Customer Service Tips Blog

No matter how many people in your business, 1 or 1000, each person needs to feel their efforts matter, that they make a difference within the organization.

Empowerment – This term is a catch-all for many different concepts of employee power and responsibility.  It means employees are given the power to do their jobs and do them well.

Empowerment can mean giving some authority to your customer service team, encouraging feedback from the team members, or simply showing trust in your employees.

There are a great number of disadvantages and costs that result from failing to empower your customer service team as well as the rest of your company’s team members.  Empowering them should be considered a vital part of improving customer service.  It allows each team member to handle a greater number of situations with a larger degree of comfort and skill.

This avoids the common experience customers have of being passed from employee to supervisor, and from supervisor to manager other departments when making a complaint.  This is extremely frustrating to customers – as well as team members – who must repeat the problem in its entirety to each new participant.  It is one of the surest ways to frustrate your customers and customer service staff.

If the customer service team members are empowered with authority to perform their jobs properly, then the company will not only save a great deal of employee time, but will also increase customer loyalty. 

Robert Moment is an innovative customer service consultant, business coach and author of Invisible Profits: The Power of Exceptional Customer Service.  Robert specializes in teaching customer service training that create “wow” experiences and generate profitable results.  Visit Customer Service Training Skills and Sign-up for the FREE 5 Day e-course “Creating ‘Wow’ Customer Service Experiences.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.