What is customer service?

The aim of customer service should be clear: the customer should be satisfied to their expectations or beyond. This outcome can manifest itself in a range of ways, from multiple long-term repeat business to not posting a bad review on TripAdvisor.
Achieving this is in large part a matter of having systems in place to ensure as little as possible goes wrong, but that when it does there is an established response that ensures customers believe you did everything to help.

Developing a customer-focused organisational culture takes time, but having the right technology in place can make the task easier by supporting your team’s day-to-day operations and giving you accurate management information.

In a typical business, a large proportion of renewal or repeat business will depend on the customer experience. What’s more, positive customer service experiences represent some of your best opportunities for profitable upsells. Can you afford not to take it seriously?
For the business-to-business sales team the better the relationship with the customer, the greater the expertise they can deliver in routine and troubleshooting situations, the more likely it is that repeat business will ensue.

In the consumer space, the nature of service delivery can vary widely. Ensuring a speedy and pleasant purchase process or an honest and clear response to a customer complaint can make the difference between repeat business and recommendations or refunds and bad-mouthing your brand.

If you don’t yet have a dedicated customer services team – and many SMBs don’t – consider seriously whether you are at the point where you need one.

The assumption we make is that good customer service leads to repeat business or renewals, but most companies don’t actually measure that directly. Instead, they use proxy measurements such as customer satisfaction, customer sentiment or Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Each metric has its own value: customer satisfaction surveys give you results focused on individual buyer experiences, for example, while NPS gives a wider aggregated picture of your business.

A comprehensive CRM system enables you to use a range of new metrics, driven by the ability to collect data in incredible detail based on actual records of customer interactions – though of course that data still needs to be interpreted with a degree of judgment.

Here are some of the basis contact centre metrics you should be using:

Delivering excellent customer service takes the right organisational culture and trained knowledgeable staff. But add the right technology platform and you can exceed customers’ expectations.

First, let’s look at organisational culture. A company that treats its customer service staff poorly is also likely, in the end, to find those staff treating its customers the same way. Some of the best customer service experiences can come from staff who are motivated and empowered to find the right solution for the customer, even if it means extending a phone call or doing some product research themselves.

Second, you need to train your staff to have the necessary skills. This isn’t always a matter of giving everybody the same technical skill – although vacuum cleaner company Dyson famously claimed that every member of its staff could disassemble and rebuild its product, this very specific type of hands-on training isn’t usually necessary. Rather, it’s about giving people the right skills to fulfil the role you need them to do.

Technology is changing the way we talk to customers. Mobile technology allows taxi and bus companies to let customers know when transport is due, and logistics providers can provide real-time parcel tracking information. IT vendors alert their customers’ IT staff to impending issues, such as servers running out of capacity. Meanwhile, mobile platforms and social media integration offer a near real-time feedback mechanism for customers, with multiplatform support communities an increasingly important resource for customers and support agents alike.

And customers need not even be aware that they’re giving feedback. Millions of devices are equipped with mobile internet connections that can provide data on their user’s location, physical activity, patterns of data usage and more. This “Internet of Things” is an opportunity to interact with customers in completely new ways. It’s likely to be a key element in the future of customer service.

CRM systems are already becoming an ideal partner in the journey towards customer service excellence. Customers are tracked through the lifetime of their relationship with the organisation, providing you with knowledge of the customer’s journey so far and insight into the next stages of that journey. This insight enables you to schedule touch points when they will be most useful to the customer, or (in concert with marketing automation tools to know when a customer is ready for sales approaches about a new product line.