So you are ready to begin diving into a new customer service strategy, Congratulations! It may not feel like it right now, but re-upping your strategies is a great way to constantly respond to your customers’ needs.
We’re going to cover the reasons why you need to change up your customer service strategies as well as the steps on how to create an effective strategy.
The Process
Creating an effective strategy takes a lot of practice and a lot of time.
Determine Who Your Customer Is
Before you can even think about how to work on a strategy, you first have to think about who your customers are. What are the demographics? Here are some questions to answer when you’re working out who your customer, or consumer, is going to be:
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- What is their gender identity?
- How are their shopping habits?
- What is their daily life like?
- How old are they?
- Where are they from?
- What habits do they have?
When you create a strategy, this is the time to dive into the mind of your customer and figure out what it is that makes them tick.
Assess Needs, Resources, and Budgets
This is perhaps one of the harder elements to address if you like the more creative side of strategy.
There are several parts of a strategy that can require new expenses and different resources. It may even require hiring a new person or two to help. Customer service is no joke!
To best assess your needs, take a moment to see how you want to respond to your customers. Do you want to have phone line availability? How about email services? What about 24/7 assistance? All of these are going to affect your strategy because each has an associated cost.
Determine Your Approach
How close are you wanting to be with your customers? Do you want a more amenable approach or are you trying to follow everything by the books? Your overall attitude is going to affect how your customers are going to perceive your company.
After attitude you have to figure out how you are going to be available for your customers. You can be available through phone, instant chat, email, and social media platforms.Also with the use of the best free shopify apps, we can increase our availability for our customers. It can also help to boost our business.Being available in so many ways can be overwhelming but necessary to best serve your customers.
Finally, what are your scripts going to be? How do you want your employees and yourself to respond to specific situations? Having scripts available can help keep everyone on the same page and working with the same material.
Outline and Implement Your Strategy
This next step probably takes the most time when you are working through this process. To outline an entire strategy you want to have the following sections:
Customer profile
Product Information
Service Attitude
Goal of Service
Troubleshooting
General FAQs
Having each of these areas fleshed out is going to help you and your team answer questions readily so that your customers get the best possible service.
Including things like product information and general FAQs is going to help remind your customer service team of what they need to know as well as provide a very handy guide.
After outlining comes implementation. The changes are going to take some time to get in order: not everything is going to change or work perfectly the first time or for the first few weeks!
Make sure that you are staying on task when implementing your new strategy. Monitor calls when you can, double check emails for a little bit and soon your team will be ready to handle situations with minimal help from you!
A Note on Change
While customer profiles may remain the same over an extended period of time, your customer base is probably going to change over time. No matter how much you market to your demographics, people will find your product.
This is why it is important to adjust your customer service strategies: if you don’t adjust to your customers then you are doing yourself a disservice!
Your first strategy may work well for a few months and suddenly there’s a dip in customer ratings. This is totally normal and it just means that you have to readjust. Follow the process outlined above and make sure that you implement the new process carefully over time.
Conclusion
Creating a customer service strategy is something that takes time, effort, and a lot of reflective thinking. To best address your customers, you have to assess where they are coming from and how they are reacting to specific situations.
It is best to have multiple scenarios ready for your customer service team as well as product information so that your team can best serve your customers. When you follow the process above, you’ll be ready to constantly revamp as much as you need to in order to help your customers have the best experience possible!
