Customer service is an important part of any business, but often you can get lost in NPS scores, quality scores, metrics and reporting. In order to make it simple we have put together 5 areas that we believe companies should be focusing their attention on in order to ensure that they are delivering consistent high quality customer service that is meeting the needs of the business and the customer. We call them “impact points” because these aspects of your service organisation directly interact with your customers. If your service organisation is focused on improving in these 5 areas then you are becoming a high performing and profitable service organisation.
1 – Your frontline service team is where value is created or lost for your organisation.
Those thousands of conversations, though, can prove to be a brand and marketing nightmare. But it should, and can, be a dream scenario – because those customers are calling, tweeting and emailing you. It means, at that critical impact point, you have complete customer engagement. And you can use that to build a bright future for your business if you take these simple but very effective steps to harnessing the impact point to maximum advantage. If your customer service team is able to able to provide consistent quality to customers they can be a far greater weapon than your sales and marketing team.
2 – Brand evangelists
If you can ensure that every person in your service centre is completely aligned to the vision and values of the company and is, in short, a brand evangelist. A team of brand evangelists can ensure their conversations add value to the customer and company.
3 – Smart conversations
Many companies create scripts for their service centre staff as part of their quality assurance program. But scripts cannot deal with the wide range of emotions, personalities and needs those staff are faced with day in, day out.. A ‘smart conversation framework’ is the best way forward, using a conversation design that allows the team to keep track of conversations and know where to listen, clarify, execute and confirm satisfaction.
The best way to build trust is through promises – promises that are kept. The way the conversation is handled is ‘the emotional currency’ which has the opportunity to build loyalty and bring about remarkable results.
4 – Measuring the impact
It is critical that the business has effective measures to fully understand the current experience and to find out what and who needs to improve. It is important that you measure all customer interactions as part of your quality assurance program in your salesforce system. It is important that call centres invest in a salesforce quality assurance solution. You can search for a quality assurance tool on the Salesforce Appexchange.
And by better understanding the customer’s perception of this interaction and whether they will stay with the brand or even become an advocate, we can equate the value/ profit that is being created – or lost.
These measures need to be at the individual agent level. After all it is the actions of each person that will realise the value for the brand. One person acting poorly can affect thousands of customers each year.
5 – Creating value
By linking the frontline agents to the quality of the conversation and the customers’ propensity to stay with the brand and become an advocate, we can see the real value driven to the bottom line.
In the award winning case studies we have worked on, we generally see service teams able to reduce customer churn by up to 30%, see significant improvements in word-of-mouth sales – improvements that are generally worth millions in profits when they implement these tips into their salesforce system.
Now that has to be a dream scenario for any organisation!
