Of course, every company wants its customers to experience communication interactions with a sense of satisfaction. After all, the benefits of satisfied customers go far beyond the moment and can help drive more growth. Loyal customers are more likely to return and often pass on recommendations to friends and family.
We want to help you develop and implement a solid strategy for satisfied customers, and not just with our technological solutions. We have defined 7 steps that will significantly help you develop a good customer service strategy.
1. Focus on the customer
This starts with thinking about your customer service mission. What is the best way to foster a culture that puts the customer and their needs at the center? A good methodology in this can be found in design thinking. This is where you ensure that all business activities are focused on satisfying the customer.
By defining this vision and embedding it into your company’s operations, customer satisfaction becomes the “common thread” that connects departments as much as common goals.
2. Specific goals for customer service
Goal setting is a series of more detailed actions that support your company’s big picture vision. While the main goal is customer satisfaction, this is achieved by breaking it down into smaller, more tangible goals.
The goals you set should be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant and within a specific
Timeframe
What does this look like for your team? It’s best to start with a vision of what you want to achieve by improving customer service. With your team, you then work out a series of smaller, specific goals that are challenging but achievable. This quickly ensures great commitment and shared goals rather than targets.
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 which touchpoints customers use to engage with your company. Analyzing each touchpoint and responding with the appropriate customer service strategy can quickly create better customer experiences.
4. An effective customer service team
Your customers’ direct contact with your company makes the biggest impression. Whether it’s positive or negative, it takes only a few moments for a bond to be formed.
Ideally, every employee should receive the same training. When your employees feel like they’re part of a passionate team dedicated to creating positive customer interactions, it goes a long way toward maintaining high morale – and that will reflect in everything they do.
5. Technology Setup
It’s not enough to assemble a great team. A good team also needs the right tools to do a good job. When complicated processes make it difficult for your team to do their jobs 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 foundation of delivering great customer service, but that data is never good if it’s siloed and difficult to access. Especially if your team has to search through different spreadsheets, dashboards, or files to find the information to help a customer. This usually leads to a stressed customer service team and angry customers.
For this reason, centralizing data is just as important as providing easy and fast access. One way to do this, for example, is to connect a softphone to your CRM to unify interfaces and provide your employees with a clear user experience. In combination with caller identification, your employees will have all important information on their display as soon as they receive a call.
7. Track and improve performance
No matter how good a strategy is, there is always room for improvement. Consistent and continuous evaluation is therefore crucial for 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 advantage.
Are you ready for a new 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. If you have more questions about our tips or would like to talk about a specific project
