In today’s hyper-connected marketplace, customer service has never been more critical. Social media and review-submission sites mean that you are continually being evaluated for quality of your services, and the time taken to deliver them. If potential customers don’t like what they hear about you, they are more than willing to switch to a more highly-recommended competitor. Today, this as easy as filling out two-minute form.
One pitfall a small or medium-sized business can face is failure to recruit a big enough customer service team, and so risk falling behind with responses to customer enquiries or complaints. The solution to this, is automating the parts of the customer service process that do not immediately require direct human attention.
When implementing an automated workflow solution for customer service, carrying out thorough planning and research beforehand can help massively. Are there Frequently Asked Questions you can list online to reduce the number of overall enquiries? What are the common complaints and problems that take time to fix, when you could be concentrating on more urgent work? What sort of language and phrasing is best suited to communicating with your customers?
Getting the workflow just right is essential. The following factors need to be decided on:
- Available contact methods for customers to get in touch
- Levels of urgency assigned to different issues
- Stages a complaint or enquiry goes through to be resolved
- Staff members responsible for responding to and addressing concerns
- Time to be logged, both overall, and for each stage of the process
With these details, you can establish a set of rules to automate the entire process. Moving a customer service enquiry from it being received, right through to its resolution. Before a request can move from one stage to another, an action may have to be taken, such as evaluating its importance, assigning it to a member of staff, sending an email, etc. All of these actions can be automated according to specific criteria.
If you are receiving a large number of enquiries through email, then it is worth consideringautomating your inbox management. Each email can automatically generate a customer service case, and be assigned to a member of staff, before moving through the relevant stages.
Once your automated system is up and running, you can then get an overview of your customer service performance. Looking at response times, customer feedback and how many enquiries are resolved overall, you can look at what improvements need to be made in future. Setting benchmarks to consistently meet gives you a clear plan, allowing for continual development going forward.
If you’re interested in a business process management platform that could dramatically improve your customer service performance,get in touch today.
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