Complete guide to developing a customer service strategy

The best way to weather today’s savvy customers demand to have airtight customer service. 

As businesses strive to stand out, customer service remains a crucial component of success. Customers look for consistent, high-quality support, and your business can build long-term loyalty and trust with its customer base by providing just that.

But great overarching customer service doesn’t come naturally. It requires a plan that outlines the right goals and methods to achieve your business’ desired results. Companies can significantly improve their reputation and drive sustainable growth by creating a customer service strategy to address customer needs and enhance their overall experience proactively.

What is customer service strategy?

A customer service strategy is a comprehensive plan of action that outlines how an organization intends to meet customer expectations and address your company’s customer service goals and challenges. It involves designing and executing processes, policies, and systems that improve your overall customer service quality and functional efficiency.

For instance, let’s say you notice your customers visit your company’s website often to resolve their concerns with the FAQs hosted on your site. You might then want to double down on self-service as a core customer service strategy and strengthen your knowledge base to make it even easier for customers to find answers by themselves. 

A good customer service strategy ultimately focuses on constantly enhancing customer experiences, nurturing stronger client relationships, and driving customer retention to impact you business’s’ bottom line.

Why having a well-thought-out customer service strategy is important?

A well-thought-out customer service strategy is crucial for any business aiming to thrive in today's competitive market. It allows your business to analyze its customer service operations and implement best practices, and it ensures that your customer service team is equipped with the right tools, training, and resources to handle inquiries efficiently and effectively.

When customers feel valued and supported by a well-planned customer service approach, they are more likely to remain loyal and even become advocates for your brand. If customers have a negative experience due to a poorly thought-out approach that fails to optimize their experience, they might associate that negativity with your brand as a whole, impacting aspects beyond your customer service reputation.

Benefits of having a customer service strategy

If you’re wondering how a solid customer service strategy can help your business (and if it’s worth the time and effort to invest in one), here’s a list of some of the specific benefits it can offer.

Optimizes resource allocation

A well-structured customer service strategy ensures that the right resources are in place to handle customer inquiries efficiently. By analyzing customer data and trends as part of your strategy, your company can identify initiatives that should be prioritized and allocate resources accordingly, ensuring that your time is well-spent.

Reduces customer service costs

Customer service strategies can help resolve issues more efficiently, minimizing and lowering operational costs. A classic strategic example is shifting support interactions from high-cost channels to low-cost digital channels such as chat or social media. Another is implementing automation tools like chatbots and self-service portals that can handle common queries, freeing up human agents to tackle more complex issues.

Improves customer satisfaction

A solid customer service strategy will set clear service standards and protocols, enabling customer service teams to meet varying customer needs and boost customer satisfaction. As you work on activities that address customer expectations, your CSAT scores will naturally improve.

Enhances customer loyalty

As per Gartner, when customers experience valuable service interactions, they are 82% more likely to repurchase from the same company. When your customer service strategy is aimed at delivering more value to customers, you are sure to earn more customer loyalty.

Builds consistency across customer support

With a well-defined customer service strategy, customers will receive consistent support regardless of the channel or representative they interact with. Standardized procedures and protocols help maintain uniformity in service delivery, which builds trust among customers and keeps them coming back.

Enhanced feedback loop

A beneficial customer service strategy includes a system for gathering and analyzing customer feedback. Feedback loops include many forms, such as surveys, social media listening, and reviews. No matter what they look like, feedback loops are essential for identifying weak areas and making necessary adjustments, ensuring your commitment to enhancing customer experiences.

Empowers support agents

When support agents are provided with the necessary training, tools, and resources, they can handle customer inquiries with confidence and efficiency. Empowered agents are also more likely to feel valued and motivated, increasing their productivity and ultimately benefiting the overall customer service experience.

How to build an effective customer service strategy?

Step 1: Map customer journeys and understand their preferences

Since your customer support strategy revolves around meeting customer needs, it’s a good idea to map out detailed service journeys and identify customer pain points, challenges, and goals, across every touchpoint and channel.

Related resource: Your ultimate guide to mapping customer journeys + FREE journey map templates

Start by gathering and analyzing customer feedback—not just from regular surveys and focus groups but also from indirect sources like support ticket data and listening to your customers’ voices on social media, popular forums, and online review sites.

Collect customer data across sales, marketing, and support to gain valuable customer insights to build a successful customer service strategy.

Step 2: Analyze your current customer service performance

Before you list out the strategic initiatives to improve customer service, assess the current state of your customer support function. You can audit your previous customer interactions and agent performance using vital customer support metrics.

Do you see a lag in response times? Is there a rise in ticket volume over the past few months? Are resolutions taking longer than expected in a particular channel? Analyzing your past customer service data helps you answer these questions and identify areas for improvement and opportunities to boost customer satisfaction.

Step 3: Define your customer service goals and priorities

After analyzing your customer service performance, you’ll arrive at a list of challenges and opportunities that compete for your team’s focus and efforts. You can’t take up all these challenges in your current strategy and expect outsized results. 

To help you narrow your list of competing customer service priorities before you strategize, here are some questions you can ask yourself.

• Which of these challenges, if addressed, would have the maximum impact on your customers?

• Among the opportunities identified, which ones align closely with your overall organizational CX strategy?

• Are there any quick, early wins you can see with minimal agent upskilling or new tool onboarding?

Based on the above questions, gauge the priority of your goals and challenges to create more impactful customer support strategies. For instance, if addressing rising volumes of repetitive level-1 queries is your top priority, adopting chatbots may become your key customer service strategy.

Step 4: Identify KPIs, timelines, and metrics to track progress

Customer support KPIs and metrics are benchmarks to improve your customer service strategy. They can reflect on agent productivity, performance, and quality of support provided to customers.

• Productivity metrics: This involves the nature of customer issues in ticket inflow, the number of tickets resolved, and the active time taken to resolve each issue. Keeping track of these can help in planning your staffing, understanding customer behavior, and agent training – all at once.

• Performance metrics: Performance metrics show your customer service team’s resolution time and first response time.

• Quality metrics: These metrics reflect the quality of customer service through Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). While NPS tackles customer loyalty and advocacy, you can use satisfaction surveys after every customer service interaction to know where your business stands in satisfying customers.

Set realistic timelines to track improvements in each of these metrics.

Step 5: Empower your support agents and align teams

Your customer service team is integral to the success of your customer support strategy. Training and equipping your agents to have a customer-centric mindset is vital in implementing your customer service plan. 

Foster a customer-first work culture and ensure to train your reps on key traits, namely,

• Empathy: Empathy goes both ways. It reminds the customer that there is a human on the other side of the support channel, and it will help you put yourself in the customer’s shoes to see the pain points of an issue.

• Product knowledge: When customers reach out to a customer service representative, they trust that they are contacting a product expert–someone who knows the product inside and out and can understand their concerns in no time.

• Aligning goals with KPIs: Support agents need to be able to work towards achieving measurable goals. A customer service strategy that tracks KPIs can empower support teams and help them assess their performance so that they get better at handling incoming customer support tickets.

Additionally, your customer service strategy requires seamless collaboration between and beyond teams. Customer requirements deal with information pertaining to the product team, sales team, finance, and external vendors, to name a few. Get all the stakeholders aligned and actively contributing to making your customer service strategy a success.

Step 6: Assess and build a unified support technology suite

Companies that want a comprehensive customer service strategy can’t afford to rely on legacy tools and systems. If your data resides in silos across multiple disparate systems, your team members will be shuttling between tabs to find relevant information—an unwanted addition to the existing agent workload.

Companies need to optimize the number of screens that their support agents handle in one go. This is not only an issue for productivity or customer handling but for the cost to your company. Multiple data sources also mean that your business incurs heightened standalone expenses of business software. 

In contrast, state-of-the-art online support software is simple to use, intuitive, scalable, smashes data silos, and discounts all maintenance costs. Make sure the support software you use has a comprehensive marketplace with tools and applications that seamlessly integrate to own a truly unified support technology suite.

Step 7: Measure and review your strategy periodically

Revisit your customer service strategy within the timelines you stipulated earlier to track the progress of your strategy. Monitor the key metrics you identified, such as response times or CSAT scores. If you don’t see the level of improvement you desire, then tweak your tactics to adapt and improve your support strategy.

Remember, you may have to realign or even build new customer service strategies depending on tectonic shifts in customer demands, market conditions, or even new overall business priorities.

Customer service strategy examples

We’ve explained what a customer service strategy is, but you may be wondering what it actually looks like in practice. Here are a few examples you can implement in your journey to enhanced customer service.

Emphasize employee training and development

It makes perfect sense that knowledgeable employees are more productive employees. When you equip your agents with the technical and people skills they need to work with confidence, you will see better customer retention and increased customer satisfaction. Active listening, patience, and communication skills can all be taught to customer service agents through training and will result in a better customer experience.

In addition to employee training, incorporating ongoing development opportunities into your customer service strategy will keep your team updated with the latest best practices and tools. By investing in the advancement of your agents’ skill sets, your business can provide more competent service delivery.

Optimize self-service options

Contacting customer service representatives can be a hassle for some people, and it can even deter customers from getting the assistance they need. By optimizing self-service options through knowledge bases and navigable self-service portals, businesses can provide a more comprehensive support system so customers can get help in whatever way they choose.

Leverage automation

Automated customer service systems such as chatbots, automated email responses, and AI-driven support tools can handle routine inquiries and tasks more efficiently than ever. This strategy not only accelerates response times but also frees up human agents to focus on more complex issues that automation technology cannot solve alone.

Pursue personalized experiences for customers

Personalized experiences for customers are possible with customer history tools. By accessing past interactions and recognizing specific needs, agents can create more relevant and individualized experiences for each customer seeking support. You can even give customers the option to connect with agents they had positive experiences with in the past by using a preferred agent tool.

Another way to personalize customer service interactions is to train your agents to treat customers as real people, not just the other half of a virtual interaction. Calling customers by their name, sending specialized offers, or delivering birthday and holiday greetings can show customers that they matter to your business. Personalization fosters a connection between customers and your business, enhancing satisfaction and promoting long-term loyalty.

See your customer service strategies come to life with Freshworks!

Now that you know what a customer service strategy is, how to create one, and how to measure its success, you need a tool to help you implement your plan. To drive repeat business by consistently delighting your customer base, your customer service strategy must become part of your long-term support culture with software that readily accommodates it.