5 key ingredients for customer service success

By Dan Moross, Director of Customer Services, MOO

When you ask someone their reasons for choosing one brand over another, how many times have you heard, “Because their customer service was fantastic”? People really value great customer care, and getting it right can be what sets you apart from your competitors.

Legendary and remarkable service can lead not only to repeat business, but life-long advocates for your brand – and you should never underestimate the power of word of mouth!

With Customer Service Week kicking off on 6th October, we’ve been thinking about what it takes to get customer care spot on. We’ve pinned it down to what we think are the 5 key ingredients for customer service success. These can be applied to all businesses, from start-ups to larger enterprises, and we’ve certainly found that they work for us here at MOO.

1. People - hire a great team and make sure they enjoy their jobs.

Get the people right and you’re onto a good thing. All the other elements only work if you have good people who are excited by your brand. To ensure they’re up to the job, it’s worth testing their abilities during the interview process. We like to send real-life customer emails to potential team members to assess their problem solving and writing skills, for example.

Once you’ve got the right people on board, it’s important to keep them happy and engaged. Rewarding good performance and coaching your team along will help to motivate them, but there is really no substitute for edible treats and an awesome office culture (did someone say cake?). We’re all only human, after all!

2. Availability and accessibility - customers expect you to be reachable via a variety of channels when they need help.

The hours you’re available and the channels you operate on will often be determined by the nature of your business and the types of customers you serve. For example, independent brick and mortar stores and other 9-to-5 businesses are unlikely to need 24-hour support via phone and web chat.

On the other hand, if you’re an international business selling your products or services online, you’ll need to be contactable during your customers’ shopping hours - which are often round-the-clock. You might also need to offer support in a number of languages. The key is to provide the services (within reason, of course) that your customers expect from you.

As part of this, making sure your technology is up to scratch is essential – there’s no point in taking a call if you can’t then find the customer’s order or advise them on a new product. We’ve used a number of software and hardware solutions over the years, but the two most important are your Helpdesk/CRM and your internal administration tools. It’s also handy to build an internal knowledge base which your agents can access to stay up-to-date with new products and features. Our current Helpdesk provider – Zendesk - is quick to set up, does all the basics very well and allows us to control a multitude of channels – this is exactly what we need.

3. Freedom from procedure – give your team the flexibility to respond to customers’ needs on a case-by-case basis.

Speak to any customer service agent and they’ll be able to reel you off a list of customer care horror stories, many of which involve agents following ‘protocol’. The trick is to give your team guidelines and the freedom to surprise and delight your customers without tying them to scripted, ironclad policies and processes.

At MOO we’ve created the ‘7 Commandments for Customer Service’, which are designed to instil the team with the right overall philosophy, rather than strict rules and regulations for them to abide by. This has empowered them to ‘own’ their decisions, using common sense to fix each customer problem, rather than simply following procedure.

4. Tone of voice – make sure your brand personality is accurately reflected across all channels.

Whilst we don’t give our customer service agents scripts to recite, we do encourage them to embrace the MOO tone of voice, whether it’s on the phone, via email or on social media. Your brand personality is likely to be one of the key reasons a person chooses you over a competitor, so ensuring your CS team embody that is essential.

Picking passionate people who are switched on by your brand will always stand you in good stead, and you’ll get a good sense of this during the interview process – if you can’t see someone speaking your brand language they’re probably not right for your team.

5. Data and metrics – regularly review your performance and work with the wider business to exceed customer expectations.

We track lots of data about our performance, both on an individual and team level - it helps us to understand whether we’re living up to our customers’ expectations. We also speak to our customers to understand why they’re contacting us, reasons for refunds and so on. This helps us to constantly improve our service, and we’ll always feed important data to other departments within MOO if we need their assistance in fixing the overarching issues.

Don’t worry if you don’t have access to fancy reporting tools, just gathering information from your CS team and jotting a few notes down can be invaluable to your business. Customer service can be seen as a sticking plaster for the pain points of an organisation, but it’s just as important to focus on working with the broader business on how to fix the problem at its source.

The bottom line

If I could only give one piece of advice, it would be to use your common sense wherever possible. Often, a solution (whether from a people, policy or technology perspective) can be reached by simply using your brain and putting yourselves in the customer's shoes. A little thought can make the difference between a disgruntled customer and one with a big smile on their face – and I know which ones we prefer at MOO!

Written on:

06 Oct 2014

Categories:

Best Practice