Expert Tips: How to Improve Customer Service in Your Firm

When you manage a professional firm, everything connected to your business is a reflection of the brand’s reputation. This fact includes the behaviors and actions of your customer service representatives. However, it can be challenging to find staff who demonstrate professionalism and decorum through every client interaction.

Firms hire employees who become responsible for scheduling appointments, fielding questions, guiding clients, and resolving concerns and complaints. Your staff must be able to handle each need as it arises and produce a solution quickly.

How well this problem/solution exchange occurs directly impacts your business’s relationship with each client and extends to the firm’s reputation. Because of the importance of this facet of management, it’s wise to take proactive steps to improve customer service at every level. These expert tips can help ensure your staff is knowledgeable and professional, and your clients are satisfied, ultimately leading to a successful firm reputation.

1. Take Time to Train

What does your onboarding system look like? In many busy firms, it may be a day or two of having the new employee “follow” someone else, watch videos, and sign the necessary paperwork to get started. From there, it becomes a “sink or swim” job, as the rest of the team gets back to their daily tasks, and the new person is left to figure out their role and responsibilities.

The problem with this system is that individuals who “swim” and manage to find their feet quickly often feel unappreciated for their skills, while those who “sink” take the firm’s reputation down with them.

Taking the time to have a leader train your beginning workers ensures they learn the ropes correctly and gives you a better idea of what they’re capable of. You see early whether this person will be a good fit for your business or not. If they have hidden skills you didn’t recognize at first, you’ll know what they’re capable of and how to grow them into a more fulfilling position within the team.

2. Request and Value Client Feedback

Client feedback is an integral part of growing and keeping your business’s positive reputation. If you’re given a poor review or customer complaint, it’s vital to handle it and not sweep it under the rug. Research shows that companies that respond to and attempt to resolve complaints receive more loyalty, even from the same consumers who voiced the issue. As a society, we recognize that everyone makes mistakes, so how you handle the issue becomes more important than the original problem.

Requesting and paying attention to client feedback can aid your firm in improving customer satisfaction, enhancing a positive image of your brand, and minimizing negative word-of-mouth reviews while simultaneously increasing positive referrals.

The key to this feedback solution is to train your staff to respond quickly to concerns, take each complaint seriously, and offer solutions with empathy. Each problem should be investigated to determine the root of the issue so that it can lead to teamwide growth.

3. Invest in Resource Planning Software

Here’s the thing about the tasks that must be done throughout the day in your firm: You’ll either pay your employees to do them, or you’ll pay for software that can automate many of these repetitive jobs, and let your team focus on more valuable work.

With the right resource planning software, you can create customized templates to reduce time spent on developing contracts, invoices, and other essential paperwork. Depending on the legalities of the paperwork, clients can sign these forms from anywhere in the world within seconds, reducing the gap between an approved contract and starting the work.

The software can also provide actionable insights on factors like team workload, availability, productivity, client work history, invoices outstanding, and many other crucial data pieces. Using these reports to drive your future decisions can help you catch problems before they have time to grow and boost your customer service satisfaction, as well as your firm’s profit margin.

Conclusion

Your firm’s success depends on more than your ability to offer top results — it also requires you to have professional customer service representatives. Train each person well before you release them into the world as someone who speaks for your business. Request and respond to client feedback in a timely, solution-based manner, and read and follow the data provided in your resource planning software. These three simple tips will boost your customer service level, increasing your brand’s reputation and client loyalty.