Customer service process: build an evergreen support workflow

Every growing customer support team needs a standardized customer service process. Without proper guidelines in place, your agents would be left in the dark, not knowing how to approach an issue, leading to duplication in effort and a delayed response time for customers. While using a ticketing system can help automate certain actions, it is unlikely to solve your team’s productivity unless your agents follow a documented customer service process, as well.

What is a customer service process?

A customer service process is a standardized and repeatable approach to customer service. It ensures that the flow of support does not get derailed with unwarranted and sometimes needlessly complicated procedures like going back and forth between teams to solve a simple customer query. It gives your agents the conviction to use a definitive set of support workflows and decision-making patterns to make your customer service coherent and fail-safe.

While the customer service process flow chart is only visible to your customer service teams, the lack of one can easily be noticed by your customers. Customer-centricity needs to be the core idea behind the framework of the customer service process.

For instance, prioritizing a company policy over customer needs can be a huge dealbreaker. Here’s an example where American Airlines failed to truly pay attention to the negative sentiment of a tweet, blindly using a template response. This points to the lack of a concrete customer service process that encourages customer-facing teams to delve deep into customer feedback.

What are the steps to building a customer service process flow?

Step 1. Create a customer journey map

The first step to building a customer service process is to create a seamless customer journey that maps to the business process flow and mirrors it to provide benchmark customer service. Understanding the customer journey will help you map every stage of their life-cycle, from a prospect to a paying customer. Small businesses in particular have to get their customer journey sorted, as they’re built on the premise that the flow of their support is much more streamlined and personalized than what a huge brand could offer.

Stages of a customer journey

Build a customer persona

Building a customer persona will help you identify selling opportunities, product and service expectations, and potential pain points that can be ironed out. Determine their demographics and put yourself in their shoes so you can understand their preferences to align your customer service and products to their needs.

Find out what customers want to solve for

Every buyer has a goal or a use case, which brought them to your business. By identifying this, you can chart out the pricing, offer the right features, and build a support plan that will help them through a hassle-free journey at every stage, from awareness to research to final purchase. Surveys can be a great way to get a gist of your customers’ aspirations. Asking the right questions matters a lot in this stage:

• What made you try our company?

• What issues are you trying to solve?

• Are you satisfied with the information on our website? Does it help you get full context about our business?

• If you reached out to our customer service, how would you rate us out of 10?

• Is there anything you think our customer service approach or website is missing?

• What would be the deciding factor for you to buy our product? Do you think we have it covered?

Figuring out your customers’ answers to such questions will help you render a foolproof approach to fulfilling their expectations.

Establish a plan for every touchpoint

While an e-commerce business may use social media as the preferred customer touchpoint for engagement, phone could be the go-to touchpoint for a travel agency. So you need to establish a customer service flow after analyzing your personas and the volume of engagement in every channel.

Step 2. Know your existing customers in and out

Your existing customer base is the lifeline of your business. Historically, retaining them has been more profitable than acquiring new customers. You already have an established customer relationship, which needs to be continuously nurtured. That personal relationship reassures them that they’re not being overlooked for new customers.

Your customers’ purchase history and prior support interactions can help you personalize a journey for them. These pieces of information can be added to customer personas to ensure that the support provided is coherent and proactive. You can also nurture the relationship by recommending tailored product or feature upgrades, as determined by your interactions with them.

Step 3. Align your support agents to a customer-first service process

When your customer service process is customer-first, it helps your agents get a perspective of your business from the customers’ side. They can identify potential pain points early and evaluate potential product and support improvements.

Empathize with customers

Empathy is the one trait that every support agent needs to foster. It goes a long way in connecting with customers emotionally and goes beyond the value they see in your products and services.

Understand customer problems from the grassroots

To gain their trust, customer complaints and requests have to be analyzed to determine the root cause of every issue and to avoid them in the future. Here is where product knowledge is critical. The support agent has to know your business in and out to resolve customer queries with expertise and conviction.

Aligning customer service goals with KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) help motivate support agents to excel in customer service work toward a common measurable goal of satisfying customers. Some possible metrics include productivity and quality of support ticket inflow, number of tickets resolved, active time taken to resolve a ticket, resolution time, first response time, net promoter score (NPS), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

Step 4. Design an escalation process for customer service

Escalations are support events that involve disgruntled customers who demand a higher level of involvement to solve their issue when the original resolution was unsatisfactory. Escalations need a dedicated high-touch customer service process. In an escalation, the customer has been waiting in line for the right fix or response. So it has to be handled wisely, with a sense of urgency.

A standardized workflow for an escalation process

5. Understand the nature of the ticket

Customer issues can be classified into categories such as simple, technical, product-related, pricing, and refund-related in order to efficiently handle them based on the support team’s area of expertise and agent skills. For instance, if the customer has an issue with a product feature, the support team needs to route it to the technical account manager for collaboration; if it’s a simple query, they can pick relevant solution articles from the knowledge base and resolve it themselves.

Gain a competitive edge with a reliable customer support process

• Streamline communication and enhance support quality across touch points with a helpdesk.

• New hires should get a glimpse of the customer service culture ingrained in your organization. Training becomes easier when they are on board with the service culture as soon as they join.

• Leverage self-service as a prime support channel to ensure optimal customer experience and improve the productivity of your support team.

• Make collaboration seamless to create consistency and accountability across teams. Helpdesk collaboration can help you avoid bottlenecks and back-and-forths between teams. For instance, if there’s a partner integration issue, your agent must have the functionality to collaborate with the partner on the ticket itself.

• Increase performance and productivity by aligning support toward common, measurable goals.

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