Your service and customer service strategy needs to have a
clear objective: put the consumer at the center . And it is that, in recent years,
trends in the marketing, sales and service sector are setting a clear course
that requires focusing every strategy to the needs of the buyer persona . It is
the way to give it a differential value.
This new approach leads companies to review their customer
service and care strategies to be more effective and achieve better results.
In this article we explain what Inbound Customer Services
are , the keys to defining your customer service strategy, and we introduce you
to the HubSpot Service Hub, the perfect tool to implement your strategy .
Before explaining what are the keys to a good customer
service and attention strategy, it is necessary to introduce the concept of
Inbound Customer Service, better known as Inbound Service.
What is Inbound Service
The Inbound Service is the set of content, technologies and
actions that a company can implement to cover all the informational or
problem-solving needs that a user has. It covers your entire customer journey ,
whether as an existing customer or as a potential customer.
Inbound Service objective
As we have commented previously, the main objective of the
Inbound Service is to help the client, giving support to the problems or
doubts, complaints that they have, but also anticipating their needs.
Ultimately, the ultimate goal is to accompany you in any interaction you have
with our brand to maximize your experience and make you a promoter .
Advantages of Inbound Service
Among the advantage of implementing a customer services
strategy with Inbound Service, the following stand out:
• Assist
the doubt and questions of your clients or potential clients through multiple
channels (telephone, email, chatbot, live chat, social networks, etc.) to
improve their experience with the brand .
• Reduce
responses time, increasing service agility.
• Identify
sales opportunities and increase customer retention .
• Anticipate
customer needs and problems.
• Collect
data and track and analyze your comments , ratings and opinions.
In this article we will detail more about Inbound Customer
Service, the difference with a traditional customer service strategy and the
benefits of implementing this methodology .
5 keys to define your customer service and attention strategy
1. Know your company, customer and product
Like any inbound and marketing strategy in general, to start
it is essential to know your business, the product you are offering and the
profile and characteristics of your potential customers. By having this
information from the beginning, it is easier to focus your customer service
strategy on how their relationship with your brand is and what the company has
with each of them.
COMPANY
In relation to your business, you can ask yourself the
following question: "Are my Marketing, Sales and Service teams
coordinated?"
It is important that the different departments are aligned,
since they will have to work together on many occasions: unifying part of the
sales / marketing funnel, sharing leads and information about your database,
sharing CRM, redirecting contacts to the appropriate department, etc.
Therefore, before defining your customer service strategy,
it is important to know, optimize and improve communication between
departments.
CUSTOMERS
Another important aspects is to know the type of contacts
that your service team will work with , since not only will they not be
approached in the same way, but they will also have to adapt the resources,
speeches and service to their needs.
Some of the questions you can ask yourself are: “Are they
clients or are they potential clients? Will all service agents work all leads?
What information we need to know about them? What information do we currently
have? Have they been through other departments before? "
PRODUCT
Finally, you must keep in mind your product and the buyer
journey of your potential clients to understand when the service team should
enter. Knowing this buying cycle can help you to raise possible questions that
may arise to the consumer or potential customers during their purchase and,
based on them, prepare content to solve them.
2. Design your flow
This is the most importants point of all: define and
implement the flow of the service and customer care strategy. However, a
previous step is required, because you cannot jump in without first analyzing
where you are currently failing.
If in recent months you are noticing a greater number of
incidents, complaints or negative evaluations from users, something needs to
improve. There is no greater insight than to carefully analyze the actions and
management that is being carried out to optimize processes.
Perhaps your current customer service and support team does
not have the capacity to process all requests , perhaps it is that their
support is not really helpful or they lack the appropriate means to communicate
with contacts.
Whatever the reason, these are some basic points for your
service and customer service strategy:
Communication channel
We could say that it is the most important part of the
customer service and attention strategy. The channels through which customers
or potential customers are going to interact with the brand and the service
team are a very relevant aspect.
In the previous point we have commented on the importance of
knowing how our prospects are related to us, and this is basic to define the
interaction channels that we are going to implement in our strategy . Here are
some important ones:
• Live Chat
• Chatbot
• Facebook
Chat
• Phone
call
• E-mail
• Forms
• Satisfaction
surveys
• Knowledge
Base or FAQ
There is no one better than another, each one adapts to the
needs and resources of the company. What I do recommend is to have the more
implemented the better, in order to be able to get as close to the users as
possible and facilitate communication.
In these interactions it is also very important to have the
opportunity to qualify the lead as much as possible, thus facilitating the
team's work during the resolution of their incident or request.
Flow sequence
The service flow has to be agile, clear and with the
different steps very well defined to optimize time and maximize productivity .
It is considered the central part of the strategy, as it is aimed at solving
the different requests or requests that reach the department's agents.
Thus, during the resolution of incidents or doubts, the
agent has to be able to advance with the consultation, and for this it is
important that the flow is well structured, step by step.
To achieves this, it is necessary to keep in mind:
• What type
of requests are you going to receive in order to internally organize the
relationship with other departments of the company. For example: are you going
to receive legal, logistics or sales requests? Surely the agent would need to
escalate the request to another department, and that will have to be planned in
your flow. Knowing the type of requests is also helpful in defining predefined
internal responses and processes, a practice that increases efficiency.
• What
aspects are necessary to handle and resolve requests . They are the ones who
will mark the steps of the flow. It is important that the agent, with the naked
eye, can quickly identify in which step of the flow the user with whom he is
speaking is. You should also have visibility into the information available
about it (if it is in the database).
I recommend that you review the final flow carefully,
identify possible scenarios and make sure that they can be solved directly with
the flow that you have defined.
3. Prepare your service team
After designing your flow of service and customer care, it
is time to share it internally . Involve the team in the strategy. At the end
of the day, they will have to execute it and can add value in solving doubts
and blind spots in the strategy.
SPECIALIZATION
The first thing you must define is whether all the agents
are going to work on all the leads or not. For example, there may be part of
the team specialized in technical issues, another section dedicated to sales
issues, a small group specialized in logistics issues. That is why it is
convenient to establish what type of incoming request one and the other will
work on.
TRAINING
Another important aspect to take into account is training .
Feel free to invest hours of training for the team . This preparation may
include guides and guidelines for each of the phases defined above and speeches
of service. The more information and guidelines you give the team, the more
unified and decisive the service you offer them will be.
RESOURCE CENTER
Finally, it is of great value to have a library or
repository of information , also called a Knowledge Base. On this Knowledge
Base your agents will be able to redirect the user, answer questions or, most
importantly, slow down the number of requests that come to them, to ensure that
they can manage them correctly and none are left unanswered.
4. Set goals and KPIs
Do you know how you can measure the performance of your
agents? And how to calculate a positive evolution in the service? This is
surely one of the most crucial points in your Inbound Service strategy.
Customer service KPIs will help you measure strategy and
team performance, as well as the experience users have afterward . Like any
indicator, they are absolutely necessary to optimize processes.
Some of the most common KPIs are:
• Number of
tickets managed : having a number of tickets that have to be managed as a team
or individually will help you measure the performance of your workers, and even
to encourage them in their day-to-day life.
• Response
time : the speed of response by the team is decisive for user satisfaction.
Establishing an average response time and working towards it is one of the most
frequent KPIs.
• User
satisfaction : you can measure this KPI through the surveys that you will
implement in your service flow and customer service. You can measure it
numerically, with stars, smileys ... but the most important thing is to be able
to hear what users want to communicate.
• NPS (Net
Promoter Score) :this is the possibility of someone recommending your brand to
their network of acquaintances and, therefore, it is also directly linked to
the brand experience that they have had. A better experience leads to more
recommendations.
• Number of
resolved requests versus unresolved requests : this indicator can help you
analyze whether your team is being efficient or not. If the unresolved requests
are greater, you can use this KPI to implement improvements in the flow, in the
processes or in the strategy in general.
• Customer
retention : if your product can be purchased multiple times, customer retention
is a very common KPI in the Inbound Service strategy. If current customers are
satisfied with the service you offer, they will probably stick with your brand
and repeat the purchase.
5. Implement your strategy
A CRM or Customer Relationship Management (customer
relationship management) is a solution for managing the relationships of a
company with its potential and current customers.
For the implementation of your Inbound Service strategy it
is necessary to have a CRM . The main advantages of using it are :
• Centralize
all customer history on a single platform.
• Improve
communication between the different areas of the company.
• Facilitate
contact segmentation, promoting process sophistication.
• Achieve
greater flexibility and customization.
• Make
possible the integration of the different communication channels.
• Increase
visibility, which has a positive impact on reporting results.
Not sure which CRM to choose? In this article we help you
decide. From InboundCycle, our recommendation is to use HubSpot , which has the
Service Hub , a customer service management software, which allows you to
optimize the service you offer, unify the teams on the platform and maximize
customer retention.
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