In any field either business, company or an institution they are usually guided by the principles of customer service. These principles help them improve the services and maintain a good relationship with their customers. Here are some of the principles of customer service that are core in any business or company. Through the core services, customer service techniques will govern the organization of the quality of service. The seven principles of customer service include; speed, accuracy, clarity, transparency, accessibility, friendliness and efficiency.
- Speed: This has been critical to many organizations. Through speed and responsiveness, it will determine the quality of service provided in an institution. As one may know, the ability to respond to the customer need has an impact on both the customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. For companies to improve on their customer service, they ensure they have good responsiveness. There are various types of responsiveness which include first responsive time, average and problem solution time. All of these differ it regarding speed, but the best way to respond to clients is using the first responsive time where the customers receive a quick response to the or clients.
- Accuracy: This is also another principle of customer service. Besides being fast in delivering information to the clients the information provided should be correct. If any information provided to the customer is not accurate, this can lead to dissatisfaction. The organization should always ensure they contain information that is accurate. To ensure this is done in the right way is to train your employees on the crucial part of accuracy. The training should much be focused on the skill, train for the efficiency in expanding knowledge. Teamwork should also be critical as it will solve the issue of a dependent through colleagues.
- Clarity: Another principle involves clarity; this is how information can be processed. This is what and how information should be provided. Simplicity is the mother of clarity, but it has always never received the respect it deserves. Employees talking simply to the clients is always not easy as it requires less mental effort to process the same information. The organization should always ensure they have a structure to ensure they increase the processing of fluency.
- Transparency: Companies need to ensure they have customer loyalty. Always companies should make sure they are transparent to their clients. When one is transparent, it means that they are accountable and open on all the policies and programs of the company. Whenever communicating to the client, customer care representative should also ensure they are as more transparent as possible.
- Accessibility: This principle is always fundamental especially when the client has a complaint or an issue and they want to get in touch with the institution. Many organizations have ever worked hard to ensure they focus on delighting the customer; however, nowadays institution is more focused on providing they reduce the customer effort. When service performance and costs are increasing customer, satisfaction is also increased. For the principle of accessibility to be successful the institution should always be accessible at all time. Despite being expensive, the customer service should always be available 24/7. However, to ensure this is reduced companies have come up with the services where clients can have self-service options, a situation they can handle the problem by themselves.
- Friendliness: Customer services should always be friendly to the client no matter the issue raised. There should be a human-to-human approach whenever delaying with clients. Human interaction may be of nuisance and may have both the negative and positive impact on the experience. It may be impossible to train employees on being polite and friendly. They may have it or not; however, when hiring employees, the employer should always be keen. Being friendly makes the customer feel good.
- Efficiency: Finally, we have the principle of efficiency. For a company to have the best service globally they should have efficiency as one of the crucial factors in customer service due to the advancement in technology there have been tools used that have bypassed the yesterday tradeoffs. With email messaging, voice mail use of phone and the live chat it has improved the efficiency used in today world of communicating to clients.
Importance of Customer Service Principles
The above principles of customer service are really critical to the business world today. They are really necessary due to the current competition available in the market from clients and customers. Any company is competing for customer loans and customer loyalty. When the above principles are met chances are customers will be right next to your door. The important part of customer care service is that it will be keeping clients once you have brought them to your business. Through the service, it will be built trust to your customers. With the current competition available, it is hard to build trust in customers. In any business customers should be the priority more than the price if having them. In this case, the above principles will ensure they put customers first more than anything else.
Additionally, it will build the brand of the company. Your company will be seen to be customer oriented and not price oriented which is good or business. Finally, with good customer care service and having filled the above principles it will reduce problems that are associated with the business. There is no way a business will have perfect customers but with the above principles will ensure customers issues are handled in a more conformable manner.
Having seen the positive side of having customer care, there is also the negative side of customer care services. When you have a bad customer care service, this will hurt your business. whenever you have customer care services that are rude to the clients, it will damage your reputation as a company. Your company will be seen to be “bad and customers will never want to be associated with you.” Secondly, it may also lead to the dropping of the value of lifetime customers. Having new customers can be very expensive compared to having your current customers. Clients are usually willing to move in case they have a good experience and will always want to do more business with you. Not only will you lose the customers, but the chances of also losing the employees are also very high. Some employees may leave the job whenever they notice the company has bad customer service. This, in turn, may lead to turnout on people that you rely on running your business. To ensure the adverse effect of customer service is always providing you have the best customer care services.