Customer Services Strategies and Tools Course Bundle

Outline

Servicing a customer is a part of every purchase and interaction with internal and external contacts. It can last a few seconds up to hours. So if we all do it and experience it every day in almost everything we do, why isn’t good customer service the norm?

We all have stories about when we were treated exceptionally well or extremely poorly. We tend to share these extraordinary stories with others. We all know that word of mouth marketing can be the absolute best advantage or the worst drawback for a company.

Warren Buffett said it best: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. “

A few basic rules about customer service:

Honesty is the Best Policy. Integrity – Be honest and own up to your mistakes. Communicate what you plan to do to change or prevent the same mistake from happening again. Don’t be fooled into believing that a regular ‘mea culpa’ will get you off the hook. At some point, the plan to fix the problem must take effect!

Break Glass in Case of Fire. Response Time – The best tact is to quickly get on the phone with the customer to explain your company’s mistake. Don’t rely on email for this communication if it can be done quickly one on one. If you are communicating to a large customer base then email is certainly the fastest and most effective way to quickly notify your customers that you are aware of the problem. Frequent updates is there is a protracted issue and a brief overview of how you will prevent it from happening in the future will give your customers confidence that you are aware of the customer impact.

Keeping it Real. Set a Realistic Expectation – Customers who have been promised something that isn’t delivered as promised are far more frustrated and disappointed than if they are notified at the outset they won’t have it sooner than later. In other words, under promise and over deliver is the best policy. This may take some arm wrestling with other departments who want to take a feature or product to market before it is ready. Set the expectations correctly internally as to what the fallout may be so everyone understands the impact on customer satisfaction and ultimately customer retention.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Everyone in your company should love your customers. Without them, you have no company. This doesn’t mean you won’t have difficult customers who will push the limits and try everyone’s patience. But if you don’t have a company philosophy to respect and appreciate your customers, the opposite tone will infect customer interactions from all departments. All departments, customer-facing or not, should care about customer satisfaction.

Five Tenents of Customer Service Metrics

The first question you should ask yourself…How do you measure customer satisfaction?

If you are measuring the # of complaints you are or are not receiving, you are in trouble. Not everybody bothers to take the time to tell you about his/her horrible experience. If you are asking your customers if they are satisfied, you are telling them that their satisfaction matters.

There are many different ways to ask: post-purchase and post-support surveys, enclosures in the monthly invoice, follow-up phone calls and quarterly or annual surveys. The right method depends on your business and your customer base. Try different ways. Just do it.

Let’s be clear: if you’re not measuring any part of your service delivery, you are missing a huge opportunity to improve, grow or even save your business during these scrutinizing, tight economic times.

The challenge with specifying key indicators is that not all businesses will use the same metrics. For example, a retail or fulfillment organization will have decidedly different key performance indicators than a software-as-a-service company.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have highlighted relatively general metrics and incorporated a few varying perspectives for different use cases.

Service Level – For call centers, support, and service desks, first call resolution is the Holy Grail. For a shipping operation, product delivery and project implementation, on-time performance is the measuring stick. In a high transaction business, the first interaction with a customer will be a key determinant of whether the customer will return. Don’t underestimate the importance of timeliness and thoroughness.

Customer Retention – For SaaS businesses, Utilization is the best indicator of a customer’s dedication to your service. Use this metric to understand who is at risk at contract renewal time. Monitoring Repeat Business is going to help non-SaaS businesses understand how sticky their product or service is for their customer base. You should know which customers are using or buying different parts of your business. These customers who buy throughout your offerings are perhaps your most important customers to focus on for your retention strategies.

Response time – You’d be surprised how many customer surveys come back with comments such as “your service is great, you got back to me right away….” “I was surprised with how quickly you responded to my inquiry and it made all the difference even if I didn’t get the answer I was hoping for…” In today’s world of electronic relationship management, response time is one of the only ways we can communicate our sense of urgency and concern for our customers and their experience with our product or service. What is your Response goal – within X hours? Set one and achieve it. You should know what your competition is doing and beat their goal.

Want to really blow away a customer and cement your relationship? Pick up the phone and give them a personal call.

Time with the Customer – Are your customer-facing employees incentivized to keep calls short or to move too quickly from customer to customer? If so, you are sending the wrong message and subsequently affecting the quality of the customer interaction. There is a definite happy medium between the overly chatty service provider and the thorough and efficient provider. Set your benchmarks for call duration and general time with the customer in relation to the ultimate goal of first call resolution, NOT the other way around.

In other words, a completely satisfied customer not requiring a follow-up call or visit is much preferred over a quick, unresolved interaction.

Churn – Cancellations and returns are the equivalents to churn. If you don’t know how much business you are losing, you won’t be able to understand how much new business you will require to stay out of the red. As important as knowing how much, is understanding WHY you are losing customers. Take it to the next level and use follow-up surveys, phone calls, personalized ‘how can we get you back’ emails. This survey information is the real business insight for understanding your lost business.