A customer-centric company would always focus on providing a positive customer experience after every transaction to ensure healthy business growth. In other words, good customer service would help the company progress in the most efficient way.

This would mean that the customer service your business is providing would ensure timely, focused and upbeat service to your customers which would encourage them to stay interested in your business.

On the other hand, poor response from your company’s customer service would depict a very irresponsible image of your company. This would let your business goals down by a huge margin.

Let’s see why it is important to do these.

Building A Customer-Centric Culture

Hiring appropriate people for customer service culture is very important. They would already know how to interact with different kinds of people and make them comfortable with your company’s policies and goals. Skeptical employees would only make it difficult to keep an acceptable image of the company by dealing with people amicably.

Treating customers with utmost care would encourage them to keep their interests in your company alive. An ill-treated customer would not care how great your company’s product or service is but would only look on to the treatment he got from your company’s service culture.

Hire for Personality and Goals, Not Skills

The most important aspect of improving your company’s customer service culture is to hire people for their overall personality and not solely for their skills. Teaching them values is harder than teaching them skills.

Communication skills need to be taught to those who don’t have very good interactive skills. Training for communication skills also requires patience, politeness and positive vibes.

If your personality is kind of intimidating, customers would not want to proceed to talk with you. It would leave a negative impact on all your customer-related services.

There’s a quote by Peter Schultz stating, “hire character, train skill.” This quote focuses primarily on an applicant’s personality and how his behavior would reflect on the company’s values.

Have your Agents Practice Active Listening Skills

The agents or employees in your company would need to work on their active listening skills if they wish to provide the best customer service culture. The components required for active listening are:

• Pay attention to what the customer is saying.
• Show that you’re listening to them.
• Provide instant feedback.
• Defer judgment.
• Respond appropriately to their queries.

Treat Your Agents Well

When you have set the right people in place, now comes the time to treat them well.

Richard Branson once famously said, “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your business”

The concept of reciprocity principle in social psychology states that you are most likely to treat those people well who have given you good treatment. To progress with a healthy and positive customer service culture, you need to give proper attention to your agents. If you treat them with care and consideration, they would get motivated to reciprocate by giving your company their best performance.

You also need to give them free breakfast, gym membership, good health insurance and paid sick leaves. This would motivate them to treat your customers well.

Free Breakfast for Your Employees

Providing free breakfast to employees would mean increased productivity. This would be very healthy for your company’s work environment. This would raise your employee’s blood sugar levels to get them in a better position to work.

As breakfast is the most important meal of the day, some people tend to skip it due to time shortages. It would make them irritable and cranky which would in return harm the environment of your workplace. Many studies suggest that having breakfast would enhance your capabilities, especially when interacting with customers. Eating a good breakfast would just help kick-start the day with full energy and zest.

Giving breakfast to employees would mean a number of things with positive results:

Show That You Care

The employees would feel special when treated with the utmost care from the company. They would put in more effort and their performance index would increase. This encouragement would help them interact with your customers in a very friendly and positive way.

Mutual Workplace Activities

You can also engage your employees in team activities like sports, movies and dinners. This would help them connect with you and this would motivate them to return to work with a more energetic and enthusiastic attitude.

Provide Gym Memberships

As giving healthy breakfasts would make your employees work in a stress-free mode, providing them with gym memberships would help them extract all their stress out of their system. Exercising helps to keep the mind and body at peace, it would help your employees come to work with a positive attitude. It would ease their depression and their mood would be enhanced at work.

A person physically or mentally unfit would not be able to deliver his best. It could impact the overall progress of your company’s goals. You can choose an office with a gym which would be convenient for your employees to work out during their breaks.

Breakfast and gym memberships would not come in cheap but the impact it would have on your employees would help make your business grow quickly. The good performance of your agents would keep your customers happy, which consequently means your business is growing. It would still be cheaper if you look at the larger picture.

Final Words

Developing a customer-centric environment in your company is not impossible. All you have to do is hire the right people and offer them incentives whenever and wherever possible. If your employees are treated well, they will in turn treat the customers well. On the other hand, if there is discrimination, favoritism, and other negative factors that hamper an individual’s personal growth, it will reflect on your customer satisfaction and retention eventually.