7 Steps to Creating a Customer Service Strategy

Employees only perform at the level they are managed and it takes great leadership to help employees understand the importance of the customer experience. This is why it is important to have a strategy to help create and reinforce a service culture.

7 Steps to Developing a Customer Service Strategy

1. Create a Customer Service Vision

The first step in creating a customer service strategy is communicating the customer service vision to employees. Employees need to understand what the vision and organizational goals are for customer service and understand their responsibility to help achieve that vision.

An organization that shares a customer service vision, and teaches customer service skills, will provide a better customer service experience than an organization that leaves the front-line employees untrained and unprepared for dealing with customer issues.

2. Assess Customer Needs

Organizations often fail, and waste valuable resources, creating products and services that they thought the customer wanted, only to find out it was not what the customer wanted at all. The trick is to find out what it is the customer wants and put together plans to meet those needs.

Organizations can’t meet the needs of their customers without understanding what they want. The first step in a customer improvement initiative is to talk to the customers to find out their perception of the services being provided and determining what their needs and expectations are.

A customer needs assessment is done by soliciting feedback through focus groups, satisfaction surveys, or customer comment cards, and developing a comprehensive plan to meet and exceed the customer needs.

There are lots of survey software available. One I like is SurveyGizmo which is an easy to use online survey tool. It’s a pretty fun tool and you can play with it for free. You should try it and see what your customers tell you!

Keep in mind that customer needs and expectations are a moving target. What a customer wants today will be very different from what the customer wants a year or five years down the road. As things change, expectations and needs change also.

3. Hire the Right Employees

Hiring with the customer in mind is another step in an overall strategy for strong customer service.

Screening employees and ensuring that they possess the disposition and skill set to help support a strong customer service environment is important.

Skills can be taught but attitude and personality cannot. It’s a sad fact but not everyone should interact with customers.

4. Set Goals for Customer Service

Once customer needs and expectations are identified and customer satisfaction is measured, it is time to create goals for achieving customer satisfaction.

Employees need to understand what the target is so they can help the organization reach their corporate objectives.

For example, if you operate a customer call center, a goal might be to answer all calls within X number of minutes and hold employees accountable to that standard.

If the standard can’t be met, figure out why and fix it.

5. Train on Service Skills

If you hire right, your employees will have a natural ability to serve your customers well. However, everyone can benefit from practical teaching on the organization’s approach to customer service.

The training should explain how the organization would like the employee to behave in every situation and should help employees understand how to respond to their customers. Employees need to know what you want them to do.

For example, teach them how to respond to customer complaints, how to be responsive to customers, how to meet customer needs, when to perform service recovery, how to answer the phone and your organizations standards for service.

6. Hold People Accountable

Employees should have a good understanding of how their service to the customer affects the organization’s overall performance and need to be held accountable for achieving customer satisfaction goals. This is part of a comprehensive performance management system and should be part of the cultural norm.

For example, share customer satisfaction data with your employees and confront employees when they are not demonstrating the desired behaviors.

7. Reward and Recognize Good Service

There should be a well thought out system for acknowledging and rewarding employees for good customer service. Employees need positive reinforcement and should be rewarded when they demonstrate the desired behaviors of a strong customer service culture.

Having a strong vision and strategy for customer service is a critical component to the success of any organization. Organizations need to identify who their customers are, what they want and develop strategies to achieve those customer requirements. A strong customer service strategy is what separates the successful organizations from the rest.