Have you ever held a job that required you to interact with customers all day long? Chances are that before you hit the floor, you underwent extensive training about the “how to” deal with customers.
You would have been trained in how to deal with angry customers, how to communicate fluently with your customers. You may have also been told to act cheerful around your customers. However what happens when a particular client need exceeds the limits of your training?
Customer orientedness is going beyond the call of duty to take care of the needs of your customers. It goes beyond all the technical skills you may have picked up. It is not just about remaining calm and positive in front of the client.
Customer orientedness stems from a deep desire to understand and help the customer. While everyone can be good at customer service, what sets some people apart is the mindset with which they interact with their customers.
Improving Customer Orientation
Here are a few tips on how we can improve our customer orientedness.
1. Recognizing the responsibility
When an employee recognizes that irrespective of whether they could actually fix the problem for the customer or not, they need to go above and beyond to make sure the customer has a great experience while interacting with them.
2. Always learning
The best of the best are continuous learners – and not just about their own products and services. They learn about competitors, what’s the latest and greatest in the industry, and general knowledge about many things.
They continuously seek to upgrade their skills and grab every opportunity to learn. Every customer interaction for them is a learning opportunity and they continuously strive to become better with every customer.
3. The desire to care
Not every employee has that mindset coming in. Even after basic customer service training, they may still not get it. Sure, they may understand the techniques to deliver service, but don’t get the essence. A customer-focused mindset includes the desire to serve.
It includes the desire to put oneself in the position of their customers and then take actions. Great customer-oriented professionals can empathize with their customers and often feel the need to go beyond their call of duty and feel responsible for their customer’s experience.
To conclude, customer service is not an easy job and it’s not particularly easy to get everything right on the first go. However, creating a positive mindset is important and critical, and to do this, it’s necessary to put the right training in place and to ensure that the employees are happy overall.
A happy employee is one that’s much more inclined to show the empathy that good customer service needs. After all, its very rightfully said that when a business takes care of its employees, the employees take care of the customers.
Speak to us if you want your employees to develop customer orientation that results in superior customer experience.