Customer Experience is the new marketing
In our highly connected and competitive world it’s important to stand out through great customer experience and service. It can set you apart from your competition and ensure you treat your customers with respect.
Customer Support teams are often on the front line of your business and are some of the most obvious brand ambassadors.
Customer experience is the new marketing – people rave about great experience, it’s actually not hard to stand out in a sea of terrible customer experience, and it will help to reduce costs from churn and acquisition and brand damage.
Get your customer support right and you’ll keep customers, build brand advocates and delight the customer.
Why build a great customer support team?
When you start building and selling any sort of product you will need to start supporting it.
Even if your product is high quality (which is of course, subjective) you will still have questions about it, or returns/refunds and other reasons your customers may want to get in touch with you.
Customer experience is about many aspects and dimensions from use, price, service and more. In this short guide I will focus on the teams supporting or servicing customers – a key aspect of customer experience.
Here’s the high level summary:
- Build relationships with your customers
- Optimise your tools and process for your customer’s benefit
- Solve problems once
- Don’t use metrics for individual performance reviews
- Measure everything, but use it to improve the process
- Provide the best environments you can
- Encourage Process Improvement
- Build Relationships with other teams
- Staple Yourself to a customer issue
- Quadruple your communications
- Follow up on all issues in a timely fashion
- Align your team
- Stop all negativity about customers
- Make it easy for customers (internal and external) to talk to you
Build relationships with your customers
Building relationships with your customers will pay tenfold. Many people say they don’t have time to build relationships but it doesn’t take much to message them, field a call, listen to them, dig into the data about their account and show you are there for them.
Your ability to do this will depend on scale and location of course, but it’s entirely possible to build a relationship little by little.
Some companies have so many customers that this task alone would be overwhelming, but contacting each customer and saying “We are here for you” will open the gates to a stronger relationship if you can do it.
Social networks, email and chat tools also allow you to get to know your customers, their businesses, their challenges and what problems your product is solving for them.
Introduce people in your customer support team to your customers. Wouldn’t it be great if they know the person they are speaking to?
Tell your customers what expertise your team have and what roles they fulfil. This has the effect of humanising your team and it will make your customer communications with you all together more personable.
If you and your team build relationships with your customer, you will build in a level of care and trust you simply wouldn’t get if you don’t know the person on the end of the phone.
This is customer support in a nutshell – providing the tailored experience they desire. They should not have to bend and conform to your processes. They are not standard. They are exceptional.
Optimise your tools and process for customer support
You should be using tools only if they optimise life for your customers, not just for yourself.
It’s common for people to optimise their tools and processes for themselves only, thus degrading their core function; the support of their customer.
Your inbound contact system, your CRM, your issue management process, your internal hardware and your communications process are all areas for optimisation. But try to do this to improve your service for your customer, not for delivering internal metrics or creating paths of least resistance for individuals and managers.
Optimising for both yourself and your customers is perfect, but your customer’s needs should always be more important than yours.
Without your customers you have nothing. If you have to jump through hoops of fire (metaphorically) to provide great customer support, then so be it.
Solve problems once
Instead of each member of the team solving the same problem each time they encounter it, try to solve it once and remove the root cause.
If the problem is related to the product or service, then could you work out how to fix the product, so customers no longer encounter it?
If the problem is related to the process surrounding the customer (training, onboarding etc), what could you do to remove the problem?
Instead of solving and digging each time a problem is raised, solve it once and fix the problem.
Don’t use metrics for individual performance reviews
The time you start using arbitrary targets and metrics to motivate, measure and reward your team, is the time you start introducing ways to destroy the customer experience for your customer.
Targets such as time on call, number of up-sells, number of resolved cases, cases in queues etc. can drive the wrong behaviour.
When you have customers with problems the important metrics are whether you solved the problem, and how fast you solved it.
Customer support is about reducing friction and increasing the rewards. If your customer has a problem, they don’t care what happens in your company to resolve it, they care about having the problem solved. And quickly.
Focus on measuring this - then optimise the fix any internal challenges or friction to providing that support.
When teams are managed by individual metrics and targets they begin to change the system of work to meet the targets, rather than to provide support to your customers. This is why any metrics and targets used should be in line with your team’s purpose, from the customer's perspective. Which is to say - how can you remove problems for the customer in the first place? And deal with any problems they do have smoothly and quickly.
Misplaced targets and metrics manifests itself in various ways such as the bouncing of issues around departments, partial solutions meaning the customer has to call back again at a later date, issues that get ignored, and a general culture of looking after individual performance levels rather than the support provided to customers.
I once saw a team bouncing customer cases between teams (queues) just as the weekly measurement snapshot was taken. Why? So the number of cases in their queue was low and they avoided being “told off”. Who suffers in this situation? The customer.
Your customer has an issue – solve it and work out how to reward/measure your team by some other mechanism.
Measure carefully, and use it to improve the process
Measure only the things that you need to improve the business. A measure that is created, captured and reported on - but not seen or used, is waste.
The test of a good measure is that helps you make the business better (against your purpose) and allows you to gain insights for making a decision.
There's an obsession with big data, AI and reporting. There's a belief that we can measure everything, just in case. We can, but should we? Not if we're not going to use it, see it or make decisions from it. That's merely putting energy and attention into something that is waste.
Measurements can tell you important things. They can point you at trends and patterns. They can help you reduce waste in the system and they can help to tell compelling stories. They can tell you whether you're meeting your purpose, how your system of work is performing and how happy you customers are.
However, numbers alone won’t give you answers to your problems, but they will help you identify ways to make your service better for the customer.
Customer support excellence comes from understanding your customer, how they use your products/service, what keeps them engaged in your company and how they like to be communicated with. And of course, dealing with queries, questions and problems quickly and professionally.
Measure things like cycle time (i.e. how long customer cases stay in your system), the lifetime value of a customer, cost to acquire, how frequently they contact you, patterns of issues (it could highlight a training challenge or product glitch) and how successfully you solve customer problems.
Use measurements to find patterns and anomalies not to reward individuals. Try to avoid turning these measures in to targets – that’s when behaviour will change and not always for the better.
Provide the best environment you can
Provide an environment that is comfortable, well equipped and suitable for your team to get work done.
If your team need more than one monitor (which I suspect, they do) then sort it out. If they need test environments or hardware to replicate issues, then sort it out for them.
If they need training to run systems queries or to learn more about dealing with argumentative customers, then provide it.
Provide internal training sessions and opportunities for your team to share knowledge. Provide the best phones, tech and computers you can. Provide quiet areas to make sensitive phone calls, provide standing desks to keep them alive longer, but most of all provide them with a safe environment to question how things are done.
Make it the norm to have robust and honest conversations about improvement. Don’t let them work in fear. I suspect your customers will suffer if you do.
Encourage Process Improvement
There are always things to improve. Always. Teams and people can always be better. Customer experience is the art of getting better at providing a great support.
Provide a way to get improvements noticed and worked on. Provide a way for your team to change the environment for the better, ideally without always asking for permission.
Give them the opportunity (and training) to understand how to improve their work. They already know what needs improving (trust me) but it’s your job, as a manager or team lead, to provide an environment where they can make these improvements.
Listen to your team, engage with your team and take on board their ideas. Even if you cannot change everything, the act of listening to people will make them feel included in the process.
There will always be things that cannot be changed; explain the reasons why honestly.
Build Relationships with other teams
If you support a product or service, then you no doubt have a delivery team, sales, marketing etc.
Get to know them and break down the barrier between teams. Do this with all teams in the business. Work out where your work comes from and where your work goes to – and build relationships at these boundaries.
Barriers between teams will mean you have to hand off work. This is fraught with communication challenges, is often slow for your customers and let’s be honest – can often be merely a financial or organisational construct - not a real barrier to customer value work (which always cross functional boundaries).
The more you know the work of the other teams, the more you’ll hear about about a change or product or release that directly affects your team. This is widening your awareness.
If you work with other teams, work on that relationship to build a positive connection and alignment. Work together to solve common problems.
It’s not easy and it takes a lot of time, but it is possible. Start by talking to the department managers. Take them out for coffee, invite them to join your team meetings, share your ideas for the business with them and get to know them.
Your team will need to this also. Cross functional team relationships will mean you can support your customer in a more holistic manner, rather than bouncing their problems between departments who don’t talk to each other.
Staple yourself to a customer issue
If you staple yourself to your customer’s issue as it flows (or doesn’t flow) through your system, you will start to realise where the problems exist for your customer.
If you put yourself in the shoes of your customer and visualise the flow of their issues you may be surprised at how ineffective your system of work is.
Looking at a system or process from the outside can open up new ideas, observations and problems you’d never have considered before.
Optimise this process for your customers.
Quadruple your (effective) communication
Within your business you probably think you’re communicating well with others. The chances are you may not be.
Whatever communication you think you are doing – double it. Then double it again. But only if it's effective.
Effective communication hits the purpose, with the right people and is contextual. I cover all of this in the Communication Skills Super Power Workshop and online course.
External to your business you are probably not communicating anywhere near enough and you probably know this too. Again, double it, then double it again.
Within your business articulate what it is you do on a daily basis, the challenges your team face and the positive experiences that happen.
On the front line of any business there will be highs and lows, it’s important to internalise these with the wider business. Own your own narrative and win the hearts and minds of others in the business through ongoing communication and storytelling.
Other people in your business may have no idea what you do and what you have to deal with, or how it feels to be a customer of the organisation.
Tell your customers that you are thinking about them. Update them with product news and release information, visit them if you can and get to know them, but most of all, treat them well and build a long term relationship with them.
They are buying a product or service from you and want to feel listened to, connected with and valued.
Effective communication is a superpower in the world of business.
Follow up on all issues in a timely fashion
If a customer issue cannot be resolved on the immediate call, then the chances are it will hit some form of internal queue or handover. Keep tabs on it and check on it often.
Keep pushing or pulling the issue around and make sure you keep the customer up to date.
Respond to all issues quickly. That case/bug/report/email is yours to own. Make sure it gets dealt with. Try not to push it into another department's queue and let it be - keep chasing it.
Keep your customers informed of progress. Consider using Time Speak. This is not only professional but it makes the process transparent and helps them understand what goes in to fixing or resolving problems.
People don’t always mind waiting, if you tell them what they are waiting for.
If other departments are not working at a rapid speed on your customer issue – don’t blame them. Take a look at yourself and how well you have communicated the importance of that customer issue.
Did you throw it in a queue and hope someone would pick it up? Did you articulate the details enough? Did you describe the problem well enough? Do they have problems that hinder their ability to help you?
Look at the hand-offs between you and the other departments and optimise for the customer.
Don’t blame others when talking to your customers; this makes you look like a dysfunctional company (you might be, but no need to broadcast this).
Push at all times to improve the feedback loop with the customer and reduce the cycle times of issues.
Align your team
Ensure your team are all alignment about roles and responsibilities, and your department's goals and objectives. Ensure you encourage a friendly and safe environment for constructive discourse and creativity. Make sure issues are aired in a timely fashion rather than left to linger causing more deep rooted problems.
Align everyone behind a clear vision with some well-defined goals – this works a treat. You can read about how to do this in my Turn Around A Team guide.
At any hand-off within your own team try to make sure the process is simple and well communicated.
Your team should know who is available to help out and who is not. They should know which communication channels your team operate on; this is even more important for remote teams.
Daily stand-ups and high visibility Kanban boards (or information radiators) are effective at aligning teams and tracking progress.
At the end of the day you need to get stuff done quickly and effectively and this means everyone needs to have the right knowledge and information. This means working on the highest priorities, identifying clear owners, and removing as many barriers as possible.
Stop all negativity about customers
Make sure no-one talks badly about your customers. Ever.
The customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so. – Mahatma Gandhi
Without your customers you have no business, let alone a customer support team.
A customer support team who don’t respect their customers, will struggle to offer a good experience to those interacting with it. How can you offer a great customer experience if you don’t care about the people you are supporting?
Sure, there are customers who are sometimes mean and grumpy, but they have a problem with your product and want your help.
Is it your product that is making them mean and grumpy?
Don’t talk ill of them – they are the lifeblood of your business.
Make it easy for customers (internal and external) to talk to you
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get help but facing resistance in the form of complicated feedback forms, difficult to find phone numbers or overly draconian instructions on getting in touch.
Make it easy for customers (internal and external) to raise problems with you. Make your phone number visible. Clearly articulate what the customer needs to do and what information you’ll need.
There is a place for self-help guides and troubleshooting information but try not to let this take the place of good customer support.
Make the submission forms easy and simple by removing unnecessary fields and data. Don’t make your customers do more than is absolutely essential to raise a problem with you.
End Notes
In an ideal world the product/service would just work, be super intuitive with a low learning curve and never do something your customers didn’t expect it to.
In reality, products are difficult to use, they break, they do things you don’t expect and have quirks of use; this means you’ll always need a customer support function providing a key part of customer experience.
The trick though is to provide a service that meets the needs of your customers and not some internal vision. The only way you’ll know what those needs are is if you understand your team’s purpose, talk to your customers and follow the work through your system to improve it.
Optimise all of this for your customers, not for you. This is easier said than done, especially if management request incomplete metrics, brutal cost reductions and offer incentives that encourage internal optimisation, but if you can resist and change minds then do so.
Your customers don’t really care about your company process, metrics and measures, or the internal politics; they just want a fast, effective service and someone to listen to them.
