Delivering Effective Customer Service – Think Beyond Customer Support Team

According to Forrester Research, 77% people say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service. The percentage is overwhelming to make organizations rethink their customer support efforts.

What constitutes superior customer service?

• Reliability
  Customers expect organizations to be honest while promoting their products.
• Responsiveness
  Adopt a proactive approach to resolve customers’ issues.
• Courtesy
  Be polite with your customers and maintain a certain courtesy level.
• Credibility
  Match your product performance with your advertising claims.
• Consistency
  Establish long-term relationships with customers through a consistent behavior pattern.
• Collaboration
  Provide a streamlined customer service by collaborating with different teams.

“Effective customer service requires collaborative efforts from all departments of an organization.Click To TweetTo provide effective customer service, an organization can not – and must not – rely on only one team. Read on to learn how different teams can contribute collectively to deliver quality customer service.

How can multiple teams contribute to providing a winning customer service experience?

C-Level Executives
Simon Sinek in his book ‘Leaders Eat Last’ writes – Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.

Therefore, it is vital on CEOs’ and other top-level executives’ part to facilitate a culture of collaboration and motivate their employees to build great products and deliver quality customer service.

The executives can also reach out to customers via digital media platforms such as social media, emails and more. Receiving personalized messages from a CEO makes customers feel privileged and increases their trust in the organization.

Early this year, United Airlines drew criticism from its loyal customers for misbehaving with a customer. Taking control of the situation, CEO Oscar Munoz himself reached out to customers, apologized for the security staffs’ misbehavior, and announced changes to improve customer service. His personalized approach helped to maintain the customers’ trust in the airline services.

Top executives can also leverage an account health monitoring systems (AHMS) to ensure an effective customer support. AHMS enables them to monitor the overall health of customers’ accounts and take preventive measures to improve the quality of customer service without looking at each issue separately.

Read this case study to learn how AHMS improved support efficiency and customer satisfaction for a leading SaaS platform provider.

Product Managers
Customer service studies indicate that 80% of the cases/tickets that support teams receive are related to 20% common issues.

Here product managers can play an important role by fixing these issues and providing support to the major fraction of customers. Be it revamping or upgrading a product, they need to be proactive in providing such support measures.

Apart from this, consulting customer support team on a regular basis can provide insights into the status of different processes. This will further give real-time updates on which products need more attention to deliver an effective service.

Customer Support Team
The prime role of customer support team is to attend calls and respond to emails. It is essential to equip them with the information they need to resolve customer issues.

Having federated search integrated into the support cloud helps improve support efficiency and reduces case resolution time. It mitigates the need for the support engineers to search multiple platforms to resolve a customer issue.

Apart from this, they can also document the solutions they provide to various customer issues. This content can then be refined and published to the customer knowledge base to provide proactive help and increase case deflection.

Empowering customers to help themselves always results in a higher CSAT than providing them with reactive support. With an enterprise search solution implemented on the company’s website, online community, and other customer portals helps drive self-service by making all the scattered information accessible to customers at one place.

Relationship Managers
Relationship managers should focus more on building customer relationships rather than targeting cross-selling and upselling.

They should stay in regular touch with customers. This can be done by sending them monthly updates on new products, offering them customer loyalty schemes, ascertaining their issues are addressed and resolved and more.

The ultimate goal should be to increase lifetime revenue from customers through regular interactions.

These are some of the approaches different teams can employ to deliver an effective customer service and keep customers happy. Happy customers will further contribute in accelerating organizational growth.

Need Help with Setting Up Effective Customer Support System? Let’s discuss.