Satisfied customers are critical to the success of your business. With a well thought-out customer service strategy, you offer an optimal customer experience. This increases customer loyalty and positive feedback from satisfied customers spreads.
We’ll show you how to develop and implement a solid strategy with these 7 steps.
Customer service strategy:
1. Focus on the customer
2. Set concrete goals for customer service
3. Identify customer touch points
4. An efficient customer service team
5. Technological setup
6. Centralize customer data
7. Continuously track and improve performance
1. Focus on the costumer
To begin, it makes sense to think about customer service goals. How can I best promote a corporate culture that focuses on the customer and their needs? A good method for this is design thinking, for example. This involves focusing all business activities on customer satisfaction.
By defining the vision and integrating it into the processes of the company, the “red thread” is created.
2. Concrete goals for customer service
To support the company’s big vision, a set of detailed goals and measures is helpful. The main goal is customer satisfaction. However, by breaking it down into small steps, implementation becomes more tangible.
The goals set should follow the SMART principle:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely
So what does this mean for your team? It’s best to start with the goal of your vision and then work with your team to create a series of smaller, specific goals. These should be challenging but also achievable. By working together, you’ll achieve commitment and shared goals rather than rigid targets for your employees.
3. Identify customer touchpoints
Customer touchpoints are how and where customers interact with your brand, product or service. Examples of touchpoints include email, phone, chat/messenger, and social media.
To increase customer satisfaction, it’s important to know how customers engage with your business. Analyzing each touchpoint and responding with the appropriate customer service strategy can quickly create better customer experiences.
4. An efficient customer service team
Your customers’ direct contact with your company makes the biggest impression. It only takes a few moments to decide whether a bond is formed.
All employees should receive the same training to do this. Create a team that is passionate about positive interactions with customers.
5. Technological setup
It’s not enough to put together a great team. A good team also needs the right tools to do a good job. When complicated processes make it difficult to get the job done effectively, it’s frustrating and demoralizing for everyone. It has a big impact on your goals and customer satisfaction.
6. Centralize customer data
Customer data is the basis for good service. But that data is never good if it’s siloed and difficult to access. Especially if your staff has to search through different spreadsheets, dashboards or files to find the information to help a customer. This usually leads to a stressed team and angry customers.
For this reason, centralizing data is just as important as providing easy and fast access. One way to do this is to connect a softphone to your CRM. This way, user interfaces are unified and your employees have a clear operation. In combination with caller identification, your employees have all the important information on their display as soon as they receive a call.
7. Constantly track and improve performance
No matter how good a customer service strategy is, there is always room for improvement. Consistent and continuous evaluation is therefore critical to long-term success.
Collecting data is an important benefit, but only if action is also taken to optimize it. Using metrics and sharing them with all stakeholders is very important for moving forward. A company that remains transparent and dedicates resources to collecting and analyzing data can quickly gain valuable competitive advantages.
Are you ready for a new costumer service strategy?
Preparing your business for transformation can be very challenging. As experts in communication solutions with high data availability and AI-powered automation, we’re happy to help with planning and implementation.