In the modern era, Customer service strategy and planning are considered as the top-notch investment in organizations. Great companies believe that effective customer service strategies are the means of gaining a competitive edge. Building a sustainable competitive edge along with consistent customer loyalty it became of essence to develop and implement excellent customer relationship policies.
Here are some practices that can help building great Customer Services Policies and also help to improve them
- Discovering what the customer wants: When it comes to the building or improving the customer services policy the brand strategic team needs to have a clear understanding of who their client is and what they are looking for. Henceforth, build a team and conduct a research about brand’s main customers. After getting an insight on the customer and the answer to why they buy your product or what problem of the client is solved. Now the brand needs to see that how better service plans can be built to facilitate the client. Taking this path to improve your customer service plan will help you discover the best ways to meet customer aspirations and accomplish outstanding customer service.
- Customer Feedback investigation: Once the customer service policy is developed and implemented efficiently, it is important to after a while a survey is conducted on the performance of customer service policy. Do not rely on assumptions or opinions by the internal employees rather gather customer response.
Be practical and definite in your approach. Gather the clients and get their help to identify what your brand could be doing better.
- Surprise elements to create an Experience: In your everyday policies or with every new campaign running focus on little things where you can build an element of surprise for your customer. There is nothing which can bat this feeling and belief that you value your customer by doing little things for. The positive side to this is it will support to raise your credibility with your customers, through constructive feedback and referrals.
- Investing in Customer Services:
Businesses these days needs to see the spending on customer service and its implementation as an investment rather than an expense. This is something which will return in terms of sales, brand credibility and loyal customer base. Finding out the right expert who has the ability to understand the business model and devise a relative plan for customer relationship management is the requirement for ensuring the improvement in current customer service policy. This can be done occasionally but in addition to this the brand needs to develop their own internal customer service training conferences to raise the importance and ensure employees involvement. - Service Consistency: Implementing consistent customer service policy throughout the retail network is important for the customer to recognize it. Recognizing a good customer service policy is the first step and after that comes the word of mouth about it. The company needs to set the standards in terms of quality delivery to the customer. There needs to be clarity to the staff about the policy and every one in the company should be on same page.
- Culture of Encouragement : In order to ensure the success of any campaign you need to encourage the people who have to implement it in all possible ways. They need to belief in the system where they are working towards achieving the company’s goals. Make your customer policy a success story by introducing a culture of encouragement who achieved their goals of excellent service to customers. As a result, this will encourage the employees and all internal stake holders to “go the extra mile”.
- Customer Centric Strategy :
Track your buyer’s journey, from discovering your brand to using your facility and goods, to billing and after sales services and assistance. In particular, brand needs to look for ways of streamlining the courses at each stage of their customer journey. Looking the whole customer touch points cycle with the brand and introducing customer centric policy will bring the progressive impact to brand’s reputation and business. - Internal Reviews: In addition to above reviews it is also important to develop a check to discover if there are glitches and what are the reasons. Brand has to build up programs to involve employees in refining processes to prevent reappearances of the problems.
Brand’s needs to develop system to track the activity and processes to see how they. For instance, understand how your arrangements and processes affect the client, and categorize what problems get in the way of good customer service. - Mystery Shopper: At times it is more effective to make your staff experience on their own rather than the management making them realize that what extra is being done in the market by the competition. Once the see it on their own they will realize and understand better what practices can be adopt for their business model and for their relative customers.
- Staff Brain Storming Sessions: Brand employees can always work in the objective to come up with solutions that are cost effective and can create experiences for the customers.
The fact that in brands employees at the retail end are the ones closest to the customer s are best people who can tell what a customer approves of and value when it comes to service or product. So, if a culture of brain storming session on customer services is introduced it can bring many fruitful thoughts and ideas from the very people who interact and deal with your customers on daily basis. - Employees are the new customers: The new finding in the organizational development industry is that employees needs to be more than just satisfied with their job and work environment. As this very satisfaction will lead to many progressive behaviors and outcomes. A happy employee can always make your sacred customers happy. The employees are also your ambassadors. Their behavior can impact big time on your amazingly curated customer policy.
As a consequence of this culture when your employees will feel highly appreciated they will share great insights and help brand improve their customer service. - Involvement Chain: All those participating should be encouraged and rewarded for their performance to make this strategy work best for the brand.
Another key factor that can help improve and build a sustainable effective customer service policy is that throughout the organization everyone has to play a role in achieving goals regarding the success of customer relationship plans. - Regular Performance Reviews: Not only the customer service program but any plan can only succeed if brands do their proper homework while building a strategy behind the program in line with the interests of the organization. Above and beyond creating acceptable KPIs to quantity the division’s performance, it is vital to follow some strategic concepts as discussed here
Accessibility of the program:
The job of the brand is not just to develop a good customer service plan but also to advertise and communicate it to the customers. It will be insignificant to have the finest customer service department if clienteles are uninformed about it. The brand has to identify the most reachable spot for its advertisement, both in the digital (corporate web, blogs, digital platforms) and the print mediums.
Customer Reviews
The value of a customer review can never be under rated but in addition to this feature there is a real need for human assistance like live chats and email support service for a great customer service plan.
Features like FAQ sections, promotional emails or answering machines aid greatly, but the customer desires to be helped by real individuals who can recognize their needs.
Community Development:
Brands needs to add to their strategy a process through which they can interact with their real clients. Get to know them better, network with them. Exhibitions, meet and greets, trade shows, and all social interaction should be encouraged to build a squad with end consumers.
Acing the communication skills
A crucial characteristic of a worker from the Division of Customer Service is to develop and maintain an excellent communication skill. Here are few basics that needs to be followed at the least
Inquire:
The important duty to ask the customer about all the appropriate questions about the problem faced. This is the first step towards the resolution of the problem and identifying their concerns. Working on all the answers given by the customers and their expectation feedback can thus help a brand to offer the best possible solution that a customer can value.
Pay attention:
The most talked about and advised rule not just hear but listen to the other person in order to interact in the best possible way.
Now it is the time to pay attention once you have asked the customer about the problems and concerns. At this particular step there is a great need to sympathize with our customer to make them realize that their opinion matters. This will make them belief that brand has every intention to resolve their problems and make them happy. A smooth hassle-free interaction process with culture of admitting brand’s mistake and offering quick resolutions to the issues faced by customers will help brand retain customers and get a great word of mouth about the service and brand.
Post Service Follow Ups:
Once you have provided your customer with the required resolutions for the problem faced, you can always go back to the customer in a week’s time to check on him/her and get a review for the service. This attempt will help great deal in winning the trust of the customer.
Lesson to be Learned
Refining your corporation’s ethos is worth the effort. Investing time and money to create a company-wide customer service culture will make every internal stake holder more involved with the program and that will bring about some great results.
The results can be seen in quality productivity of the employees as they will be working for a goal or assignment in which they believe. Making them happy will automatically decrease the turn over rates. Turn over rates reduction can save a lot of money to any organization in addition to the time invested in training the previous ones. Employees who work long term with any organization build relations with regular customers, this thing always bring loyalty to the brand. In the era of competition all brand knows that retaining a customer is easier in terms of money, time and efforts than acquiring a new one.
It is for sure time taking to take all employees on board with a customer service culture and notion of internal customers. Still, once you integrate this idea into your corporation culture, it will improve not only brand’s customer service, but the whole lot of business which range from efficiency to employee gratification.
In the end here are few skills that the customer service reps need to ensure in their interactions and behavior.
- Endurance
- Concentration
- Clear communication skills
- Product Knowledge
- Constructive language skills
- Time management skills
- Pleasant Calm Persona
- Goal-oriented Approach
- Persuading skills
- Persistence in behavior
- Empathy
- Willingness to learn
The businesses who do not pursue on how to improve what they do, whether it’s developing products, marketing industries, or serving customers, will be left behind by the competition who is more than willing to invest in their skills.