Creating an excellent customer service experience is one of the most challenging things to do, especially when there’s an extremely high volume of service/support tickets. I’ve been working in this field for over 15 years, but I still get the shivers and get into a postponing cycle when I need to call or email customer service to handle my stuff.
The main reasons for that for me (and for most customers are as follows):
- Waiting a long time on the line listening to repetitious and annoying elevator music and announcements regarding the long waiting time or anticipating an email without having any indication when I’ll get it.
- Getting into a cookie cutter cycle of robotic processes which the agent follows without any relation to what I’ve been explaining or getting into a similar interchange over email (which is even worse because again no indication when I’ll get a response)
- Issue resolved? Great, oh wait, it isn’t, but it looked like they closed the request. Crap, I need to go through this again with a new person (including explaining all over again what occurred before, like there is no documentation)
So even after everything is sorted, all I remember is an awful service experience, and if you find yourself nodding your head to these points, you realize this is the new norm of customer service.
This is good and bad because fixing these issues is not as hard as it might look. Bad because providing a better service than this shouldn’t be the exception. It should be the norm.
At the end of the day, when we contact a company, whether it’s for a service-related issue or a technical problem, I want to be able to:
- Get someone fast and if I email, get a response that tells me when I can expect to hear back
- Have the rep handling my call, listening to me, asking very good and concise leading questions which makes my request or query clear
- Being provided with a good answer and have the issue troubleshoot efficiently to get to a solution (which sticks, not an easy fix which will cause further problems.
- The ability to come back to the same rep in the odd chance the issue isn’t resolved and get a quick response, or alternatively get to someone who is available but knows the history
Now, these should be the core objectives of every team. How to get there will vary depending on a lot of factors. Here are some tips which I think can benefit everyone.
1. Tone and Messaging
Let’s get one thing straight, the best service feels personalized and can fool us to feel like it is done just for us. When in fact, most chances it’s not, and it’s a canned response created to lead the rep to the point of understanding your issue and saving time.
I believe in canned responses because at the end of the day, It’s efficient, it can help guide the process of helping the customer, and it is a tool to make sure you pass your message and create the settings for a specific dynamic between you and the customer, but it’s also a double-edged sword.
It can (and most likely will) take some of your service reps into a lazy comfort zone, and even worse, in many companies, different people write these comments, each bringing a different writing style and tone. So, here are two tips on how to do it right:
- Designate one person who is skilled, and you are impressed by their tone of customer response and the dynamic they create with customers to re-work all your predefined comments to get a concise tone and messaging. Make sure that even if everyone contributes (which is recommended) to the canned response pool, that person edits all of them.
- Do not limit your team to the canned response. Encourage them to customize the responses before sending to the customer, removing the un-needed steps and adding new ones which are needed. Bottom line, a script is needed, but it needs to be flexible enough to allow needed deviations.
- You can also measure how effective the responses are! Check at the number of touches, time to resolution and reopen rate to get an indication of where you might have an issue.
2. Online chat as a major tool for improving the communication with your customers
If you are not utilizing it already, consider adding a live chat option to your service channels. You will be surprised at what a difference it can make. If we look at the problems I’ve raised above and what chat can do to mitigate them:
- Chat is online and unlike phone calls, it’s much more scalable. A rep can do multiple chats at the same time (3-4 is the max from my experience one can do experience).
- Chat is more personal then email and some information are easier to explain in writing, whether it’s copying or pasting an email or log-line, sending a screenshot or doing a live remote session. It’s also immediate.
- Most chat systems will allow you to set a configuration where customers can get to the agent who handled them last automatically (providing they are available), even if not, unlike email and phone, you are not only relying on internal comments left by the last rep, you have the entire transcript with the customer as a reference.
Suppose you are using or planning to use live chat, one last tip. The advice about messaging and tone above is even more critical. Especially considering the easier you make it on your agent with good predefined responses, the easier it will be for your team to handle multiple chats and for the customer to get great answers quickly.
3. It’s not just about the quantity. Put an emphasis on Quality
The most common mistake for customer services leadership is to focus on quantitative metrics, like the number of tickets/calls handled, waiting time, and immediate customer satisfaction scores.
These metrics are essential, but you can still provide fast support and end up with a satisfied customer (for the short term). Yet give a service which is not good in terms of quality. Try measuring other stuff like the number of touches re-open rate, and send a delayed customer satisfaction survey (can be tested, but I recommend 12 hours to 48 hours) to better understand the quality of treatment/solution after it resonated.
