4 customer service techniques that might help you

Are you a customer service professional? Do you work in this area in your company? Do you have a small or large business? Do you usually deal with customers?

When it comes to your business, at some point in your life you will have to deal with clients. And it is also very likely that you will have your own way of dealing with them, based on your personality or your experience. We know that you might already know this, but you can always learn new things. You should know that, there are some customer service techniques that can improve your ways of dealing with them. In this post we will talk about some interesting customer service techniques for you.

1. Feel, Felt, Found Technique (FFF)

This is a method, which is aimed especially at generating empathy between the agent and the client. There are three steps:

• Feel refers to the emotional connection that must be established with the client’s problem. You have to achieve this and let him/her know that you understand his/her situation.
• Felt is about letting the client know that you know how he/she feels, because you have also felt in a similar way in the past.
• Found is about letting the client know how you’ve faced this type of problem in the past and then you found a successful solution.

2. ELI5 technique

This stands for “Explain it like I’m five years old”. It consists of explaining a very structured message and using a very simple language with the client, in order to make it easier for him/her to understand the message.

This is a technique, which is widely used in the area of technical support, especially when it comes to assistance that involves asking the client to execute a series of specific steps. Due to the technical knowledge of the person who offers support in this customer service, it will be very useful to use clear and simple steps and to use non-technical words with the clients.

But you need to keep in mind that this simplicity must be limited when explaining specific technical instructions. The technique is not about treating the client as if he really were 5 years old…

3. Active listening technique

This one is about letting the client know that we are paying attention to the problem. This type of actions will have a double effect: on the one hand they will allow us to summarize the problem and clarify the main points, and on the other hand they will help us improve the client’s mood, since they will notice that their problem is important to us.

These types of techniques include all kinds of small practices in order to let the client know that we will take care of their problems.

One of them, perhaps the most basic one, is to agree repeatedly while the client talks about his/her problem, which will let him/her know that we are listening to them (this is a particularly important practice when it comes to telephone customer service).

Another one is to repeat the phrases of the client. This will be very useful when it comes to emphasizing some interesting aspects, and it will also show that we are paying attention.

Another great one is to make a brief summary of the situation. With this practice we will not only show that we have paid attention to the whole message, but we will confirm with the client that we have correctly understood that, and it will help us clarify any misunderstanding.

By the way, if you are interested in learning more about active listening when it comes to customer service, we already published a post about this. You can find it here.

4. Counselling techniques through questions

When a client gets in touch with you, the client might have a hard time explaining the problem or query.

You need to be quite specific about the kind of questions that should be asked, this will be a very effective way to achieve small victories, such as clarifying the situation, streamlining the workflow, and even creating a better feeling for the client.

For example, if the client cannot explain his/her problem, it can be very useful to guide him/her through questions aimed at explaining essential points, such as “when has the product stopped working?” Or “When do you usually hear those weird noises in your product “?

But, you need to know that due to our experience, from the very start of the conversation with the client we can already predict the cause of the problem. Thus, asking questions in order to know more about the problem can be quite effective in order to solve the problem faster. If, for example, we think that the product does not have any problem, but the user does not know how to use it, we can ask them questions about how they have used the product in order to find out if they have missed an essential step, which might be the origin of the problem.

These are some customer service techniques, but I’m sure that you, dear reader, know some more customer service techniques. Do you want to share them with the readers of this blog? You can do that by leaving a message in the comment section, which is placed at the end of this article. But you need to bear in mind that, before writing, you can spend a few minutes in order to learn more about a technological tool that can help you improve the customer service of your company or organization. We are talking about Pandora ITSM.

Pandora ITSM is a program that has, among other features, an incident management system (help desk software) based on tickets (ticketing), which is capable of helping you with customer service.

Do you want to know what Pandora ITSM can do for you? You can find out all about it by clicking here:
https://pandorafms.com/en/itsm/help-desk-software/

Or you can send us any question you might have about Pandora ITSM. You can easily do that by using the contact form that can be found at the following address: https://pandorafms.com/en/contact/

The Pandora ITSM team will be happy to help you!