Read Time: 4 Minutes ?

---

Today’s customer service and support isn’t just about having a friendly voice over the phone or a smiling face behind a desk. To us, excellent customer support means giving the customer the confidence that we’ve got your back!

And at ProWorkflow we believe that excellent customer support extends beyond the basics, we execute the best practices and have the best customer support behind our brand. Customer service is integral to ProWorkflow’s operations, and if you or your organisation wanted to follow suit, here are some of the ideals we believe inspire great client interactions.

Empathy is everything

Customers will come in all kinds, whether some are full of questions, chatty or just blunt and straightforward, they are all humans at the end of the day probably with some similar problem with your business, and all they’re after is some empathy to their problem.

Most the time lousy customer support isn’t the initial problem itself but more with the delivery and when we are in a rush to help them, it’s easy to forget that our customers want to be heard and acknowledged that their problem matters!

Sometimes the support team can’t always resolve the problem immediately, but they can still convey understanding. More often than not this is fine, because the customer just wants someone that “gets it.” So slow it down, muster all the empathy you can and watch your customers frown turn upside down.

Don’t just be useful when you’re asked

A customer support person – the person you take all your problems to and then they magically solve it. Often considered like a firefighter who’s there to put out the fire in emergencies.

Excellent customer support happens when you extend beyond what you’ve just asked for, it is about thinking one step ahead of your customers and trying to minimise the number of questions the customer will have for you afterward.

If you’ve identified and targeted everything the customer wanted to hear before they had to even mention it, anyone listening will assume the customer was sold before your conversation; but you’ll know the truth!

Have thick skin

As well as support queries, our customer support team have to deal with negative customer complaints and feedback. “The customer is always right” is probably a phrase you’ve heard countless times during any customer service training you’ve taken part in. But don’t take this literally, this saying is just a phrase to remind you to swallow your pride, accept the blame and take on any negative feedback.

The real game is all about de-escalation, a tactic that’s popular in more than just customer service. You have to ask yourself what is more important: to argue with someone that doesn’t care, or to turn a negative client experience into a positive one.

A more positive spin on the famous phrase that we like to use is “make the customer feel like a winner.” It’s not important that they were rude, and it’s not important you have an argument with them. If you can turn one bad interaction into a positive one, isn’t that more than you would have had otherwise?

Self-service is just as important

As much as customers want to be helped, they want to help themselves as well. Some customers want to be hands-on and solve their issues right then and there. Unless you have a 24/7 support team, then chances are you’re going to have to have people try to contact you while you’re not available to field incoming communications.

This means having a knowledge base, a blog, articles, tips and anything that the customer can get their hands on at any given time. When you didn’t even have to speak to someone to resolve their problem, it can only be called a win.