An 11-Step Process for Building a Customer Service Strategy (+ Worksheet)
Customer service is one of the most important functions of any business. It’s how you build relationships with your customers, keep them happy and loyal, and ultimately, sell more products and services. The problem is that there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for delivering great customer service—you need to tailor your approach to each business and each industry. And it can be difficult to know where to start when building a world-class customer service strategy from scratch.
Here are 11 steps that will help you get started:
A customer service strategy is one of the most important functions to get right for your business
A customer service strategy is one of the most important components that your company will need to succeed. If you do not have a plan in place for how to provide customer service, it’s like having no plan at all.
It’s where all of your other functions come together around the customer. Service can make or break a company in today’s marketplace, so it is important that you do everything possible to ensure that your customers feel valued and happy with their experience shopping with/using/partnering with you as an organization or brand.
A customer service strategy can help you improve your customer experience and put your customers first.
Customer service is critical to your business. It’s the lifeblood that keeps your customers coming back and referring others. Whether you’re a small startup or an established brand, customer service is an essential part of every business.
In today’s digital world, it’s important for customers to be able to reach out and connect with businesses in real-time—no matter what their question or complaint may be about a product or service, no matter where they are in the world, and no matter what time of day or night it might be when they need help!
To build a strong customer service strategy that creates positive experiences for all parties involved (including yourself!), we recommend following this 5-step process:
By creating a customer service strategy that accounts for your customer’s needs, you’ll be better equipped to deliver the experiences they’re looking for.
By creating a customer service strategy that accounts for your customer’s needs, you’ll be better equipped to deliver the experiences they’re looking for. A customer service strategy is one of the most important functions to get right for your business because it helps you improve your customer experience and put your customers first.
Customer service strategies can be used in many ways:
- To establish a set of actions aimed at providing the best possible experience for each individual customer (the primary goal of effective CS)
- To define how employees will respond when given certain situations by customers or other employees (the secondary goal of effective CS)
- As a way to standardize responses across departments, locations, and times
Creating a customer service strategy requires looking at your data, researching your customers and competitors, and defining key goals.
The first step to creating a customer service strategy is to look at your data. This can be as simple as looking at your website analytics or diving into more advanced methods like survey software and customer feedback tools to understand what customers are saying about your products or services. It’s important that you know what your customers want, how they perceive their experience with you, and what their perception is of the competition around them.
Researching the competition is also an important part of building a successful customer service strategy—you need to know what they’re doing well (or not) so that you can compete with them on their strengths while simultaneously improving areas where they might have more room for improvement than you do.
Set Goals & Objectives for Your Customer Service Strategy
Once you have an idea of what your customer service goals are, it’s time to formulate some objectives.
- Set goals that are measurable. The success of your strategy depends on whether or not you know how to measure its performance—and if something is too vague, measuring it becomes difficult. For example, “increasing the number of positive comments about our brand on social media accounts” is a better goal than just saying “positive comments.” It gives direction for what kind of positive comment counts as progress toward reaching this goal (e.g., who said the comment and where did they say it).
- Define the problem before starting on a solution. If there isn’t any clear problem with your current approach (or there isn’t an existing way that needs fixing), then what’s the point? Before starting work on something new, make sure there’s actually something broken or missing first!
This step can seem like extra work at first glance, but once you’ve got all this information ready to go, you can start strategizing in earnest!
Build & Train Your Customer Service Team
Before you start your customer service team, it’s important to create a strategy for them. Many companies hire people without any training or direction, which can lead to a disorganized and uncoordinated experience for both customers and employees.
A good place to start is by providing your new hires with some basic training on how to respond to customer requests. This will help ensure that they understand their role in the company and how best they can serve your customers.
The process of building and training your customer service team should also include:
- Timely Response;
- Friendly Communication;
- Understanding of Company Culture;
- Initiative & Responsibility;
- Ability to Problem Solve;
- Patience;
- Ability to Follow Procedures;
- Respect for Customers.
Once your customer service team is trained, it’s time to put them into action. You can start by creating a system for the team members to follow when responding to customer requests. This can help ensure that all communications are consistent and professional, which will, in turn, improve customer satisfaction levels.
Teams should define their KPIs to measure the effectiveness and success of their customer service strategy.
You need to define your KPIs for your customer service strategy.
A good KPI should be measurable and actionable. Your KPI should be specific to your business and customer service strategy and achievable and realistic. Make sure that you set a time limit for achieving each target you set so that you can measure progress towards achieving them on an ongoing basis. For example, if one of your KPIs is improving response times from customers within three hours, then this means that every time an email comes in asking for help or advice from your team (or social media inbox), someone at the company must respond within three hours—and not just once: if someone replies after three hours with an apology saying they’re busy right now but will get back as soon as possible (which has happened many times), that counts towards their KPIs as well!
You can also set up different KPIs for different departments in your company, such as customer service, marketing, and sales. And don’t forget to measure your KPIs against competitors’ performance: if you see that they have lower response times than yours do, then you know where you need to improve.
Create Customer Service Information Resources
- Create a knowledge base of information. To help your team be effective and efficient, you’ll want to create a customer service knowledge base where they can look up questions that come up frequently. This is especially helpful if you’ve got a lot of new employees or are growing quickly.
- Use customer service software to make sure all of your resources are accessible to everyone on the team in any location.
- Make sure that all the information in your resource library is up to date—it’s no good if someone has been giving out incorrect advice for years! You should also make sure it’s easy for people who need access from outside the office (like remote employees), so they don’t have trouble getting what they need when needed most–and keep an eye out for areas where content could use updating (e.g., if there’s been some major news about one product or another).
The last thing you want is to have your customer service team making mistakes because they’re working with outdated information. This can lead to poor customer satisfaction, which can cause big problems for your business.
Another way to make sure your customer service team is ready for anything is by having a communication strategy. Make sure that everyone knows what to do in any given situation and how to respond if something goes wrong. It’s also important that people know who they should talk with when there’s a problem—and who will be taking care of it once it’s resolved.
Identify Your Customer Service Touchpoints & Select Your Service Software
Identify Your Customer Service Touchpoints & Select Your Service Software
Once you’ve identified the customer service touchpoints you’ll want to use in your strategy, consider how much time and effort each one requires. Some channels may be more helpful than others, depending on how well they align with what you’re offering and how accessible they are to your customers. For example: If a customer has an issue with their order but doesn’t have access to email as part of their phone plan (e.g., if they don’t have internet), then it makes sense for them to call in rather than email; this is because calling in allows them to communicate directly with a human being. Additionally, since calls are generally shorter than emails or chat messages—and therefore less likely to result in an angry customer—you’ll save time by routing these interactions through the phone instead of other channels like live chat or social media comments section that takes longer because there’s no way around having actual conversations between people involved).
Look for software that can help manage all touchpoints from one place so employees can stay organized while helping customers across various channels at once – not just one channel.”
Regularly Monitor Your Customer Service Quality
This step is often overlooked, but it’s important to make sure you’re doing it right. Regularly monitoring your customer service quality is a continuous process that requires a combination of data and analytics, along with qualitative feedback from customers and employees.
Here are some best practices for monitoring customer service quality:
- Ensure you have the right data and analytics to measure your customer service performance. Your system should be able to tell you how many inquiries were resolved within an hour or 24 hours after being submitted, how quickly issues were resolved on average across all channels (phone, email, live chat), average response times for various types of requests (e.g., refunds), overall satisfaction rates across different channels and departments as well as any other relevant information such as whether customers who had a problem were satisfied with their resolution experience or not. You may also want to consider tracking more granular data like the number of calls answered without having to wait on hold for more than 5 minutes – this will help identify areas where improvements need to be made so they can be addressed immediately rather than waiting until someone calls up asking why they haven’t heard back yet after submitting an inquiry two weeks ago!
With the right processes, framework, and content in place, you can be more efficient, available, and proactive.
With the right processes, framework, and content in place, you can be more efficient, available, and proactive.
You should always start with your goals. If you don’t know what you want to achieve before you start working on a customer service strategy, then it will be harder for you to measure its success or failure.
It’s important not to worry about what other people are doing – do your own thing! Just make sure that whatever your goals are, they are realistic and achievable within 3-6 months so that they don’t lose momentum and become something else entirely by the time they’re reached. You may find it helpful at this point to write down some tangible fitness goals as examples (e.g., losing 1 stone / running 5k / fitting into a favorite dress).
You will also need to think about how you want your business to be perceived by customers. Do you want them to see you as a provider of excellent service, or are you more interested in making sales? This is important because it will influence the kind of content that goes into your strategy and how it’s presented on social media. If your aim is purely to make sales, then this should inform the tone of what people see from you on social media – for example, if customers are asking questions about products, then answer them quickly but don’t go into too much detail (because this could lead them away from making a purchase).
Conclusion
If you want to build a customer service strategy that’s truly effective, it’s important to focus on the details. One of the biggest challenges for businesses is figuring out where to start and how to keep track of all their data, but once you have a process in place, it gets easier every time. As we’ve shown you here—and with our free worksheet at the end—it can be as simple as following these five steps: define your goals; research your customers; identify key goals and objectives; build your team; and create information resources. But above all else? You need commitment from everyone involved in order for this effort to succeed!
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