What is customer service management?
At a conference in 1997,The Ultimate 5-step Customer Service Management Guide for your Organization Articles Steve Jobs famously said this in response to a provocative question from one of the audience members about the company’s strategy at the time:
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.
The 5-step customer service management plan for your business
1. Building a robust and scalable support team
The first step in your journey of establishing customer service management is putting together your very own A-team. There are two parts to this: hiring and training. Let’s take a look at both
Part 1: Hiring the right personnel for the job
People are your most important resource, especially when it comes to customer service. Here’s what you should look for when hiring service reps:
Social skills
Empathy: We start off with what’s 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 reps are often in high-stress situations, with tight deadlines and high customer expectations. However, presenting a calm, helpful demeanor can diffuse even the hardest situations. Having the patience to listen and respond appropriately to situations is an important skill to possess.
Persuasiveness: A support rep needs to be an effective communicator. This is not limited to just getting a message across clearly but ensuring that message is persuasive and reassures customers who might not be in the right frame of mind.
Hard skills
Decision making: Customer service reps have to make important decisions in a short period of time when dealing with issues. It could be having to allow a concession or even taking a call on whether an issue needs external support.
Logical thinking: Keeping a calm head and making calculated decisions is necessary for support reps to analyze situations and solve problems efficiently.
Knowledge management: Customer support associates need to have the capacity 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 creating well-defined 成立公司費用 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 primary members you’ll need:
Customer service/support associate: The customer service associate or representative is the first line of offense 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 reroute high priority issues to the right personnel.
Customer support engineer: The support engineer is usually a domain expert or a product specialist who can deal with complex or technical issues that require bug finding or troubleshooting.
Customer support lead/manager: The manager oversees the work being carried out by support engineers and service reps while also stepping in for critical issues as necessary.
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 because of the size of the account.
Support operations analyst: The support operations analyst/ helpdesk analyst’s primary responsibility is to analyze performance and productivity data to help managers make hiring and operational decisions.
Head of support: The director of support heads the entire customer service department. Their responsibilities span from strategizing a plan of action, understanding resource management, and ensuring the quality of customer experience.