Customer Service: 9 Ideas for Driving Customer Promotion

In today’s market, your customer service team is no longer just responsible for dealing with customer complaints. This team now serves as the lead in customer experience management, which means it plays an important role in ensuring customer satisfaction and generating customer promotion through referrals and recommendations.

Many organizations have not accounted for this new focus in their customer service strategy and are missing out on a very powerful marketing resource within their own organizations.

Here are nine tips on how to design a customer service strategy that breeds loyal customers who promote your products and services to peers and colleagues:

1. Establish corporate goals for your company’s customer service strategy.

These goals should align each customer interfacing group within your organization (i.e. Marketing, Customer Service, Supply Chain, Operations, Sales, and other corporate groups). This will ensure that there is a uniform message being delivered to customers across all types and levels of interaction from the CEO down to Customer Service Representative, from the Supply Chain Manager over to the Account Manager. Forgetting this important point can undermine an entire customer service program and actually damage a brand, customer acquisition, and your customer retention rates.

2. Strategically select Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your team to target that strike a balance between service and cost.

Each KPI should be tied to one or more of the organization’s short-term and long-term customer service goals. Part of each customer service representative’s compensation should be determined by how well they execute against these goals as individuals and as a team to encourage best practices.

3. Make it really easy to contact your company.

Different customers feel more comfortable interacting with customer service personnel on different fronts, so try to offer several options so that the customer can utilize the most fitting means to interact with your company. Some of the more common channels offered in the market include voice, email, online, online chats, social media, surveys, and proprietary user communities.

4. Design a customer service response process that is simple and hassle-free.

The last thing a customer wants to deal with when they are having difficulty with your products or service is a complicated process with long wait times. So make the process as simple and straight forward as possible for them. They want to resolve the problem as quickly as your staff does, so help facilitate a streamlined contact resolution process.

5. Develop a 24/7 line of communication with your customers that is accessible via several channels.

Also, make sure to respond to all customers within a 24 hour window or less. This will ensure that customer needs are met in a timely fashion and improve the overall customer service experience for incoming contacts.

6. Listen to your customers via social media and traditional communication channels.

This will help you resolve any foreseeable problems before your customer approaches your customer service team. Telling a customer that your team screwed up or that there is a problem with your product or services is difficult. However, customers will appreciate the fact that your team is proactively resolving problems, which should increase customer trust in your products, services and/or brand and boost customer retention. Additionally, this can eliminate unnecessary customer contacts, which in the long-run will allow you to reduce the size of your customer service call center team.

7. Create an online self-help center to educate customers about how to better use your products and services, and how to resolve common problems.

This will provide customers with the option of resolving their own problems if they desire to do so and develop a more knowledgeable user base. In the long-run this should eliminate some of the incoming contacts and reduce the cost of operating your customer support call center.

8. Create a culture of service – not sales – in your customer service division.

Customer service contacts must not be treated as inbound sales leads. These are customers who are having problems with your products or services and need your assistance to ensure that the product fulfills their needs. Trying to pitch products to them on a customer service call is only going to frustrate them and will jeopardize the relationship. In the long-run, providing positive customer service experiences will lead to higher customer retention rates and increased customer referral levels, which in most cases will lead to a more beneficial financial position for your company.

9. Consider hosting or sponsoring user meetups, user forums or a convention to facilitate user education and peer-user problem solving.

As your user base grows and matures, this will help ensure that your customers have a positive user experience and hopefully promote your products and services to colleagues and peers.

By integrating these tips into your customer service strategy, your company will be able to start realizing the power of a customer referral network. Over time, you’ll be able to develop a pipeline referral system that can help power your company’s sales machine.

If you are interested in learning more about customer service, you should read my blog posts on customer service mishaps that can break a company’s back and Net Promoter Score (NPS) mistakes that can derail the customer management process. Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about CRM implementation and how to develop a first-class customer service model, I highly recommend reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs by Bill Price.