Companies engaged in the sale of products or services, sooner or later think about the client service. You are probably already among them, once you read this article, but companies that are just getting to know this term, often postpone the care of their customers to better times (in vain!). Let’s sort out the issue.
Customer service is the help and advice that the company provides to its potential or current customers during the phases of sales, additional sales and service. A client service is needed to help the client take the next step in interacting with the company, for example: if he has a new need or he has got problems.
In a competitive market, the level of service is important for preservation and expansion of customer base, and ultimately for profit growth.
Today it is difficult to find a business area with a free market. Most obvious examples are banks, internet, and mobile communications: highly competitive markets where the most important issue is to provide a high level of service, otherwise the customer will leave for another company.
Client service is important for the following reasons:
- Impact on the company’s economy:
- growth of LTV;
- increase in market share;
- UpSale и CrossSale;
- reduction in lead cost.
- Increased loyalty:
- growth of NPS;
- work on client success;
- references;
- anticipating the customer’s needs;
- preservation and enrichment of the customer interaction history;
- faster processing of requests.
To attract a new client, it is necessary to spend 2-7 times (depending on the business area) more costs than to hold an existing one. A frequency of repeated calls is service-dependent.
Customer service is important for both external and internal customers (i.e. your employees – for example, they can ask for a certificate, vacation, sick leave, etc.), so it is important to separate properly the client service and improve it at every stage.
What is included in the client service
To ensure a high level of customer service, the business must solve basic tasks:
- Organization of fast service at all stages, starting from the first contacts with the customer on the site, in instant messengers or by phone and ending with acceptance of warranty or post-warranty service requests. Statistically, customers are 7 times more likely to choose a product where service is faster.
- Record of all customer interactions. Maintain in your CRM system or service delivery system all contacts and points of contact with customers. This will help to understand quickly the situation for any employee, even a beginner. In addition, the marketing department will spend money on advertising more effectively.
- Maintaining omnichannel communication. Today it is important to be able to interact with customers through all communication channels, in all messengers, social networks, by email and by phone. Each customer will choose a channel that is convenient for him, and you must be able to support it, otherwise the client will leave for a competitor.
- Monitoring of service quality and customer satisfaction with SLA. It is also a very important part of customer service as you see your growth points.
Customer service maturity stages
It is convenient to learn the value of a client service through a standard framework of maturity of processes – paying attention to the maturity of service processes and keeping history from the process approach.
Surely you can assess at what stage your company is now, and it is easy to remember a few situations that pushed the company to think about the service. It happens at a time when something goes wrong in business and/or it moves from one stage to another. Most often, customers think about client service in stages 3 and 4, but the sooner you come to this, the easier it will be to implement technologies and IT products and the sooner you start receiving a result, including a financial one.
Stage 1. Low Maturity (start of work of company or division)
The task of the client service in these conditions is to approach flexibly communication with customer adapting your business processes. It helps the company to increase the number of clients.
Implementing an IT solution promotes flexibility, data accumulation, and
possibility of quick launch of MVP.
Stage 2. Formation (owner removes from business, departments’ building begins)
Problems arise:
- sales volumes are growing, at the same time costs are increasing too;
- attention to the needs of customers disappears;
- the owner seeks to increase the number of business areas;
- there are no boundaries between employee areas of responsibility;
- there is no clear motivation system;
- there are doubts about the quality of work of employees.
The necessary level of service needs to be described in standards and policies, it is needed, first of all, for the control and quality of work with customers.
The task at this stage is to improve the management system and keep the focus on profits, not on revenue.
When choosing IT products, we look at the availability of ready-made tools “in the box” – the ease of setting up roles and workplaces for each type of employee is important, as well as training speed, the ability to build reports for managers, and scalability.
Stage 3. Development/Flowering
The company has achieved success and a balance between effectiveness and performance. The goal of the company is to hold out at this stage as long as possible, getting rid of the unemployed, creating new products and opening new markets.
The task of the client service is to develop personalized communication with the client and to improve the current IT product for operational performance and efficiency of employees. This is possible due to the continuous collection of feedback and adaptation of product and business processes.
At this stage, when choosing an IT solution, it is important to pay attention to omnicanality, presence of AI, as well as the ability to build processes quickly solving related problems in one interface. For example, working with portal, full-featured document handling and sales automation tasks. Solutions with BPM technologies and a set of modules on a single platform will suit.
Stage 4. Wilting
The company’s products are becoming obsolete, and demand for them is declining. The purpose of the company is finding new markets/tools/ways to save and make money.
The task of the client service is to show that you can also earn while using it, listening to the client and leading the upsail.
Important factors of IT products are low cost of adaptations, integrations, the speed of interfaces change. The low-code technologies and BPM platforms are as useful as possible here.
Customer service difference in b2b- and b2c-sales
Client service in b2b
The market is limited, so it is necessary to fight for customers, increasing their loyalty and LTV. You can implement this in different ways, but the most logical thing is via CRM + Service bundle.
The industries that most often face these tasks:
- oil and gas sector;
- metallurgy;
- mechanical engineering;
- energy;
- IT and telecom, consulting;
- cross-industry holdings.
Examples of client service automation projects in b2b:
- Seamless CRM + Service + Marketing bundle in one system (or multiple systems through a single interface) – you need to provide loyalty and service for current customers, as well as to grow sales, so the strategy should be general.
- Flexible sales and post-sales service processes – typically there are complex sales, so processes are customized individually for every customer. And the setting should be so flexible, that in any moment it could be changed quickly and at little cost.
- Automatic query typing and routing – so you can process requests more efficiently and reduce service costs.
- Query preprocessing (Bot/AI) with a large amount of data – if queries are numerous and they are not easily categorized, then it is important to reduce labor costs to preprocess the request.
- Delimitation of access rights – there is a common area of work of different departments with one client, so it is important to show only the necessary and sufficient information without confidential data.
- Omnicanality – the convenience of communication between the client and the business that works on customer loyalty and retention.
An example of a comprehensive solution for amortizing such tasks may look like so: Low-code BPM platform with configured modules Service, CRM, Marketing, Service Desk, help desk and external portal for the required tasks, while the solution can be assembled on a single platform or from several ones. This is being solved individually, each option has its pros and cons. But in practice the option of the smallest “zoo” wins more often – with this approach the cost of solution content is reduced.
Client service b2c using the example of a contact center
Main tasks: a large number of requests that need to be processed effectively. At the same time, the company is not yet so large to outsource the client service. When processing a request, the context of communication with the client, his previous history and all accumulated data are important.
The industries targeted by marketing in this task are:
- retail;
- services;
- IT-Telecom.
Business request examples and key IT solution features that are important to perform the task:
- Omnicanality – helps to build consistent interaction and push customer inside the sales funnel.
- Seamless Integrations – information access speeds up efficiency of work of the contact center.
- Out of the box portal – an additional point of convenient communication without the cost of support for another IT tool.
- Query preprocessing (Bot/AI) is a large volume of queries, so you need to reduce resources for preprocessing and closing typical ones.
- Delimitation of access rights – there is a common area of work of different departments with one client, so it is important to show only the necessary and sufficient information without confidential data.
- Outgoing communication (unsolicited messages, messages in BA) – control of not only incoming, but also initiative outgoing communication is important.
- An after-hours bot is a reduction in the cost of additional operator changes.
- Operator and service speed analytics – finds bottlenecks for higher efficiency.
Client service of monopolists
Many feel there is no need to think about a client service if you built a monopoly. But the client service can be useful here too.
The monopolist does not need to fight for customers or work with leads, but it is very important to provide exactly the service for the finished base: it is good to build internal processes to reduce cost and operating costs increasing net profit, as well as indirectly or directly improving client service for internal employees in order to increase their loyalty.
The industries targeted by marketing in this task are:
- retail;
- cross-industry holdings;
- state-owned or semi-state-owned companies.
Business request example and key it solution features that are important to perform the task:
- Easy to integrate, open API, as there is often already a number of operating systems and you need to synchronize with them.
- The ability to connect an arbitrary messenger – there is often a corporate messenger or mobile application with which you need to integrate.
- A single window for an operator with a user-friendly interface that reduces labor costs of operator when working with applications.
- Accumulation of customer data from external systems to improve quality of maintenance due to full access to information.
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Summarizing, we considered an important aspect of modern business – customer service, its components and influence on various aspects of the company. Various IT instruments are used for the development and improvement of the customer service of the company. The main conclusion is that you do not need to try to implement everything, everywhere and at once, to influence customer experience. It is enough to implement the tools satisfying your current needs. But, in order not to limit business development and not to spend budgets on IT infrastructure transformation, I recommend choosing low-code tools because they help in scaling functionality, in fact, endlessly.
By Alexey Kolmay, CRM Director, ELMA