Chicomm Blog

The foundation of excellent customer service is great employees. You want customers to walk away from interactions with your staff feeling supported and satisfied enough to want to come back for more – and to send their friends and colleagues your way. So one great customer service skill is to hone your hiring process to find genuinely friendly and helpful people.

That all starts with a hiring process that focuses on both skillset and how well a prospective candidate’s personality aligns with your company’s customer-centric focus. To build a winning team, you need people who are both talented and can demonstrate a willingness to go the extra mile for your customers.

Customer service skills are probably the most important asset to front-line staff dealing with the public or clients. But customer service technology – and knowing how to use it – can be just as important as people skills.

The right communication technology can create a win for everyone involved – the business, the staff, and customers. On-site service staff equipped with lightweight, convenient radios can assist customers by having real-time communication with team members handling inventory, accounts, and other functions.

Buying the right devices isn't enough, though. Too often, businesses buy the right devices, hardware or software but don’t take the time for adequate instruction to unlock all of the technology’s benefits. Training is the easiest way to ensure that you’re putting technology to work to meet your customer service goals. While most modern radio solutions are pretty intuitive, it’s still a best practice to make sure staff know how to use them correctly and efficiently. If that’s not the case, it can impede staff confidence and ability to build trust with the customer.

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply," wrote Stephen R. Covey, author of the best-selling guide The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They're words to live by – and work by, if you're working or supervising in a customer service role.

Rather than just telling your customers what you offer and how you think it will help them, being willing and able to ask them what they need, listening to the answer and discussing how you can work together to meet those needs will set you apart from competitors, particularly those who talk more than they listen.

Listening carefully will give you insight into how customers are using your product or service and help you anticipate their needs in the future. And excellent customer service skills are all about not just meeting, but anticipating the customer's needs.

Nordstrom, the Seattle-based retailer with legendary customer service, is known for the effectiveness of its Employee Handbook and its “One Rule”: “Use good judgment in all situations.”

And it’s good to keep in mind that even the best customer service practitioners need resources for developing their customer service skills. If you’re looking for good customer service training ideas, have your staff pair off and role-play challenging customer service situations. Assign the one in the staff role to use just one rule in determining how to respond: use good judgment.

As you’re honing the great customer service skills that will make you and your business stand out, one to keep near the top of your list is also one of the easiest to practice: Be responsive. Customers who have become accustomed to the immediacy of the internet have little patience for companies or representatives who don’t respond quickly. Being responsive and accessible is key when you want to be known for excellent customer service.

Facebook is even awarding a "responsiveness badge" to businesses that have a response rate of 90% and a response time of 15 minutes over a seven-day period. To ensure that you and your team build responsiveness into your customer service strategy, make it a rule to respond to customers within a preset amount of time, say, no more than 2-4 hours.

While the healthcare industry refers to the people it serves as patients, the customer service mentality is key. When people feel they've gotten excellent customer service in healthcare systems, that often means they got excellent medical care.

Great customer service - in healthcare and in every industry - isn’t just about how you and your staff behave when things are going smoothly, it’s also about how you face challenges and complaints. Employees should acknowledge complaints immediately, keep customers frequently updated about the status of the issue and, perhaps most importantly, be empowered to resolve situations.

It's a question pondered by job seekers, trainees, and seasoned businesspeople alike—not to mention customers themselves: "What does customer service mean to you?"

At Chicago Communications, we're in a good position to define great customer service skills, because our clients work in some of the most high-pressure customer service situations: they're first responders, educators, manufacturers, hotel and hospital workers, and more.

For many of them, providing good customer service means making a critical difference when it matters most, whether they're saving a life, teaching a child to read, building a product that consumers can depend on, or providing a weary traveler with comfortable accommodations.

If you're looking for customer service training ideas, consider having your team watch, discuss, and write about "The Diamond Story" video, described below. It's a sure-fire way to build your team's customer service skills. But beware—it's a tear jerker, so have tissues handy in the training room.

While hurriedly trying on clothes at her local Nordstrom store in North Carolina, long-time customer Lisa McIntire Shaw lost the diamond from her wedding ring and didn’t realize it was gone until she got home. 

She rushed back to the store to look for it. When Nordstrom loss prevention manager Eric Wilson spotted her looking for the ring – on her hands and knees in a dress, no less – he took up the search himself. When he couldn’t find it, he enlisted the help of two building services staffers to sift through packed vacuum cleaner bags until they unearthed the "diamond in the rough."

Have you ever gone to use something at home only to find out it doesn’t work?  And then, when you mention to your family members that it isn’t working they look at you very matter-of-factly and tell you it’s been broken for a while?  Ugh! The frustration!