Crucial to adapt to the company's DNA
Customer service on behalf of others requires an understanding of the company whose customers you are interacting with on behalf of the company. And you need to be able to switch effortlessly between company cultures and different ways of meeting customers.
By Johanne Castillo, COO Connexio
Professional customer service is supported by a range of tools, technologies and systems that help professionalize and streamline the task. When a company chooses to outsource a larger or smaller part of its customer service activities, customers can usually be served better and more efficiently. For example, by always having the capacity to handle inquiries during peak times and at odd hours.
However, a crucial element of customer service is still the ability to understand what kind of company you are representing and which customers you are interacting with. For example, if the task is for a certain type of interest organization or NGO, it can be a good thing in a customer service situation to have opinions and show engagement in the conversation, while for other customers, an objective, apolitical conversation where the employee does not bring themselves into play in the same way is more appropriate.
And if you represent a company such as Duka, which primarily helps older target groups with IT, telephony, computers, etc. it is important to take your time, while a musician who calls Danguitar for advice on choosing speakers for his next concert may well be met with a more technical approach.
Being able to act professionally on behalf of others and switch effortlessly between different communication strategies requires thorough training, which is why it's important to prioritize training employees for customer service.
At Connexio, the way this is done is very practical, says Head of Customer Success at Connexio, Kathrine Lykkeborg.
"Our first priority is to build skills in dialog techniques and cultural understanding. We always start by assigning a new employee to a single major customer, and the first step is to sit in on a listening session with a more experienced employee. When the employee is ready to have customer contact themselves, we first work with telephone inquiries." says Kathrine Lykkeborg.
Sales outreach calls, interviews or late delivery inquiries are great training for new customer service agents, as these types of calls are less culturally sensitive and have a framework for the conversation that the agent is working from.
The factual part of the dialog with the customer doesn't require much training, as this part is taken care of by knowledge databases that systematically learn from what customers ask.
"Once an employee is familiar with the corporate culture of the first major customer and has the necessary experience with telephone inquiries, more activities can be built on, which also depends on the skills the employee possesses. If an employee speaks certain foreign languages, they will be able to work on behalf of a certain type of customer," says Kathrine Lykkeborg.
In order to effectively adapt to a company's DNA and act like the company, it's important to collaborate openly on the task at hand. Online supermarket Osuma is an example of a company that has successfully outsourced its customer service to Connexio, but CEO of Osuma, Carsten Pahlke, understands that this can be a daunting task for some companies.
"It's a real concern whether an external customer service agency can handle the contact with your customers as well as your own employees. When you outsource customer service, you lose some of the direct contact with the customer, but in our experience, this is clearly outweighed by the flexibility and resources it frees up in the organization. Resources that, in our case, could be used to focus more on the overall customer experience," says Carsten Pahlke.
His recipe for a successful customer service outsourcing process consists of three elements. The first is a mutually transparent collaboration, the second is a thorough initial analysis of the customer service task, and the third is a willingness to let go of the reins.
