I Have To Learn To Be Nice To Customers, Too?
The stereotype of the unpleasant customer service representative has been around as long as call centers themselves. You’ve seen them on television and in sketch comedy, chewing gum and rolling their eyes. Yes, this representative can help you with your problem, but they don’t want to and they want you to knosaw how burdened they are by your lack of knowledge. When it happens in real life, it feels like a disaster scene from a movie.
Nobody wants a customer service team like this. If customers feel insulted by service interactions, they’re unlikely to stick around! Still, the angry customer service rep trope is a cautionary tale for managers: it’s possible to offer a comprehensive training program but still neglect an important area of your customer service training. But there is a way to deal with situations like these, it just requires a slightly different approach to training.
Understanding Why Your Employees Are Being Rude To Customers
It does happen. Sometimes a team has been thoroughly trained when it comes to a company’s offerings. The reps may know your products and services inside and out. They might be able to solve any customer’s issues quickly and efficiently when they call in. Still, the manager is seeing low customer feedback scores and receiving complaints from customers.
Why? The answer is simple; your reps might be solving problems, but they’re not pleasant to deal with. Every good training program is a mix: Just as you have to invest in product training, you also need to train for soft skills. If you manage to add this to the mix, your team will soon turn to a success.
Can Soft Skills Help Rude Employees?
What are soft skills? They are the skills that are a cluster of productive personality traits that characterize one's relationships in a milieu. These skills can include social graces, communication abilities, language skills, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork, and leadership traits. Simply put, they’re the skills that make a person pleasant to interact with. Empathy, good listening, and communication are all soft skills that customer service reps need in order to provide exceptional service. While not every rep needs this training, it’s important to make sure you’re offering it. Some employees may not have had the opportunity to develop these skills on their own, and even your best reps can have a bad day.
The good news is, unlike your product training, you don’t have to develop soft skills content from scratch. Soft skills are often called transferable skills because, unlike hard skills, soft skills transfer between jobs. Because such learning is in demand across companies and industries, soft skill training content is readily available.
SAP Litmos Training Content offers off-the-shelf soft skills training courses that you can simply purchase and add to your current eLearning library.
Dealing With Customer Service Complaints
No matter your business, customer service is one of your products. Most unhappy customers won’t let you know they’re going to take their business elsewhere. They’ll simply leave, according to research. Only about 1 in 26 complain to the company, but that doesn’t mean disgruntled customers aren’t complaining. They are; 13% of unhappy customers complain to others, both in person and online. That kind of bad publicity is hard to overcome. You have to stop it before it starts by providing exceptional customer service. Do that, and you’re likely to be rewarded; research shows that 95% of consumers will stay with a company because of a positive customer service experience.
While every employee in your organization is tasked with providing an excellent Customer Experience, no workers shoulder that responsibility more than your customer service team. It’s a high-stress job, and just as customer churn can take a toll on your business, so can employee turnover. It’s in your best interest to alleviate complaints about training by making it engaging and valuable, and making sure your reps have the tools and support they need to do their jobs well. The eBook The Top 5 Customer Service Complaints About Training will help you achieve just that! Your customer service team supports your customers. It’s vital to your business that you support them in turn.
