Customer Service Fundamentals

Keeping customers satisfied and ensuring they return to your company requires that you're focused on your customers. To focus on your customers, you need to pay them your full, undivided attention and minimize interruptions to your interactions with them. To focus on customers, you also need to connect with them. Finding commonalities helps establish connections, which are created and nurtured through communication and relationship building. Finally, a positive and friendly attitude is helpful. By having a good attitude, you reduce stress in yourself and in others. You also need to offer positive solutions to customers' problems. In each case, either come up with a practical solution or validate and recognize the personal nature of the customer's problem. Empathy enables you to connect with customers and build good relationships with them. Empathy involves listening to, understanding, and validating customers' feelings. Three techniques you can use to demonstrate empathy are to relate your own experience, reflect people's emotions, and to normalize their responses. Relating your own experiences is a way of reassuring customers that you have some understanding of their situations, and places you on equal footing with them. To be effective, keep your stories brief and relevant. Reflecting customers' emotions and problems back to them can be a very effective way to convey understanding and shows a desire to be helpful. As such, it is a good way to set distressed customers at ease and address their problems effectively.