6 Tips for a Great Customer Service Strategy

Improving the customer experience through customer service is one of the most important principles for any organization for one simple reason. Without customers, your organization will fail overnight. Customer service, also known as customer care or customer support, involves the activities an organization undertakes to meet the needs of its customers.

Every customer interaction is different, but organizations looking to improve customer retention and grow their customer base need to create an effective customer service strategy. This requires combining organization-wide rules and customizations for how to respond to customer issues to create the best combination of personalization and scalability.

Why customer service is growing in importance

Customer service is more important than ever. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, poor service is the top reason consumers stop buying from a company. The organization agrees. Most service professionals say customer expectations were rising even before the pandemic.

Customers today are more likely to switch to another product or cancel their membership than ever before. The pandemic has resulted in out-of-stocks, canceled orders, and difficult offline shopping conditions, disrupting normal customer experiences and resulting in reduced customer loyalty.

McKinsey found that 75% of consumers have tried new shopping behaviors during the pandemic, with 39% choosing new brands over existing favorites. This trend is even more evident among Gen Z and Millennials, evidence that addressing customer needs will become increasingly important.

Customers are still attracted to a variety of factors, including product price, availability, and convenience, but they also want organizations to understand their pain points and provide simple ways for them to communicate and receive answers directly about products and services. According to Zendesk, approximately 70% of customers make purchasing decisions based on the quality of their customer service experience.

Leading organizations are therefore obsessed with delivering exceptional customer experiences. They must meet the customer’s needs, be ready to solve any problems that arise immediately, and do everything possible to meet the customer’s expectations.

The difference between great, good, and poor customer service can mean the difference between retaining a customer or losing them to a competitor.

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6 Tips to Ensure a Successful Customer Service Strategy

1. Make customer-centricity a core element of your strategy

Today’s customers are more conscientious about the values ​​of the organizations they purchase goods and services from and the value being delivered. They also know that switching solutions or products is never easy if the organization is not getting what it wants. This means that organizations must do everything possible to attract and retain loyal customers. Estimates vary by industry, but it is well known that it costs much more to recruit new customers than to retain existing ones.

An organization’s customer service vision can set the tone for employees to understand how important their role is in providing excellent customer service.

Therefore, organizations must pay more attention to every potential touchpoint in the customer journey as an opportunity to reinforce value and ensure customers are satisfied with their experience. Organizations need to surprise and delight existing high-value customers by asking how they can provide more value. Some examples of ways you can do this include offering limited edition or exclusive products, or surprising and delighting your customers when possible. Making your customers happy upfront will lessen the impact if problems arise later.

2. Embrace technology

While human representatives remain a critical component of customer service strategies, technological advancements such as artificial intelligence (AI) can help organizations serve more customers more effectively. AI can provide automated chat support, live scripted recommendations for reps during phone calls with customers, predictive problem resolution, and other improvements that help customer service reps do their jobs faster and more effectively.

3. Make sure your customer service is an omnichannel offering.

Managing customer support today is more complex than ever. Long gone are the days when customers would try to contact an organization individually through the two main channels of the time: customer service phone lines or writing letters. Organizations often deploy a customer support strategy where all customer service issues are routed to one help desk. From here, the issue can be forwarded to a representative who can resolve it based on their expertise or availability.

Customers now have a variety of channels to communicate, including text-based social media, online video, chat rooms, help forums, and chatbots.

Therefore, your frontline customer service team must be adept at resolving customer issues in real time, wherever they arise. These teams need to understand that other customers can easily see whether the organization is responding to their questions and know exactly what the organization is talking about.

A modern customer service approach means many organizations must invest in talent development initiatives to prepare customer service representatives for the future.

For example, customer service now takes place in an omnichannel environment that requires triage of conversations occurring across multiple channels. Organizations can accelerate response times by deploying chatbots to understand common requests from customers.

These automation strategies save money, but if chatbots can’t successfully resolve a given customer’s issue, organizations must quickly transition to human operators on their customer support teams. Maintaining high customer service standards is very important.

What complicates these requests is that thousands, if not millions, of people see them and they go viral, creating additional customer service issues. For example, if a customer complains about a product that doesn’t work right away just a few days after purchasing it, some potential customers who read that message will not buy the same product. Of course, this can cut both ways. Customers who talk about their positive experiences with your brand can help your organization recruit new customers.

4. Build a comprehensive self-service knowledge base

While many customers prefer to speak directly with a representative, others prefer to research solutions to their problems and solve them themselves. Therefore, organizations must invest in training resources, such as frequently asked questions (FAQs) and large information databases, to provide a wealth of information to those who prefer to find answers on their own. This approach increases the usability of the solution for some customers and saves some bottom-line costs because it eliminates the need for customer support representatives for costly one-on-one conversations. It also frees up other support agents to deal directly with more customers who prefer having a representative guide them through solutions.

5. Track customer information

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a great way to learn more about your existing and new customers. CRM is critical to customer service operations to determine if a customer has a problem, when the problem occurred, whether the problem was resolved, and any necessary follow-up steps that may occur. You can also see whether certain types of customers are buying more or less of your products than in the past, so your organization can effectively deploy the right resources to maximize value. However, there is a legal and reputational obligation to protect customer information, so organizations must protect this customer data at all costs.

6. Identify and track SMART goals

No customer service strategy is complete without metrics, KPIs, and continuous measurement. Organizations need to have the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer satisfaction and track them regularly.

Organizations must ensure that they have well-defined and achievable customer service goals. The best way to do this is to use the SMART (Specific, Measurable and Achievable in a Reasonable Time) framework, which ensures that goals have specific targets and make it easy for the organization to evaluate success.

For example, it is nearly impossible to guarantee 100% complete customer satisfaction. And it’s highly unlikely that any customer who raises an issue with a customer service representative will leave that encounter completely satisfied. You should first benchmark how your organization is performing in these key areas, set specific goals for improvement, and track progress.

Every organization has different benchmarks and therefore unique goals, but here are some metrics you can measure to determine your SMART goals:

• Improved first response time: Organizations need to track how quickly customer service team members can identify and respond to customer service issues.
• Resolution time: Unfortunately, only some customer service issues can be resolved immediately, while others take days, weeks, or longer to resolve. A recent study found that nearly 60% of executives felt their first contact with customers was poor or inappropriate. Therefore, organizations need to track how long it takes to ensure that the customer’s problem has been resolved and the customer is now satisfied.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): To understand the success of their customer service strategy, organizations can create and track customer satisfaction surveys to help them better understand what their customers are thinking and feeling. This allows organizations to know whether they are excelling at delivering value to their customers, or whether they are falling short. Organizations often check these scores through surveys.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This score asks how likely a customer is to recommend a product or service to their network. This is a powerful data point that shows whether your organization is providing so much value that individual customers will make the effort to tell their friends, family, or colleagues how much they like the organization’s solutions.
• Customer Retention Rate: Understanding whether customers continue to purchase your organization’s solutions is important in gauging the overall health of your organization. A high retention rate is a positive indicator of customer satisfaction and loyalty, indicating that your organization is meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Take the next step

Organizations must continually invest in customer service to retain existing customers and acquire new ones through referrals or positive word of mouth. Providing better customer service than your competitors is one way to grow your business and maintain a strong reputation. Following the above guidelines can help your organization succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

According to the IBV CEO’s Guide to Generative AI for Customer Service, it’s no surprise that customer service has become a top priority for CEOs when it comes to investing in generative AI. The goal of helping organizations meet the dual challenges of increasing customer demand and operational costs is a perfect fit for AI.

For more than a decade, IBM has been helping companies apply trusted AI in this space, with generative AI dramatically transforming customer and field service through its ability to understand complex questions and generate more human-like conversational responses. It has additional potential to do so. IBM Consulting provides end-to-end consulting capabilities in experience design and services, data and AI transformation. Collaborate with customers through the AI ​​value creation process to advance conversational AI and improve agent experiences using IBM watsonx™, IBM’s enterprise-grade AI and data platform, and watsonx™ Assistant, IBM’s market-leading conversational AI solution. and optimize your call center. Operations and Data.

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