In a customer service environment, communication whether verbal or non-verbal is a powerful tool that plays a crucial role in ensuring productive and satisfying ends for the customers. With verbal communication in a customer service environment, individuals can make their meanings understood through the choice and order of words. People employ tactics to convey their meanings in a way which shows they are self-confident and capable in their speech to help hold the attention of a listener customer. With non-verbal communication, people can make their attitudes understood through a comfortable level of eye contact, a self-assured way of standing, vocal cues, and engaging with gestures to project concern and warmth for the customers (Gabbott & Hogg, 2001). Thus, effective communication requires both verbal and non-verbal elements such as active listening skills, using clear and concise language, comfortable postures and gestures, and a positive, friendly, and calm tone as well as body language to ensure that customers feel valued while representatives speak.
Importance of Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication
In the realm of customer service, the most important aspect of using verbal and non-verbal communication is to make customers feel valued, heard, and at ease for providing high-quality customer service. It is achieved through mutual understanding between customers and the representatives of customer service while understanding what customers’ communicative preferences are in a certain situation (Lucas, 2022). These elements of communication are important in customer service as they help build trust, reinforce the message, facilitate communication, and make rapport with customers so that they can be happy and comfortable as positivity and comfort make a huge difference in customer service (Garrett & Meyers, 1996). In a nutshell, both verbal and non-verbal communication skills work in tandem in a customer service environment to deliver an understandable message.
Impacts of Unproductive Communication on Customer Service Experience
Failing to communicate effectively with customers negatively impacts the customer service experience which may lead to frustration, lack of clarity, and misunderstandings between representatives and customers. For instance, a representative may intentionally or involuntarily interrupt the customers while they speak or take too long to respond which makes them feel that they are unheard, disrespected, or ignored. Such unproductive communication may also lead to a negative perception of the organization or other representatives of the company which may lead to a big loss in the company. Dissatisfaction with the organization or the customer service staff due to unproductive communication may arise because customers expect such a service to be highly responsive and helpful where they are prioritized and valued. However, when their queries are not responded to quickly and their problems are not resolved promptly in such an environment, they feel a lack of trust in the company (Traut, 2012). Therefore, it is important for service representatives to be mindful of how they communicate verbally or through their body language in order to ensure they are effectively communicating their message to the customer.
Strategies for Improving Customer Service Experience
Communication is important for customer service experience and to achieve it, several strategies can be of utmost significance for enabling better communicative exchanges between representatives and customers. These strategies or tactics include speaking directly and frequently with customers to identify what better meets the needs and expectations of the customers, creating a clear customer experience vision, using a quality framework for customer service team building, and capturing customers’ feedback in real-time to deliver superior service (Lucas, 2022). These would help build personal as well as professional connections with customers, implement processes where vision, product, or service is communicated effectively, and understand what an organization and the team need to do to achieve customer satisfaction. Moreover, speaking with customers directly helps representatives to drill down honest feedback for the individual representatives, team efforts, and the organization which helps the organization to ensure best practices throughout. Capturing feedback using online surveys, reviews, or other tools further improves the customer service experience as it provides an opportunity to create a perfect strategy within the organization for great customer service (Frow & Payne, 2007). Hence, these basic yet powerful strategies can improve customer experience on individual as well as organizational levels to provide a great customer service experience consistently.
References
Frow, P., & Payne, A. (2007). Towards the ‘perfect’customer experience. Journal of Brand Management, 15(2), 89–101.
Gabbott, M., & Hogg, G. (2001). The role of non-verbal communication in service encounters: A conceptual framework. Journal of Marketing Management, 17(1–2), 5–26.
Garrett, D. E., & Meyers, R. A. (1996). Verbal communication between complaining consumers and company service representatives. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 30(2), 444–475.
Lucas, R. (2022). Customer service. McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed USE.
Traut, T. R. (2012). Unproductive Reactions to Change: How to Recognize and Deal with Them. Effective Executive, 15(4), 41.
Cite This Work
To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below:
