Service Orientation: How to adopt a service orientation culture in your company

I don’t suggest you should completely forget about pricing, conversions and or sales. What I suggest is to do all these things but with customers and their needs in mind. At the end of the day, your goal is to help them reach their goals, right? So there you have it – being customer service oriented should be natural.

Here are a few suggestions about how you as a company can become a little bit more customer service driven:

Hire people with customer service oriented skills

It looks kind of obvious, but in order to be customer service oriented you need to have people with very specific customer service oriented skills onboard. The funniest thing is that these skills have little to do with professional training or qualification, they are rather personal qualities and understanding of human psychology.

Top 5 skills you should be looking for in a customer-oriented person are as follows:

• Empathy – for feeling people’s mood and being able to show genuine compassion;

• Active listening – for resolving conflicts fast and to everybody’s benefit;

• Attentiveness – for paying attention to even the smallest details in order to address issues in the most effective way;

• Proactivity – for addressing issues before they even arise or escalate;

• Patience – for both having a thick skin about unsatisfied or rude customers and being able to get to the bottom of every issue.

All in all, a customer service oriented person is someone able to listen, ask all the right questions, clarifying everything that’s unclear, and respond to everything promptly. It’s also crucial your employees have a deep knowledge of your product or service.

Look for customer service oriented people not only for positions directly connected to front-line positions but for every position at your company. Front-line employees will not be able to compensate for decisions made elsewhere within the organization that is not in the clients’ best interests. Who you hire will be the single most important factor in determining whether or not you can successfully achieve a service culture.

You need to let your service representatives just be themselves and show their best qualities in their work. Being friendly and open towards your customers is the first and foremost foundation of customer orientation. It’s always a great idea to rely on customer service golden rules and keep that fine balance in interactions with clients. Honestly, I would choose to speak to Captain Mike of Netflix any day of the week.

I know this is rather subjective and I don’t recommend overdoing it, especially with really frustrated customers. But by adding a pitch of informality and a bit of genuine interest, you’ll build a long-term relationship with anyone who’s ever contacted your team.

Just let your people build stronger connections with clients and encourage creativity in every aspect.

Create a customer service oriented philosophy at your company

A customer service philosophy is a set of values that you as a business share with your employees and encourage them to share with customers. It’s how you work with people and it’s how you want your business to be perceived.

If you want your company to be customer service oriented, it’s better to make sure that everyone knows it’s your focus. To be on the same page with clients, you need to create this system of values and preach it on every corner.

This philosophy should be implemented from top to bottom and start with a business owner, manager, or team lead. Yes, it’s great practical training to talk to customers on your own and be aware of what’s going on.

Provide colleagues with the most powerful tools

People are a crucial part of the whole customer service orientation success. But they can’t do much without powerful tools that make communication with customers easy and seamless.

Live chats and emails are preferred by an overwhelming majority of people, so that’s where your customer service focus should be.

For instance, with an all-in-one tool like HelpCrunch, you can handle both from one dashboard. Its live chat is easily integrated with any website or app and you can set up a shared inbox for all incoming emails and chats. This is the most effective way to keep and manage everything in one place and always stay in touch with customers.

HelpCrunch allows you not only to support customers as a truly customer-oriented company but also to handle all communication with customers (including email marketing campaigns, in-app messenger, etc).

Engage customers proactively

The highest level of customer service orientation is to not only help customers when they need it but also be ahead of the others and assist them before they ask.

A true customer service oriented team knows their customers better than they know themselves. They know exactly what should be changed about their product or services in order to make clients happier and more satisfied.

For instance, you can set up proactive auto messages that are based on certain behavior in HelpCrunch. If you feel like some part of your services/website/product might seem complicated or unclear, just shoot an automated chat message relying on such triggers as a current page URL, time spent on page, or whatever else you need. This is what ‘proactivity’ entails and it’s the major league of a customer service oriented culture.

Final Words

I know that half of the stuff from this article might come across as obvious, while the other will seem totally counterintuitive. We all must love and deeply care about our customers, but should we completely forget about our own interests? Of course not.

A customer service oriented company is somewhere on the intersection of people’s interests and its own benefits. Genuine care and interest will never go unnoticed and will eventually pay off. To become a customer service-oriented person and promote such a philosophy within your company, put yourself in your clients’ shoes, develop soft-skills, and go for cutting-edge software.

So, why don’t we try to shift our focus on customers, just for a day or two? Create an account with HelpCrunch, make avail of its handy tools, and let your customers know your company is always there to help them.

For a system to support Customer Service Orientation please visit HelpCrunch for your one platform, multiple tools and infinite customer relationships

Reference: https://helpcrunch.com/blog/customer-service-orientation/