6 Steps to get Sustainable Customer Service Program in auto repair shops

6 Steps to get a Sustainable Customer Service Program in auto repair shops.

Recently, more businesses have talked a lot about customer service and how to mend issues with unhappy clients in an attempt to convert them into customers once more. But have you stepped back to think about what good customer service really is? Most entrepreneurs are confused about how important customer service is to the success of their businesses. In fact, some companies continue to succeed despite their bad customer service.

While it may seem like a waste of resources to invest so much money in customer service, a strong customer service team can actually help boost your bottom line, when handled skillfully. According to IBM, there is a strong relationship between good customer service and business success. When your customer service team provides excellent customer support, your clients will turn into loyal clients. Otherwise, when your business has a poor support team, your clients may choose to purchase from your competitors. As a business owner or a manager, you can grow your business through better customer service by following these simple but essential steps.

1.Treat Your Customers with Empathy and Understanding

Any experienced customer support will tell you for free that the most important skill that customer support professionals should have is empathy. Empathy allows your customer service team to understand your clients’ state of mind and enables them to address your problems in an affable manner. It’s important that you build long-lasting customer relationships. However, when your customer service team fails to implement empathy in all conversations with your clients, your business won’t connect with your clients at a personal level.

According to a recent study by Harvard Business Review, most customers purchase products from brands with which they develop an emotional bond. Therefore, to turn your clients into repeat clients, ensure that your customer service team makes empathy a major part of your customer communication to enhance the customer shopping experience.

Other Reasons why your Customer Service Team Should Use Empathy

Empathizing with a single client may seem futile, especially when you have so many issues to juggle concerning your other clients and your business as a whole. However, expressing empathy has several benefits, including making your clients happy. By being empathetic, your customer service team will:

Understand clients better: Customer service involves understanding customers. When your customer service team understands your clients better, they will be able to support them better. By practicing empathy on a daily basis, your customer service team will learn to become empathetic.

● Notice the unsaid: Customers often have to spell out what they want. However, based on their situation, voice, body language, and tone, your customer service team will be able to determine what the client needs, the client’s feelings, and what’s at stake.

● Learn to treat clients with care and dignity: Empathy will enable your customer service team to treat your customers with care and dignity. For example, when a large number of your clients are parents, your team will show sentiments of parenthood by creating a play area in your business. This will put you apart from your competitors that will have notices prohibiting things like eatables. A parent with a child will most likely carry an eatable. Therefore, treating them with care and respecting their sentiments will enhance their experience.

2.Respond Promptly and Accurately

Data collected by Edison Research revealed that almost 40 percent of customers expect to be responded to on social media within an hour. However, the average response time is somewhere within five hours. This means that the client’s expectations aren’t being met which causes anger. What’s more, about 48 percent of complaints sent via email aren’t addressed within 24 hours.

Most of your customers are trying to reach out, and they either find silence or late responses from your customer service team which increases their frustration further. Regardless of the size of your team, use these tips to improve your response time and keep your clients happy.

● Have an automatic response email to inform your clients that you have received their inquiry: While you won’t answer their question right away, an acknowledgment email will give your clients peace of mind that you are working to solve the problem.

● Have a quick reply feature: Also commonly referred to as quick response on some apps, this is an email tactic that most businesses use, especially when they receive several inquiries of frequently asked questions (FAQs). These are pre-written emails that answer some of the common client questions. When your customer service team has these emails at their disposal, they will reduce the response time by just copying and pasting the answer.

● Invest in specialized technology: Some help desk applications hosted in the cloud will allow your clients to get answers to their queries from a knowledge base, and they won’t have to call your customer service team. You can also increase your response time if your technology is able to store solutions to some common problems.

3.Be Reliable

Results from a recent study revealed that 75 percent of customers want reliable customer service every time they engage with your brand. Today, you won’t win customers by just delivering products or services to them. You need to have a reliable customer service team that can respond to your clients on the go. A reliable service team will help increase your sales by:

Always being available – When dealing with frustrated customers, you will have to provide them with consistent availability. To do this, you may need to offer them 24/7 customer support or tell them what times of the day they can get assistance from your team, and the time they should wait before they get a response. By doing this, you will be able to set your customers’ expectations accurately.

Staying in touch with your customers – According to a recent research, approximately 96 percent of unhappy clients won’t complain when they are unhappy, and roughly 91 percent will leave your business and never return. That’s why you need a reliable service team that will treat customer interactions as opportunities to build on customer relationships. Your customer service team can do this by tracking customer feedback sentiments towards your business by always being in contact with them. When your customer service team frequently communicates with customers, they may be able to help fix any emerging problems.

4.Explain the Procedure

You would definitely not board a plane with a crew that was just told what to do without following clear guidelines. Unfortunately, most businesses today operate this way, and they don’t realize the negative consequences, from inefficient employees to lost clients. Telling your customer service employees what to do isn’t as effective as having a set of clearly written instructions that explains how some common tasks should be performed. This is why you need SOPs (standard operating procedures).

An SOP is a comprehensive document that most businesses compile to assist their employees in effectively handling routine processes and respond in different scenarios. Irrespective of the size of your business, effective SOPs will make things easier for you, your customer service team, and your customers. Some of the reasons why you should use SOPs include:

●Improve communication: Results from a recent report estimated the cost of poor customer service to be over $75 billion annually. While several factors affect service quality, one obstacle is a clear lack of communication among agents, especially when there’s a problem. Having an SOP will ensure that all customer service employees understand what they should do at every step of the customer service protocol. This can be through having answers to common questions and by knowing how to speak to customers through email, phone, or live chat.

● Train and empower new employees: Having an SOP will make it easier for you to train your new customer service employees more effectively. By including an SOP in the foundation of your training, your new employees won’t have to rely simply on what they saw and heard during the onboarding process. Instead, they will learn to refer to a step-to-step guide whenever they are in doubt and reduce the likelihood of making mistakes.

● Boost confidence and employee capability: For any customer service team to become successful, confidence is key. In fact, confident employees tend to become more successful. According to a Zendesk survey, incompetent customer service agents unable to solve problems quickly and effectively frustrate customers. A well-designed SOP will transform your customer service agents into competent employees that can help resolve customer queries effectively.

5.Make Information Accessible

When you think about providing your clients with a better experience, you may visualize on the common aspects of customer service – having employees with friendly behaviors, promptly solving problems, and giving customers value for their money. While all these are important, most businesses struggle to establish coordination among different teams, and this leads to customer dissatisfaction. To overcome this problem, you can streamline all workforce processes by using smart CRM platforms. These systems will ensure that all your employees are on the same page. This is important if you want to establish high customer service standards. CRM platforms have several benefits, including:

●Providing useful insights about customers that can help you understand their needs, provide personalized experiences to each client, and sell faster.

●Enabling your customer service and sales teams to work closely, and eliminate all chances of confusion.

●Improving customer engagement, and help you build permanent customer relationships.

●Ensuring that your customers get what was promised. This will help improve customer satisfaction.

●CRM platforms are easily accessible on various devices, including laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. Therefore, you can assist your clients from anywhere and at any time.

6.Be the Expert

When we think about great customer service, we usually think about those employees with great personalities, those who are truly extroverted. However, your business needs expert customer service professionals to help keep your customers. Almost 90 percent of clients in a recent study indicated that they started doing business with competitors after poor customer service experience. You can determine if you have expert customer service professionals if they have the following skills:

● Patience: Patience is key if you want to maintain your customers. Sometimes customers willingly test our patience, especially when things don’t seem to go our way. However, your customer service team should remain composed and show patience until the end. A calm and patient customer care agent will most likely have a calm customer than those who demonstrate their frustration.

● Product knowledge: While it’s obvious that your customer service team should have product knowledge because of the scripts they are given during the onboarding process, your customer service team needs to have product knowledge in order to help improvise solutions for various problems that your customers experience. To ensure that your customer service team is familiar to all your products, start by training them on how your products work.

● Desire to learn: The business world is dynamic, and it’s always changing, and your customer care agents will have to face all the frustration. When your business makes a wrong public move, it’s your customer service agents that will receive all the calls and try to solve the problem on your behalf. This means that your expert customer service team should learn how to change direction on how they handle things depending on the business needs.

Clients are of utmost importance when starting your business. Without clients, especially loyal clients, you cannot have a successful business. This means that if you are able to understand your clients and form relationships with them, you will be able to grow your business successfully.

Developing a good relationship with your clients isn’t only a smart strategy from a marketing perspective, but also a way to anticipate your clients’ needs and perform the necessary adjustments to help you improve your business over time. By taking the time to understand the needs of your clients, you will be in a better position to ensure that your clients are always satisfied with your products and services, and prepare yourself to take new opportunities. Ensure that you follow the above tips to help solidify your client relationship and also create a firm foundation for your business to grow. If you need help improving your customer service in Auto Repair Shops, get in touch with one of our knowledgeable JMC Equipment client service agents on 800-562-4791 for sound customer service advice.

What do yo think is the more accurate tip to improve your customer service in auto repair shop?  

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