Perspectives on Gold Star Customer Service

Delivering a great customer experience is a mandate from most CEO’s. The customer experience ideally encompasses every interaction of the customer with your product or service. This means it could include marketing, sales, digital assets like website or app, account management, delivery, customer service etc. In this post, I would cover some perspectives on building Gold Star Customer Service.

For limiting the scope of what we talk here, let us take an example of typical customer service with channels such as inbound calls, outbound calls, chat bot, WhatsApp bot and emails. What could be some of the perspectives to make this customer service team deliver a great customer experience.

For any kind of service build up, it is important to align it with the company values. Any misalignment on values would accentuate later in the game and start to show up in cross functional alignments, project prioritisation etc. So it is better to write down the values you want this team to deliver in alignment with the company values.

Secondly when you start to think about building a gold star customer service, it is important to put some KPI’s on how would you measure this service. You could put some goals on metrics like queue time, resolution time, on call resolution, first call resolution, CSAT, NPS, self serve, % call drops or abandoned or define a composite metric like customer pain etc.

Make sure to benchmark your current KPI’s so that you can measure the displacements.

In order to achieve these goals and building a customer service which your customer’s love; I suggest looking at multiple perspectives. Some of the perspectives you need look at include process, technology & UX, data and people. Let us look them in more detail.

Process Perspective for customer service

In any digital transformation journey, processes play a very important role. In fact, in my view it is important to put focus on the processes before you bring in Technology layer and not the other way round. Yes, processes need to be agile and context aware; but they are the most important perspective.

For process perspective for customer service you should look at:

• The SOP’s needed to resolve all kinds of customer queries
• Define leadership and functional ownership for different sets of issues or queries
• Setup escalation management and root cause analysis (followed with actionable items)
• Define or re-define your SLA’s
• Agree on OLA’s with cross functional teams keeping in view your goals on metrics
• Setup a knowledge repository and continuous learning guidelines

Depending on the context of your business, you may even want to look at short/medium and long term capacity or manpower planning and a strategy to manage the peaks (for short spurts in your business cycles).

Technology & UX Perspective for customer service

In today’s digital transformation age; you cannot look away from Technology or UX for long if you need to build a gold class customer service. The technology goes far and beyond and helps to manage effective operations as well as serving customers.

There is a long list of things to look at in the Technology and UX perspectives

• For inbound calls look at a tight integration and real time visibility with your telecom and telephony partner
• CRM (customer relationship management) product
• Backward integrated bots including chat bots and WhatsApp bots
• Cross channel integrations (bots to calls to emails etc)
• Enhancing discoverability of your customer service on your digital assets
• Contextual awareness of bots (predicting customer query based on where they are in their journey)
• FAQ’s and help section on your digital assets (including text, images and videos)
• Ease of use of technology stack for your service agents
• IVR designs for ease of use

Of course, depending on your current context, some of these would take priority over the others. You could use the project prioritisation framework to build relative priority.

Data Perspective for customer service

Data plays an extremely crucial role in enhancing your operations and planning for the future. It can also play a role in prioritising the interventions for maximising the gains. Here is my view on the data perspective to build a gold standard customer service.

• Automated data dashboards to track operational metrics with ability for managers to intervene and correct course
• Weekly, monthly reporting in various cuts and dimensions
• Building CSAT and NPS attribution models
• Volume forecasting for capacity planning and workforce scheduling
• Prompting and suggesting personalised actions based on a customer 360 view

People Perspective for customer service

Last but definitely not the least, it is important to look at the people perspective for landing a great customer service. With the latest technology trends around zero touch service or low touch service, in my view you would still have a good percentage of customers looking for a manual touchpoint for years to come. I’m sure you have been irritated with badly designed calling or bot options which keep taking your round and round while you really want to talk to an actual human.

So while we keep improving zero touch or low touch models, for now let us keep our focus on this important people perspective including:

• Defining and ideal persona for the agents
• Mapping of agents on this persona and creating an individual development plans
• Values and soft skills training
• Product and service related trainings
• Incentive policies
• Personalised interventions based on day to day performance
• Recruitment and employee journey management

Once you have defined and aligned these perspectives within the organisation, it comes to about doing an effective execution.

I hope these perspective would help streamline your thoughts on building a gold star customer service. For any questions, please write to me on mohit@moonshotscaling.com