We will like to recommend our readers this great article by Harvard Business Review. The article talks about provision of good customer service.

However, to us at Alchemy a more important point is finding the right candidate for your role!

Kick- Ass Customer Service

By Matthew Dixon, Lara Ponomareff, Scott Turner and Rick DeLisi

Source:
https://hbr.org/2017/01/kick-ass-customer-service

The article correctly pointed out the difficulties customer service staffs faced. These challenges will only get harder as companies migrate to self serves platforms. Therefore, it is important for companies to find the right candidate for the right job!

What is also clear is that customer service staffs should be properly trained to handle these difficult situations. Clearly, an area companies need to start thinking about. In our work, we do observed companies adhering to attributes that arguably are no longer relevant to customer service staffs. We are optimistic that as companies continue to face challenges in this area they will adapt and make changes to the requirement.

All this creates a new challenge: As customers handle more of the simple issues themselves, frontline service reps get increasingly tough ones—the issues customers can’t solve on their own. And today’s reps are struggling with these complex problems. As one service leader at a large retailer admitted to us, “Our people are woefully ill-equipped to handle today’s customers and their issues. We’re not running a contact center here. It’s more like a factory of sadness.”

Compounding the issue, as companies have focused on new self-service technologies, they’ve underinvested in frontline service talent. They still hire, onboard, develop, and manage their service reps in much the same way they always have. While the self-service experience has improved dramatically in recent years, the live service interaction has barely changed in decades, creating a gap between customers’ expectations and actual experience. Tales of poor service provoke outrage on social media and go viral despite companies’ best efforts to contain them. Not surprisingly, customer satisfaction has been in steady decline across industries for years. Types of personality of customer service staffs:

Seven Types of Reps
1. Accommodators – meets people halfway, involves others in decision making, eagerly offers discounts and refunds.
2. Competitors- focuses on winning, outperforming colleagues, and changing other’s views.
3. Controllers – Outspoken and opinionated, likes demonstrating expertise and directing the customer interaction.
4. Empathizers – Enjoy solving others’ problems, seeks to understand behaviours and motivates, listen sympathetically.
5. Hard Workers – Follow rules and procedures, likes working with numbers, is persistent and deadline-oriented.
6. Innovators – Identifies ways to improve processes and procedures, generates new ideas and options.
7. Rocks- Unflappable and optimistic, doesn’t take difficult conversations personally.

Finally, we hope this article bring about new insight to the needs and difficulties the customer service industry is facing.