Does this sound like you? Is your company facing rapid growth, expansion into new markets or addressing new product and services demands?
During day-to-day operations you always experience some challenges, particularly within a company that is transitioning from startup to maturity. Key operational issues demand immediate attention to avoid offending your precious friendly customers, and the wrong or delayed reaction will cause clients to lose patience and even give up on your company. Starting a business or adding a new product line to an existing business always introduces a new set of challenges on top of the already ongoing operational challenges. Things go wrong, that’s life! Do you have the time to deal with new set of challenges when you know your attention should be focused on your goals and strategies to grow your business?
There are many issues new companies, products or services must address, but in this blog, we want to focus on the top three concerns:
- establishing an operational department that focuses on customer service, a customer focused mentality and commitment to excellence;
- overcoming the chief challenges all service departments face; and
- establishing a product innovation process that supports the company growth without overwhelming the best and brightest on your team.
On the surface, it seems easy to manage customer service. After all, if we put well-mannered individuals on a support line and answer each call, everyone should be happy, right? Well, not exactly—a quick on-line search indicates that most beginner customer service teams face similar challenges. Approaching the ongoing operational challenges with a best practices process approach to deal with issues in a timely manner, with minimal disturbance to the organization while the company works to improve service levels by eliminating the root causes over time based on the experience of a mature operational team.
Even simple issues introduce demanding problems. Number one on the list is not anticipating the level of support and the number of calls, leading to the “long waits on hold.” Newly founded departments are plagued by waits on hold, changes of personnel during a call to get the proper expert on the line to resolve an issue, and the dreaded “repetition” of the problem, where a suffering client must repeat their difficulty over and over to different people. We expect that your team is not disinterested or rude, but what happens if the problem can’t be resolved on a first call?
Frankly, it is common for service organizations, especially new departments to be chaotic. Often resources are pulled from various departments like development to keep a friendly customer happy or address an angry rant from an unhappy client. In the meantime, planned work comes to a standstill. In order to keep your current business, you divert future focused personnel from their important work to address short term challenges.
Studies show that 70% of customer churn can be avoided if the service request is fulfilled during the first interaction. When a service call arrives, cheerful and polite personnel should quickly determine the urgency of the situation. A customer response playbook should be used to educate your staff for quick response, and if the customer is pressed for time, try to resolve the case in the first call but don’t waste time repeating steps or researching irrelevant information. New employees don’t have the experience to manage these calls. But making this happen with diverted experts from other departments presents a new challenge: those resources are most likely demotivated by the operational chaos, now forced to do work that they weren’t hired to address and probably don’t like. This forced “all hands-on deck” response lowers moral and increases the risk of losing your most valuable and experienced resources. Suddenly the problem becomes even bigger.
Most important, if the fundamental problem is a challenge to your team and there is no clear answer, your people need the guidance to politely request a call back and explain why calling in an expert will yield a faster resolution. Will a team of experts assembled from your development and product teams really be prepared to politely manage upset people?
But why is customer service distracting you from reaching goals? Poor product performance or new product or feature request is another major challenge for a growing organization. Let’s be honest: part of this feedback is the exact input you need to better your business, new enhancement ideas and directions for new feature development, but you need a process to separate the really important information from the known bugs in a current product or deficiencies in education and training that would eliminate the complaints.
A great customer service staff expects complaints to occur and can quickly judge whether the issue is a fundamental problem in the product or is only because the customer is using your product wrong. A skilled team will know how to evaluate the complaint and how to keep the clients from turning away to your competitors. Build a team that happily educates customers, looks for their needs and teaches them how to successfully use your product, and never belittles a client for user error.
One way you can improve first call resolution rates is to add self-service support options to your company’s website. Tools like community forums and a knowledge base can help customers find their own solutions and avoid service calls altogether. This creates a more enjoyable and convenient service experience for your customers.
Award winning customer service teams have a reliable and tested process for managing customer expectations, resolving issues and following up with the clients to ensure no buyer’s remorse” after the fact. They need to clearly communicate expectations and response times. Constant reports and consistent follow up indicate that your company both cares about the individuals and is professional and competent in their follow up.
And the customer service staff needs a complete process to determine and collect new features or product enhancement ideas to submit to your development team without interrupting that department’s more important role in your growth plans. Customer service teams encounter new feature requests on daily basis. If your product or service isn’t a perfect fit to all of your customers’ needs, they will propose a new product or feature. Sometime these ideas hold the gem of a great new direction, while others respond to a specific use-cases that will not serve the bulk of your customer base. A solid process will allow first line evaluation of the applicability of the suggestion and the best way to submit those new ideas to the appropriate members of the company.
It’s important to know, you don’t have to face these struggles on your own. Solving that problem by outsourcing your operational work to OPSgrok will eliminate the risk of diverting your best and brightest from their important goals, lower the disturbance and chaos within your organization, and ensure your company retains your most valuable resources dedicated to the projects they were hired for and actually do best. At OPSgrok we have field proven professional processes and a well-trained, experienced staff to support a complete customer service function. We can augment or relieve your team of these challenges while providing processes and documentation that supports your goals. Our conscientious and well-mannered staff is adept at handling to most difficult of clients. Need a “playbook” to address customer service concerns? OPSgrok has the experience to assist you in the crafting of a focused and thorough response plan. We employ a state-of-the-art ticketing systems and procedures refined through years of experience, and we can help your team focus on the growing the business rather than “putting out fires.” Whether you need assistance establishing a department, support for an expanding department or a reliable out-source partner, OPSgrok is ready to come to your aid.
