The 7 building blocks of customer service

Efficient and productive customer service representatives are a baseline, not a gold standard.

A recent Aberdeen report reveals that forward-thinking customer service organizations have developed strategies to directly benefit customers by making engaging with brands more convenient. These companies understand that effortless service experiences create a competitive advantage.

The building blocks of convenient, customer-focused service
Aberdeen suggests that seven building blocks help companies minimize customer effort.

1. Understand your customers’ journeys clearly

It’s important to capture customer feedback across all channels, to monitor sentiment and feedback. Analytics help you understand how customer sentiment and feedback change throughout a customer’s journey and then identify areas to improve.

2. Ensure all interactions are consistent

Interaction consistency is critical across channels and departments, to avoid frustrating and confusing customers. Integrating disparate systems is essential to this consistency.  

3. Be a consistent, authentic communicator

Don’t rely on customers to initiate the engagement process. Be proactive and use alerts, reminders, and notifications to help them anticipate potential issues and to understand that you’re addressing them. Become not just a responder but also a trusted partner.

4. Analyze self-service data to identify common issues

Understand the problems that customers are trying to solve themselves. Chatbots and automated apps can resolve issues that otherwise vex customers. 

5. Enrich customer journey management activities

Take advantage of tailored workflows to better manage customer journeys, including workflows to provide personalized self-service options or automate customer requests.

6. Give your customer reps the tools to win

The right tools include the training, technology, processes, and data—as well as the authority to use them to full advantage—to satisfy customer needs and solve problems. Without the right tools, your customer service will be a source of customer frustration.

7. Align organizational culture

Provide your employees with the training required to understand how greatly they influence the customer experience. Allow them to suggest improvements to the business of client management.

Business benefits of customer-focused convenience: by the numbers

Aberdeen reports that companies who create formal programs to optimize effortless customer service enjoy significant business benefits.

• 96% greater year-over-year growth in annual company revenue
• 4.1x greater improvement in the annual customer retention rate
• 3.5x greater annual improvement in average customer spend
• 3.9x greater annual improvement in customer satisfaction rate

Customer retention is good business

Happy customers tend to be loyal customers, so enabling effortless customer experiences is worth the investment. Aberdeen also found that focusing on customer convenience also increases the chances that a company can win back former customers.

Learn more about tools and solutions that can help you enable effortless: customer service.