Interpersonal Skill and

Leadership
Week 6 - Customer service skills
 OUTLINE
• Introduction
• Customer Tips
• Telephone Communication Skill for Customer Sevice
• Customer Service for Media Social
• Customer Service by Email
• Dealing with Difficult Customers
• How to Handle Customer Complaints
Introduction
 Introduction
• Customer service skills are exactly what the phrase suggests:
the skills required to provide a service to your customers.
Customer service is an essential part—some would say the
most important part—of delivering customer satisfaction.
• There is a world of difference between good and bad
customer service. Good customer service—whether before,
during or after a sale—results in happy customers, or even, if
you have done particularly well, delighted ones. This often
translates into good reviews, word-of-mouth
recommendations to other people, and repeat custom
 Introduction
• Bad customer service, on the other hand, results in unhappy
customers, poor reviews, and lack of repeat custom. It is not
hard to see why organisations strive for good customer
service. This page provides an introduction to customer
service, and the skills required to ensure that your
organisation delivers good or excellent service to your
customers.
 Understanding Customer Service
• Customer service is all about delivering a service to customers.
• Customer service is not about ‘after sales’ service, or sales, or
marketing: it is all of them put together.
• It relates to every single ‘touch-point’ with your customers,
that is, every time they make contact with the organisation in
one form or another: website, phone, email, in person.
 An Evolving Situation – Understanding
How Customer Service is Changing
• Ten or twenty years ago, most organisations had a defined
‘customer service’ department. Once customers had
completed a purchase, responsibility for them was handed
over from the ‘sales’ team—whether in store for retail,
online, or sales reps for business-to-business sales—to the
‘customer service’ team.
• If they had a problem with the product, they picked up the
phone and called the number for customer services.
 There are a number of things that you can do to
ensure that customers are satisfied with your service.
These include:
• Responding rapidly to customers, whether online, on social media or by phone.
Especially electronically, and particularly by social media, customers expect a more-or-
less instantaneous response, just as they expect an answer to a phone call within normal
business hours. It is as well to respect this and respond quickly. If you don’t have a full
response, at least reply to show that you have seen their message and are dealing with
it. If the customer is complaining, a reply should probably steer them towards a private
message, rather than continued interaction in public.
• Getting to know your customers by keeping records of your interactions. Nobody wants
to repeat their story again when they call back, or have to provide more information if
they call after emailing for a while. Having accurate records of conversations, email
exchanges and so on, and, crucially, keeping them so that you can track by customer
rather than separately by channel, means you will be able to respond to your customers
as individuals, and in the full knowledge of their history.
• Acknowledging and fixing mistakes as quickly as possible. As often as not, all a
disgruntled customer wants is an apology and a way to fix the issue when they make a
complaint. Make sure that staff are empowered to provide both of those as quickly as
possible
There are a number of things that you can do to
ensure that customers are satisfied with your service.
These include:
• Going the extra mile. Going that little bit further can be the
difference between ‘satisfied’ and ‘delighted’ customers, and
it often takes very little additional effort. It is especially
worthwhile for good and long-term customers. However,
make sure that what you do will actually solve the customer’s
issue: it is no good going above and beyond if what you do
doesn’t actually help.
 Skills for Good Customer Service
• Listening Skills
Being able to listen to a customer and understand their issue or
problem is perhaps the most important skill for good customer service
• Communication Skills
As well as listening skills, general communication skills are an important
part of good customer service. It is essential to communicate clearly so that
customers know what to expect, and what they are getting.
• Patience
Patience is sometimes seen as an old-fashioned concept, a virtue that
has little place in our fast-moving world. It is, however, important in customer
service, because many customers only contact organisations when they are
already frustrated and cross. This may well make them communicate less
clearly than usual.
 Skills for Good Customer Service
• Empathy
Empathy, or the ability to put yourself into someone else’s shoes
and be aware of their feelings and emotions, is an important skill for
anyone dealing with other people, but particularly if you are providing a
service for customers.
• Resilience
or the ability to bounce back after a setback—is helpful in customer
service.
• Persuasion Skills
Persuasion skills may be a surprising inclusion in a list about how
to meet customer needs. However, customers will sometimes need to
be steered and persuaded that what they want may not actually meet
their needs.
Customer Tips
 Tips to Improve Customer Service
• Customer service skills are a key contributor to customer
experience, and therefore to customer satisfaction.
• If you have any type of contact with customers, whether it is
over the phone, face-to-face, in a restaurant, shop, office or
financial institution, your customer service skills will
contribute to the overall experience of your customers—and
therefore to their views of your organisation.
 Tips to Improve Customer Service
• A happy, satisfied customer is likely to return and/or tell
others about the good experiences that they had when
dealing with your company. Similarly, an unhappy customer
is likely to spread the word—and probably to far more
people than a satisfied customer.
• We all tend to value recommendations from friends and
colleagues. Whether positive or negative, they have far more
weight than anything you may write on your website.
• This page therefore contains some simple tips that you can use
to improve your customer service skills, enhance the customer’s
experience and increase their satisfaction.
 The key to good customer service
• Listen Carefully to Your Customers
• Smile at Your Customers, and Make Them Feel Welcome
• Communicate Clearly and in Positive Language
• Learn Your Business – Be an Expert
• Keep Your Word—and Don’t Over-Promise
• Be Memorable – For the Right Reasons
Telephone Communication Skill for Customer
Sevice
 Adopt a Positive Tone
• Projecting an enthusiastic, natural, and attentive tone while
on the phone can help a customer feel comfortable during a
conversation.
 Clear Enunciation
• The ability to understand what someone is saying on the
phone separates a productive conversation from one filled
with tension.
 Be Sincere
• Starting with the greeting, conversations over the phone
must be sincere. Say hello and be genuine. Try to avoid
scripted greetings as most sound artificial and inauthentic.
 Use Their Name
• As soon as you receive a customer’s name, use it.
 Leave the Customer Satisfied
• As with most things, finishing a conversation on the right
note can create lasting positivity and a satisfied customer.
• Finishing a conversation in a positive manner can transform
what may have started as an angry phone call to a pleasant
experience for the customer.
Customer Service for Media Social
 Delivering Customer Service via Social
Media
• Whether you like it or not, your customers are on social
media. Maybe not all of them, but a reasonable proportion.
Are they talking about you? Are they talking to you? If you
don’t know, and you are not there ready to respond, you may
be setting yourself up for a problem.
• Like it or not, social media is now a customer service
channel. Customers expect to be able to communicate with
businesses or organisations using social media, and that
means that they expect to get a response to their comment
or complaint. This page explains what this means for
businesses, and how you can develop an effective strategy
for customer service via social media.
 1. Monitor the conversation
• Using social media for customer service is not a one-off.
• You need to be monitoring social media constantly to see
what people are saying about you—and if you are sensible,
also about your competitors (see our page on Gathering
Information for Competitive Intelligence for more). You
should be joining in the conversation, if not actively starting
conversations with your customers, to build your
relationship with them.
 2. Respond rapidly—and move
complaints off-line
• Social media moves quickly. A post can go viral in a matter of
hours, and woe betide if it is a negative post about your
organisation.
• You therefore need to respond rapidly to any complaint, and
—and this is crucial—move it off social media, and into a
more private messaging domain.
• This has two main effects: it gets a potentially negative
situation out of the public eye, and it also shows your
customers that you are prepared to deal with the situation
 3. Respond whether the comment is
positive or negative
• Your customers and potential customers like to know that
they have been heard, whether they are making a complaint,
asking you a question, or giving you a compliment. You
wouldn’t ignore a customer in your store if they told you they
were delighted with your product, so don’t do it online.
• Every post or mention on social media should get a
response, even if it’s only ‘Thank you’ or a simple ‘Like’.
Businesses often retweet positive messages, both to
spread the word, and to thank the user.
 4. Stay positive, don’t get defensive
• If you or your organisation are being criticised, it is easy to
get defensive. On social media, you can’t afford to do that.
Instead, try to stay positive.
• This does not mean being relentlessly upbeat and ignoring
the face that your customer has a problem.
• It means acknowledging their issue, apologising if necessary,
and explaining what you can do to put it right. This may be
as simple as ‘Please call us on xxxx and we can help to sort this
out’.
5. Remember that social media is a part
of your overall customer service strategy
• You cannot afford to have a ‘social media strategy’ which is
separate from the rest of your customer service strategy.
• Your customers do not distinguish between a contact by
email, phone or social media. Nor, therefore, should you.
When a customer contacts you, by whatever means, they
should receive the same (broad) reply within the same time
period. What’s more, their history of conversations and
interactions with you should be available to whoever is
responding, by whatever channel. This requires good
records, and an ability to bring together data across
channels.
Customer Service by Email
 Customer Service by Email
• Despite the increased use of social media, email is still an
important customer service channel in many sectors and
businesses, and certainly for many customers! Like the
telephone, many people see it as immediate—which is why you
need to reply quickly to emails—but it has the advantage that the
answer can be kept and referred to again.
• For businesses, email as a customer service channel has many
advantages. You have a bit more breathing space to find a
suitable answer than you do with instant messaging or
telephones. Email also has the advantage that your messages are
private—at least until your customer chooses to share them
more widely.
 There are a number of situations when you might
want to deliver customer service via email. These
include:
• When your customer has emailed you, it would certainly make
sense to reply by email. However, if the issue raised is
complicated, it may be helpful to include a phone number on
which they can call you back, and also explain how they can
speak directly to you (by giving your name and extension
number, for example).
• When the issue that your customer has raised is
complicated, and you need to provide clear written instructions
or an attachment. Even if the customer has phoned you, or used
social media or messaging, it may sometimes be most
appropriate to reply by email. Use the customer’s choice of
contact method to explain why you need to move to email, and
ask for their email address
There are, however, some important rules that are
specific to dealing with customers by email.
 1. Reply promptly
• It is easy to forget that many people treat email as ‘immediate’,
the equivalent of a telephone. They always have their mobile in
hand, and always reply to emails immediately, so they expect the
same from anyone else.
• Always reply immediately (say, within an hour) to an email from a
customer.
• One way to do this effectively is to have an automated messaging
service that acknowledges receipt of the email and explains how
long the customer can expect to wait for a reply (usually no more
than 24 hours, unless it is a weekend, in which case, until the next
business day). It follows that you must then respond within that
period with a substantive answer.
 Keep it short and sweet
• Email is generally considered to be a fairly brief form of
communication. Nobody wants to plough through the
equivalent of War and Peace to find the answer to their
question.
• Try to keep your email to no more than three paragraphs,
and use short sentences (no more than one line on screen)
since many people use mobile for email.
• However, be careful not to be too brief. You want to come
across as efficient, not rude
 3. Use a formula to reply, such as
‘Acknowledge, Agree, Assure’
• Acknowledge the customer’s issue. Reflect back to them
what they have said in a way that shows that you have heard
their complaint or question. Apologise if necessary and
thank them for sending the email and raising the issue.
• Agree that this is an issue and show that you have
understood it. Some people use ‘Align’ here, to indicate that
this is about creating some common ground.
• Assure them that you are doing something to solve the
problem. This might be a matter of providing a refund, or
passing the message on to someone else. If you are passing
it on to someone else, explain what will happen next
 4. Make your email personal
• One of the most important elements of customer service is the
human touch. This is one of the reasons why people telephone
companies when they have an issue to resolve. It is also why
completely standard email templates do not work very well.
• It is therefore important to make your email as personal as
possible.
• Always greet your customer by name, using the details on their
original email. Equally, always sign off with your name, and a
brief signature that explains who you are and your position in the
company. This means that if the customer wishes to pursue the
conversation with you, they can do so.
 5. Follow it up later
• It has become recognised good practice to follow up
customer service emails a few days later with a quick survey
question along the lines of ‘Did we solve your problem?’, with
a yes/no button for the customer to respond. This has two
functions:
• It allows you to sign off the issue as complete, or
• You can follow up if the customer is not satisfied, but hadn’t
bothered to get back in touch.
• It follows that you should always respond to an unsatisfied
customer, asking what else you can do to help.
Dealing with Difficult Customers
 Customer Service Skills:
Dealing with Difficult Customers
• Facing a difficult customer, whether in person, on the telephone or via direct
messaging, email or social media, is many people’s worst nightmare. If
talking to customers is part of your role, however, it is almost inevitable that
you will have to deal with a difficult customer sooner or later. Learning how
to manage those conversations will be a useful skill for the future.

• Difficult customers are not just encountered when they make a complaint,
although this is often the case. Sometimes, though, the most difficult
customers to satisfy are those who have contacted the company for the first
time, because you have no history with them, and therefore have less
information about how to treat them. For those customers, it is doubly
important to listen carefully to what they are telling you, because that will
give you important information.
 The Number One Rule of Dealing with
Difficult Customers
• Not listening to what they are saying – or being perceived not to
be listening.
• Not acknowledging their feelings, or that they have a reason to
complain
• Not letting the customer explain the problem.
• Making excuses or getting defensive.
• Promising too much and then having to backtrack.
• Not explaining what is going on or disappearing for long periods.
• Trying to guess what they want, and how to resolve their
complaint or issue.
How to Handle Customer Complaints
How to Handle Customer Complaints
• Customer complaints are inevitable, no matter how
streamlined your business. They must always be
acknowledged and dealt with effectively. By ignoring or
dismissing complaints, you are effectively telling the
customer that you don’t value their opinions.
• Many business owners see complaint management as a
time-consuming and frustrating process. However, by
developing an efficient system, complaints can be resolved
quickly and easily.
 Taking the Complaint
• When a customer first makes a complaint, take a step back
• Give the customer your full attention and listen to the whole
problem before responding.
• Don't jump the gun
• Try to understand.
• Always use your initiative when dealing with complaints.
• However, never pass the customer around from person to
person.
 Finding a Solution
• Once the customer has aired their grievance, you should
immediately give a sincere apology.
• Customers never want to hear excuses.
• Sometimes, a complaint will be followed by a request for
compensation - typically a refund or a voucher
 Useful Tips for Dealing with Complaints
• Try to remain calm when dealing with a complaint - even if
the customer becomes irate or confrontational.
• Complaints should always be resolved as quickly as possible.
• Keep comprehensive records of all customer complaints,
from the initial problem to the eventual solution.
• All customer-facing staff members should be trained to deal
with complaints
THANK YOUUUU….!!