Customer service is not just any department in a company. It’s one that is necessary to build customer relationships and boost retention rate and loyalty. The customer service team interacts with your customer throughout the buyer journey and helps them have a delightful customer experience with your brand.
Today, customer service’s definition has evolved to meet customer demands. What used to be just answering questions and closing tickets reactively, today, customer service stands for delivering proactive and instant support to customers from anywhere, anytime.
How your customers contact your customer service has also advanced. Thanks to technological development, customers can connect with a company by phone, mail, SMS, chat, and more. To keep up with these changes, customer service needs strategic planning. In this article, we will answer why and how to build customer service.
Why do you need to have a customer service system developed?
To accentuate the importance of customers, companies came up with the slogan, “Customers are King.” While the saying might be old-school today, the concept stands the test of time. Companies go above and beyond to delight customers. And to achieve this, they need to build a customer service department.
A customer service system helps a company organize processes that are highly integrated and achieve the goal of seamless customer service. This system lets a company handle the volume and variation involved in customer service. It brings order to chaos.
A well-defined customer service system will determine the quality, productivity, and excellence of the customer service department.
Related: 5 Ways to Make Customer Support Automation as your Strategic Advantage
How to build a customer service system?
An efficient and effective customer service system will help you focus on creating exceptional customer experiences that’ll build a long-lasting relationship. Building it from scratch or on top of your existing team requires a clear path and structure to succeed.
Let’s look at the building blocks of how to build a customer service system.
Conceptualize your customer service
As the first step, you must have a vision for your customer service. And to understand how you want to serve your customers, begin with understanding the primary or common issues your customers face with your brand and how your customer service team supports them during this time.
Documenting each step will help you get a clear picture of what is going right and what is not. Based on this documentation and your vision, you can plan your next steps to building an efficient customer service team.
Identify customer communication channels
Today customers have many channel options to connect with companies—phone, email, SMS, website, social media platforms, and WhatsApp, to name a few. This is probably also the right time to figure out if these channels can be automated with the help of chatbots to handle the high volume of customer requests.
By identifying which channels YOUR customers are on, you can build your customer service system around them. It will ensure they have a way to initiate a customer support request from that platform. This exercise will help you bridge the communication gap, reduce friction and build a stronger bond.
Research tools required
Choosing the right components to support your customers and agents is the most crucial step in building customer service systems. For a functional approach, you need customer support AI tools that work together and efficiently to help you achieve your goal.
Every customer service department should have essential tools such as ticketing systems, help desk software, multiple communication channels, customer databases, internal team communication, and, most importantly, automation software such as chatbots to handle the high volume of tickets.
Build a knowledge base
Customers today want self-service. So, when building a customer service system, help them achieve that with a comprehensive knowledge base. A comprehensive help desk knowledge base will ensure your customers can find answers on their own at a time convenient to them.
If you want to improve the customer experience a notch more, you can automate this knowledge base with the help of a chatbot. Then, customers can easily find the right article in no time. As for your company, it’ll help you scale your customer service by doing more in less time.
Bring it all together
In the third point, we talked about the different components of a customer service system. To ensure all these tools talk to each other and perform efficiently, we need to connect them with integrations.
To build an effective strategy, you need to think through the workflows which connect these platforms in an actionable manner. The integrations will also reduce the manual work required and save time and costs involved in building customer service systems.
Measure the data
Once you’ve built your customer service, how will you know if it’s effective or not? Answer: by measuring it. To make an effective plan, you need to answer important questions such as, “Why are you reporting?” and “What do you plan to do with this data?”
By knowing why, what, how, and when, you can find a correlation between what you are doing and how it’s affecting your customer service system.
Improve and refine
No process is foolproof, and you learn as you go. Once a strategy is implemented, it needs to be constantly analyzed and changed to improve. Just as each drop makes an ocean, each change optimizes the process and helps the company achieve the customer service they had envisioned in the first step.
Tips for the customer service manager
Now that we know how to build a customer service system, let’s look at some tips managers should keep in mind.
1. Don’t wait for the customer to reach out to you. Best customer service is when customers don’t face any issues. Be proactive in future-proofing the customer service system.
2. Automate frequently asked questions and standard processes for high efficiency and instant resolution. Deploy a chatbot application.
3. Make use of social media platforms to reduce the load on call centers. Customers are anyway seeing your products on social channels. Let them stay on the same platform to connect with you too.
4. Build an omnichannel experience. By connecting all the channels, customers can jump from one channel to another without losing context.
5. Double down on self-service. By automating customer service systems, businesses can empower customers to find answers to their questions independently. This improves customer experience and reduces the load on agents.
6. Offer a live chat option when using automation. Some customers still prefer interacting with human agents to using automation software. To ensure a good customer experience, offer human handover at every stage.
7. Get customer feedback after every interaction. Customer service revolves around customers and their experience. By gathering their feedback, you can analyze how well the customer service system you built meets customer expectations.
8. Empower customer service agents with automation tools to improve their productivity and experience. Tools such as quick replies, 360-degree customer view, etc., help agents resolve customer queries quickly.
Conclusion
Building customer service is an ongoing process. Businesses need to adapt to advancements in technology and changing customer demands. Another factor that impacts how you build customer service is market conditions, which affect your budgets, team size, geography, etc.
No matter how you plan to change your customer service, your vision for customer service remains the same: help them find the right solution at the right time at their convenience. In other words, a delightful customer experience.
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