7 questions to ask before starting a customer service team
Source: Salesforce
Your company is growing and you're receiving more questions and requests from your customers. You have decided that it is time to forge the next branch of your business empire and are ready to build a customer service team. Here are 7 questions to ask before starting a customer service team:
What kind of employment will you offer your customer service agents?
The main options you have are full time, part-time, and independent contractors, but don’t think you must stick with one type. you can of course also do some combination of the three, such as having a full time team with additional contractors hired during busy seasons. Also be sure to keep in mind the different career paths you can provide for customer service agents - do you have the capacity to offer growth and career enrichment to those who show excellence in customer service?
What skills will Your Agents Need?
Ask yourself, if you were a customer, who would you want to answer your questions?
Typically, most customer service representatives only need a high school diploma. However, for some specific industries, more certification is needed. For example, those in the tech industry may need a bachelor's degree in engineering, or those in healthcare may need HIPAA certification. Most companies develop their own training course to certify their customer service agents. Make sure to have the parameters clearly laid out throughout the interview process. You can set tiers of skills ranging from “a must,” to “nice to have,” and all the way down to “bonus.”
How do you define excellent customer service?
We figured out who we need for our customer service team, now let’s examine what they need to do:
Clearly define your companies values, and how they can be upheld in customer service.
Set clear, consistent, definable, metrics of excellence for your customer service team to uphold. This can include, email response time, average handle time, interactions per resolutions, or simply providing a standardized send-off for customers ensuring their satisfaction.
Research your competitors and turn their weaknesses into your strengths. What are the biggest and most common “pain points” the customers of your industry suffer through when contacting a customer service agent or call center? Avoiding these pitfalls will not only separate you from your competition but show you’re ahead of the curve.
What channels do you want to prioritize for your customers?
A small customer service team cannot possibly keep all channels occupied 24/7. Identify your strongest channel(s) and keep the focus there. This can include email, social media, phone, live chats, self service tools, to name a few. While we know you want to be able to reach customers wherever they are, it’s better to give excellent customer service in one or two of these than attempting them all and giving spotty service.
Is company leadership aligned on the importance of a customer support team?
Getting your CEO to agree to increase staff isn’t always easy, here’s a good points to get them on your side:
Increasing sales through customer service - According to a Forrester Study, 52% of customers will bail on an online purchase if they cannot easily access the specific information they are looking for about a product. Having a support team ready to handle inquiries not answered by an FAQ is paramount in saving these sales.
Do you have a customer retention plan?
Getting new customers is of course always the goal of a growing company, but keeping the ones you’ve already made is half the battle. Considering it costs approximately 6 - 7x more locking down new customers than it does to retain them, it’s worth the investment.
According to the U.S. Small Business Association, 68% of customers who abandon a product do so because of poor customer service. Keep your people happy, and they’ll talk about you to their people. That's called free marketing.
How do you plan to gather valuable customer data?
As Elon Musk once said, “it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.” Your customers provide an insight into your product or service you cannot get anywhere else. Giving them a clear and easy channel to address those issues, can only strengthen your product. After all, customer insights are crucial for product direction. David McConnell, the founder of Avon, found that he couldn’t sell his books door to door. However, he noticed his female clients were interested in the free perfume samples he provided. He decided to pivot his business, make his own perfume, and sent women to sell them door to door instead of himself.
As a customer service manager, you can use the data given to you by your agents - what issues your customers are calling about, how frequently each issue arises, how often a certain remedy is applied, etc to help strengthen every other department of your company, from research and development to sales and marketing.
Still have questions around launching a customer support team? Let us know!