Your customer service team is the core of your business. In fact, how you respond to and handle complaints can make or break your company. Slow response times, less-than-courteous representatives and poor reputation management skills are the fastest way to lose your following.
But building a five-star customer service team takes time, planning and plenty of patience. Whether you a new startup looking to expand or an established business looking to overhaul your customer success team, below are five actionable steps you need to take.
Rethink the Onboarding Process
As invested as you are in your business, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities and not focus on the onboarding process. Who you hire plays an enormous role in your customer success rate.
In addition, you also need to remember that while you know your business inside and out, anyone you hire may not. It’s an ongoing process, which takes time to learn and perfect.
It’s at this point where revamping your onboarding process comes in. Your team needs to be well versed in the products and services your company provides and be able to guide customers during the buyer’s journey. This saves you and your customers time and money.
Engage with Your Customers
It may sound like a no-brainer, but the best way to achieve customer success is through your target audience. You need to identify who your target audience is and approach them the right way.
Customers who have had positive experiences with your brand are the backbone of your company. Find out what made their experience memorable and find ways to emulate that sentiment. Creating buyer personas should be your first order of business, especially when trying to create look-alike audiences.
Monitor During the Customer Journey
You need to be present for your customers through their entire journey. During the awareness stage, the more information you have, the better equipped you are to create unique experiences, throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Even in the awareness stage, you can connect with leads and find out what they like and dislike. You need to follow along to determine how their needs change, so you can accommodate.
Create Scalable Solutions
Once you do get your success program in gear, you need to create scalable solutions. Just like a marketing strategy, your game plan is never a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to nurture relationships along the way, making your efforts pay off. One of the easiest ways to make this happen is wit automation.
Streamline your customer service team tasks with email templates and style guides. You can also divvy up work evenly to avoid conflict. What goes on behind the scenes is just as important as what is front and center.
Create a Success Report
Regardless of your KPIs, you need to send out performance reports. This can include everything from customer service satisfaction reports to customer feedback about products.
You also include updates about the team process and set new benchmarks to meet. You need to highlight areas where your team superseded their own expectations but also educate about areas that need improvement.
Finally, focus on collaboration. Even if other departments aren’t on the front lines of customer service, what they do can still impact your overall success. Both sales and marketing teams should be involved and have the same action plan as the rest of your team.
Final Words
Customer satisfaction is the hallmark of success. Without it, even the most lucrative brands suffer. Optimize your company’s values and give your customers an experience of a lifetime