Customer services are face of the company, shine it.

I required a financial service thus applied online to get that service. I got a call and was asked to provide some documents and I called bank executive to collect those documents. Executive told me that he would be there in half an hour. Everything was going fine until the time he communicated me to collect the documents. But when he did not turn after forty five minutes I called him to know the exact time as I had another meeting in the afternoon. I made six to seven attempts to make call but his number was busy. Once again I called him after fifteen minutes but call was unanswered. Finally he came to collect the documents three hours after the scheduled time. One document was missing so I asked his email id to send that document later. I sent the mail and called him to get confirmation of it. He said he would call after checking it but hours later when no call was received I called him to get the confirmation of receiving. But I was shocked that email was not received by him till then. I would like to ask some questions to that executive, like –

• Was not it his responsibility to reach to me on time communicated by him?
• Was not it his responsibility to inform me if he was getting late to reach to me?
• Was not his responsibility to inform about receiving status of the email?

I am not here to blame a particular person for such casual behaviour of the company’s representatives but to know reasons behind it. You can experience such scenario many times while interacting with front representatives especially in banking or telecom sectors. The front liners of any service providers represent the brand image and efficiency of the services and they need to act professionally to maintain the good image of the company. So, this issue is required to be resolved and beginning should be done from the root level.

Hiring process is very important both for the company as well as job aspirant. Any company hiring a prospective representative of the company for the direct customer services should be very cautious before making final selection. Some companies generally hire customer service representatives without following a procedure to know the etiquettes, behaviour, attitude and psychology of the candidate. A casual approach of the company’s representative will affect the company’s image, not that of representative of the company, so it should be attentively consider while hiring customer representatives.

Training is another important factor for efficient customer services. The fresh pass outs are not well exposed to elements of the customer services, so training with real time customer exposure will help them to understand good customer services. In the training, prospects should be well trained about behaviour control, good etiquettes, appearance, dress up, manners and other ways to make efficient customer services. Dos and Don’ts of the customer services should be explained in the training and the candidates who successfully complete this training should be given responsibility to handle customer services.

Monitoring by senior officials helps improving customer services. All customer activities should well observed by supervisors or other concerned officials. Company’s new representative should accompanied by any experienced representative to monitor and observe his/her working. This will also help new representatives to get valuable suggestions from the experienced representatives. There must be a post interaction feedback from the customer after interaction with representative of the company and this can be done through email, call or SMS.

Appreciating and recognizing the employees with high customer satisfaction score will motivate both performers as well as non performers to improve their performance in future to obtain such appreciation and recognition.

Customer services are face of the company it’s needed to glam to attract customers and more referrals from the satisfied customer. This is true to say that a customer with high satisfaction may or may not share his experience but an unsatisfied customer will definitely share his experience to many people. So, customer satisfaction is the key to generate goodwill in the market, keep it maintained.