If a Customer Service agent is professional, friendly, and can solve a customers needs, that customer will have a positive impression of the company. This pleasant experience can lead to repeat business and even referrals increasing profitability.

On the other hand, if a Customer Service Agent is unprofessional, uniformed, and unable to solve a customers needs, the customer will hang up the phone in frustration resulting in a negative impression. Consequently, the customer will indeed talk about your company, but with a very pessimistic tone which can discourage customers away from you and to your competitor decreasing productivity!

As a leader, it is your responsibility to train the staff with proper telephone skills and company and product knowledge as well as the requisite customer service skills necessary to excel customer expectations. With this education, you are arming the Customer Service Agent with the power to better assist customers and increase productivity creating many positive first impressions along the way!

The Customer Service Representative

As the leader of customer service agents, you will engage with a wide variety of personnel, different backgrounds, different ages, and different skill sets including:

* The young employee who is starting his first job.
* The single mother who needs a second job for additional income.
* The recent college graduate who has not yet found his dream job, but needs a job to pay the bills.
* The middle-age mother who has gone back to work now that her children are grown just to give herself something to do.
* The business professional that has just been laid off from his real job due to downsizing.

These are just a few examples. Every Customer service agent has a different story and a different reason for working.

Your staff may or may not be excited to work at the company. For example, a recent high school graduate may be quite excited about his first job. Whereas, a single mother would much rather be at home with her children. It is your job as the leader to motivate everyone even the most disgruntled Customer Service Agent!

Every Customer Service Agent within your staff will have different skill sets. For example, the business professional may be quite computer-savvy, whereas the middle-age mother who has gone back to work may have very little knowledge of computers. It is your job as the leader to train everyone even the Customer Service Agent who thinks he knows it all!

A major component of your responsibility as a leader is motivating and training the Customer Service Agents so they are comfortable with the technological and people skills that are needed for the job. You also need to know what motivates each employee to keep them excited about being at work.

Call Center Challenges

As a call center leader, you face many challenges a day. Here is just a sample:

* A competitive workforce for qualified Customer Service Agents
* Lack of time to properly train Customer Service Agents
* High turnover rate among Customer Service Agents
* Technological challenges for Customer Service Agents
* Unmotivated Customer Service Agents
* Different skill levels of Customer Service Agents

While at first glance these answers may sound correct, nothing could be further from the truth. Say for example that you ran a restaurant. If a customer were to enter your restaurant and ask for some office supplies would you be able to give the customer what they want? Would you be able to satisfy a customer who was looking for some jewellery if you worked in a hardware store? No, it would be impossible. The best that you could do would be to politely tell the customer where they can go and get Jewry. Obviously, customer service is not about giving customers what they want, or even satisfying customers.

The same is true for the way we give customer service. When we ask the question: what is the most important thing for good customer service, almost everyone we ask will answer: smile. While this may be good in some cases it is not appropriate in all cases. Just imagine if a distressed mother came up to you and told you that she had lost her 2 year old child in your store. Imagine how she would respond if you were to smile at her? Or imagine if a customer told you that he/she slipped while climbing the stairs or escalator in your store and as they explained their excruciating injuries you smiled back at them.

The truth is that customer service is not about practicalities, it’s about principles. The practicalities may change but the principles stay the same. Staff are not meant to smile all the time, to give customers everything they want, or to satisfy all their needs. Staff are meant to promote the organisation and its values. If you want to increase the impact of your customer service teach staff to represent your organisation and its unique traits.

When we teach customer service training modules we first focus on what the organisation values, what it’s all about and what does it want customers to see. Once we have done this, we move on to how to serve in light of these values. This is a very easy way of getting staff to change the way they serve, it produces better results and is a lot more fun to teach.

Here is something you can do to help your staff engage in effective customer service. Take a black/white board and draw a very basic house. Ask staff to take a piece of chalk or the white board marker and to take turns to turn this basic house into your organisation/company. They may add pictures or words to the basic drawing. Some will add words like: quality, professionalism, friendliness, service, money, speed, or simplicity while others may draw things like customers and staff.

Now ask staff this simple question: in light of this picture, what does a good customer service representative do? The participants will now find it easy to see what customer service is really about in your organisation. They may say for example, in light of us being a friendly company we should smile. Or perhaps they will highlight the organisation’s professionalism and explain that it’s professional to stand up straight and to dress appropriately.

Instead of teaching staff practicalities teach them principles and the practicalities will follow naturally.