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The Emotional Foundation of Customer Service

Guest post by: Meridith Elliott Powell

Article Overview: To serve your customers you need to first emotionally connect. Yes, you need process and consistency to create long term value, sustainability and credibility, but first you need to ensure that both you and your team understand the basics of emotional connection.

The Emotional Foundation of Customer Service

To script or not to script customer service people that is the question! I get asked this question so often that I had to devote this weeks blog to the subject. This is a big debate in companies. Many leaders feel that if you want consistency you have to script your customer service people, and others feel employees need more autonomy and more flexibility with customers.

The answer is they are both right - sort of! Consistency is key if you want to create some foundation of trust and value with customers. They attach value to knowing they will always be treated with the same positive, upbeat service no matter time of day or employee waiting on them. However, employees reading from a script do lose that personal touch, flexibility to respond to individual needs, and the ability to put their personality into their work. Customers recognize it, feel it, and respond negatively to it.

So what do you do? Whether you choose to use a script in your business or not, you need to ensure your build an emotional foundation for your employees. An emotional foundation consists of the following:

Make sure your employees understand:

1. The vision of your company - where you are headed and why

2. Their role in the vision - what is their purpose and why does it matter

3. The customers basic need - we all have the same basic need when it comes to customer service: to be heard, acknowledged, remembered and respected.

When employees understand these three basic things, they emotionally connect to your organization and what you are trying to accomplish. That translates into emotional connection with your customers. At the end of the day customer service, sales, and even growth of our business are all rooted in emotion. If we do not first make that emotional connection, the question of whether to script or not to script is an irrelevant.

Emotional connection turns the process of service into an exercise of building relationship and adding value. So, to script or not to script? Any answer you choose is right if and only if, you first create the emotional connection.

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Article Tags: consistency, credibility, customer service, emotional connection, emotional foundation, sustainability



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