Enhance Customer Service Leadership with Feedback

While customer service is a competitive advantage, unsatisfactory support is one of the main reasons why customers abandon companies. As consumer expectations, propelled by the latest technological advancements, continuously evolve, customer service leadership has emerged as the main factor impacting the quality and efficiency of customer service.

Customer service leadership has emerged as the main factor impacting the quality and efficiency of customer service

As a support manager you should balance budgets, enhance team performance, and deliver an elevated customer experience. Daunting as the task might sound, you can inspire loyalty, increase employee satisfaction and keep costs down by utilising feedback insights.

In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how to use feedback as a tool to

Enable personalized customer support
Empower customer service agents
Improve the customer service process

Deliver personalized support

According to Gladly, over 90% of customers would stop buying after a few bad experiences with support, and 25% of them would jump ship just after one lousy experience.

To keep up with and exceed rapidly evolving expectations, build your contact center to match customer wants and needs at a personal level. When it comes to personalised support, feedback insights are vital as they enables you to understand your customers better and react to their issues accordingly. This is how:

Know your customer

Feedback data is mainly used to gauge customer sentiment after an interaction with support. This data, however, can become extremely powerful when linked with customer information already in your Customer Relationship Management platform. Connecting feedback with your CRM platform will allow you to tap into information about previous interactions the customer has had with your brand across multiple points in their customer journey and deliver a personalized and memorable support experience informed by data relevant to that particular customer.

Act on customer feedback

Acting and reacting either to negative or positive feedback will boost your customer service efficiency and help your company grow. Immediately reacting to negative feedback means that you can turn a negative experience into a positive one, therefore, increasing customer satisfaction. Positive feedback will help you identify happy customers and provide you with up-selling or cross-selling opportunities. All it takes for both scenarios to yield positive results is to automatically route feedback insights to the hands of the right people or departments in the company.

Empower your customer service agents

Happy employees make for happy customers. Recent research shows that, on average, in customer care organisations, agent turnover is between 30% – 45%, and agent turnover cost can reach up to 20.000$ per agent, not accounting for costs involved with training new agents and the blow on team morale. Use feedback management insights to steer higher-level leadership decisions in the right direction to avoid turnover and increase employee satisfaction. To do this, identifying coaching needs at an individual level and automate positive feedback to the right people.

Identify individual coaching needs

By tracking feedback, you can find out when new employees become profitable and how newly acquired skills are making their way into customer interactions. Furthermore, feedback can show you whether your training programs are informed by agent behaviour and address real needs at an agent and not just team level.

According to Harvard Business Review, customer service agent personality types can differ. Feedback can help you better understand these personality types and tailor coaching at an individual level. As a result, your agents will be more successful in performing their tasks and more satisfied with their role in your organisation.

Redirect positive feedback back to your agents

Positive feedback on agent performance gives customer service managers an excellent opportunity to motivate employees or reinforce wanted behaviour. Acknowledging and celebrating positive feedback aimed at the agent helps create a positive, empowering environment that facilitates learning and boosts performance.

Positive feedback can also foster a culture of shared leadership. When that is the case, employees take more responsibility for internal process development and pro-customer decisions. As a result, your support team will increase productivity, deliver a better customer experience, and report higher employee satisfaction rates.

Improve the customer service process

Focusing on your customer service process can make a significant impact on customer experience, employee performance, and the way you develop and improve operations. A good service process consists of a defined way of addressing common customer care scenarios and links all relevant internal structures, templates, policies, and system protocols.

Capturing feedback is the fastest and easiest way to monitor and measure the success of your customer service strategy

Capturing customer feedback can help you monitor and measure how well-implemented your service process and whether your strategy needs rethinking or improving. This is how to use feedback to achieve that:

Pinpoint the root cause of repeat issues

Identify repeat issues effectively and systematically utilising customer feedback. Analyse this feedback to understand the root causes behind those issues, address them in a timely manner and/or adjust your service process to deal with them faster and more efficiently. You can, also, reroute feedback insights pertaining to repeat issues to different organisational departments and inform decision-making in terms of future product or service development.

Prioritize First Contact Resolution (FCR)

Fist Contact Resolution or FCR is one of the most critical metrics for measuring service process efficiency and can give you a whole new perspective on what your customers think of the quality of the service received. Low FCR rates can lead to a spillover effect which might result in reducing loyalty by 10-30% and increasing service costs by 50%. So, tracking FCR is vital if you want to ensure that your customer service process is actually delivering the desired results – meaning really solving customer issues and not just patching them up.

Wrapping Up

To conclude, customer service leadership can highly benefit from a well-integrated feedback management solution that provides actionable feedback data that can be used to reduce employee turnover, customer churn, and a costly customer service process.