In business, it’s a well-known saying that “customer is king“. Good customer service is essential for increasing and maintaining profitability. That’s why you need a carefully selected customer service team. A strong customer service team will help you build a positive image for your company, attract and retain customers, as well as spread positive attitudes about your brand.

Customer service is a key factor in attracting customers back to you, allowing them to do more business. It also helps to build a loyal customer base that will help your company grow. Employee retention is also improved by good customer service. Customers who feel valued and treated well by their company are more likely to stay with them and follow its values.

However, providing outstanding customer service requires more than having friendly and helpful representatives. If you want to improve your customer service, you need a well-rounded strategy. To make the most of your marketing strategy and customer service strategy, it is a good idea to align them both.

Strategy: Why You Need It

What are the benefits of a comprehensive customer service strategy? There are many reasons.

Consider first the high cost to get new customers compared with the cost of keeping them. Customers will often tell their friends about poor treatment and end up doing business with companies. This can lead to disastrous results in the age of social media, viral posts, and other online tools. New customers can cost five to ten times as much to acquire as loyal customers.

With this in mind, customers should feel valued. Customers who are valued will return to your business, even if they have better offers elsewhere. Consider it this way: A referral from a loyal customer is free. It doesn’t cost anything extra. Loyal, satisfied customers will tell others how much they feel valued and appreciated and will in effect become your ambassadors. This will give you free advertising.

This is the goal of your customer service strategy: to build more loyal customers and keep those you already have.

A well-rounded customer services strategy is another great reason. It creates harmony in your company and fosters synergy. Everyone will know where they stand when a strategy has been clearly defined, explained, and understood. The roles of employees are clearly defined and a process is in place to ensure customer relations are smooth and problems are addressed promptly.

11 Steps to Create a Well-Rounded Customer Services Strategy

We’ve now established the reasons you need a clearly defined strategy to improve customer service. Now how do you put that strategy together? These are proven steps to improve your customer service.

• Evaluate your current customer service strategy,
• Consider the needs of your customers.
• Identify your customer touchpoints,
• Create a customer service vision
• With clear, measurable goals, list your key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Assess your customer service staff.
• Use the best customer service tools
• Give the right resources to the customer service team.
• Give your customer service team the power to succeed
• Create a reward, incentive, and team-building program.
• You should allow your customer service team to provide feedback regularly.

1. Evaluate your current customer service strategy

You’ll need to take a long, hard look at your current strategy. Find out what’s working well and eliminate what’s not. You may have the tools to measure customer satisfaction. If you don’t have the tools to measure customer satisfaction, it is worth taking the first step. This can be done through surveys, emails, polls on social media, or any combination thereof.

You can also measure customer satisfaction by looking at hard numbers such as average resolution time, abandonment rates, and customer effort score (CES). Customer service is based on the principle that customers will be happier if their problems can be resolved quickly and with minimal effort.

2. Take into consideration the needs of your customers

According to statistics, almost 80% of customers expect companies that understand and know their needs. Understanding your customers’ needs is key to your marketing in Miami and customer service. Surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups are all ways to learn more about the needs of your customers.

Once you have identified the needs of your customers, you can share that information with all departments within your company. This information can be used to provide quick solutions to common problems, improve your products, and reduce support tickets. Although it may take some time to determine the needs of your customers, once you do, this information will be a powerful tool in your marketing and customer support departments.

3. Identify your customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints are a way for customers to interact with your business. Customers have more options than ever to contact you. It’s crucial to provide as many channels as possible to help them identify their needs, get feedback and improve their perception of your business.

First, identify the touchpoints that you already have in place: digital and print ads, website, referrals, reviews, chatbots, customer agents, chatbots, customer agents, email surveys, social media, reward or loyalty programs, billing systems, and even email surveys. Once you have identified the touchpoints, it is possible to identify gaps and add additional touchpoints.

4. Create a vision for customer service

While it’s easy to state that customer service is your top priority, your strategy should not be limited to customer service representatives. To ensure everyone understands their role in the strategy, your strategy must flow from the top to the bottom.

This is your customer service vision. It helps employers understand your organization’s goals for customer service, and how important they are to them. A clearly defined ideal for customer service can inspire others and give them an understanding of what is expected.

5. With clear, measurable goals, list your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Now is the time to make those goals concrete and actionable. You will need to identify your key performance indicators and determine where they are below expectations. Then, you’ll need to set concrete, measurable goals for your customer support team.

Key KPIs to be measured might include:

• First response time

• The average speed of answering
• First, call resolution
• Average handling time
• Escalation rate
• Rate of inbound abandonment
• Average call transfer rate
• Customer satisfaction rate
• Net Promoter

You can transform your vision from a realm of dreams into concrete numbers and shape your customer service strategy in measurable, actionable ways.

6. Assess your customer service staff

Once you have these goals in mind it is time to assess your customer service team to see if they are up to the challenge. Your team may not be able to achieve the goals you have set. Sometimes, it is simply not possible to inspire and encourage them. If your team is not adequately resourced, you may need to identify skill gaps and hire additional staff. It may be necessary to increase your budget if you want customer service to be your top priority.

7. Use the best customer service tools

You can also upgrade the tools that you provide to your customer service team to improve your customer service strategy. You can empower your team with the right tools like those offered by Kobe Digital to increase their productivity and reduce their workload through automation.

Auto-dialer software, for example, can draw numbers from a list and call them. This does not mean cold-calling people. Auto-dialers can be used by businesses and medical offices that need to schedule appointments. The software can set up auto-prompts so customers can make appointments without having to interact with anyone. This is a huge benefit for your phone support.

Support via social media is another area that can benefit from more assistance. Many businesses are already able to improve their customer service by setting up social media accounts on different platforms. They also assign people to monitor DMs regularly to ensure that any customer service inquiries or contacts come in.

Not all customer service tools have to be customer-facing. Tools like knowledgebase software can be used internally by service representatives so they have something to refer to without having to escalate a call or ask another person for details about a product, policy, or service.

8. Give the right resources to the customer service team. Train them.

We discussed earlier how to address any skills gaps in your customer support team. Training is something that many employees and employers fear. But it doesn’t need to be difficult.

The information age has opened up new opportunities to help employees improve their customer service skills. Not only do you have the classic customer service manuals and books. But there are also training apps, webinars, QA sessions, online courses, and training sessions. Soft skills and hard skills can be taught, as well. There may also be discussions about ethics and time management.

Consider the cost of new customers, which can be 5-10 times more than the cost of keeping existing customers. It might not seem so bad to set aside money for training.

9. Give your customer service team the power to succeed

You can improve your KPIs and reach those measurable goals by giving customer service reps more power to resolve issues without escalating calls or calling management.

Additional tools such as live chat, email helpdesk, and software for collecting customer feedback can prove extremely useful. You might also give your team members the option to offer discount coupons or lower prices to customers, provided that there are certain restrictions, to retain them and keep them coming back.

10. Create a reward, incentive, and team-building plan

Incentivizing your employees is another way to increase performance. This means setting goals that your team must achieve and rewarding them for their efforts. Incentives that are memorable, beneficial to the whole team, and show appreciation for their hard work should be memorable. Team-building exercises can be offered, but they must be enjoyable for everyone and not something to fear. You can keep team members motivated and have rewards and incentives for their performance.

11. You should allow your customer service team to provide feedback regularly

We come back to feedback. Only now that feedback should be from the customer service department, not customers. Another example of how you can identify what is working and what isn’t. Give your employees the chance to discuss their challenges while trying to achieve these new goals.

It is crucial to identify where a strategy falls short and adjust accordingly. Each strategy is susceptible to improvement. Giving your team the chance to propose improvements and point out areas that might require more training or resources will not only empower them but also make them feel valued.

It’s not easy to develop a comprehensive customer service strategy. It will take time, money, and resources to get your customer service up to the next level. However, when you consider the many benefits of customer retention, such a strategy is a great way for your company to increase profits, morale, and reputation.