Is Adaptability and Resilience the Golden Ticket to Customer Success?

As a business owner or manager, you are really never sure what kind of day it’s going to be and in the customer service world, the customer is very powerful.

They sometimes call in confused and in search of answers, other times, they are angry and dissatisfied with your service offering.

Customer service is not easy yet the survival of a business largely relies on the customer and in today’s world, the customer is ready to pay more if a business provides them with a positive customer experience.

However, in today’s fast-paced and ever changing business landscape, entrepreneurs and professionals alike, are required to wear many hats and take up multiple roles in order to survive. On the other hand, customer needs and challenges keep changing as well.

In this regard, adaptability and resilience in the workplace is vital if a business is to survive. Take for instance the impact of Covid-19 pandemic; it was instantaneous and harsh. The job market as we knew it changed. Some people had to quickly learn and adjust to working from home.

A majority of businesses had to embrace remote working or hybrid working options and some had to quickly adopt e-commerce if they didn’t already have it in place.

For those still working in offices, they too had to adapt to the new working conditions and protocols such as social distancing, wearing face masks to help lessen the spread of the virus.

Adaptability and resilience are skills that every business today is trying to adopt in their day to day operations and it is now a skill that most employers are keen to see in their employees.

So what does it all mean? Let’s have a look…

Adaptability

Refers to the ability to adjust to new situations and change quickly. This is a key skill required in the ever changing field of customer service. In order to stay ahead of the competition, customer service agents need to be flexible as situations change.

Customer service representatives have to be open to new ideas, experiences and mindsets because in their day to day operations, they deal with diverse populations, different ages, cultures, languages, and lifestyles.

Resilience

Refers to the ability to bounce back from adversity or setbacks. The customer service field can be quite challenging because the majority of the time, agents are dealing with dissatisfied and sometimes, very angry customers.

It is therefore important for the customer service agents to maintain a positive attitude and persevere even when they are facing challenges. They need to remain resilient and find ways of solving issues even when things get overwhelming.

 

Why is Adaptability and Resilience Important in Customer Service?

Adaptability and resilience are key in succeeding not only in customer service but any other business in general. The customer service field brings along uncertainty and risks but having an adaptability mindset offers an organisation a competitive advantage over the competition.

For the customer service representatives, being resilient in challenging interactions with customers allows them to overcome intense work stress and helps them to steadily handle potential work burnout.

Resilience allows customer service agents to recover from a service hitch, overcome difficulties that may arise while maintaining a positive attitude. This allows them to persevere, still keep their focus and achieve their goals even when faced with challenges.

Customer needs, behavior and trend keeps changing especially now that we live and operate in a very technology savvy world. Customer service agents who are able to exercise adaptability are able to learn new skills, adapt to new circumstances and with different people from all walks of life.

Adaptability allows customer service agents to keep up with the new developments in the customer service field, embrace new ideas and efficiently work with other workmates.

In life, change is a constant and in light of this, adaptability and resilience are very important skills for a customer service agent because of the challenging and ever changing environment that they work in.

 

Ways to Boost Adaptability and Resilience as A Customer Service Agent

Adaptability and resilience are not necessarily natural skills but rather, these skills can be learnt and nurtured over time. Let us explore a few ways that customer service agents can work towards enhancing this skills:

1. Exercise Mindfulness

Being mindful increases cognitive flexibility and it enhances accuracy in judgement as well as an understanding when it comes to problem solving.

Mindfulness practices such as focussing on one task at a time allows one to be fully present in the moment which can help foster healing from stressful situations and potential burnout and in turn develop resilience.

2. Embrace Change

In life there are things that will remain constant – taxes, death and change. Change is a constant part of life and even so knowing, it still can be challenging and scary at the same time. However, to better adapt to change and become more flexible in life, it is important to welcome change.

By accepting change, one is able to grant themselves an opportunity to learn something new that they would otherwise not have learnt had the need for change not come up.

Sometimes we are forced to change because we didn’t succeed in something, however, one stands to learn a lot from failure than success. It is important to accept that sometimes mistakes may happen when we take the initiative to do something new.

Nonetheless, once you figure out things and overcome the challenging situation, you are better off because you get to learn from those mistakes.

 

3. Be Versatile in Accepting Diverse Solutions

When it comes to satisfying customers, sometimes we can get caught up in getting it right and we pour everything we have in the process. It could be identifying various features of a product or service that you believe will answer to the customer’s needs or even the customer journey.

Occasionally, no matter how much effort you have put into it, the customer may not always like some parts of the solution. It is therefore important to have some other ideas lined up so that it doesn’t end up feeling like a rejection and you can quickly adapt to the customer’s needs.

It is ideal to come up with multiple solutions for customers when brainstorming ideas on how to achieve success for a particular cause. It helps to be mentally prepared in case things do not go your way making it easy to pivot to another strategy.

 

4. Switch Off Work

Every now and then, it can get difficult to put down work; more so now that a good number of people work from home after the effects of Covid-19 pandemic. It is important for everyone to learn when to detach from work especially when it has become challenging and stressful.

Giving your brain a break is equally important as achieving a solution for a challenging task at work.

Granting yourself time to relax, get a breather and decompress may offer you a chance to come back refreshed and ready to handle those difficult situations and save yourself from a potential burnout.

 

5. Consider Challenges as Opportunities

Majority of the time, panic sets in when we are faced with an expected situation. Eventually, this reaction results in poor decision making and consequently poor results.

For instance, when customer service agents have to learn how to use a new Customer Relationship System (CRM) or a process, it can be daunting; however, it would be ideal to look at it as a challenge and get to learn something new and improve your skills.

Instead of allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed, take the opportunity and initiative to learn from the experience. Additionally, do not be shy to seek help from fellow colleagues; it just shows you are eager to better yourself and you are putting in the effort in order to fulfil your responsibilities.

 

6. Be Optimistic

Maintaining a hopeful mindset is a key component in achieving adaptability and resilience. And as much as it is easier said than done, reminding yourself that challenges and setbacks are short lived will help you push to overcome and thereby achieving resilience.

Although sometimes easier said than done, maintaining a hopeful outlook is an important part of resiliency. Try to remind yourself that setbacks are temporary and that you have the skills and abilities to overcome the challenges you face.

 

7. Set and Manage Goals

It is not possible to remember every task that you are required to attend to on the spot. It is therefore ideal to plan out your work for the month while organizing your daily task in order to avoid straining your mind.

Setting monthly objectives help in breaking down goals into small achievable tasks which will assist in clearing time from your schedule allowing you to handle any unexpected tasks that may come up.

In any type of work, and especially in customer service, problems will come up. However, you cannot wish away the issue, it is important to start working on how to resolve the problem. In doing so, you are already improving and taking control of the situation.

 

8. Create Strong Personal and Professional Relations

If you have good relations with your colleagues and bosses, you are able to openly discuss issues or concerns that may come up at work. It is important to build trusted relationships at work so that when there are challenges or things get overwhelming, you have someone to confide in.

For the sake of health and wellbeing, it is important to have some social support and to receive this, one has to also make the effort to support and care for those around you. Consequently, those people will be able to be more understanding and willing to assist when you need help.

 

9. Believe in Yourself

Being your own cheer leader and reminding yourself of your skills, strengths and achievements helps boost one’s self esteem which plays a key role in managing stress and recovering from challenging situations.

Building up one’s confidence aids in coping with stressful situations not only at work but in life as well and develops one’s resilience in tough scenarios.

 

10. Cultivate Emotional Intelligence

Business owners or managers can help their employees to be more adaptable by offering self-management classes. The training helps employees to be more aware of their emotions and those of the customers.

In doing so, customer service agents are able to adapt to different situations that come up while serving customers while maintaining their cool and still managing to provide a positive customer experience.

Managers should also exercise emotional intelligence when dealing with their employees because in case they lash out at them due to stress, there is a possibility this will trickle down to the team and hurt their morale.

 

It is important to remember that

In customer service, there can be days when even your solutions don’t work and you feel like you just can’t win. However, having adaptability and resilience can be something that makes or breaks the success of the team.

Change is inevitable and therefore having a team that has adaptability and resilience skills allows them to embrace change with an optimistic mindset and a problem-solving mentality thereby producing an ideal outcome.

Customer service managers who help their teams to hone their adaptability and resilience, create teams that are determined, better prepared for any situations and are able to rise up again even when challenges come up.

As a manager it is important to keep in mind that not everyone has the same capacity; some employees will have much higher degrees of resilience than others. Exercise patience because anyone can learn to be adaptable and resilient in difficult scenarios.