One of the most important aspects of retaining clients is improving the ways your team interacts with them. These six tips will help you improve your team’s tactics with clients.
1. Improve Your Customer Service Skills
Employees who work directly with clients need a specific skill set to succeed. Coach your employees on improving their empathy, consistency and patience. Your team needs to be prepared to handle clients who are irate, chatty or have a lot of questions without becoming impatient or seeming uncaring. Negotiations training can help your employees learn how to deal with difficult clients.
Additionally, employees need to be adaptable and able to deal with lots of different types of customers. Communication skills are important for making sure customers understand exactly what is being communicated to them. Your clients will expect your team to be committed to seeing their interactions through to the end, so work ethic and time management skills are important.
It is also important for your team to demonstrate that they know what they are doing. Provide your employees with ongoing training on your products and services, so that they can answer questions competently. Finally, employees must be able to accept negative feedback.
2. Improve Customer Interactions
In addition to having the right skills, your team needs to be able to relate to clients. Suggest that your representatives identify shared interests with clients. Train your employees to practice active listening so that your customers feel like your employees value what they have to say. Encourage your team to be willing to admit mistakes. Make sure your employees follow-up with clients to make sure they are satisfied with the service they received and provide clients with an opportunity to engage in new business.
3. Improve Your Customer Service Strategy
For your team to be successful, you need to set them up for success from an organizational standpoint. Clients get frustrated when they feel like it is too difficult to get in touch with a real person. Do not overuse bots and other automated features. Respond to customers on social media. Include photos and bios of your team on your website, so that clients get a feel for the people who they are working with at your company.
Another major source of frustration for customers is having a difficult time reaching your team. Make sure you have multiple ways for customers to reach you and consider expanding your hours to accommodate clients in different time zones. Consider assigning specific reps to important clients. Use social media, trade shows, webinars, blogs and forums to create communities your clients can be a part of.
4. Work on Employee Engagement
Training will only take you so far if your team is not engaged in their work. Many employees fear to directly approach their supervisors with complaints, so consider employing an anonymous suggestion box for employee feedback. Ask your team for feedback on working conditions, opportunities for advancement, compensation, training and their co-workers. Use benchmarking tools to compare your team’s level of engagement to the standard in your industry.
5. Solicit Customer Feedback
One of the best ways to find out what your team is and is not doing well is to ask your customers. Try including surveys at the end of phone calls or in emails to customers. You should also have a way for customers to contact you on your website. Use the feedback you get to find opportunities to reward your team for a job well done and improve on areas of weakness.
6. Hire Problem Solvers
All of your other customer service strategies will have larger payoffs if you start with team members who are focused on and good at solving problems. Hire problem solvers and then empower them to solve problems.
Improving your team’s interactions with customers can go a long way towards retaining existing loyal customers and obtaining new clients. These six tips can help your team develop their tactics for working with clients.
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