Ensuring your customer service team is systematically helpful, knowledgeable and able to deal with irate customers is a critical component of successful business, even if one of the trickier ones. Here are a few tips to help you provide better customer service.

Monitor & improve: Remember getting an English paper back with red marks all over it? More than likely you noticed some of your mistakes and didn't make them again. If you monitor your staff and provide them with pertinent tips for improvement, they will improve. Top tip? To monitor them in an unobtrusive way, get call recording so that you can play back their calls.

Think like a customer: Think of all the things that could really upset you with your product or service. List them and put the best response / possible solution next to each one. Review this with your customer service team until they are confident with the answers. Top tip? As a rule of thumb, the quicker the agent, the better the customer service. Monitor the customer service team call statistics to figure out who is slow.

Be available: If the customer can’t get through to you, you have failed already. Make sure you have a call queuing system in place that lets the customer know where they are in the queue if someone is unable to take their call immediately. Top tip? Play a recording while they wait that gives them helpful information – not fuzzy, terrible music.

Practise the path of least resistance: The customer is always right. If they are angry, don’t get defensive or angry too, just provide facts and information, and sympathise. Sympathy and an apology can go a long way. Top tip? When something goes wrong, ensure that this is logged in your CRM system (even if a proper ‘case’ hasn't been filled out). Knowing who has had a bad experience is invaluable next time they call. Get CRM-phone integration to make this easy.

Provide tools: Make good customer service as easy as possible for your team. Do they have to press 9 different numbers to transfer call to another department and then worry if it has actually gone through? Are they able to see which of their colleagues is on the phone? A hosted VoIP phone system makes this easy. Top Tip? Get a hosted VoIP phone system.