Customers have higher expectations about the quality of customer interactions and support than ever. This means that companies providing the same customer experience training that has worked on a basic level in the past can’t have the same impact on people judging them by higher standards. Getting to a higher quality of support means we should all strive for what some call “White Glove” customer interactions. What does this mean?
What is white glove customer service?
According to McKinsey & Co., this next step in the evolution of customer service is “completely customized to each individual: when a customer calls a contact center, the agent can pull up a profile detailing the customer’s every interaction with the company, from previous service calls to payment schedules to marketing segmentation.” It gets its name from the kind of attention and care that was once the purview mostly of high-value and high-dollar customers involved in transactions involving significant amounts of money or assets. Today’s version of this quality support involves “attention to detail, convenience, speed, and emotional fulfillment… [plus] solutions, products, and services that are tailored to each customer’s specific and unique needs.”
Four ways to build a company culture built around white-glove customer service
Customers are more likely than ever to quit doing business with organizations that provide bad experiences. Exceeding their expectations and making them happy has never been as important as now. Here are four ways suggested by Hubspot to truly institutionalize white-glove customer service within an organization:
1. Establish a clear structure for your customer service strategy and use that template to govern every customer interaction.
This strategy needs to receive regular attention and improvement so that companies are constantly getting better at training support agents to serve clients.
2. Gather feedback from customers to identify how you can improve
You need to know whether your customers are happy with your service and be able to pinpoint where to focus your efforts on changes and improvement.
3. Make personalization the goal pursued to improve every customer's journey.
You want customers to feel that “every interaction has been created specifically for them." Calling them by name and anticipating what they want goes a long distance in this regard.
4. Be exact and demonstrate urgency when responding to customers.
Avoid ever giving an impression of sloppiness and resolve customer issues as quickly as possible.
Training for better customer experience
When new customer experience agents are being added to your team, their onboarding needs to include soft skills training, technical training specific to their tools and processes, product knowledge, and especially for nearshore or offshore talent, extensive U.S. culture coaching to support their effective communication with North American customers. These training components are supported by direct training, nesting within existing team operations, and continuous coaching cycles driven by regular monitoring.
At Altiam CX, we judge the success of our training by its ability to foster mastery in the following skills:
· Empathetic listening
· Problem solving aimed at customer issue resolution
· Understand and communicating the client’s brand voice
· Using and understanding U.S. conversational norms
· Developing depth of product expertise
Learn more about Altiam CX Services.
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