One of the oldest rules in the book of good customer relations says that by smiling you are at least part way to delivering effective service. Creating a positive atmosphere, especially when dealing with a difficult situation can help to defuse tension and allow you to effectively solve the issue at hand. Sounds sensible, but is it actually true?

Good systems save lives 

The car dealer and customer service guru Carl Sewell wrote in his million selling business bible Customers for Life, ‘Saying please and thank you doesn’t ensure you’ll do the job right the first time.’ He proposed instead a mantra of ‘Systems, Not Smiles’, arguing that if you sign up to a skydiving school and jump with a parachute that doesn’t open, all the smiles in the world aren’t going to get you back inside one of that company’s planes. Better to have systems in place to ensure your parachutes are all in working order before people jump out of the plane. An extreme example certainly, but it’s best practice for any business to have appropriate systems and processes in place to meet their customers needs and avoid disaster of any scale.

Invest in cost-effective systems 

While it’s true that being friendly is free, that’s no reason to offer cut price customer service. The best way to keep costs down and create happy, returning clients is by investing in robust, effective systems that ensure clients’ needs are met promptly and effectively while being easy to for staff to use.

All businesses should undertake regular customer service audits. They should assess how easy it is for clients to get in touch, how quickly customer queries are dealt with, and how satisfied customers are. Identify the key procedures that every member of staff needs to follow during any interaction and ensure staff feel confident using the systems. Train staff to prioritise what’s really important to customers and not waste time attempting to address less urgent issues.

Make your customers smile

Not every situation can, or should be dealt with in the same fashion. The best customer service representatives are those with genuine empathy with their clients. If a customer has a particularly serious complaint, or is especially upset, a fixed grin and an upbeat tone will only exacerbate the situation.

Getting to know your clients better and understanding what they want from you is the single most effective action a business can take in creating great customer service. Encourage them to tell you how you are doing, perhaps through a Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) and you will be able to begin to address problem areas head on.

What you should really be aiming for aren’t customer service representatives with fixed, fake smiles, but skilled, empathetic members of staff who listen and react appropriately to their clients. Robust systems make this much easier to achieve. Ultimately, we want to be making the customer smile. That way everybody’s happy.