Expect the client to not really understand what can, and cannot be done. Be patient when you explain what you are doing to the client. I see web designer complaints about clients online all the time. Sadly, rudeness permeates our culture and even freelancers are not immune. One of the biggest competitive advantages freelancers have is that they can provide more personal attention to their clients. That advantage is destroyed if a freelancer behaves rudely.
Plus, I like to use colorful language. My clients know that and understand. It could very well be true that some of your clients are used to you being abrupt. Naturally, there are some people who are less sensitive to social niceties. Ask yourself this—have you ever lost a client without knowing why?
Your best work occurs when you and the client work together to meet a common goal. The team mentality goes against the natural tendency of many freelancers, who view themselves as working alone.
As a team member, you need to work hard to keep your part of the project going. Meet deadlines on time and notify your client quickly of anything that might slow you down. It can make a huge difference in your client satisfaction. This last principle gets to the heart of what customer service is all about. Your client is more than just a paycheck. You can also show your clients that you care by learning about their business. You can also show them that you care by asking them questions.
When the project is over, send an email or letter to the client thanking them for the opportunity to work on the project with them. Laura Spencer is a freelance writer with over 20 years of writing experience. So if you want to improve your service, responsiveness is a good place to start. You can track various types of service speed, like:.
Contact channel. Some communication channels are faster than others. Email is slow. It could take longer than a day to receive a response. Customers use the phone because they want to get help now , but the waiting line experience often shatters this hope.
Live chat is probably the fastest support channel due to one rep being able to chat with multiple customers simultaneously. Employee skills. Amar Sagorica explains the impact of your staff's knowledgeability on problem resolution time. The more knowledgeable, the fewer questions the rep needs to grasp and solve the issue. Also, training can boost typing speed, the mastery of macros , and explanation techniques.
Employee empowerment. The extent to which frontline employees can make decisions and bend the rules on their own. Because what really puts service operations to the test is the intensity of variability caused by the customer. In other words, there will always be unexpected situations — how businesses react to them is what sets them apart. A non-empowered employee needs to escalate the issue to her managers.
An empowered employee, on the other hand, can make the judgment call herself — which drastically reduces costs. Chris DeRose and Noel Tichy share some good tips on how to empower your service reps. Besides being fast, your service answers should, obviously, be correct. Johnston's study shows that customers regard accuracy as the minimum. It won't raise customer satisfaction, but inaccuracy definitely causes dissatisfaction.
One metric for measuring accuracy is things gone wrong. Originating from the Six Sigma approach, it tracks the ratio of "fails" — mostly complaints — per or surveys. The Accuracy Principle gets interesting when we look at the factors affecting it:. Even more than for speed, service training is crucial to raise accuracy.
While training for speed focuses more on skills, training for accuracy is about expanding knowledge. The most successful companies invest in continuous staff education honing their employees' soft skills, like active listening and empathy. Information systems. The generation, flow, and access to information are crucial for service accuracy. When your contact channels aren't properly integrated, for example, your customer will have to repeat herself at every touch point.
Or worse, she'll receive conflicting messages. With a fluid integration of your database, CRM, and helpdesk systems, service reps will have the relevant information at the right time. Team work. Support is a team sport. To solve an issue you will often depend on the input from your colleagues.
But the quality of this internal communication depends heavily on the quality of your company culture. Internal politics, competition and inter-departmental misgivings can block effective collaboration.
Clarity is about how processable your communication is. When accuracy is the what , clarity is the how. We all know some people who just have a knack for explaining things.
Those who make the complex sound simple, natural born teachers. What is it that makes a sentence easier or harder to grasp? A few factors:. Not knowing what is happening or why makes us uneasy. Which is why transparency is just as critical to service as speed and accuracy. Known versus unknown waits.
The Psychology of Waiting Lines explains that uncertain waits, not knowing how long the wait will be , and unexplained waits, not knowing the reason for the wait , both make queueing more painful. The labor illusion. An interesting Harvard research showed the power of the labor illusion — a show of effort to meet the customer's request.
In one of their experiments, two groups of participants searched on a website for airplane flights. After typing in their destination and date, group A was shown the typical loading bar known wait. Group B was shown not only the loading bar, but also a list of all the airlines being searched.
Test Userlike for free and chat with your customers on your website, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. Both groups were presented with the same results page. But while the website of group A showed the results instantly, the website of group B loaded for 30 - 60 seconds.
Still, group B gave higher service ratings! Seeing the work that went into delivering the results gives satisfaction. One side note: the labor illusion only works when the end result is good.
A similar experiment was conducted with dating sites. When the shown matches were good looking, the effect was positive. But when the matches Because justification. A now famous Harvard experiment shows the power of explanation. It tested how willingly people would allow someone to cut in line at a photocopying machine. The people in the line were asked 3 slightly varying questions. This experiment shows that the actual reason isn't so important. As long as you give some reason.
From my experience of doing live chat support , I know the temptation of diving right into solving mode upon a customer issue. But the transparency principle suggests to first explain what you'll look into, even if it makes the wait a little bit longer. For a long time, the entire customer service theory focused on delighting the customer — on exceeding expectations.
Research by CEB , however, showed that it pays off more to focus on reducing customer effort instead. While effort also depends on factors like speed and accuracy, accessibility is its biggest hurdle. You can get this data through post-service or in-app surveys. Contact channels. How many actions does a customer have to take to get an answer to her question? Live chat on the website has a low effort score.
So does messaging, support via e. Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Don't confuse this with omnichannel.
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