking after them is key to a successful business. No matter how great your products and ideas, without an efficient team you simply won’t be able to achieve your goals.
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All good leaders know that finding the right staff and looking after them is key to a successful business. No matter how great your products and ideas, without an efficient team you simply won’t be able to achieve your goals.
The most coveted customer service programme in the Middle East, The Service Olympian Awards are a must for any organization that wants to be recognized for its commitment to customer service. For the past five years the awards have seen entries from hundreds of high profile organizations, with winners including Emirates Airlines, Noor Bank and Dubai Customs.
The Voice of the Customer (VOC) Program is a relatively new term that describes customers’ feedback about their experiences with a product or service. It enables companies to focus on the needs and expectations of the people who buy into their organizations, so they can make necessary improvements and deliver exceptional service.
Asking for customer feedback is always a double edged sword. It’s great when people have lovely things to say about us, but criticism can be hard to handle. It’s also pointless asking for someone’s opinion if we’re going to totally ignore it, so obtaining feedback is invariably something that results in at least a little extra work. But if you’re serious about providing the very best possible service to your customers and keeping them coming back, it’s absolutely essential that you ask them how you’re doing.
Today’s customer is able to enjoy more choice and convenience than ever before, but this age of instant gratification doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with quality. Online reviews aren’t always trustworthy, so how do we know who’s really as good as they claim to be? For many industries the answer is star ratings.
There’s a whole world of knowledge out there about all sorts of subjects- you can buy books on everything from motorcycle maintenance to psychology and learn a new language in your lunch breaks. But when it comes to customer service, nothing beats personal experience. We’ve all got our own horror stories about grumpy sales assistants or terrible services, and it’s important to bear them in mind when working with customers ourselves.
Humans are an essential part of the customer service experience, right? Not necessarily, according to some companies. Automation is all around us- we can now book doctor’s appointments, order take outs and check flights without even talking to another person, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. By 2020, it’s predicted that 85% if all customer interactions will take place without humans, thanks to state of the art bot technology.
Having a robust customer service policy in place is fantastic, but you can only make it work if you have employees who genuinely care about providing a great service in the first place. As much as training is a wonderful way to embed skills and remind people of the most important aspects of a customer experience, truly great reps are a breed of their own. If you want to provide the best service, you need to hire the best people for the job.
Mystery shopping is a tool that’s commonly used in the retail industry to help companies improve their customer service. “Shoppers” perform a range of tasks from giving feedback on staff behaviour and presentation to reviewing new products. It’s usually something that people do to fit in around other commitments and it’s rare to find a company who employs mystery shoppers full time, but some scammers would like us to believe otherwise.
It’s a common problem. Customer feedback is essential for improving your service and gaining a real understanding of your customers, but very few people want to spend hours filling in forms. What this often means is that you’ll only receive responses from those who have something to complain about. While it is of course necessary to understand the root of any peeves and act on them, you don’t want to miss out on hearing from those who are simply a little bit underwhelmed (or delighted).