How to improve the quality of customer service? [Checklist]

Customer service is one of the most important pillars of looking after not only your sales results, but also your company's image. Even the highest quality products and services may not bring you the success you expect if you do not also look after the quality of communication with customers. But do not worry! The advice below will help you understand your customers' needs better and steadily raise the level of service in your company. How many of the methods listed do you already know? See for yourself!

What is a customer service standard and why does it matter so much?

The term service standard describes a set of communication principles and rules that determine how the customer service process runs in a given company. If the concept is not familiar to you yet, nothing is lost! It is worth getting to know it today, because it will bring you enormous benefits.

Standards should above all contain clear guidelines on contact with customers: how to greet and say goodbye, how to behave during a conversation, and which practices are not accepted in the company – for example swearing in front of customers. Besides that they should also be comprehensive, meaning they cover every element of the service process. Otherwise it may turn out that not all communication channels or communication situations have been described in them, which puts staff in a very difficult position when they do not know how to behave at a given moment.

What is more, standards also have to take into account the differences between individual communication channels, for example social media, email and chat. Each of them has a slightly different dynamic and level of formality, which affects how the conversation goes.

A customer service standard helps you make sure that staff observe the rules of good manners in contact with customers, behave politely and courteously towards them and show them respect. That applies not only to the consultants employed in the service office, but to all staff regardless of department, even if their scope of duties does not require daily contact with customers. Sooner or later every one of them may find themselves in a situation where a conversation with people from outside is unavoidable, which is why the guidelines gathered in the standards should be followed by everyone to the same degree.

Do you feel that the standards in your company could be improved? Would you like to update them, but have no idea how? Or have you never had the chance to write them at all? Read on to find out how you can do it!

Practical advice on how to improve the customer service standard in your company

Raising the quality of customer service in your company does not have to be a difficult task at all! What matters is that the steps you take are not one-off episodes, but become a permanent part of your daily routine. Which of them do you already know, and which have you not yet introduced in your company? Here is a checklist for you – check for yourself!

#1 Feedback

Getting to know your customers' expectations and needs is the absolute basis of improving the quality of service in your company. When you have detailed knowledge of which aspects of service are worth working on, it will be much easier for you to prepare the right strategies. Collecting feedback is a very good way of getting to know customers' impressions and understanding their perspective. Thanks to that you will be able to keep your customer service standards up to date, depending on your current observations, and also to verify to what extent they are being followed. Feedback is therefore a valuable source of knowledge that is not worth underestimating if you want to look after the quality of customer service in your company.

Sources of opinion can be both analyses of what customers say, for example on social media, and surveys or questionnaires. At Smartsupp you can count on support for proactive activities aimed at collecting feedback. At the end of every conversation the user is shown a short survey. The customers' task is to click an emoticon (these are "faces" – each of them corresponds to a different level of satisfaction) that reflects how they feel about the quality of service.

#2 Clear guidelines

Building customer service standards also means that communicating specific requirements to staff runs smoothly and effectively. That means the guidelines contained in the standards should be worded clearly and understandably, so that they raise no doubts. When a text is chaotic, disorganised and has no proper substantive grounding, it may turn out to miss the mark completely. So before you hand the file over to the team, it is worth asking other people for their opinion on whether the guidelines contain any ambiguities, vagueness or passages that drag on. Feedback from staff is also highly important – if they signal any difficulties connected with the service standards, those should be taken into account and any changes introduced.

#3 Further training

Another interesting idea for raising the quality of service in your company is training, courses and workshops. During sessions with specialists all participants will get the chance to gain new skills and to learn how to use them in practice, that is in everyday communication with customers. Regular feedback will certainly help in choosing the right training – it is exactly what tells you which staff skills need improving from the perspective of the people using your company's services.

When choosing the ideal training, workshop or course, it is worth taking into account factors such as the total cost (including transport, accommodation and meals if the training does not take place on site or online), the competence of the trainers, the duration and the range of topics. It can also be a good idea to ask staff directly whether they have specific training offers in mind that interest them – you will then find out in which direction they want to develop, and you will be able to support them in reaching their goal.

#4 Ready-made scripts and conversation scenarios

If you want to be sure that customer service standards are being observed in your company, it is worth equipping your staff with ready-made conversation scenarios. Scenarios should take into account different ways a conversation can go, both positive and negative, and also allow for awkward situations in which it is very easy to lose your head and your control over the conversation. Besides that you also have to adapt the scenarios to every communication channel you use, because a conversation on live chat will go differently from one over email.

Every scenario or script is a kind of universal guide to conversations with customers, making sure that everyone is treated fairly and according to the same rules. So apart from the course of the conversation itself, they also have to contain greetings, farewells and any transfers, if the conversation calls for them. You then gain certainty that your staff follow uniform standards in communication with customers. To support your agents, use the shortcuts Smartsupp offers. Shortcuts work like ready-made message templates. Thanks to them a member of staff will always be able to keep communication on the right track, and also finish serving a customer much faster than if they had to compose every reply themselves.

#5 A fast response time to messages

If you care about improving the quality of customer service in your company, looking after your staff's skills is only half the success. It is equally important to equip them with the right tools, which will let them use their potential to the full. The Smartsupp platform offers support for different communication channels, which will let you increase your team's efficiency in the long run.

A centralised inbox makes communication with the customer easier and minimises the agent's response time. Constantly checking Messenger, the email inbox and chat is hardly effective and takes an enormous amount of time.

Thanks to the Smartsupp platform your customer service team has access to a list of visitors in real time and to incoming conversations from many channels in the admin dashboard. And that will certainly make replying to messages in the blink of an eye easier.

A centralised inbox is one of the basic features of Smartsupp, but it is also worth trying out the interface to check whether it is the right solution for you and your team. When agents have trouble handling customer conversations, it slows down the average response time and reduces customer satisfaction. To try Smartsupp in practice, set up a free trial account and see for yourself!

#6 Easy searching for information

For customer service to be fast and smooth, it is also worth making sure that consultants can easily search for all the information they need about customers. In the Smartsupp system you can create tags of varying complexity quickly and conveniently. Adding tags to conversations lets you understand customers better and see what visitors ask about most often. Thanks to that you can be better prepared for the questions to come (add new shortcuts or update your FAQ). What is more, you can filter conversations based on business goals or update the content on your site based on customer opinions. On top of that, adding tags even to conversations that have already taken place and are closed is exceptionally easy.

Tags and filters are therefore a way of quickly searching for relevant information. A member of staff does not have to search for it themselves, which noticeably speeds up the customer service process and, as a result, increases the efficiency of the whole team.

Summary

Looking after the quality of customer service should be a priority for everyone who cares about customer loyalty and brand image. Besides raising skills and developing new ones, it is also worth investing in multifunctional tools that improve everyday communication. Do you want to know more? Sign up for Smartsupp, try the free trial version and see in how many ways we can support your company!