4 Questions to Ask When Planning Your Customer Service Initiative
If you want to implement a successful customer service or customer experience initiative, there are four mission-critical questions you should answer before you get started. Overlooking even one of them can spell disaster.
Let’s take an example: A hypothetical project designed to improve response time when receiving customer inquiries.
1. How will we achieve buy-in from all levels of the organization? Before you gain buy-in, you’ll need to build a business case using rock-solid data. Use that business case to reach out to senior management first, then middle and front-line managers, and the remainder of your work force. Each of these different segments will require a subtly different approach.
In addition to your business case, you’ll need an internal communications plan that points out the benefits to your organization, your customers, and most importantly to individual employees. Do not ignore this last segment. “What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM) is linked directly to their employee engagement. Consider Stephen Covey’s “Begin with the end in mind,” and propose an organization-wide goal that states “We will improve response time of customer inquiries by __%.”
2. How will we hold employees accountable? Do you have the right people who have been trained the right way? You may need to revise the way you hire, the way you train, and the performance objectives you use. What incentives will you provide? Take a hard look at your rewards and recognition programs to see if they will complement or conflict with your new initiative.
Shortening response times will be easier if you empower more employees to handle inquiries that result in first-call resolutions. That empowerment will be more successful if you’ve hired the right people, with the right competencies, who will be fairly compensated for their new roles.
3. What additional resources will need to be developed? In addition to the business case and the internal communications plan, you may also need to create either a list or database containing the contact information of “go-to” people for the project. In many organizations hours are wasted as people email each other asking who is responsible for what. Your list should contain the contact information for each program, service, or product; and whom to call in case the primary contact is unreachable.
Next, you may need to create a process for communicating these inquiries that stands out from every day communications. Adding keywords to subject lines such as “CUSTOMER INQUIRY” or insisting that employees pick up the telephone to expedite responses are two ways to do that. Then employees must be held accountable, through their performance objectives, for following through.
Finally, you'll have to train employees on the new processes. Without effective training, the entire project is a waste of time and money.
4. How will you monitor progress? Once you’ve implemented your plan, you need to have a mechanism in place to measure your efforts. As the U.S. Army likes to say, “No plan survives the first contact intact.” Identify the metrics you’ll need to use, and create the necessary reports and reporting processes. Be sure to go beyond metrics, and identify ways to capture feedback from customers and employees. Metrics can only tell you so much, and they can be easily “gamed” to show the results you (or one of your subordinates) wants to show.
Answering these four questions will help you increase the likelihood of success. Notice that the answers are both strategic (revising hiring competencies and rewards) and tactical (creating a communications process and new performance objectives).
Regards,
Glenn
I have a rapid response time on Twitter. Follow me there; I’m @txglennross.
