Classier Customer Service In 3 Days

Knowing what to focus on does wonders for results.

What’s the next, best step for your customer service program?

When businesses overhaul their customer service program, CRM project teams often hear different business rationales for the endeavor. Improve customer satisfaction, say some executives. Cut costs, mandate others. Oftentimes, of course, project teams must do both.

But what’s the best way to achieve those goals? Finding the answer to that question can be difficult.

5 Capabilities Spell Service Excellence

So, take a step back. Based on Innoveer’s extensive project experience, we’ve found that service programs excel when they master five best practices:

• Services leadership: Manage service excellence
• Experience management: Deliver service against agreement levels
• Case management: Keep customers by solving problems
• Service operations: Drive customer satisfaction through service quality
• Service measurement: Know if your customer service approach is destined for success

Accordingly, keeping in mind your company’s business goals — improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, cut costs, boost revenues, or any combination thereof — the top question for any given service project will be simple: Which capability should you address first?

Service Strategy Priorities: 3-Day Workshop

To answer that question, Innoveer offers a brief service workshop that compares your organization’s current approach with our benchmarks of hundreds of businesses’ CRM programs. We identify where your program excels, as well as where it needs work. Many service programs, for example, are great at case management, but fall short when it comes to creating an excellent customer experience (aka experience management).

But we also dig deeper, for example looking not only at high-level experience management competencies, but also your organization’s current approach to the core, underlying components. In the case of experience management, that includes segmenting customers, setting and reinforcing expectations, practicing proactive customer retention, and up-selling and cross-selling customers.

For example, many service organizations fail to retain customers by proactively fixing problems. Of course, most service departments are set up to troubleshoot problems, not create opportunities. As a result, freeing resources to advance a business’s proactive troubleshooting capabilities can be difficult. But companies that do this well will identify new ways of engaging with customers in a more positive manner, which will ultimately facilitate not only happier customers, but a stronger bottom line.

For Long-Term Success, Begin Right

The philosophy behind Innoveer’s assessment is simple: with a customized service-improvement strategy, you’ll understand the next, “best steps” for your service program. Because if one of your service program’s capabilities is less advanced, then any investments you make in the other capabilities are almost being wasted. Instead, start by fixing what you’re not good at, to deliver service program improvements offering maximum return for minimum effort.

Learn More

Take our Service Program Quiz for a preview of the areas in which your program currently lags or excels. (Innoveer’s actual workshop drills down much more into each individual service capability.)

To reap even bigger benefits from CRM, also make sure you’re seeing the big picture. To help, review our “top 10” marketing, sales or service questions to see how your program compares to best practices and our benchmarks.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Pedro Szekely.