How to drive High performance growth with customer service?

Whether you are a well-established firm or just starting to scale
and grow, a successful customer service team can help you to grow your business,
boost retention and increase sales among your existing  customer bases. Customer
service is not about just resolving the questions it’s about building long-term relationships with the customers. Customers expect quick, easy, and effective service
and they are willing to switch if they don’t get it. Many business leaders say
that customer service has a positive impact on their company’s growth like an increase in net promoter score, increase in retention, customer loyalty,
increase in cross-sell.

After understanding the importance many organizations have
set priorities for Customer Support Team like driving better customer
experience, improving efficiency, driving stronger customer relationships, increasing
customer satisfaction, and sustaining the quality of support.

To build a highly effective customer service team it is also
important to see things not only from implementing technology but also by
building efficient processes and hiring the correct people to run the department.

If you are starting a new support team, immediately hire a Customer
Support Center Manager or Head of Support department so that he can execute the
below aspects:

Establish a core team and assign a team leader to specific agents focused on weaving customer service into the company’s strategic roadmap and
business objectives.

Incentivize quality improvements: Advocate that
compensation of team leaders be directly tied to customer service performance
to ensure buy-in at the highest levels.

Benchmark performance: Track customer service
performance relative to others in the industry to get a baseline, define goals
for improving customer service quality, and frequently monitor performance to adjust,
as needed, in real-time. (Example if the average CSAT of your industry peer is
around 93%. It can be taken as a baseline, and you could set 95% as a threshold target. 

Keep leadership in the loop: Ensure the core team
provides regular updates to leadership so they’re aware of evolving customer
service plans and metrics. Create opportunities for customer service insights
to play a greater role in larger company policy and strategy.

Focus on business impact: Create opportunities for
agents to drive profits through upselling and cross-selling, informed by a deep
understanding of the customer’s immediate needs. Establish a separate profit
and loss statement that captures revenue generated by agents so the link
between customer service and business growth is more tangible.

Track data beyond CSAT: Identify and track key
metrics associated with quality customer service. Most organizations start with
CSAT but fostering an organization-wide understanding of the importance of
indicators like first response time, average handle time, Net Promoter Score
(NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES) creates multiple lenses for viewing the
quality and progress of your customer experience efforts.

 Integrate systems:
Integrate customer service and CRM platforms to monitor changes in customers
and their lifetime value. Sharing data between these platforms can lead to the
discovery of personalized, relevant solutions to customer issues that otherwise
wouldn’t be considered.

Review performance frequently: Conduct weekly reviews
of key performance metrics and corresponding revenue projections that reveal
low-hanging fruit and other opportunities to iterate on ways to improve customer
service quality.

Key important factors which clients expect from a customer
service team:

1)     
Offer multiple support to reach out like Email/Chat
& Phone

2)     
Avoid asking for repetitive information

3)     
Want personalized support

4)     
Want issue to be resolved at first contact

5)     
Want information to be available on the self-service
portal

Key important factors which support agent expects from a customer
service team

1)     
Manageable workload: Customer support agents are expected to handle a manageable workload so that they can balance their
health. Too much pressure on workload impacts the quality and it directly impacts
the customer satisfaction score. Hence it leads to employee churning out from
the company. So as a Customer Support Leadership Team you should regularly keep
an eye on Employee Utilization and ensure that it is always balanced so
that they are happy.

2)     
More training: Customer support agents
expect regular training so that they are aware of how to handle questions
that they encounter from customers. Lack of training leads to bad customer
satisfaction score. So customer support leadership team should ensure that they
have Cross training/Knowledge transfer processes in place to ensure that
everything works effectively well for the employee.

3)     
Showing their Performance DATA: Customer
Support Agents should know the Metrics used to measure their performance. Customer support leadership should communicate the Metrics to them and should give them
real-time access to check how they are performing daily, weekly, and on a monthly
basis. Also, their Performance rating should be shared every month so that they
are aware of their score and how to improve on them.

 Career Advancement opportunities:  Customer support agent always expects to know
what their next career growth in the department. So, leadership team should always demonstrate to them about various parameters which will be
measured to promote him/ her to the next level in the department. Lack of guidance
will dissatisfy support employees and that will have a direct relationship with
his/her performance.