Customer satisfaction can make or break a business. One bad review can cause you to lose people’s trust, potentially leading to decreased sales. On the contrary, maintaining good reviews equates to better sales, as people rely on reviews before purchasing.
That said, good customer service is crucial. But how can you achieve that if you’re overwhelmed by the concerns you’re receiving? Well, there’s this thing called dedicated customer service.
What Is a Dedicated Customer Service?
Dedicated customer service is a specialized approach businesses use to provide personalized, consistent, and focused customer support. It consists of professional agents trained to understand your products or services and customers and how they can provide timely and relevant assistance.
This customer service model enhances customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty. With personalized support, customers will feel valued, which can result in long-term relationships.
Dedicated customer service is ideal for businesses that offer complex products or services, as customers often need assistance.
Forbes describes in more detail what a dedicated customer support or dedicated contact center is.
What to Look for in a Dedicated Customer Support Partner
Choosing a dedicated customer service team ensures your customers receive excellent assistance. However, you can only provide tailored service if your partner can provide quality service.
Here are the things you must look for in a dedicated customer service team:
- Knowledge & Expertise.
Dedicated customer service should thoroughly understand your products, service, and customers. This way, they can provide expert assistance when customers run into problems. - Training & Skill Development.
To ensure that your dedicated customer service representatives (CSR) will gain knowledge about your business, look for a team that keeps their skills up-to-date. A partner that provides training to its team leads to customer satisfaction and retention.
Find out more about customer service training on LinkedIn. - Problem Solving Skills.
It can be difficult for customers to explain their problems. Your dedicated customer service team should be skillful enough to navigate the problem and provide a solution. - Communication Skills.
Your CSR must have excellent verbal and written communication skills to explain problems and solutions clearly to customers. They must also be able to simplify complicated information to make it easy to understand. - Technology Knowledge.
Dedicated customer support teams should be familiar with CRM systems, customer support software, and communication tools. This knowledge will improve their efficiency in handling customers. - Customer-Centric Approach.
The team must desire to help customers patiently until they resolve their issues. - Ability to Accept Feedback.
Look for a team that takes the initiative to seek feedback to improve its customer service.
Forbes lists the main factors businesses must consider when choosing a dedicated customer support partner.
How to Hire Dedicated Customer Support
Several steps are necessary when hiring dedicated customer service. By following these steps, you can ensure that the team you recruit will perfectly fit the job.
These are the steps to hire dedicated customer service:
Step 1: Identify Your Needs
Determine the responsibilities your customer service team needs to handle. Will they handle general inquiries or more complex technical support? Knowing these things will help you find a partner specializing in such skills.
Step 2: Create a Job Description
In your job description, clearly outline the job, soft and hard skills, necessary experience, and educational background the candidates must have.
These requirements will allow teams to determine whether they fit the criteria. This way, most of the applications you’ll receive will come from people who can handle the job.
Step 3: Post the Job Description on Various Channels
To ensure a broad reach, utilize multiple recruitment channels, such as social media and job boards. You can also let your employees know you are seeking a dedicated customer service partner.
Tell them that you’ll give incentives to the one who will refer the team you’ll hire so that they’ll refer actively.
Step 4: Screen Applications
This step will take the most time during the hiring process. You’ll have to review resumes individually to ensure the applicants you’ll shortlist will match your needs. A quick phone interview with the shortlisted applicants is also ideal for assessing their communication skills.
Step 5: Interview Applicants
Prepare comprehensive questions to assess each applicant’s skills and experience. For instance, ask them how they will deal with a demanding customer or simulate interactions to see how they will practice empathy.
You also need to assess the candidates’ technical skills and cultural fit. Ask them about their experience with relevant tools and software. In addition, tell them about your company’s values and see if they align.
Step 6: Provide Training
This is where you will onboard your new dedicated customer service team and train them on your products, services, and protocols for handling customers. Make them feel welcome so that they can work smoothly with your other employees.
LinkedIn has listed a few reasons to train your customer service team.
Step 7: Monitor and Provide Feedback
Conduct performance reviews to assess your team’s performance. Provide feedback regularly so that your team knows where they excel and what needs improvement.
You can also ask your customers to answer surveys about how your team handled their concerns. This will give you first-hand information about how your dedicated customer service team is performing.
Do your customers specifically need tech support? Here’s how you can successfully outsource technical support.
Benefits of Hiring a Dedicated Customer Support
If done properly, hiring dedicated customer service to manage product and service-related concerns can be beneficial.
Here are the benefits of hiring dedicated customer support:
- Performance Maximization.
Your dedicated customer support team is an extension of your business. By hiring them, you allow your in-house employees to focus on their tasks while the customer support team focuses on customer concerns. - Risk Mitigation.
Customers hate waiting. Hiring customer support lets you handle customers ASAP, preventing them from walking away with a bad experience. - Accessed to the Best Tools.
Dedicated customer support teams are experts in various CSR tools. This helps them understand customers and deliver prompt support without any hassle. - Adoption of Expert Support.
Customer support teams are professionals who are trained to handle people expertly. By adopting the right people, you provide your customers with a sophisticated experience.
Provide Dedicated Support to Customers
Customers are the backbone of your business. Therefore, it’s important to provide them with prompt support when they experience problems regarding your product or service. The best way to do this is to adopt dedicated customer service.
A dedicated customer support team ensures that your customers will not have to wait long to speak to an expert. It will also help you provide relevant solutions, mitigating the risks of disappointing customers.
