3 Steps to Taking Advantage of Customer Service Wins

All of the focus surrounding customer service tends to centre on the disasters. As a result of the press coverage these disasters receive, brands tend to be on the back foot, frightened that they will be the next headline. But a better approach is to build on where the success is. We have looked at how to turn your customer service successes into a habit.

1. Get Feedback

Not all customer service encounters go smoothly and even the successes begin as a problem. When you’ve scored a success and turned a customer’s experience from negative to positive, it is a good idea to analyse how that happened. What was the beginning of the customer’s problem? How did the customer approach the problem? What channels did they use to ask for help? Finally, was their problem moved through the various stages smoothly or did they become agitated at delays?

In future you can use these learnings to recognise the same patterns in future problems and stop them from descending into trouble. Scrutinizing the data is also important so that you can understand not just this one incident but others like it and build a model for solving similar problems in the future.

2. Get Motivated

A customer service team that feels on the defensive is not a happy work environment. By sharing the good news stories regularly, the general morale of the team will stay high. You can do this in many ways, such as singling out Customer Service Reps (CSRs) that score a win, or beginning team meetings with case studies of success. A team that feels they are always succeeding is more likely to stay successful and motivated.

But even when the encounters don’t go to plan and the outcomes aren’t totally good ones, there’s always a lesson there for the future. A team can feel more confident of handling those tricky circumstances if there’s a culture of sharing case studies and learning from the mistakes. So be certain as a team leader to keep sharing best practice and celebrating the wins, while also learning from mistakes and resolving to do things better next time.

3. Get Fixing

Now you have some of the building blocks in place to systemise ongoing success. With high morale and a consistent feedback loop, the recipe is there for baking this into the company culture as well as creating some really powerful marketing for your brand. By analysing the data you can build a better system for making sure that it is increasingly less likely customer problems will fall between stools.

Really successful customer service can not only power strong morale throughout the company but can also help differentiate the brand.

Want to learn about how your Customer Support can shape service in 2015? Visit salesforce.com/au or download the free e-book.