5 Ways to Manage Your Customer Service Strategy

No matter whether you are starting your business from the ground up, changing your entire plan completely, or want to strengthen your current approach, an effective and actionable customer service strategy is important for all businesses. A robust customer service strategy will aid your team in handling all your customer service interactions throughout the customer journey smoothly, with the key goal of elevating customer happiness. In the absence of a proper customer service vision for your company, strategy for collecting feedback easily understood guiding principles, and systematic approach, customer experience is unlikely to improve.

A lot of brands strive to provide a consistent experience throughout all channels. But doing so can be pretty difficult unless you take a step back and try to develop a winning customer support strategy. Here are some of the ways a company can manage its customer service strategy more competently:

● Regularly communicate and engage with customers:  From reviews and surveys to VOC and other tracking systems, companies ideally must try to constantly communicate and collect data to determine customer satisfaction much after they have made a purchase. 

Companies that have a high growth rate are more likely to understand the sentiments and thoughts of the customers about their brand. A few of the most successful strategies included collecting direct feedback with the help of a satisfaction survey and tracking customer happiness. Finding out such information need not be too expensive or difficult. One must continue to reach out to buyers throughout the after-sales process and customer journey. You can ask them to complete surveys or monitor reviews to make positive changes in the customer service process and make sure that the customers feel heard.

● Close the feedback loop: When it comes to feedback, apart from collecting it, companies must also find means to properly acknowledge it. In case a customer reaches out to explain their negative experiences or ends up writing a less-than-stellar review on social media, you would have an opportunity to understand how they view your brand. Closing the feedback loop would help you to directly respond to customer responses, no matter whether they are negative or positive. 

You can continue the conversation by offering to make changes or asking them to try your brand again by offering a discount to reduce churn. In case a customer leaves a positive review and brands respond with a thank you, doing so can augment brand loyalty and help turn passive consumers into promoters. Proactive customer service will involve reaching out to customers in such a manner.

● Creating a longstanding program:  One of the best ways to augment employee and customer engagement would be to encourage them to interact more and become brand promoters. Developing long-term programs that are dedicated to understanding the customers provides great opportunities to receive and study feedback, and ultimately turn it into action. Customer-facing programs like referrals and rewards make existing customers feel like their individual experience is truly valuable, while also introducing new consumers to the service or product in an exciting manner from a trustworthy friend.

● Invest in self-service solutions: Self-service solutions aid customers to help themselves. Much like how the self-checkout system at the supermarket can help shoppers who are in a rush, and simply need to purchase a few items fast, using tools like chatbots and other types of automation can help create improved experiences for online shoppers. As these tools can receive answers to their questions fast, they help in saving the time of the organization quite a bit.  With the growth in both business and customer experiences, the usage of self-service tools can help enable everyone to have a better experience.

● Leverage automation to create a personalized experience: Maintaining customer service experiences is majorly about consistently improving interactions consumers have with your brand. At a high level, doing so would mean knowing the customer history and facilitating personalized interactions, to treat them like a person and not a transaction number. More specifically, this can be about offering them distinctive offers and opportunities that they would like.  It is not easy to know customers personally. Doing so takes a lot of time and effort. It is not practical to expect a customer service team to gain an understanding of the intricacies of each customer. However, that is where having automation and a unified customer data platform can help. Smart chatbots with access to unified customer data can be used to the advantage of a business. Even though artificial intelligence of this nature is not a replacement for your staff, it can be a simpler way to make customers feel heard. You can use automation to make customer experiences more immediate, while not sacrificing the personalization aspect.

The number of customers making their purchases online is increasing with every passing day. Hence, it has become crucial for you to upgrade your digital customer service strategy in hand with their distinctive in-person interactions.  In addition to using self-service tools and automation to collect data fast and diagnose issues, digital systems need to be integrated with discerning other information stores to allow for a seamless customer experience.

Your customers would desire access to support in the medium that is most convenient to them at a certain point in time. For example, in case they are shopping on your mobile app for the very first time and face navigation issues, they must be provided with means to contact customer service within the app, without having to switch devices. Providing customers with a simple, hands-off experience is important for all businesses today.

As you try to create and maintain a well-planned customer support strategy, it is prudent that you expect to make certain changes to your processes along the way. As you ultimately receive customer feedback and data, there is a good chance that you might uncover untapped opportunities that help in improving customer experiences. You must always try to use insights from customer feedback and advice to the best of your ability to benefit your brand.

Author Icon
Wolken Software