Customer Service Operations: Build a Customer-Centric Culture

Customer service operations! Well, it’s not the newest trend. For the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about the transition toward a customer-focused approach. Companies are now more serious about prioritizing customers and catering to their expectations.

Are you juggling between providing excellent customer experience, maintaining team morale, and optimizing efficiency, all while working with a limited budget? Then what’s missing here is opting for customer service operations.

The customer support operations team is responsible for managing both the strategic and operational processes necessary for the support team to operate effectively and concentrate on its primary responsibility of resolving customer issues.

Your customer service team works on the front line for your company. Customer demands are always increasing. The more it will grow the more the team will understand the advantage of customer service operations.

Want to know more about customer service operations: roles, responsibilities, and how they can help you to make your customers and support agents happy? Then you are at the right place. This blog is just for you. 

What is Customer Service Operation?

“Customer service operations are all about devising an effective service plan and working closely with the customer support, success, and experience teams.”

The main objective of the team will be to assist the company in expanding its customer service department. 

There should be a dedicated development team who will take care of the customer service operations. The aim of the development team is to provide the necessary environment, skills, techniques, regulations, and benchmarks to facilitate efficient work.

But sadly, many companies still don’t have such a dedicated team to take care of the customer service-related business operations but it should not be. It’s important to ensure that customer success and support teams are in sync with the broader service strategy and business goals.

Why is it So Important?

Because it connects your brand and products with the customers. Customer service operations are the first point where customers will come when something goes wrong and it’s also an important resource from which you can learn more about how to improve your services too.

If you do it right, customers will come back to you for more business.7 out of 8 customers will switch brands and go to other competitors for better customer experience and service, so taking care of them is important if you don’t want to lose business. However, the advantages of investing in such relationships extend beyond customer retention as it also helps you to stand out amongst your competitors in the business.

Customer service operation may sound like an afterthought sometimes but it lets you offer excellent services and gain happy customers.

The 4 Main Benefits of Customer Service Operations

Overall, a strong customer service operation can have a significant impact on a business’s bottom line and help to ensure its long-term success. In addition, good customer service can enhance a company’s brand reputation, reduce customer churn, and improve employee morale.  It can provide numerous benefits to a business that include:

• Customer Satisfaction

It is crucial for the success of any business, and having an effective customer service operation can greatly enhance it. By providing quick and efficient resolution of customer issues, you can create a positive experience for your customers, leading to increased loyalty and repeat business. Good customer service can also improve a company’s reputation and differentiate it from competitors, making it more attractive to potential customers. 

As per HubSpot’s recent study, nearly 93% of customers love to come back to companies for businesses that offer outstanding customer service. Service operations ensure that customers receive excellent treatment during their interactions with your business, which is essential for fostering trust and enhancing satisfaction levels.

• Customer Retention

As per Semrush, “The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70% whereas the probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%.”

Customer retention is an important aspect of any business, as it is typically less expensive to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. A well-designed customer service operation can significantly contribute to customer retention by providing a positive experience for customers. 

By addressing customer complaints and concerns in a timely and effective manner, you can reduce customer churn and retain more customers over time. Good customer service can also increase customer loyalty and repeat business, leading to higher revenue and profitability for the business. 

In addition, by developing a reputation for excellent customer service, companies can attract new customers and differentiate themselves from competitors, thus getting a competitive advantage in the market. 

• Company Reputation

Great customer service operations management helps you to develop a positive image for your brand. If customers get a good experience with your product offerings and services, they will surely recommend your brand to their friends and family.

Research shows that 93% of people trust suggestions for products or services when they come from individuals within their personal network.

On the other hand, poor customer service can result in negative reviews, loss of customers, and damage to the brand’s reputation. Therefore, investing in quality customer service operations can be a valuable strategy for building a strong and favorable brand image.

• Competitive Advantage

With good customer service, like proactive outreach, you can get more than just keeping your old customers and getting new ones. You can stay ahead of your competition because of your customer service operation management. 

When customers have positive experiences with a brand’s customer service team, they are more likely to continue doing business with that brand and recommend it to others. This can lead to increased customer retention, acquisition, and ultimately, greater revenue and market share. 

How to Enhance Customer Service Operations?

The customer support department is one of the most important sections of any company. It works as a backbone to retain your customers and assist them especially when they face any problem. Providing regular training to your customer support agents is important, but you need to make your whole team strong and efficient. Let me tell you why.

Customers think that if they need to explain one simple issue to multiple agents, then that’s called poor customer service. So, each of your support team members should be able to handle one customer complaint on the first attempt, without escalating it to other agents multiple times.

So, if you can’t manage your customer service operations efficiently, then your company will suffer for sure and you may get distracted from your business goals. How can you bring improvements to customer service operations? Here’s the list of things you need to look into.

• Enhance Your Knowledge Base

You may provide customer support in various ways like email, phone calls, or live chat but if the support agents are handling the same customer issues or questions then there has to be a knowledge base containing all the required resources and general FAQs and that should be easily accessible by both customers and your employees. It will not only enhance your customer support efficiency but also save enough time for the agents.

Incorporating a knowledge base into your customer operations management approach is helpful as it can enhance your agents’ response speed and mitigate customer attrition by providing helpful information.

An updated knowledge base will help your support department to get all the required information in one place thus providing better assistance to the customers.

• Select the Right Team Members

Hire the right people– If your team members genuinely care for the company and want to offer their best, your customers will be happy too. So, appoint people who are dedicated and actually want to work hard. Don’t select someone whose only motive is to complete his shift and go back home.

If you want to have loyal customers, hire people for their empathy, rather than solely focusing on skill sets. Choosing someone with great communication skills but less product knowledge is better than someone who knows everything but your brand and product offerings but lacks in providing greater services to customers. 

• Prioritize Customer Success

As per Forbes, “Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.”

Prioritizing customer success is essential for any business to thrive. It involves training your customer service team to handle customer inquiries and complaints efficiently and effectively. Additionally, using customer feedback to improve service, implementing a customer-centric culture, and leveraging technology to streamline operations are also essential. By prioritizing customer success and continually enhancing your customer service operations, you can build loyal customer relationships and ultimately grow your business.

• Help Your Customers

As per a recent study, “77% say that they view organizations more positively if they offer self-service options for customers looking for support.”

Customer service is not only always about offering resolution to some issues, it’s also about helping customers to fix their problems by themselves through different knowledge bases, documentation, tutorial videos, FAQs, etc. It will save time for both of your customers and support team members.

The biggest obstacle to exceptional customer service is undoubtedly the ‘waiting time’. Customers hate it especially when they need some urgent assistance. This is why you need to prioritize customers and offer them the simplest and most expeditious solutions to their problems.

There are several self-service options available like FAQs, tutorial videos, knowledge bases, and most importantly chatbots that can help customers to resolve their issues quickly.

• Gather Customer Feedback

Want to understand the effectiveness of your customer service operations? Ask your customers. They are the ones who can provide you with a clear picture of your performance. So, encourage them to give you honest feedback on what they think about your brand, your product offerings, and your customer service initiatives.

Customer feedback will help you to identify the drawbacks in your products and services and work on further improvements.

As per studies, nearly 95% of consumers go through company and product reviews before making any purchase.  So, the more you collect good customer reviews, the more you will get business.

For collecting feedback from customers, don’t make the whole process too complex. Provide them with easy ways to give their input like polls, questionnaires, ratings, and social media mentions. 

• Leverage AI

Automate your customer service operations to streamline all the activities! Automation tools like chatbots and live chat software help you to offer instant help to your customers and automate many of your activities. Chatbots can automate the whole customer service operations by replying to customer queries and all the FAQs and frees up your customer support team for other complex tasks.

As per Statista, 64% of businesses believe that chatbots will allow them to provide a more customized support experience for their customers.

On the other hand, live chat software allows businesses to provide instant support to customers, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s important to ensure that there are enough support agents available to handle live chat sessions and that they are properly trained.

How Can REVE Chat Improve Your Customer Service Operations?

The use of technology, tools, and automation is prevalent in nearly every profession, including customer support operations. REVE Chat offers a suite of customer support products that you can utilize to establish a robust support team and efficiently manage their tasks and responsibilities.

REVE Chat is an omnichannel customer service platform that lets you offer instant assistance to customers on your website, mobile apps, and other social media channels like Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

REVE Chat also offers an AI-based chatbot platform to automate all your customer service operations efficiently. If your support team is unable to provide 24/7 customer support due to limited manpower, REVE Chatbot can serve as a solution as it provides instant and precise responses to customer queries. Customers can communicate with the chatbot and get instant assistance with their queries.

Useful Features:

• Proactive Chat

Let your support agents engage with the customers proactively to offer instant assistance much before they even ask for it. With Proactive chat, agents can monitor in real-time which pages the customers are browsing, and based on that, they can offer personalized assistance to them. 

• Voice and Video Chat

With REVE Chat, customers get voice and video calling facilities on your website and mobile apps. Anytime they can initiate a free video call or voice call to the support agents and talk to them. 

With such features, your agents can elevate the quality of interactions with customers with just one click. It not only reduces the number of touchpoints for customers but also allows for faster resolution during the first contact itself. As a result, customers can receive a quicker and more efficient resolution to their queries.

• Co-Browsing

The co-browsing feature of REVE Chat allows support agents to share their screens with customers and guide them through a website or application in real-time. It enables agents to see exactly what the customer is experiencing and provide targeted assistance. It can also save time and reduce frustration for customers who may be struggling to navigate a website or find a particular feature. With co-browsing, agents can quickly identify and resolve issues, leading to a more positive customer experience.

• Reporting and Analytics

Want to know how your agents are performing? REVE Chat offers detailed reports on agent activities like their login and logout timing, offline messages, missed chats, number of transferred chats, past chat history, etc. so that you can have a better understanding of those problem areas and work on those for rectification. 

• Chatbot

REVE Chatbot enables you to offer automated assistance to your customers. It allows customers to interact with a bot that is programmed to respond to customer queries and issues. This frees up support agents to handle more complex queries and can also provide support outside of regular business hours. It can improve customer experience by providing quick and efficient responses to queries, reducing wait times, and increasing customer satisfaction. 

Apart from the above-mentioned features REVE Chat also offers other significant facilities like Chat triggers, canned responses, customization, visitor analytics, department management, etc to manage your customer operations in the best way possible.

Want to give it a try? REVE Chat offers a 14-day free trial to try out all its unique features. So SIGN UP today!