12 Min
Saying that a customer service management strategy could make or break your business is an understatement. Today, every customer interaction counts because, like Maya Angelou said, “People will never forget how you made them feel,” and your customers surely will not. So, it’s essential to understand that the way you make your customers feel is paramount.
This is not just our opinion; Zippia’s report shows that 42% of customers are willing to pay more when offered a more friendly and welcoming customer experience. This has led to companies focusing on improving their customer experience to see an 80% increase in their revenue.
So, if you don’t want to be left behind, you must focus on your customer experience (CX). Creating an effective customer management strategy is the first step toward building your CX authority. This is a blueprint for effectively meeting customer expectations by delivering consistent and efficient customer service.
In this blog, we will help you create an effective customer service management strategy in just eight steps.
Table of contents
8 Steps to Create an Effective Customer Management Strategy
1. Identify and Address Your CX Agent’s Weaknesses
Your customer support agent is your key to delivering a great customer experience. So, start by analyzing your agent’s performance across metrics like average handling time, customer satisfaction score, and first call resolution. Based on these insights you can identify their weak points and invest in training resources like an interactive Learning Management System to improve performance.
Action: The first phase of your strategy is to analyze and improve agent performance by employing effective training resources.
2. Enable Your Agents to Easily Access Important Data
It might sound silly, but 3 in 10 agents cannot reliably access customer information, which causes customers to become more irritated and dissatisfied. Study shows that employees spend around 29% of their workweek searching for information. So, the next step is to identify how much time your agents are losing searching for data.
Based on the insights, you can consider whether your current system enables your agents to access information fast enough. If not, consider investing in an effective knowledge management system with an intelligent AI-search functionality.
Action: The second phase of your strategy is to lower the information search time for agents by empowering them with an AI-powered Knowledge base.
3. Reward Your Top Performing Agents
Your CX agents are key to delivering a better customer experience, but providing training and easy access to a consolidated knowledge base might not be enough. You also need to motivate them effectively.
Reward is a proven method to do so. But it is not a one-size-fits-all. You need to reward your agents meaningfully to make them want to serve your customers better. It’s crucial to understand their needs, like bonuses, status, acknowledgment, etc. You can gain this insight through employee surveys or having one-on-ones with top-performing agents.
Action: The third phase of your strategy is to effectively motivate your agents by building a culture that encourages better performance.
4. Provide Seamless CX Online Through AI and Self-Service Channels
While your agents remain the star of the show, your CX goes beyond them as well. Today, 91% of customers prefer to use a knowledge base to solve their problems before calling an agent.
So, you need to ensure that you have an effective knowledge base for your consumers. It shall consist of easy-to-follow resources like interactive FAQs, picture guides, articles, tutorials, etc.
Besides having an effective knowledge base, you must also provide seamless CX through chatbots that effectively help your customers online. Studies show that 52% of shoppers want an AI tool that guides them through a website, product, or feature. Also, 3 out of every 4 shoppers expect the AI to provide them with the same degree of online customer experience as their human counterparts.
Here, Gen AI chatbots can help you meet your customer’s expectations. Gen AI chatbots use semantic search and state-of-the-art models to converse in natural language, quickly understand customer intentions, and deliver accurate answers from your knowledge base. When the AI cannot solve a customer query, it escalates the query to an agent, along with a context of the customer problem. This saves time and allows the agent to understand and resolve customer queries quickly.
Action: The fourth phase of your strategy is to offer a seamless CX experience online by providing an effective knowledge base and intelligent chatbot service that can efficiently solve customer problems.
5. Personalize Your Communication
76% of consumers get frustrated when they do not experience personalized interactions with companies. Now, you must ensure that customers experience customized communication across all touchpoints, whether in the store, through your self-service channels, or with an agent.
Deploying a knowledge management system that seamlessly integrates with your CRM can help you achieve personalized communication for individual customers.
This integrated knowledge management software empowers agents to simultaneously access comprehensive customer information and data like product details, procedures, and offers. This enables agents to provide personalized communication and simultaneously resolve queries within a single application. This reduces average handling time and enhances customer satisfaction.
Action: The fifth phase of your strategy is to personalize your customer communication across all touchpoints with a comprehensive knowledge base software.
6. Collect Customer Feedback
Now it’s time to see how you’re doing, and who better to give the final verdict than your customers? In this step, you need to gather customer feedback effectively without annoying your customers.
You could do this by deploying customer feedback forms through communication channels, where it’s easy for consumers to fill them, like pop-ups on your website, chatbots, or emails.
Ensure that your feedback forms are short, simple, and personalized to encourage participation. You could do this by asking a maximum of 3 to 5 questions, personalized with their name and activity. You could also provide incentives like a discount on the next order.
Many customers are also not inclined to write comments, so if you want to assess specific parameters like customer satisfaction, agent resolution, or chatbot performance, it is more effective to use rating scales.
Action: The sixth phase of your strategy is to seamlessly gather customer information across various channels with effective feedback systems.
7. Assess Agent Performance
The measure of success is always dual. While your customers can externally sense the change in your customer experience and give you their subjective feedback, it’s also crucial for you to internally assess your agent’s performance.
You can do this by employing a comprehensive knowledge management system that gives you micro-segmented analytics regarding individual agent performance. For instance, to what degree do they adhere to your SOPs, how much time do they spend at each step, or how often can they resolve customer queries during the first call.
Action: The seventh phase of your strategy is to gather in-depth data regarding individual agent performance with a comprehensive Knowledge management system.
8. Analyze and Improve
Now that you have gathered data regarding customer satisfaction and agent performance, it’s time to analyze that data and improve your customer service strategy.
For example, you might find that customers like it when the agents already know their whole purchase journey by just typing in their name; but might not be impressed with your self-service channels as it redirects them to a CX agent for every minor issue.
Or your agents might love not having to toggle between multiple tabs and instead be able to access all the required data in just one application quickly; but might find it hard to follow lengthy SOP manuals for resolving customer queries.
The key is to actively listen and effectively resolve these issues. You might replace your knowledge base articles and blogs with easy-to-follow video tutorials. For your agents, you can repurpose your existing manuals into interactive next-best-action workflows or picture guides.
Action: The eighth phase of your strategy is to analyze customer and agent feedback to improve your customer support strategy.
How To Make Your Customer Management Strategy More Effective with a KMS?
A web-based knowledge management system (KMS) is software that integrates with all your existing knowledge bases (like CRMs, Slack, etc.) to create a single source of truth. This is a one-stop shop for all your knowledge.
By employing a comprehensive knowledge management platform like Knowmax, you can easily store, create, access, analyze, and share data, in one place.
With Knowmax, you can auto-generate micro-segmented analysis regarding agent performance, customer satisfaction, and more. You can also seamlessly repurpose your existing data into interactive decision trees and picture guides with AI.
Your agents, on the other hand, quickly access important information and resolve customer queries more effectively in real-time.
But believe it or not, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Knowmax can streamline your operations and enable you to reach the pinnacle of CX success faster. How? Find out here.
