Delivering great customer service
Kate Leggett of Forrester recently wrote an article entitled Customer Service Done Right In 10 Easy Steps: Step 10 that offered helpful tips for organizations looking to improve their customer service levels and better align customer needs with their strategic goals.
These two tips are worth exploring:
1. “Master your customer service strategy”: Leggett asserts that one of the ways to master strategy is “knowing your customers and understanding how they want to interact with you and using this information in your strategy to align customer service with your company brand.” Customers have many options in terms of where and how they would like to engage with your company. As a result your priority is to have an effective system in place to seek out and understand customer behaviors, wants and needs, and their preferred method of communication. This information then needs to be linked to strategy through team work. Delivering great customer service is a team effort that involves the close collaboration and interaction of employees with customers and business partners.
2. “Choose the right customer service technology”: Leggett believes that great customer service applications must have the ability to improve the communication between customer service managers, product managers, marketing and sales teams. Furthermore the right customer service technology enables team members to access past customer interactions and, as Leggett explains, have the ability to “map communication channels to customer issues so that customers can find answers to their questions” in a timely and cost-effective manner.