Ultimate guide: how to organize customer service management

Today, many companies have forgotten that the essence of running a business begins with the customer. The idea behind being successful in customer service management is to build and execute a strategy that revolves around a clear philosophy, a plan of action, and choosing the right tech stack to support those plans.

Surely you are wondering how to organize customer service management so that customers are satisfied with the care provided by responding and providing practical solutions to their most immediate concerns and problems. The answer is not so simple because a series of actions must be carried out to optimize said management, which will be reflected in the reduction of complaints and demands by them.

<<< 5 ways to take customer experience strategy further >>>

But, how to start? What is the starting point from where you should organize customer service management? In the following section, you will find the first key to start your ideal customer service management.

1. Building a robust and scalable support team

The first step in your journey to establishing customer service management is putting together your A-team. There are two parts to this: hiring and training. Let's take a look at both

Part 1: Hiring the right staff for the job

People are your most important resource, especially when it comes to customer service. Here's what to look for when hiring service representatives:

Social skills

• Empathy: We start with what is probably the most important quality to look for when hiring a support associate. Empathy is crucial because it makes it easier for your agents to put themselves in the customer's shoes and handle difficult conversations better.
• Patience: Customer service representatives often find themselves in high-stress situations, with tight deadlines and high customer expectations. However, presenting a calm and helpful demeanor can defuse even the most difficult situations. Having the patience to listen and respond appropriately to situations is an important skill to possess.
• Persuasion: A support representative must be an effective communicator. This is not just about getting a message across clearly, but about ensuring that the message is persuasive and reassures customers who might not be in the right frame of mind.

Hard skills

• Decision making: Customer service representatives must make important decisions in a short period when dealing with issues
• Logical Thinking: Keeping a cool head and making calculated decisions is necessary for support reps to analyze situations and solve problems efficiently.
• Knowledge management: Customer support associates must have the ability to acquire and absorb essential information about company policy, support processes, etc., to provide customers with the best possible solutions.

Part 2: Defining roles and responsibilities

The next step in customer service management is to create well-defined roles for your team members. These roles will depend on the size and scale of your customer service team. But, in general, these are the main members you will need:

• Customer service/Support associate: The customer service associate or representative is the first line of attack and defense for your organization, making them the most important member of your team. They deal with day-to-day complaints, handle different channels, and route high-priority issues to the right people.
• Customer support engineer: The support engineer is typically a domain expert or product specialist who can deal with complex or technical issues that require looking for errors or solving them.
• Customer support leader/Manager: The manager oversees the work being done by support engineers and service representatives while also intervening for critical issues as needed.
• Technical account manager: The Technical Account Manager or TAM is a special role within the support team, where he or she is in charge of one or more large customer accounts that require special attention due to account size.
• Support operations analyst: The support operations analyst/help desk analyst's primary responsibility is to analyze performance and productivity data to help managers make hiring and operational decisions.
• Support manager: The support manager leads the entire customer service department. His responsibilities range from strategizing to an action plan, understanding resource management, and ensuring the quality of the customer experience.
  
  

2. Training programs and shift management

Regardless of how big or small, all support teams need to be trained on how to interact with customers. Training programs will vary by company and customer service philosophy, but they are at the core of managing customer service quality. But here are some aspects in which you will need to train new employees:

• Support process: What is the workflow your company follows when it comes to resolving customer issues? What are the different levels of support? Which queries are classified as low or high priority? The answers to these questions are what support representatives need to know before starting their work every day.
• Channel classification: Identifying the most relevant communication channels for your business/target customer is essential to get the CX right. Once you have that in place, train your support representatives on the tone of voice and communication etiquette for each of these channels. For example, chat and social media conversations will have very different conversational tones, while phone and emails will still have a more formal tone.
• Crisis training: Situational awareness can only take you so far. Support associates need to know how to handle high-priority issues where customer and business revenue is at stake. Crisis training is a great practice to prepare team members for such scenarios to minimize improvisation and maximize problem-solving effectiveness.

The second thing support teams need to figure out is shift schedules. There are various shift schedules and customer service models you can use depending on the volume of inquiries your team supports. These are just some examples:

• Follow the Sun Model: Follow the Sun model is based on the principle of distributing your customer service team to various locations around the world. This is effective when you have to provide 24/7 support, but also have a global presence.
• Traditional 24/7 Model: The most commonly used support model where call centers are present in the same geographic region and there is a transfer between different shifts.
• Remote/Distributed Model: A rapidly emerging support model due to both situational factors and the flexibility it offers in terms of team members being spread out and able to work from any location.
  
  

3. KRA and performance management

Tracking how well your team is performing helps identify strengths and weaknesses in your customer service management process. Having certain KRAs (Key Results Area) and KPIs (Key Management Indicators) in place helps you continually measure performance and ensures that you continue to improve your support processes. Below, you'll find some parameters and metrics that can help set benchmarks and standards for your support team.

External/customer metrics

Customer feedback is the most important tool in your arsenal. Without understanding what the customer thinks, you cannot move forward. Here are three important customer metrics you can measure:

• CSAT: The most widely used metric in industries and businesses to measure customer feedback. CSAT is a simple survey tool where customers can rate their experience on a scale of 1-10.
• NPS: NPS or net promoter score is a great metric to measure and understand customer loyalty.
• CES: Customer Effort Score is a relatively new metric that takes into account how easy or difficult the experience was for the customer and how much time and effort they had to spend throughout the process. In the survey, customers are asked, "On a scale of 'very easy' to 'very difficult,' how easy was it for you to interact with our company?"

<<< Customer loyalty metrics: NPS, CES or CSAT >>>

Internal support metrics

Analyzing your team's performance is just as important to maintaining service quality as collecting customer feedback. To understand who is doing well and who needs help, here are some metrics you can implement:

• First contact resolution: Measures the percentage of issues resolved by the agent in the first contact or conversation with the customer.
• Ticket volume: measures the number of tickets your team receives on a monthly or weekly basis and is one of the factors involved in forecasting and contracting demand.
• Average response time: A metric that tells you how long it takes on average for an agent to respond to a customer inquiry.
• Average resolution time: Measures the average time it takes for an agent or support team to resolve a customer issue.
  
  

4. The role of the customer service manager

The customer service manager has to play a strategic and operational role while enabling the support team to achieve its goals. Let's analyze what responsibilities translate into:

1. Agent role assignment: The manager is responsible for assessing the skills of the hired agents and assigning them the correct roles and the proper channels to handle.
2. Shift schedule management: A very critical role played by the customer service manager is deciding shift schedules and schedules based on volume, availability, and other factors.
3. Hiring and staffing: The customer service manager must keep an eye on the performance of his team and the volumes of support to be able to hire new employees in advance.
4. Performance review: The manager must track the group's overall performance as well as customer feedback and take steps to ensure consistency of customer service.
5. Escalation/Incident management: When there is a major issue that the younger members of the team cannot handle on their own, the manager must be able to step in and resolve the issue quickly and efficiently.
6. Stakeholder review: Monthly or quarterly reviews will be held with the head of support and other important stakeholders where the manager needs to provide their valuable input so that the right strategic decisions can be made.

5. Choosing the right tech stack

Now we come to the last piece of the puzzle: deciding on your tech stack. Technology can simplify much of the operational and administrative work while giving organizations greater visibility into their support processes.

However, the main reason the right tech stack cannot be overlooked is that the agents on the front lines are the biggest beneficiaries. Here are some of the features/functionalities you should consider when choosing customer service software:

• Self-service: Having self-service options, such as a knowledge base or FAQ, can be of great help to both customers and agents. For customers, it's a way to get information on their own without having to contact an agent or wait in a call queue. You can also create an internal knowledge base for agents to refer to when looking for quick answers to repetitive questions.
• Omnichannel: Email and phone may still be popular channels for support teams, but they're not always the right support channel because your customers sometimes prefer modern channels like chat and social media. Therefore, it is important to have the right mix of channels that suit the needs of your customers. Customer service software like Freshdesk allows you to choose the channels you want your customers to engage with.
• Chatbots and messaging: Today's millennial customers want instant responses, and the best way to achieve that speed is through AI-integrated messaging and chatbots.
• Reporting and analytics: The last feature that will round out the essentials of your support tech stack is a reporting and analytics tool. Having the ability to create custom dashboards and reports to generate actionable insights into your support performance is the most effective way to improve and scale your team. Freshdesk has a built-in analytics tool that makes it easy to measure and collect all the essential metrics for any support team.

Customer service management has become a hotly discussed topic in recent times due to how the world has changed drastically, especially in 2020. CEOs of all companies are looking to their customer service teams for insights on customer behavior to modify your approach to selling products and services and build better customer relationships.

In 2021 and beyond, we will see more organizations adding someone from customer service to the decision-making table because their input now is arguably one of the most important when making strategic decisions in the future.