In a time when customer service is considered a competitive advantage, unsatisfactory support is one of the main reasons why customers abandon companies. As customer expectations, propelled by the latest technological advancements, continuously evolve, customer service leadership has emerged as the main factor impacting the quality and efficiency of customer service.
Customer service leadership has emerged as the main factor impacting the quality and efficiency of customer service
Managers in customer service environments are expected to balance the budget, enhance team performance, and deliver an elevated customer experience. Daunting as the task might sound, customer service managers can inspire customer loyalty, increase employee satisfaction and keep costs down by utilising customer feedback.
In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how to use feedback as a tool to
- Enable personalized customer support
- Empower customer service agents
- Improve the customer service process
Deliver personalized customer support
According to Gladly, over 90% of customers would stop buying after a few bad experiences with support and 25% of them would jump ship just after one lousy experience. To keep up with and exceed rapidly evolving expectations, your customer service platform needs to be built to match customer wants and needs at a personal level. When it comes to personalized customer support, feedback is key as it enables you to better understand your customers and react to their issues accordingly. This is how:
Know your customer
Customer feedback data is mainly used to gauge customer sentiment after an interaction with support. Feedback data, however, can become extremely powerful when linked with customer information already in your Customer Relationship Management platform. Connecting feedback with your CRM platform will allow you to tap into information pertaining to previous interactions the customer has had with your brand across multiple points in their customer journey and deliver a personalized and memorable support experience informed by data relevant to that particular customer.
Act on customer feedback
Acting and reacting either to negative or positive feedback will boost your customer service efficiency and help your company grow. Immediately reacting to negative feedback means that you can turn a negative experience into a positive one, therefore, increasing customer satisfaction. Positive feedback will help you identify happy customers and provide you with up-selling or cross-selling opportunities. All it takes, for both scenarios to yield positive results, is to automatically route feedback insights to the hands of the right people or departments in the company.
Empower your customer service agents
Happy employees make for happy customers. Recent research shows that on average, in customer care organizations, agent turnover is between 30% – 45% and agent turnover cost can reach up to 20.000$ per agent, not accounting for costs involved with training new agents and the blow on team morale. Feedback management insights can be used to steer higher level leadership decisions to the right direction to avoid turnover and increase employee satisfaction. This can be accomplished by identifying coaching needs at an individual level and automating positive feedback to right people.
Identify individual coaching needs
By tracking customer feedback you can find out when new employees become profitable but, also, how newly acquired skills are making their way into customer interactions. Furthermore, with using feedback you can ensure that your training programs are informed by agent behavior and address real needs at an agent and not just team level.
According to Harvard Business Review, customer service agent personality types can differ. Feedback can help you better understand these personality types and tailor your coaching at an individual level. As a result, your agents will be more successful with performing their tasks and more satisfied with their role in your organization.
Automate positive feedback to your agents
Positive feedback on agent performance gives customer service managers a great opportunity to motivate employees or reinforce wanted behavior. Recognizing and celebrating good feedback aimed for the agent helps create a positive, empowering environment which is known to facilitate learning and boost performance.
Positive feedback can also foster a culture of shared leadership. When that is the case, employees take more responsibility both in internal process development and pro-customer decisions. This empowerment leads your team to increase productivity, deliver a better customer experience, and experience higher rates of employee satisfaction.
Improve the customer service process
Focusing on your customer service process can make a big impact on customer experience, employee performance, and the way you develop and improve operations. A good service process consists of a defined way of addressing common customer care scenarios and links all relevant internal structures, templates, policies, and system protocols.
Capturing feedback is the fastest and easiest way to monitor and measure the success of your customer service strategy
Capturing customer feedback can help you monitor and measure how well your service process is implemented and whether it needs rethinking or improving. This is how to use feedback to achieve that:
Pinpoint root causes of repeat issues
Repeat issues can be identified effectively and systematically utilizing customer feedback. Analyzing this feedback will lead you to understand the root causes behind those issues, address them in a timely manner and/or adjust your service process to deal with them faster and more efficiently. Feedback insights pertaining to repeat issues can also be rerouted to different organizational departments and inform decision making in terms of future product or service development.
Prioritize First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Fist Contact Resolution or FCR is one of the most important metrics when it comes to measuring service process efficiency and can give you a whole new perspective on what your customers think of the quality of the service received. Low FCR rates can lead to a spillover effect which might result in reducing customer loyalty by 10-30% and increase service costs by 50%. So, tracking FCR is key if you want to ensure that your customer service process is actually delivering the desired results – meaning really solving customer issues and not just patching them up.
To conclude, customer service leadership can highly benefit from a well-integrated feedback management solution that will provide actionable feedback data that can be used to reduce employee turnover, customer churn, and a costly customer service process.