When you’re planning customer service process you need to take into consideration what your customers will be expecting and the impression you want to give.
The first thing to consider is what is your point of difference? Do you want your business to be known for having the best prices? Or do you want to be known for having the best service? Whichever it is, it needs to be part of your customer service process.
Price
If price is going to be your point of difference you need to know what your customers’ price expectations are. There’s two options, either you have the lowest price; or you have the best value for money.
Lowest Price
If you want to offer the lowest price you need to offer your clients a price guarantee. Make it a key part of your marketing and repeat it often to manage expectations from your customers. Nobody expects great service from someone with the lowest price. Automate services as much as possible as a way to save on staffing costs. If necessary, consider an option to provide extra services at an additional fee. It is important though to make sure that when service is necessary, it’s good service. Don’t think that lowest price means you can treat customers badly, or ignore their complaints. Managing expectations is vitally important.
Best Value
If best value is your offering, the first thing to do is to find out what best value is. Once you’ve decided what that is, look to provide a reasonably good level of customer service. Make sure to advertise all the things that go into creating value. That may include discounts, bonuses and extra gifts, loyalty cards etc. Whatever it is, if you’re not publicising it your customers probably won’t know about it and won’t see the value. It’s not easy for customers to see value in offerings where it’s not pointed out to them. What any one person perceives as valuable is probably different from another person.
Service
To have service as your key point of difference, again, you need to know exactly what do your customers consider to be good service? There are three areas of service that you can differentiate by:
Quick Service
If you want to provide super quick service as a point of difference, you’ll probably be marketing a “no waiting” or “## minutes or it’s free” message. To keep customers happy you need to have enough customer service staff to handle queries quickly – the easiest and most cost effective way to do this is to cross train staff so they can help with sales or dispatch if that’s busy and jump in to take customer service calls when the demand is high. You should also consider offering self-help portals including a well written and frequently updated FAQ. Multiple contact avenues are also a bonus – if your customers can choose to contact you via phone, email, social media, live chat or whatever else works best for them you’ll increase their satisfaction levels as long as the response time isn’t diminished.
Full Service
If you want to offer a full service or comprehensive service where customers get VIP treatment, usually at a premium price, account reps are a great idea. Then one person can work with a customer from the start to finish of their contacts with a company. It’s also beneficial to have well documented processes so that staff members can easily deal with issues and to prevent incidences of having to go back to the customer as much as possible. If you’re offering a VIP service multiple contact avenues are also great to allow customers to be in the driver’s seat with their company contacts.
Friendly & Personal
Lastly, there’s friendly and personal service. If you’re wanting to offer this service, you need to be sure you have highly motivated and well trained customer service staff that not only know how to provide great service but who want to delight customers every time. That can only be achieved with a combination of knowledge and support from the company, particularly direct line managers. Nobody will ever be able to provide consistently outstanding service when being pushed to reach targets. Another useful element is a personalised online portal, allowing customers to log in and interact with staff, check up on their orders and track progress. Lastly, to ace personalised service you need to have a great and often updated CRM. I’m sure we all have some sort of CRM, but the processes need to be in place to note all customer interactions in the CRM. That way, no matter who a customer speaks to, they don’t have to retell their story time and time again.
If you keep all these in mind when you’re planning customer service process you’re likely to be able to fulfil the needs of your customers easily.
