Research has shown that a positive customer experience is often seen as added value within the customer service department. The report highlights that customer contact and business strategy are key elements of customer service. Consumers indicate that their loyalty to a brand is largely determined by the quality of the service they receive.
Service = Loyalty
In the research, consumers state that their loyalty to a brand is greatly influenced by the quality of the service they receive. In short: customers remain loyal when you invest in high-quality customer service.
How do you put this vision into practice?
1. Give customer service staff attention and freedom
According to the report, the best-performing service departments are almost twice as likely to empower their staff to provide personalised service compared to the worst-performing departments. Strict rules and tight guidelines seem necessary to offer consistency and quality in customer contact. However, in practice, this is not the case. It is much more important to properly train staff in skills and knowledge and to allow them to grow to a higher level with personal attention. This gives customer service staff the tools to make the right choices independently in every customer contact. This freedom ensures that customer service staff enjoy their work more and are motivated to improve themselves. This process naturally begins with hiring the right people. Valuing skills, the willingness and ability to learn, and function independently is just as important.
2. Use smart technology
Another condition for giving customer service staff freedom is to use smart technology. The staff must have easy access to the right information. Smart technology ensures that customer service staff do not need to memorise everything but have direct insight. An example of this is that systems 'recognise' customers, providing the staff immediate insight into previous contacts and agreements with the specific contact. At ContactCare, we have developed such a system ourselves, MyCare. Combined with Nixxis and Slack, this software ensures that staff always have access to the information they need.
3. Ensure synergy within the organisation
The report, 'State of Service', emphasises the importance of extensive collaboration between service departments on one hand and sales and marketing departments on the other. More than two-thirds of respondents indicate they are committed to company-wide initiatives regarding customer experience. This includes an understanding of each other's ways of working and support for each other's tasks. This way, the departments do not become isolated islands but work collectively as a company on customer experience. This can be achieved by offering transparency in the service department. A first step in this can be to let first-line staff conversations be reviewed by colleagues from other departments. When a phone conversation pertains to a particular department, those colleagues can provide feedback on the reviewed conversation. This way, quality is enhanced and everyone remains engaged with customer contact.
The marketing department determines the communication style that best fits the target audience and the organisation itself. This way of communicating should be implemented throughout the entire company. Both the CEO giving a lecture and the first-line customer contact staff assisting a customer should speak the same language. This can only be achieved when everyone within the organisation has the company DNA running through their veins. This is created by a common goal: serving customers as best as possible.
