Working at a customer service center is quite a daunting task. You have to deal with a variety of customers and situations may not always be in your favor. The only solution is to handle every situation gracefully. There are certain things that a customer service representative needs to know before everything else. Let’s see what they are:
Things won’t always go as planned:
A knowledge base is provided to each customer representative. It may help in solving the most common problems faced by the customers but there are situations where the customers come up with rare problems. A customer service representative should come up with a solution each time an unpredictable query comes up. However, there is a provision for escalating a case and seeking the guidance of more experienced representatives.
Emotional intelligence is your greatest asset:
While working at a customer support center, one has to deal with various types of customers. A customer service requires a good deal of emotional intelligence to be successful.
Extracting customer details is your job:
Not all customers are willing to share their details. Moreover, a customer feels frustrated when he/she has to tell his/her story over and over again. So, you should try to remove as much burden as possible from the customer. Instead of troubling the customer, again and again, you can simply get the details by asking another agent or by checking previous interactions with the customer in your email conversation history or in your CRM.
Customers may be wrong at times:
The customers may not always be right. Sometimes they may be wrong or mean or may be lying to you or simply having a bad day. Whatever the case be, being right or wrong does not matter. What matters a customer representative’s ability to turn a bad situation into a better one.
Scripts are not enough:
Scripts provided to all the customer service representative can be helpful to make sure that they don’t drift away from the core of the problem too much. It is basically meant to optimize the customer service and to get a general idea of what you should and what you can do in a specific situation. A customer service representative still needs to verify if the customer who is being dealt with has the same problem or maybe there are some changes required. In other words, forcing the script on the customer won’t do any good.
Customer service is a responsibility, not a burden:
In certain situations where a customer representative is unable to solve the problem and readily gives an excuse for that, the customer is left dissatisfied. Thus, the only thing that makes a difference in customer service is that customer queries are resolved in real time.
