The 6 essentials of customer service in hypergrowth

When setting up their customer service, many rapidly growing companies try to reach for the stars before establishing firm foundations. Having a solid base, though, is the difference between your service being the Burj Khalifa or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So how do you create these foundations? By releasing a product so good that your customers don’t need support (“Best service is no service”), by relying on the power of AI so your customers can help themselves, and by creating reliable live assistance.

Ask yourself these 6 questions to find out whether your growing company is doing all it can to build the basis for a customer service that is the afterburner of your success.

Are you doing enough to prevent customer issues in the first place?

When your product works flawlessly — be it video streaming, car sharing or a bank — your customers don’t need to contact you. Hence: best service is no service. Cross-industry studies show that 80% of all customer support requests have a negative impact on customer loyalty. And customers who have to contact a company even once are 20% less satisfied than the ones who don’t. To minimize these contacts, you should set up a feedback loop between your front office and your development teams. Three things move the needle here: first, you have a small team that reports on all customer contact reasons, and quantifies them in a log reflecting your products and processes (e.g. card issues, login problems, delivery). These logs are presented to senior management at least once a month. Second, you have these contacts translated into costs and added to the P&L of the responsible contact owner across the organization. Including contact reduction as OKRs of your product, tech and operations teams help as well. Third, you ensure that reducing customer issues is on your development roadmap — whether on a quarterly or ongoing basis.

Can your customers help themselves with AI-supported services?

Self-service is wonderful, because customers can access it anytime, anywhere. To make it work, you at least need to provide four things: an effective web- or app-based help center, interactive voice recognition (IVR) for phone calls, an intelligent chatbot, and in-product self-service features (changing an address, etc.).

An illustrative version of customer journeys. Source: Bain & Company. More details available here.

Start by mapping your key customer journeys based on input from customers and service experts (see the graph below and here for more info). Use this as the basis for structuring self-service channels, such as your FAQ page. If you’re a tech company and thinking of having a chatbot, it’s worth considering an open source framework. This keeps development pathways shorter than in-house development and the costs remain manageable. Take a look at Rasa, MindMeld and Hu:toma for this. Then there’s the question of whether to opt for a textbot or a voice-activated variant. The latter is becoming increasingly popular, with, for example, the Bank of America (Erica) and Capital One (Alexa skills) both relying on them.

Are you available for your customers across all relevant channels?

Ideally, you should keep your customer response time to within 30 seconds, if you want them to be happy. Many studies show that anything longer than 90 seconds will increase your risk of them feeling undervalued. In a hypergrowth company, you will need a good contact center network to deliver on this. A “hybrid model” may work best, with an in-house center of excellence setting the performance benchmark and cost-efficient external partners providing support from countries with low labor costs. Nearshoring to countries such as Athen, Lisbon or Georgia often provides a good balance between lower labor costs and a well educated workforce. To steer your network you also need a strong workforce management team. This team delivers a contact forecasting at least three months into the future, supports with scheduling & shift planning on cycles of 6+ weeks and does intra-day resource management to allocate your service specialist between channels to boost your availability. Details of WFM roles can be found here. Having a proper integrated WFM tools in place such as Verint, NICE, Aspect, and Teleopti is of essence to be available to your customers with the highest efficiency possible. Check out Doug Casterton’s 50 expert tips on taking WFM to a world-class level. Finally, a good operational readiness team will ensure your front and back office are best equipped in the event that something goes south (product launch, communications, etc.).

Are your processes focused on resolution?

Good service requires good processes. “Processes disorder” is common for rapidly growing companies, and it is essential to clean this up quickly. First, map your customer-facing processes with a special focus on resolving dead ends. Some companies rely on ISO 9001 certification to ensure proper documentation is followed. Second, once you have identified your key processes, assign “process owners” from management to each one. These “process owners” — supported by junior “process champions” — are responsible for keeping the processes up to date. Ensure that your processes are continually up-to-date, e.g. deploying six-month expiration date for knowledge base articles. Third, assemble an operational excellence team that teaches your process experts how to map, optimize and refine processes based on a specific approach, e.g. Lean or Six Sigma. Finally, deploy a simple workflow tool that guides your front office colleagues to resolve customer cases. This is ideally a decision-tree based tool in which your front office colleagues need to answer questions which leads them to the solutions. LucidCX and Unimyra are examples for guided knowledge bases.

Do you drive quality communication at scale?

Quality communication at scale means all employees in your front office centers have the right information they need to resolve customer inquiries. Take Leo, a service specialist who recently joined your company. Leo needs a strong training team to support him in his onboarding journey. After completing a week of theory training, a more experienced buddy coaches him on resolving customer inquiries starting in Week 2. Regular quizzes to assess knowledge gaps and virtual learning sessions support his early tenure. Once he’s settled in, the coaching and QA team issues Leo a quality score each month that reflects how well he is adhering to the internal quality standards (e.g. understanding issues, resolution communication, compliance, etc.). The best approach here is to allocate one coach for each front office team, with the coach working closely with Leo’s team lead. If he’s doing well, he can further specialize in his job. Specialization should aim for an 80/20 split: Leo works on his specialty (e.g. onboarding customers) 80% of the time, and handles all other customer inquiries for the remaining 20%. Leo is therefore quick and effective at resolving customer issues within his area of expertise and can address other issues as required.

Do you have the right tools for your service landscape?

If you don’t have the proper tools to hand, you’ll never be able to navigate the peaks and valleys that make up your service landscape. Meet Lea, an English-speaking customer who, in this scenario, uses your chatbot to ask how to open an account. Your chatbot adds her to the English onboarding queue, and your rule-based routine algorithm connects her with Joav, an English-speaking agent who specializes in delivery. Joav takes care of the request with support from up to five tools: 1. A CRM tool such as SalesForce to understand Lea’s customer data. 2. An in-house knowledge database to guide him to find a solution fast. 3. A real-time recommendation engine to present a course of action based on Lea’s profile. 4. An internal database to update Lea’s customer data, such as on-boarding status. 5. A coaching tool to receive feedback afterwards.

If your answer to all six questions is a resounding YES, then congratulations: your hypergrowth company is well on its way to becoming a recognized landmark in your market. Now you can focus on personalizing the service you provide to your customers. And if you still have work to do? Don’t worry: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Stick to the advice above and you’ll get to where you want to be soon rather than later.