Today, the gap between a customer’s expectations and the customer experience they receive is huge. In our latest customer experience survey, we found that just over a third of US brands deliver a good experience. What is even more surprising is that in the 5 years that Forrester has been collecting this data, this number has not significantly changed.
Delivering good customer service is a cornerstone to delivering a good end-to-end customer experience. Yet, few companies undertake efforts to follow best practices. This lack of attention on customer service has significant impacts for companies: escalating service costs, customer satisfaction numbers at rock-bottom levels, and anecdotes of poor service experiences amplified over social channels that can lead to brand erosion.
Mastering the customer service experience is hard to do. Here is a recap of my 10 step program. I’ve reordered the steps a little, but the message is still the same:
Master your strategy
- Step 1: Figure out how your customers want to interact with you
- Step 2: Align the service offered with your company’s brand
Plan and run your operations
- Step 3: Don’t offer silos of communication choices
- Step 4: Reduce the effort of getting service: Understand what your customers are trying to do, and enable a successful journey
- Step 5: Don’t think that your customers will start and end an interaction with you on a single communication channel – empower their end-to-end journey across all channels
- Step 6: As you work on a service issue, keep your customers in the loop
- Step 7: Empower your agents to deliver good service: make their toolset more usable
- Step 8: Empower your agents to deliver good service: tame your knowledge problem
- Step 9: Extend the reach of customer service with social technologies
Focus on success
- Step 10: Become a customer-centric organization.
