How can you empower customer service staff to take ownership of customer issues?

Empowering customer service staff starts with clear guidelines and training. Provide them with the autonomy to make decisions within defined boundaries. Encourage active listening and empathy, ensuring they understand the customer's perspective. Recognize and reward initiative and problem-solving skills. Foster a culture where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities rather than failures. Regular feedback and support from management reinforce their ownership of customer issues, promoting confidence and accountability in resolving them effectively.

Good Customer service demands empathy and compassion. Two traits that most people find incredibly difficult to master. The fastest way is to get them to be customers. Customers come with baggage so the more you practice with good mentoring you'll get quick results. No amount of knowledge, vision etc will change most peoples behaviour.

We empower our teams to use our core values as key questions to ask themselves as it relates to the challenge the lient may be having. They function as a decision making matrix and helps to provide clarity of the intentions of our leadership team. We also define the tools and resources they have at their descretion to address challenges to make the customer happy. We would rather they over deliver and let us calibrate their choices with training than to under deliver. Finally we see challenging situations as opportunities to turn a customer into a raving fan or into a fervent detractor. Raving fans is the intention.

What I strongly believe in is when you empower your people you must trust them and support them with the decisions that they make. When they know you believe in them and that they can take calculated risks, based on how you have trained them, they will excel and take your service levels to new heights. Even when it may go wrong, this is a great time to say thank you for making that decision, but the next time it comes up consider this way as your other option. Again even when a mistake happens, you are still telling them you trust them and they are still empowered to make the call.

Give staff the ability to make valuable changes without requiring prior authorization. EXAMPLE: Customer calls to complain about a recent drop in their internet service. The customer requests to cancel service. In this example, the staff's goal is to earn back the customer's patronage. Empowered staff can deescalate this situation by offering promotions or courtesy credits. RETENTION AGENTS: An admission of fault and an apology (by way of promotions) is used often for customer retention. REMINDER: delegated authority works best if staff understand the reason(s) why they're making changes. And how much change they're allowed to make.

Your customer service team will watch every move you make and take their cues from your actions, make sure your actions match your words. Be precise and consistent with your instructions, give them the tools to be successful and avoid embarrassing anyone when they make a mistake or decision different than your hindsight perspective, people are smart they will learn from their mistakes. Respond immediately to unacceptable behavior in a calm and professional manner taking appropriate action