26 November 2021
By Roger Jones
roger@TheCork.ie
If you run a business of your own, one of the most important things that you need to be aware of is your customer service and how it is being applied to your customers each and every day. The better your customer service is, the more likely it is that you are going to be able to keep your business going strong, so this really is one of those things that you will want to focus on as best as you can.
There are many aspects to good customer service, but one thing that is always important is making sure that you are giving it the human touch. Your customers will appreciate it greatly when you do this, and it will make everyone feel so much better to work with your company. So how can you do this? Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to give your customer service the human touch right now.
Focus On Empathy
One of the most important things you can do is to focus as best as you can on empathy. As long as you are being empathic with your customers, you will find that you are going to be doing a lot more to keep them happy. The main reason for this is because people will remember most of all how you make them feel, so if you can connect with them and make them feel understood, that is going to serve very well in general for improving your customer service.
So how can you improve the empathy in your customer services? A simple way is to hire people who are naturally empathetic. You can simply look for this in your recruitment process, and ultimately you will be able to find people who fit the bill, and who are therefore going to be great customer service advisors in that respect. You might also want to make a point of instructing and training those staff members to establish empathy with a customer. The more that you can do this, the more the customer feels understood, so this really is an important thing to focus on in general.
Establish Rapport
Rapport is another important watchword if you are keen to give your customers the best possible experience with your customer service. This simply refers to a feeling of goodwill and mutual understanding between you and someone else, and it’s something that you are going to want to try and establish with each and every customer where possible. The more effectively you do this, the more that you are going to get out of each experience, and the same will be true for your customer as well.
How do you establish rapport? It’s fairly simple, and it all comes down to something called mirroring. That means that body language, voice type and tone and even breathing are being aligned with each person. This actually happens naturally when you are in rapport with someone, and it is something that you can utilise in order to make people feel more comfortable in your presence.
While you don’t need to do anything outwardly fake to make this happen, it’s worth advising your customer service advisors to try and establish rapport with each and every customer as soon as possible. If they do this, it is generally going to lead to a much more effective and enjoyable process for everyone involved – and that all-needed human touch is very much going to be there.
Keep It Formal
You should bear in mind throughout all of this that it is still important to keep the conversation formal to a degree. After all, you want people to be able to trust you, and they are usually calling in for a good reason, so at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you are doing all you can to look after their needs in the professional manner which they are seeking.
Keeping it formal can be aligned with providing the human touch with practice, although some might find it tricky at first. To really do this effectively, you will want to make sure that you are essentially being friendly even while you are professionally fixing people’s problems. And remember that they always need to be shown the respect that they deserve, which means that they are not going to be spoken to in a manner that you might outside of a professional setting. So as you can see, there is a balance to strike between being human and simply not being professional, and you need to make sure you get this balance right.
If you do, it will mean that your customers are much more likely to respect you in turn, and the whole relationship is going to be improved tenfold in many important ways.
Put A Face To The Name
A simple, small and yet highly effective thing you can do is to make sure you are always putting a face to a name. Whenever speaking to a customer representative, your customers want to know who they are speaking to, and that means they want to be able to see a face. Of course, this is not always possible, but there are ways to include the face in the interaction in some manner. For instance, you might want to have a small profile picture at the bottom of an email, or an About Us page where the main members of staff are shown with smiling faces.
This can be an important part of bridging the divide, as it shows that the people in your business really are human after all! This can be especially important amongst populations who might have a sense of businesses being all faceless and empty. If you can quite literally show the faces behind the door, that is going to go a long way to restoring faith in the company, and your customers are probably going to respond in a pretty healthy manner as a result. Putting a face to the name is always effective.
Use Only The Best Automated Services
If you are really focusing on providing the human touch as much as possible, you might be excused for thinking that avoiding using automated services at all is the way to go. Certainly, you will want to put some kind of a limit on it, but that limit should have more to do with the nature of the service than the number. In other words: it’s fine to use these services, but make sure that you are using only the best ones. Why? These are more likely to be designed with the human touch in mind, and they will be more able to retain that human touch, even while providing you and your customers with a useful way to communicate.
Let’s take online chatbots as an example. A lot of people don’t like talking to chatbots, but only when they are not responsive or don’t seem to work. If you can utilise the latest technology in this area, however, you are going to find that it is much easier to keep everyone happy while still making use of this kind of automation. If you visit this website, you will see an example of a live chat service that really does have the human touch, and that is going to be beneficial for everyone in so many ways.
Treat Every Customer As An Individual
Customers know straight away if you are thinking of them all as merely numbers, so you need to make sure that you are avoiding this at all costs if possible. You need to treat each and every customer as the individual they truly are, as this is going to help establish a much healthier relationship between you and them. How can you show that you are treating them as an individual? Well, many of the above tips are designed to help you do exactly that, but you might also want to remember the simple things like using their name, asking about them, and generally making sure that there is a real human connection going on there. This is what is going to be remembered most of all, and it’s something that you need to work on with each customer you come into contact with.
Don’t Let Technology Stand In Your Way
If you are not careful, the latest tech can often seem to actually get in the way of your relationship with your customer. When this happens, something important has been lost, so it is best to avoid this at all costs. In essence, what we are saying here is that you should not allow technology to stand in your way of real human connections. As long as you are utilising technology, but not relying on it too heavily, you are going to find that your customers are treated so much more effectively.
Do all those, and your customers will be much happier to deal with your company. This is going to be good news for them and for you.
