THOUGHTS

Top 4 Customer Service Skills That Can Drive the Growth of Your Retail Business

Jan 16, 2019

The retail industry is witnessing constant changes and players in this industry are facing immense pressure when it comes to keeping up with the ever-changing customer expectations, maintaining customer loyalty, retaining and engaging employees, and digital disruptions. With the constantly changing customer behavior, meeting customer expectations is getting really difficult for companies in the retail industry. To meet customer expectations, it is highly essential that you provide great customer service as it is a vital element of business operations that can affect your bottom line as well as how your business is viewed by the public.

If your business fails to provide great customer service, it is likely that you will end up damaging your brand’s reputation. High-quality customer service management is important for a growing or established company’s bottom line. Therefore, businesses need to realize the importance of customer service. They must understand that it is a virtuous circle that drives profits and allows companies to compete against rivals with more resources and funding in their pocket.

At Infiniti Research, we understand the impact that excellent customer service can have on your business. And to help companies excel in a highly competitive landscape, our team of experts has highlighted the four best customer service skills that can drive the growth of your business and boost your ROI.

Want to win new customers, improve customer experience and increase customer loyalty? Understanding your customers’ needs and competitors’ pricing models may hold the key to success. Request a free brochure to know more about the benefits of our customer intelligence services. 

Top Customer Service Skills to Boost Business Growth

Skill #1: You need to have genuine empathy

Empathy is one of the most important customer service skills that can help you improve customer experience immensely. Empathy helps you to put yourself in the emotional shoes of your customer and analyze their issue accordingly. To build a great product or service, you need to understand customer needs and pain points thoroughly. To sell a product or service, you need to understand the way customers think and personalize communications accordingly. To provide great customer support, you need to analyze the emotions of your customers. Empathy breeds understanding. If a customer feels understood, they will feel valued. If a customer feels valued, they will stick around and pay you for a longer period of time.

Skill #2: Develop flexibility

Flexibility is very important when dealing with the problems of your customers. Giving free product or service may go against the rule book of your business but sometimes you need to be flexible. An occasional bending of the rules to make your customer happy should not be discouraged. This is one of the beneficial customer service tips especially when you for some reason fail to meet customer expectation. Such tips help to improve customer experience.

Still, want to know more about customer service skills and how they can help companies gain a competitive advantage? We’d love to help! Request for more information here.

Skill #3: Effective listening

Every conversation has two outcomes:

  • You can interpret correctly what the customer is trying to say.
  • You can misinterpret what the customer is trying to say.

Effective listening is one of those customer service skills that separate those two outcomes. It is about more than just hearing what the customer has to say. It involves understanding both what is being said and what is left unsaid. Not being able to differentiate between these two things can cause miscommunication and lead to customer dissatisfaction and frustration.

Skill #4: Your customer service team should have sound knowledge of products

It is very important that your customer service team have a deep working knowledge of the product. They should be up-to-date on the latest features of the product and thoroughly understand the value and benefits delivered to the end-user. Such customer service tips help in:

  • Faster troubleshooting.
  • Smarter recommendations of product or service (cross-sells and upsells).
  • The customer support team can tackle problems without outsourcing help.
  • Clearer communication of value and benefits.
  • Better customer interactions leading to better customer experience.

Understanding the product or service as if you are a daily user is not only important to improve customer experience, but it is an important function of the entire process of sales. Furthermore, it helps in customer retention and helps win new clients, whereas upselling and cross-selling can help extract more value from existing customers.

Growing a business amidst immense competition is a difficult task. It requires developing an understanding of your customers, improving customer experience, analyzing their spending habits, competitors’ products, and much more.

Request a free proposal to gain unlimited access to our portfolio of customer intelligence services.

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