How To Streamline Customer Service
By Grace Murphy
Customer service is often a point that can use a lot of improvement in many companies, and it’s unfortunate to see so many business owners willfully neglect it simply because they assume it doesn’t play an important role in their operations. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a regular retail store, an eCommerce business, or something completely different – you must always put effort into streamlining your customer service if you want to survive on the market.
Provide Multiple Contact Methods
A common point of frustration is when companies don’t provide a sufficient number of different options for contacting them. Sometimes, calling a phone support line and waiting for an hour is the only option for getting in touch with a representative. This can lead to various long-term issues. For one thing, people who are frustrated with your services will either have no way of expressing that, or they will vent their frustration on someone completely incapable of addressing the problem. It also makes it more likely that certain issues will slip through the cracks and persist for far longer than they should, simply because nobody is aware that anything is wrong.
Automate Common Processes
Many customer service processes can be automated, if not fully, then at least partially. Resolving some of the most common problems boils down to working through a checklist – only when something doesn’t fit into that checklist is the issue escalated up the chain. This means that you can save a lot of manpower by investing in automation solutions that guide people through those common resolution steps.
This is becoming increasingly more affordable these days, to the point where some companies only use support specialists for tasks that pose an actual challenge. However, as useful as this may be, it must be carefully balanced against what we described above. You don’t want to create a situation where a customer finds themselves in an infinite loop of automated options with no way of escalating, simply because their problem is an edge case that was never considered.
Constantly Analyze Your Performance
Customer service is something that requires constant work to ensure everything is operating smoothly. It’s not the kind of operation that you set up once and forget about it. You should be constantly looking into ways to improve things and optimize in the right areas. If you’re not analyzing your support calls, for example, you’re missing out on a lot.
It’s not hard to get started – all you need to do is learn how to record a phone call, invest in a system for sorting and categorizing those calls, along with some additional data generated during them (such as specific points addressed by a customer), and then run all of that through a modern analytical system. OpenPhone has a helpful guide on getting started with how to record a phone call. It’s a great starting point for many reasons, as it also covers issues that sometimes get ignored, such as the legal implications of recording a phone conversation.
Not Every Complaint Should Be Taken At Face Value
You’re going to get lots of complaints once you get the ball rolling on improving your customer service. It’s inevitable – it’s not an indication that anything was wrong before, but simply the natural consequence of allowing people to express their frustration for the first time. Keep in mind that you should never take every single one of those comments at face value. Some will be the product of a lot of pent-up frustration and won’t reflect any actual issues with your business. You should still look into every complaint, of course, but try to read between the lines. And whenever a customer is specifically complaining about an interaction with one of your employees, get both sides before responding in any manner.
Build Up A Knowledge Base
One common problem in companies with poor customer service is that they don’t share enough information internally. Different departments – sometimes even employees from the same department – are left to their own resources, without being provided any common point of guidance or other indication of what’s actually expected of them as a team. This can lead to lots of obvious problems and building up a centralized internal knowledge base is one of the best things you can do to improve the long-term prospects of your customer service.
This is something that everyone should ideally participate in. Employees on all levels of the organization can have various valuable insights into the way things are running, and you should not ignore those. It will take a while to build up that knowledge base at first, but once you’ve got the project going, it will go a long way toward improving your customer service in the future, especially as you continue to bring new people on board. Having an established, streamlined onboarding process is invaluable in this context.
Take Advantage Of AI
As a minor extension to what we talked about above regarding constantly analyzing your performance, you should specifically look into AI-driven solutions. These are becoming increasingly easier to obtain and deploy these days, even without having specialists with knowledge in the field on your team. Many solutions are now designed to just run out of the box, and you’re going to be amazed by how much you can learn about your operations with their help. It can be a pretty significant investment in the beginning, sure – but it’s well worth it in the long run.
Streamlining your customer service should start with the above points. There is always more that can be addressed in those situations, sure – but starting from those areas should result in the biggest improvements at the start. From there, you can take what you’ve learned from your ongoing analysis to figure out what steps you should take next. This will vary from company to company and it’s impossible to predict what your own requirements will be, but as long as you’ve put enough effort into assessing the interactions between your customers and representatives, you’re going to spot various opportunities for improvement sooner or later.
About The Author
Grace Murphy is an experienced reviewer and journalist dedicated to sharing updates from throughout the business market, as well as reviews on the products and services you want to hear about. Small businesses across the corporate market have relied on her insight and knowledge to drive them forward for years.