Customer service can make or break your business. It’s key to retaining your current customers and engaging new ones, it can boost your revenue, and it’s a valuable competitive advantage over other companies within your industry. And to provide outstanding customer service, you need to have an outstanding service attitude at all times.
Having a service attitude goes beyond being helpful and genuinely interested in the problem at hand: it means understanding customer expectations and going above and beyond to meet and surpass them.
Now, most of the time, customer service interactions occur over the phone, and showing a service attitude via this channel can sometimes be challenging. Here are some tips that might help:
Tone of voice
When you’re speaking with a customer over the phone, they can’t see your face or read your body language. So, the tone of voice you use is the key to conveying your emotional state and attitude. You should always aim for an empathetic tone of voice to drive customer loyalty.
However, the tone of voice can adapt depending on the context. In general, as long as they feel their problem is being taken care of, people prefer a more casual and friendly interaction.
Key questions and when to ask them
To convey a service attitude over the phone, you need to ask the right questions at the right time. This enables you to identify the root cause of the customer's issue and steer the conversation in the right direction.
It’s important to know which questions to ask to engage in a productive conversation and provide a better experience. For instance, you might need to ask clarifying questions to better understand what the customer is saying or funnel questions to dig deeper into an issue.
Solutions and alternatives
Customer service should be focused on providing solutions, and it’s very important to convey that over the phone. To do so, you need to actively listen to the customer. This will allow you to have a deeper understanding of the issue at hand and be able to come up with solutions faster and more easily.
You also need to make relevant suggestions and come up with alternative solutions to the problems the customer is facing, showing that you’re deeply interested in helping them sort them out.
Customer service is an essential —and often overlooked— part of your business success. If you want to provide an outstanding experience to your customers, you need to convey a service attitude across all communication channels, including the phone.
By using an empathetic tone of voice, asking the right questions at the right time and coming up with relevant solutions, you’re setting your business up for success.
And if you want to make sure your customer service checks all those boxes and keeps your clients happy, you can always trust Easybee as your new phone answering service. This virtual call reception service can help you streamline your business operations and follow up with clients in a more organized fashion. Give it a go!
