Great Customer Service Takes Empathy
Step No. 3: Develop a service culture. When Nordstrom’s deals with online customers, for instance, it personalizes email and tweets with the customer’s name and goes even further by suggesting a pair of jeans that would go with the halter top she just bought.
“Absolutely, the companies that will win in the future are investing strongly into service. They’re investing time, money, and resources to develop the kinds of systems and people who are able to provide a better service that differentiates their organizations from others,” Kaufman says.
Step No. 4: Train and support your people using peers. Some of the most service-oriented and empathetic companies teach their junior customer service agents by example.
“Pick one of your best customer service agents and have her tell stories and become a mentor to the rest of your staff,” Tan recommends. “In many ways, this can be better than you as a supervisor having to tell the stories yourself, because they are hearing from a peer. When the more experienced agents tell the younger ones these stories, the concept of empathy and customer service gets passed down and becomes part of a service culture.”
Step No. 5: Teach agents to be responsive. Sometimes an agent might not have a ready-made solution to a problem, but if the agent is responsive and communicative with the customer, the effort goes a long way. It lets the customer know the company cares, and that his issue hasn’t been forgotten.
Mike Little, CEO of BYTE, which provides online restaurant menus and reviews to restaurants and diners, emphasizes the need for strong and continuous support that relates to the issues customers experience. “One thing we have already learned as we move into this business is that you have to continue to diligently support and expand your product for your customers,” he says. “To do this, you have to empathize with their situation and understand the kinds of problems that they are trying to solve.”
Step No. 6: Change with your customers. What service agents imagine to be a display of empathy and understanding to one customer might not translate to another.
“Younger customers are a great example of this,” Tan stresses. “These customers grew up with and are accustomed to social media. They like bonding with each other and they do this by sending texts, Instagram photos, etc., that capture their smiles and also their frowns. They exchange these images faster than older customers do. Because of this, customer service agents need to be sensitive to this need to respond earlier in the dialogue with a younger customer.”
Customer service is a vital element for businesses. Consumers have a variety of choices to meet their needs, and customer service plays an intrinsic role in that decision. Savvy companies differentiate themselves not only by product quality but also by service quality. In fact, the number-one reason consumers recommend one company over another is superior customer service.
Yet industry practitioners like Oracle’s Hamilton say that many companies find it difficult to determine a return on their customer service investments. “As a result, the impact of customer service initiatives is frequently untracked, and when it comes time to cut organizational costs, customer service is an easy target,” Hamilton says.
Half a world away in Singapore, Up! Your Service’s Kaufman often sees the same thing.
“In today’s world, with commoditization, globalization, and increasing price pressure on all companies because of the widely available alternate services and products, customer service is more important than ever before,” Kaufman says. “In many cases, the quality of customer experience becomes one of the only things that a company can actually differentiate on, and when people tell other people their experiences and their feelings about working with an organization, it’s very often the service experience that they’re talking about. The recent situation with United Airlines is a good example. The problem wasn’t about location, price, or whether the airline took off on time. It was all about the customer experience.”
So how do you pin a dollar value on great customer service and the empathy factor?
“We often like to quote Henry Ford, who understood this implicitly over 100 years ago,” Hamilton says. “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
Mary Shacklett is a freelance writer and president of Transworld Data, a technology analytics, market research, and consulting firm. She can be reached at mshacklett@twdtransworld.com.