CUSTOMER SERVICE FRAMEWORK FOR KENYAN BUSINESSES

DEFINING YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE FRAMEWORK

In these current times where your potential customers have more and more options to choose from, businesses cannot afford for customer service to be an afterthought.

For your business to stand out, as a business owner or as a manager, you need to ensure that the customer service team is offering high quality service. If the customer receives low quality service, they will leave dissatisfied taking their business to your competitors.

We have established that improved customer service results in loyal customers and brand advocates who buy more hence improving the business performance. To achieve this, a business needs to plan out a strategy .

We may then wonder...

What is a Customer Service Framework?

It is a well thought out plan of action to handle customer interactions. It includes processes, tools and methods to be applied in order to achieve and deliver the quality of customer service your business envisions.

However, a majority of businesses do take time to plan a customer service strategy because they are mainly driven to make sales and profits forgetting that customer service is an integral part of all these business components. Customer experience is at the center of it all.

Many companies have an internal approach to business that is; focusing on sales, reducing expenses, minimizing resources and lowering any expensive interaction channel hence valuing these processes more important than the customer.

To reap the benefits of customer loyalty and enhance business growth, let us look at the main components of a solid customer service framework. Let’s us look at what to consider when creating a customer service framework:

1.Customer Service Vision

The vision sets the tone for the experiences your customers are going to have with your organization and the long term perception you want these engagements to create.

Putting customers first is not only a guiding principle for the customer service team but rather, it should start from the company leaders trickling down to the whole of the organization. The company should not value itself over the customer but instead, the customer needs, wants and concerns should be the foundation of the company’s policy.

When everyone in the organization has a customer centric approach, it makes the flow of information much quicker, the work of the customer service team is better and the delivery of the solutions to customers is much easier and prompt.

Take for instance you make an order for a burger from an eatery in Nairobi CBD but by the time the delivery gets to you, the burger is all squishy and the extra sauce on the side is smeared on the box.

So perhaps the packaging team is not taking time to properly pack and secure the box because in their minds, they need to quickly complete this order and get to the next without thinking much about how it will get to the customer.

It is therefore important for everyone in the company to have a customer-first mentality .

2. Create the Customer Journey

In order for the customer service framework to be successful, it is important to understand the customer journey by analyzing customer interactions and then identifying the touchpoints.

The objectives of the customer service framework need to track progress in order to see where and how to modify and improve the approach. Below are a few questions you may consider in order to evaluate and understand the customer interactions:

• How soon do customers contact you after the purchase?
• Which channels do they use to contact you?
• How often do they contact you?
• What do customers request from you when they contact you?
• Do you get more or less contact from customers who have stopped buying from you?

You stand to understand a few things about the customer touchpoints such as:

• ?Do new customers contact you? And if they do, at what point?
• Do you get inquiries about billing and after how long do these questions come up?
• Do you receive questions about the features of your product and which questions are common?
• What issues do customers report on and at what point?

Getting an in-depth understanding of all this helps your organization to preempt customer inquiries and with this your customer service team can be ready with solutions or better yet, be proactive and offer a solution at the point of sale.

As a business owner you get to know which product needs improvement in order to avert customer issues, anticipate customer needs and allocate your employees accordingly as well as reduce customer churn.

3. Set Clear Attainable Goals:

Once the vision is set, it is then important to come up with goals and look into how each employee will contribute to achieving the mentioned goals and how they need to prioritize customer service in their day to day operations.

?The goals need to be specific focusing on a particular area. The goals need to be attainable with work and targeted effort, however, they also need to be challenging enough in order to keep growing and being better.

Also define ways to measure the goals and while stating the timelines.

For instance, the goals could be looking into improving customer satisfaction so at various points for the customer journey, prompting a survey to understand how customers feel will help identify at what point issues come up. This is especially useful after a customer interacts with the support team.

4. Build a Driven Customer Service Team

As a business owner you need to find the right type of people to join the team to ensure that the customer service strategy is implemented effectively. You need to make sure that the team chosen has the required skills and personality to deliver high quality customer service.

Every new team member, irrespective of their rank, needs to go through the same customer service training program at the onboarding stage to ensure that you provide a consistent customer experience. This is quite important to ensure that the team is prepared to handle the day to day challenges.

he team needs to understand the company’s standards and processes, customer expectations and how they fit in the organization’s overall picture.

Managers need to keep monitoring performance while providing feedback to their teams and sharpening their skills in the delivery of exceptional customer service.

5. Adopt the Right Tools

Streamlined customer service support is important and more achievable today than ever before because of the availability of toolkits that offer multiple functionalities and features to support this.

When a customer has to keep explaining their issue multiple times, they view this as poor customer service. As a business, it is crucial to have a system that can support an Omni channel environment such as a combination of phone, live chat and email.

Chat box has also grown to be a popular channel that offers automated customer support for common issues. Other channels include call centers, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), tutorials and videos on how to do something.

At the end, being able to bring the multiple functionalities together in one platform is the greatest achievement. Giving your agents access to one pool of data that includes customer history, previous interactions and preferences, helps them gain context and a quick understanding of who your customer is.

Empower your Customer Service Team:

When the customer service agent has been given some leeway to make decisions and take action based on their analysis of the situation, this can help personalize customer service and exceed the client’s expectations .

Empowering your team also leads to an improved responsiveness and higher productiveness because they do not need to keep consulting or escalating even the small issues. It would be ideal for an organization to set up processes and policies to facilitate this while keeping the representatives accountable.

For instance, enabling an agent to offer a discount or refund when a customer complains about a product or service after authenticating the issue would be a good way to go. This helps to resolve issues quickly before they escalate and as a business, you are able to retain your customer.?

6. Make use of Feedback

Customer feedback offers invaluable information and having a reliable customer feedback loop ensures there is continued improvement on your product or service offering. Get to listen to your customers from the comments on social media, feedback and suggestions from the surveys or customer conversations with your customer service representatives.

It is also important to collect feedback from your customer service team to learn of their experience and identify any service gaps and opportunities for training and hiring.

As a business, you stand to nurture customer relationships by responding to the feedback received. Offer solutions for those that had negative feedback while thanking those that had positive feedback. This makes the clients feel heard, understood and appreciated.

The work does not end by implementing a customer service framework. When it comes to customer relationship management, best practices are continuously evolving. This is because the business and customer needs evolve over time and it is therefore important that the customer service framework evolves and adapts to these changes. The constant adjustment should cut across the whole organization.

However, one thing remains the same, the whole team should keep the customer at the front and center of everything they do.

Does your company have a customer service framework or strategy? Is your team aware and conversant with the framework?

Reach out to Customer Centric Kenya to tailor make a training suitable for your team and help improve on your customer service.

Article Author

Jackie Wahome, a Customer Experience Trainer in Kenya with over 15 years of experience in Customer Experience across different industries in Kenya.

I help businesses make more and retain more customers through unrivalled Customer Experience.

Jackie’s Profile Link

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jackie-wahome-customer-experience-trainer-7b272554/

?Subscribe to my Biweekly Newsletter

https://www.dhirubhai.net/newsletters/unrivalled-customer-service-6917811470386794496/

Company Profile Link - Customer Centric Kenya

https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/customer-centric-kenya/

?

?

https://www.goboomtown.com/blog/customer-service-strategy