How can you become customer-focused when solving problems?

Shift to customer-focused problem-solving by empathizing, actively listening, and tailoring solutions. Communicate transparently, respond promptly, and take ownership of resolutions. Follow up and encourage feedback to continually improve. This approach enhances customer satisfaction and builds strong relationships.

The first thing is to have good knowledge of your customer stakeholders and a perfect understanding of their environment (internal strategy and personal goals+market insight). This will help you in managing their perceptions and expectations, through appropriate communication strategy, during customer support request handling. This will also help building a strong realtionship with the customer, which is a must for a fruitful collaboration.

Customer support is all about understanding customer needs and how well our response can impact the current or future business with them. Some of the key factors affecting their experience with customer support staff is in how well we are able to listen, understand and identify what do they actually need and assist them in the best way possible. Politeness and being able to put oneself in customer's shoes helps in differentiating their experience to the competition.

Know Your Customers: Understand their needs, preferences, and pain points through research and feedback. Empathize: Put yourself in their shoes to see problems from their viewpoint. Define Customer-Centric Problems: Frame issues in terms of how they impact customers. Feedback Loop: Continuously engage customers for feedback and actively listen. Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Involve various departments in problem-solving. Set Customer-Centric Goals: Align organizational goals with customer needs. Continuous Improvement: Review and refine processes based on feedback. Employee Training: Ensure employees understand and support a customer-focused approach. Celebrate Success Stories: Share positive impacts of customer-focused efforts.

Many times, we fail at being customer focused when we hide our faces and progression from our customers. I dream of a day when all tech/customer support workers were passionate about communicating root causes in an easy-to-understand way along with a clear time frame of resolutions. Tech is very high demanding in today's world, what once was a device to make a 30 minute phone call now has become an all day gaming console. Yes, tech is complicated, but when you CARE about your end user, you do the work of breaking down progress and statuses of problems.

Understanding a problem from the customer's viewpoint is like piecing together a puzzle. By asking the right questions - the who, what, when, where, why, and how - we can capture the complete picture. Sometimes, it's akin to peeling an onion layer by layer using the 5 Whys technique, delving deeper until the heart of the issue is revealed. This genuine quest for clarity allows us to sidestep assumptions and truly align with our customers' expectations. Only when we truly grasp the essence of their concern can we genuinely prioritize and craft meaningful solutions. It's not just about fixing things, but about connecting with the genuine needs and emotions behind every challenge

I agree that we must use discovery techniques to understand the problem. The use of the 5W1H is excellent; I am unsure if using the Five Whys is the best approach for a customer. A must when doing RCA, but I believe Five Whys is not the ideal CX.

Know to handle the customer based on every situation is great. But there will be a situation that there are more than 3 - 4 customers come, especially for someone who's handling the LIVE CHAT. We must know how to act and react quickly and define the issue while holding another customer that is waiting for our reply. Try to calm, relax, and enjoy every process in the communication. It's not gonna be so easy, it will be challenging, but then, time & experiences will help you in solving those cases in the future.

Every person has a different way of explaining a problem, The trick lies in asking the questions and listening to however the customer explains and extracting all the relevant information that is crucial in defining the problem

Collaborate with other depts and other people who solve problems differently. Also, if you're going to provide your customers with choices, make sure they're clearly defined and only offer 2-3 tops of you'll confuse and frustrate them.

Finding solutions is much like embarking on a creative journey with the customer's needs as our compass. With tools like brainstorming and mind mapping, we let our imaginations flow, exploring various avenues to address the issue. The SCAMPER method further enriches this process, allowing us to reshape, remix, and reimagine solutions. In this dance of creativity, it's not just about solving the problem, but weaving a tapestry of value, choices, and adaptability that resonates with our customers. It's through this imaginative exploration that we not only answer their immediate concerns but also cultivate deeper connections and trust.

Asking to others, forwarding issue to another departement that has the speciality for different issue is good. What is better to do is trying to understand every product that is assigned and do some research outside the product, to increase your knowledge and might give more ideas to answer / react with every incoming issues.

Be sure to listen and understand the issue carefully. One thing that should be remember is every customer might come with the same issues one or another, but the way we communicate with them should be different from each other, because the situation will be completely different based on every customer mood / characters.

Implementing solutions to customer issues should be done meticulously. You might have a great solution, but if not implemented rightly, or in the right order, it could result in an unsatisfactory situation. There are different methods to implement, and it should be done with customer expectations in mind.

Follow up is the ultimate tool in the customer service and support industry, never underestimate the importance of one more email inquiring if they are happy with the solution provided or if they need more help. As this is how you build trust and rapport with the customers.

Of course follow up is the ultimate step for maintaining good customer service. If follow up is done after the issue of the customer is resolved then customer feels that his issue was taken with priority. We must show that each and every issue is taken seriously then only we can maintain good customer service. Most of the complaining customers are detractor if their issues are taken seriously and resolve in time we can make them promoter. For this follow up call or email plays great role.

To truly be customer-centric in problem-solving, the emphasis should be on post-solution engagement. For instance, after resolving a software glitch, reaching out to users to ensure the fix improved their experience demonstrates genuine concern. Such follow-ups create open communication channels, allowing customers to voice any residual issues or provide feedback. It reflects a company's commitment to the user's well-being and progress rather than just its business goals.

Following up also creates an opportunity to find out what your customer experience was, ask for feedback on what can we improve on & what they loved most. This will assist on strengths and improvement from a customer’s perspective- valuable feedback

There are times we don't really have a solution on the spot to provide. I found out though that building a connection with customers can make all the difference betwen getting that negative feedback, to receiving a great one. It all comes down to understanding our users. When they know we do, and we see things from their perspective, this makes us more than credible in their eyes. They'd be more inclined to listen to our suggestions and recommendations, having built that trust with them.

Mostly customer’s perspective is to address their issue and need fast resolution. We need to listen to their concern and echo to what they say and providing assurance that their concern or issue will be fixed. If we convey at what time it would be resolved, will create a great impact. When I worked I have witnessed it. To go an extra mile we need to update the customer before the expected time and asking them to check if it got resolved. 10/10