Revisiting Customer Service in Higher Education Workshop Mrs. Sophya Johnson, M.S. Certified Customer Service Representative, Assistant to CETL Director
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Overview: • Review what is customer service. • Why is Customer Service important • 2 types of customers. • Learn customer service skills and how to apply it. • Methods of customer service/communication • Dealing with challenging customers • How to Build Stronger Cross Cultural Teams 2
What is Customer Service?
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What is Customer Service?
• Customer Service is the process of
meeting customers’ needs and expectations by providing a high level of quality service resulting in satisfied customers. • Customer service goes beyond just giving customers what they want or ask for. • It entails proactively discovering and anticipating the customers’ needs and servicing those needs with a standard of excellence. 4
Why is Customer Service important?
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5 Reasons Why Customer Service Is More Important Than Anything Else http://www.daymondjohnssuccessformula.com/five-reasons-why-customer-service-is-moreimportant-than-anything-else/
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Customer service is absolutely the most important part of any business
“To over-deliver in service to a customer is by far the most valuable thing to a business.” “There are only two ways to improve the operations of a business: increase sales or decrease costs.” You will find it very hard to decrease costs, but you can offer better customer service and that allows you to increase sales. 6
1. The Best Customer Service Builds Trust
• These days, people will only stay loyal to a company if they have very good reason to. • There is plenty of competition available they could choose to move to. • As a result, you have to work even harder to keep customers and build their trust in your brand. • By providing the best in customer service, you will increase trust, and that could mean the difference between customer loyalty and customers who jump ship.
2. Customer Service Matters More Than Price
• Studies have shown that a large group of consumers say that customer service is much more important than price. • To get the right experience, they are willing to pay more.
3. It Will Build Brand Awareness
• Word of mouth is the most powerful ally you have on your side. • What your customers say to others could make or break your business. • When you provide the best in customer service, guess what happens? People will talk about you. They will remember your brand. • If they hear someone else talking that they need a specific kind of company, they are much more likely to say, “Oh, go to this place. They are great!”
4. Good Customer Service Reduces Problems
5. It Appeals to the New Customer
•Problems are always going to arise for any business no matter how hard you try to avoid them. •While you can’t run a perfect business with all the perfect customers, you can ensure friction doesn’t become an issue. •If customers know that they can voice complaints and those issues will be handled properly, they will feel more comfortable doing business with you.
• You need to cater to the New Customer. • This is someone who expects to be treated as a person, who wants more from the experience, and who does not want to be just a number. • Better customer service will ensure you are providing them what they want. 7
When & Where does Customer Service Take Place • Takes place anywhere and anytime • Takes place whenever you interact with a student/faculty/staff/alumni in the process of meeting their needs
• This service can be a brief
1 minute encounter or a continuous relationship with the customer.
• Remember it can take only 10 seconds to make a lasting impression on a person you interact with. 8
How is Customer Service Demonstrated Customer service is demonstrated when you interact with any person. Listed below are ways that you interact with your customers
Person-toperson
Telephone
Internet email and Internet chat
All forms of written communication
fax
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Types of Customers
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2 Types of Customers Internal:
External:
• Are persons within your institution/department who depend upon you for your service to perform their own jobs. They are essential co-workers with needs that you are able to fulfil. Companies in which employees serve each other are better able to serve their external customers. Developing an internal culture of service can only extend to external customers.
• This is any person outside of your institution with a need that your department is able to fulfil.
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Who are your Internal and External Customers Internal Customers
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Faculty Staff in the same department/office Staff in other departments/offices Administrators
External Customers
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Students Parents Alumni The Community 12
15 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140616101744-56883908-15-customer-service-skills-thatevery-employee-needs
• There are certain customer service skills that every employee must master if they are forward-facing with customers.
• Without them, you run the risk of finding your business in an embarrassing customer service train-wreck, or you'll simply lose customers as your service continues to let people down.
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The Customer Service Skills that Matter: 1. Patience
•Should be near the to top of a customer service skills list. •Important to customers •They often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated, •Important to the business at large • Great service beats fast service every single time. •If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want — they'd rather get competent service than be rushed out the door!
2. Attentiveness
• The ability to really listen to customers is so crucial for providing great service for a number of reasons. • Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions (watching the language/terms that they use to describe their problems), but it's also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.
3. Clear Communication Skills
• Make sure you're getting to the problem at hand quickly; customers don't need your life story or to hear about how your day is going. • More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it's best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation. • When it comes to important points that you need to relay clearly to customers, keep it simple and leave nothing to doubt. 14
4. Knowledge of the Product
• The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works. • should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it everyday would. • Without knowing your product from front-to-back, you won't know how to help customers when they run into problems.
5. Ability to Use "Positive Language"
•Ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns can truly go a long way in creating happy customers. •Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use. •Example: Let's say a customer contacts you with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be backordered until next month. •Without positive language: "I can't get you that product until next month; it is backordered and unavailable at this time." •With positive language: "That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse." •The first example isn't negative by any means, but the tone that it conveys feels abrupt and impersonal, and can be taken the wrong way by customers. •The second example is stating the same thing (the item is unavailable), but instead focuses on when/how the customer will get to their resolution rather than focusing on the negative.
6. Acting Skills
•Sometimes you're going to come across people that you'll never be able to make happy. •Situations outside of your control (they had a terrible day, or they are just a natural-born complainer) will sometimes creep into your usual support routine, and you'll be greeted with those "barnacle" customers that seem to want nothing else but to pull you down. •Every great customer service rep will have those basic acting skills necessary to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.
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7. Time Management Skills
• Despite many research-backed rants on why you should spend more time with customers , the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner. • If you don't know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support member will get a customer over to someone who does. • Don't waste time trying to go above and beyond for a customer in an area where you will just end up wasting both of your time!
8. Ability to "Read" Customers
• You won't always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won't even hear a customer's voice! • You should understand some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to "read" the customer's current emotional state. • This is an important part of the personalization process as well, because it takes knowing your customers to create a personal experience for them. • It is essential because you don't want to mis-read a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication. • Look and listen for subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and you'll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.
9. A Calming Presence
• There's a lot of metaphors for this type of personality: "keeps their cool," "staying cool under pressure," etc., but it all represents the same thing: the ability that some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic. • The best customer service reps know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to lose their cool; in fact it is their job to try to be the "rock" for a customer who thinks the world is falling down due to their current problem. 16
10. Goal Oriented Focus
11. Ability to Handle Surprises
12. Persuasion Skills
• Many customer service experts have shown how giving employees unconstrained power to "WOW" customers doesn't always generate the returns that many businesses expect to see. • That's because it leaves employees without goals, • business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service. • Relying on frameworks can help businesses come up with guidelines for their employees that allow plenty of freedom to handle customers on a case-to-case basis, but also leave them priority solutions and "go-to" fixes for common problems. •Sometimes the customer support world is going to throw you a curveball. •Maybe the problem you encounter isn't specifically covered in the company's guidelines, or maybe the customer isn't reacting how you thought they would. •Whatever the case, it's best to be able to think on your feet... but it's even better to create guidelines for yourself in these sorts of situations. •You need to come up with a quick system for when you come across a customer who has a problem you've never seen before... •Who? who you should consider your "go-to" person when you don't know what to do •What? When the problem is noticeably out of your league, what are you going to send to the people above •How? When it comes time to get someone else involved, how are you going to contact them?
• This is one a lot of people didn't see coming! • Experienced customer support personnel know that oftentimes, you will get messages in your inbox that are more about the curiosity of your company's product, rather than having problems with it. • To truly take your customer service skills to the next level, you need to have some mastery of persuasion so that you can convince interested customers that your product is right for them (if it truly is). • It's not about making a sales pitch in each email, but it is about not letting potential customers slip away because you couldn't create a compelling message that your company's product is worth purchasing! 17
13. Tenacity
14. Closing Ability
15. Willingness to Learn
• Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) is a key skill when providing the kind of service that people talk about. • The many memorable customer service stories out there, were created by a single employee who refused to just do the "status quo" when it came to helping someone out. • Remembering that your customers are people too, and knowing that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold should be your driving motivation to never "cheat" your customers with lazy service. •To be clear, this has nothing to do with "closing sales" or other related terms. •Being able to close with a customer means being able to end the conversation with confirmed satisfaction (or as close to it as you can achieve) and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of (or will be). •Getting booted after a customer service call or before all of their problems have been addressed is the last thing that customers want, so be sure to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they had on deck has been entirely resolved. •Your willingness to do this shows the customer 3 very important things: •That you care about getting it right •That you're willing to keep going until you get it right •That the customer is the one who determines what "right" is. •When you get a customer to, "Yes, I'm all set!" is when you know the conversation is over.
• This is probably the most general skill on the list, but it's still necessary. • Those who don't seek to improve what they do, whether it's building products, marketing businesses, or helping customers, will get left behind by the people willing to invest in their skills.
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Internal Customers
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Internal Customers
• Faculty • Staff in the same department/office • Staff in other departments/offices • Administrators 20
Don’t Forget • Colleagues in your office are also your “customers”. So extend to them the same level of customer service as you would to a student, parent, vendor, executive , etc.
• Colleagues in other offices are also your “customers”.
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How to Provide Internal Customer Service Excellence By John Tschohl http://www.customerservicemanager.com/how-to-provide-internal-customer-service-excellence.htm
Develop a positive attitude.
•Your attitude is reflected in everything you do. It not only determines how you approach your job and your co-workers, it determines how they respond to you. Don’t complain— and don’t hang around negative co-workers. Do whatever it takes to get the job done—and done right.
Listen.
•You can’t help a co-worker unless you hear and understand what he needs. Listening shows that you care and provides you the information you need to do what needs to be done. Ask questions. Rephrase what your co-worker is saying to ensure that you understand the situation. Then use that information to decide how to move forward.
Solve problems.
•Great customer service professionals are quick on their feet. They have the skills necessary to quickly analyze a situation and decide what needs to be done to solve the problem. Don’t procrastinate. Develop a plan of attack, and handle the situation as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Be accessible.
•This means returning phone calls and responding to emails as quickly as possible. Doing so sends the message that what your co-worker needs is important to you and that you are available and eager to provide whatever assistance is needed.
Be honest. Make your coworkers feel valued.
Perform.
•If a task is outside your level of expertise, or if you cannot meet the required deadline, admit it. Then offer to facilitate by helping your co-worker identify someone in the organization who does have the expertise and the time to assist with the project. Honesty earns respect. The same holds true when you make a mistake. Admit it, apologize, and learn from it. •Recognize them with a smile. Call them by name. Make eye contact. Be attentive to what they have to say. Compliment them when they do a good job. Ask for their advice. Make them feel important.
•Deliver what you promise. Send the message that your co-workers can depend on you. Do what you say you will do—and do it with quality, speed, and accuracy. If you say you are going to complete a report by Tuesday, do your best to complete it by Monday. 22
Do you know the Community you Serve/ Work with?
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Our Students • From 44 states and 11 foreign countries • 4,851 undergraduates and 1,008 graduate students • 42 percent first-time college students • Faculty & Staff: Diverse cultures, race and ethnicity •
Request additional information from Institutional Research department.
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Barriers to providing exceptional customer service • • • • • • •
Poor communication skills Staff not empowered to make decisions Lack of adequate training Staff on “auto pilot” Difficult to understand processes Policies that don’t make common sense Poor leadership/unmotivated staff 26
Communication Skills
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Vocal Charades What is the percentage of a message conveyed? Face-to-Face Communication
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55% body language 38% tone of voice
7% words used
Telephone Communication
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82% tone of Voice 18% words used
Email Communication
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100% words used 28
Listening • A good listener… • • • •
conveys sincerity focuses on the speaker and what they are saying does not interrupt listens with their eyes and their mind
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Listening • Things to avoid… • •
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Formulating what you want to say while the customer is still talking Thinking about other things while the customer is talking
Jumping to conclusions
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Verbal Communication Tone of voice (Action)
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Tone (“How may I help you?) Inflection (“Great. We will be happy to serve you”) Energy (“Welcome to AAMU”) Volume
Pace (“How may I help you?”)
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The Power of Words Words to use:
• May I • How can I help • Would you like • Consider this • Opportunity • I’ll be happy to
Words to avoid: You have to Not our policy Not my job
We’ll try I don’t know
I have no idea
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Non-Verbal Communication Body Language (Action) Eye Contact Facial Expression
Body Posture
Hand Gestures
Physical Touch
Physical Distance
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Tips for Face-to-Face Communication Smile Professional greeting Lean forward toward the customer Make eye contact
Be aware of body language Give contact information for future questions
Thank them for coming in with their inquiry 34
Why are Customers Challenging? • They may not have an understanding or expertise of the situation
• They may not speak “our language” • They may have difficulty in making decisions • They may be impatient, hostile, non-communicative, immature, etc.
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Ways to Work with Challenging Customers
• Listen and don’t interrupt
• Ask questions • Show empathy • Solve the problem • Follow up • End on a positive note
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Then There Are The Very Difficult Customers • Listen to their concerns. Speak clearly and slowly. • Set limits. Be clear that abusive or offensive language/behavior will not be tolerated.
• Involve a supervisor or colleague for assistance or a new perspective.
• On phone calls, ask for their number and call them back later. This allows for a “cooling down” period.
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Then There Are The Very Difficult Customers • For in-person situations, get them out of the mainstream customer area, but don’t get yourself stuck in an area alone.
• Reassure customer that you will follow up. • Don’t make promises you can’t keep. • Document the incident. • Understand what campus resources are available for further assistance. 38
How to share bad news
• Acknowledge customer’s feelings • Share the responsibility of the problem • Convey sincerity • Ask for the opportunity to correct the problem • Request the opportunity to continue doing business in the future
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When You Can’t Say “Yes” • Show empathy • Explain the reason • Offer what you can do • Suggest what they can do
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What To Do When You Are Wrong • Admit the mistake • Apologize for the error • Find a solution • Document the error • Incorporate ways to lessen the likelihood for future error 41
From Conflict to Cooperation: Building Stronger Cross Cultural Teams http://www.business.com/management/from-conflict-to-cooperation-buildingstronger-cross-cultural-teams/
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We live in a world with a globalized workforce where many organizations have teams that span different offices, time zones and continents. Running a team these days is a different endeavor than it was in the past due to the emergence of cross cultural teams. Dealing with cultural differences, language barriers and remote team members are some of the issues that today’s managers and leaders face. Acceptance of cultural diversity and an inclusive outlook are hallmarks of high-performing companies. So how can you better manage your culturally diverse team for peak performance? Here are five tips for strengthening your cross-cultural team. 42
1. Acknowledge and Respect Cultural Differences
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Address the existence of diverse cultural backgrounds within the team and the necessity of navigating those differences in order to optimize team performance. Cultural diversity can manifest itself in different ways:
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language, culture, behavioral differences due to norms and values, and even different meaning attached to words, ideas or actions.
One way to encourage this understanding of cultural diversity is to discuss cultural differences in a team meeting where everyone can share their cultural background and expectations about communication and working style.
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Icebreakers good way to do it. 43
2. Establish Norms for the Team • • • •
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Once cultural differences and everyone’s expectations are laid out, the next step is to establish norms for the team. The key is to get everyone to contribute to the formation of the norms. Getting their buy-in makes the norms stronger and ensures that everyone feels committed to living up to them. Each team, depending on its makeup and other factors that affect collaboration, will need its own set of rules and norms.
Once team norms have been established, check in with your team regularly to see how effective they are. 44
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3. Develop a Team Identity and Outline Roles and Responsibilities In any team, it’s important that everyone knows what they’re working toward. It is doubly important in a cross-cultural team.
Having a shared goal and a common vision on how to achieve it gives your team an identity that can unite them and promote teamwork. Break down your common goal into actionable steps and outline each individual’s role and responsibilities.
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4. Over-Communicate •
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With a culturally diverse team, overcommunicating is a good thing!
Most of the time, we take for granted that our colleagues completely understand what we say because they have the same frame of reference or cultural background. Giving everyone the bigger picture and the information they need to successfully do their part will reduce conflict and team dysfunction. Remind your team that each person’s cultural background informs his behavior and communication style in different ways. Treating each other with kindness and giving your teammates the benefit of the doubt can make working in a crosscultural environment much more pleasant for everyone. 46
5. Build Rapport and Trust • Building trust takes time. • Create an environment where your team feels safe so that they can better collaborate with each other.
• Respecting differences, following through on group norms and having a common goal help build unity within a team. 47
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Conclusion
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Characteristics of Good Customer Service: 4 Ps http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-customer-service-definition-types-role-in-marketing.html
Customer service is meeting the needs and desires of any customer. Some characteristics of good customer service include:
1. Promptness: • Promises for delivery of products must be on time. Delays and cancellations of products should be avoided.
2. Politeness: • Politeness is almost a lost art. Saying 'hello,' 'good afternoon,' 'sir', and 'thank you very much' are a part of good customer service. For any business, using good manners is appropriate whether the customer makes a purchase or not.
3. Professionalism: • All customers should be treated professionally, which means the use of competence or skill expected of the professional. Professionalism shows the customer they're cared for.
4. Personalization: • Using the customer's name is very effective in producing loyalty. Customers like the idea that whom they do business with knows them on a personal level. 50
How can you take ownership for EXCEPTIONAL Customer Service You must accept the fact that customer service is our responsibility, no matter what position you hold. You must discover, anticipate and serve our customers’ needs and expectations within reason. You must develop the skills required to PROFESSIONALLY serve customers with a standard of excellence. You must provide this service in a timely manner. You must balance AAMU’s interests, policies and procedures with the customer’s interests, needs and expectations. You must develop communication skills to effectively serve different customer styles. You must treat students, faculty, staff and administrators the way you 51 would like to be treated.
Take Away Question
• Based on your own evaluation what are 3 things that you could work on that you learned from this workshop? How can you hold yourself accountable?
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References
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Carlaw, P. & Deming, V. Customer Service Training Games. The McGrawHill Companies, New York, NY. (1999) Ciotti, G. 15 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs. Linked In (2014). Innovative Educators: Exceptional Front-Line Customer Service in Higher Education Mckinney, P. What Is Customer Service? - Definition, Types & Role in Marketing: Characteristics of Good Customer Service . Study.com
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