A colleague of mine told me of frustrations with the IT department at a small organization. The IT department consisted of one lone individual tasked with helping several dozen employees at the office. His job ran the gamut from minor troubleshooting to small projects like recoding websites and databases.
Whenever an employee needed help with a project, however, he was notorious for refusing to commit to a timeline. When asked why, he would explain, "When you look under a rock, you never know what you'll find. Sometimes there's nothing. Sometimes there's all kinds of bugs."
Being a team of one, his outlook may have been justified. If he ran into an issue he didn't know how to solve, there was no one else in the organization that he could ask.
If you work in a larger organization, that's less of an excuse - chances are that someone has an idea for how to help. For customer service teams especially - or anyone in a customer-facing role - knowing how to best marshal the experts and knowledge at hand to solve a customer's problem quickly is key to keeping that customer relationship healthy. The more people that you call on, the more likely you are to find someone who can fix the issue.
Effective collaboration is just one key to good customer service. There’s also a big difference between customers who are simply satisfied and those who become loyal. Shep Hyken, a leading customer service and experience expert, says in a recently published ebook, Engage Customers With Service Excellence, that one study at Vanderbilt University found that about 25% to 40% of customers didn’t come back to a place of business even if they’d felt satisfied.
But how do you create a customer experience that does make customers loyal? To view all 8 lessons from Shep Hyken, register now to read the ebook.
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