8 Useful Tips for Building a Customer Service Strategy

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Professional customer service is the key differentiator between your business and its competitors. It is the main factor in building a brand in the market. Essentially, a customer service strategy acts as a yardstick you can rely on to guarantee service quality. The article below shares with you the importance of — and the elements for — building an excellent customer service strategy. Let's explore it with SimERP!

What is a customer service strategy?

If the customer experience refers to every interaction a customer has with the business, both before and after the sale, then a customer service strategy defines the actionable plans for delivering positive, meaningful experiences across those interactions.

A successful customer service strategy needs to consider several important factors, including:

• A panoramic view of competitiveness

• Consumer research

• Market data

• Mission and vision

When defining a customer service strategy, make sure you plan for all departments — not just the people responsible for interacting with customers. By combining feedback and insights from across the enterprise, you'll find it easier to align the organization's activities with the set objectives.

Factors to consider when drawing up a customer service plan

Review your current customer service strategy

The first step in building a customer service strategy is to examine your company's current one. The goal here is to determine what is working well and what you could improve. If you don't know where to start, try checking the customer care department's data to understand the metrics used to evaluate customer service quality, as well as customer satisfaction scores and churn rates.

Another effective way to review your current strategy is to create a customer journey map. The customer journey map outlines all interactions between customers and your business, including identifying any "pain points" along the customer's experience journey. This not only helps you identify difficulties in the customer experience, but also suggests effective ways to remove or replace them.

Train your customer service staff

Once you know what needs improving, the next step is to share that information with your employees and train them on the new protocols going forward. It's important to share your findings with employees — even if it's bad news — so they understand why you are making these changes. This will make your new policies effective and will encourage employees to improve their performance going forward.

Identify customer needs

Fast, timely service with a positive attitude are customers' basic needs. These are the things customers will expect from your business.

However, most customers have different needs that vary by specific situation. In some cases, you must provide a rapid response; in others, quality and transparency are the key to success. It all depends on the customer's purpose when they contact your business.

Solve problems for customers

A superior customer service strategy focuses on solving customers' problems, whether or not those problems were foreseen. When we mention the customer support function, we usually default to picturing call centers and teams of employees answering phones day and night. However, many companies today have teams that specialize in anticipating potential problems and preventing them before they affect customers.

These are the businesses with top-tier professional customer service. They not only plan for ongoing issues, but also check in with customers regularly to make sure everything is going well after the purchase. This type of proactive customer service reduces chaos and strengthens lasting relationships with your customers.

Self-service

In today's technology boom, there is no reason for businesses not to offer customers self-service options. Rather than requiring people to contact your business whenever they need help, customers should be free to answer their questions and resolve issues themselves using the ready-made materials you provide.

In addition, self-service tools such as knowledge bases and chatbots not only help customers find solutions more easily, but also reduce the workload for your staff. With more people using your public resources, fewer customers will contact the customer care department for common or simple problems. That saves your staff a bit of time to focus on more complex issues that take longer to fix.

Collect feedback regularly

If you truly want to understand your customers, you must ask — and, more importantly, listen. 70% of customers will leave a review of your company if asked, but what matters is that you weigh it and apply it to your strategy.

You should also collect feedback from your customers regularly. As SimERP mentioned earlier, customer needs can change, so you'll need up-to-date information on how customers perceive your business. Things can change quickly, so having an automated tool that collects feedback after every customer experience is incredibly useful.

Track employee performance

If you want your customer service strategy to deliver results, you must track its performance over time. Customers are always looking for things that give them the most value for their money, and they are willing to switch to a competitor if they believe they can get more benefits or more reliable service. If you are complacent about your strategy, competitors in the industry will be able to catch up and potentially poach your customers. Or a new trend may emerge in the industry and you'll miss the chance to capitalize on it because you haven't collected any recent customer feedback.

The most successful businesses are those that regularly track employee performance and are always looking for new ways to raise the value of the customer experience. These businesses hold their employees to extremely high standards and expect them to create positive interactions with every customer they encounter.

8 useful tips when drawing up a customer care strategy

Reach your target audience

Communication in business plays an important role in shaping the customer experience.

Success in customer service means your business must first identify which channels customers are most active on, so you can adjust your approach and serve them there.

That's why it's important to familiarize yourself with the channels — whether social media, email, live chat, and so on. Ask yourself: How do our customers communicate on this channel? And how can we use this information to support the business's engagement activities?

Accessibility can be a useful competitive advantage if done right, so it's important that your business handles customers' preferred channels effectively and delivers reliable, consistent service through them.

Provide convenient customer service

As customers discover solutions and information on their own through the internet and social media, demand for service convenience keeps rising. To maintain a solid position, businesses must prioritize online support.

If a customer has a question on the weekend, do they have to wait until Monday for an answer? Or do you offer 24/7 live chat to meet their needs?

Providing a knowledge base and keeping it updated on your website is an effective way for customers to resolve simple problems themselves without contacting you for help.

Make purchasing convenient

Nordstrom — a luxury department store famous for its flawless service — recently launched a new customer experience tool to improve shopping convenience.

"To give users maximum convenience, customers can select the products they like on the app and book a fitting room so they can come and try them on quickly," says Rachel Arthur, fashion and business editor.

The new system solves the problem by letting customers try on clothes at the location and time most convenient for them. Getting customers through the door is also a way to introduce many potential products.

But this is just one small example of how your brand can leverage and invest in shopping convenience as part of its customer service strategy.

Personalization

In the effort to deliver excellent customer service, businesses should collect customer information so they can make relevant recommendations in the future.

In customers' eyes, personalization (when done right) is a sign of respect for their loyalty. It also shows that your business cares about deepening its relationship with customers by continuously providing better services, smarter recommendations, and more timely support.

Simplify the interface

If your website or app has poor UX/UI, there's a high chance customers will abandon your brand.

Think back to 2015 — the moment mobile internet use exploded. Since then, mobile optimization has become the top priority for businesses seeking to provide a simple, seamless experience for customers and potential buyers.

When you want to simplify the interface, you'll need to focus on making your website easy to navigate in every browser. Amazon is a classic example: the app simplifies checkout by allowing Amazon Prime members to buy an item with a single click:

Moreover, product information and reviews from other buyers also become simpler and faster to access:

When you want to go omnichannel, keep the term omnichannel in mind.

Omnichannel, also known as unified-channel selling, is an approach that gives customers an integrated, seamless experience — even when switching from desktop to mobile or to a social media channel.

In omnichannel, the customer experience must be the same across all platforms.

"To succeed with omnichannel, you must have a comprehensive view of customer interactions across all channels (digital and traditional) to track customer preferences, trends, and journeys from the customer's perspective," says TeleTech.

If you consider multi-channel reach one of the key elements of your customer experience strategy, this is the moment to align with your staff on the plan and the necessary steps to build an effective strategy.

Leverage automation and AI

As a business's customer base grows and expands, personalizing services becomes harder. In addition, raising service quality is also a difficult problem for businesses. This is when you'll need the help of technology, especially automation and AI.

Used properly, these platforms will raise the value of the customer experience and create amazing convenience for your customer support staff.

For example, a chatbot can take over customer questions on your website when your staff are away. So even outside normal working hours, customers can still get answers from your bot, and these questions won't pile up for the team to handle the next morning.

Be proactive

Being proactive in customer care is the key to your business's success. Every employee in your company can be a link in the chain of the customer's post-purchase experience.

In the customer service department, representatives can notify the customer success manager (CSM) if someone has complained multiple times. Rather than expecting the manager to discover this person on their own, frontline staff can easily review the customer's order history and realize whether they keep running into problems with your product. Many customers will leave a business without telling you, so it's important to check accounts regularly if you notice any recurring issues.

A customer care strategy is a long game

You can't expect your customer service strategy to succeed overnight. Excellent customer service will convince employees to stay with the business long-term while reinforcing customer loyalty.

For customer care to be at its most effective, it must be placed within the big picture of the customer experience management strategy. That's because customer experience management is what guarantees consistency across all touchpoints, and customer service is only some of that entire journey.

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