Best Practices for Building a Customer-Centric Support Team

A customer-centric company looks at customers’ needs at every level of the organisation, from marketing and sales through to support, to create products and services tuned to these needs.

Give the power to make more customer-centric decisions, promote cross-functional collaboration and align incentives and performance metrics with customer-centric strategies.

Build a strong team

A good team is what any company requires to increase speed and efficiency, improve innovation and positively build a company culture, but building it is no walk in the park. To build one, the builder must be prepared to learn everything about what makes for a team. From techniques on building the team to the perfect routine for making it work. This also entails being selective about its members. A customer-oriented company such as Amazon or Zappos surrounds itself with an efficient staff and collectively feeds from its customers’ observations to refine its products, create more satisfied and loyal customers – and, ultimately, more customer loyalty. At the heart of any successful team are clear lines of communication and openness – setting individual and collective goals and reviewing those on a regular basis, as a team. Leaders must provide consistent one-on-one coaching for team members to keep them accountable to their goals; leaders can introduce various tools, such as Clifton Strengths assessment to help individuals identify and leverage their uniquely innate talents to optimise performance.

Create a strong culture

The ethos of customer-centricity needs to permeate every part of your organisation. As Vasylyna says, the idea that ‘all of the company’s teams should consider customer or user satisfaction a key goal, and that all decisions must consider how they will affect customers’ – that is the ‘customer-centric ethos’. Leadership is also important – customer-centric leaders paying attention to customer needs and wants (rather than, for example, short-term results) will encourage teams to do so; while customer-centric leaders not paying attention to either won’t. Relationships with support team partners and integrating them into the planning processes for product development are crucial to identifying issues your customers are having in order to prevent them from still lingering on, or being altogether ignored. Secondly, having feedback channels and creating review processes for your support team to provide feedback and otherwise pass observations on to the product management teams – even if the users may not be visible – is key to customer feedback being collected and addressed, straight away.

Create a strong support system

A good support system is not just there to cushion you when the chips are down. It is also essential to your success in business and in your life. Hence, the kind of people you want in your support system are the ones you can count on when things do go wrong, both in life and at work. In fact, in today’s highly-competitive marketplace, where customers have many choices among businesses that take account of their needs, it’s led to customer centricity being more critical than ever, as customers will favour those that prioritise them over those that do not prioritise them so keenly. Ensuring that you build an effective support system encompasses creating an empathetic tone and ensuring that your calling agents have effective ability to resolve issues in the right and caring way. The right tools and knowhow vested into your agents ensures that the job gets done right. Giving agents access to an in-context overview of tickets, queues, customer information, and problem solutions shortens response times and helps to build confident and speedy support, while agents maintain focus on providing a great customer experience. Plus, not having to type out a greeting and closing to each customer every single time frees up agents’ time to deliver individualised and personalised experiences.

Focus on the customer

Whether it is business texting software to automate responses to customer enquiries or simply adding a personalised message to an email, a company that strives to deliver a positive customer experience emphasises that personalisation is important and an organisation can only achieve this when every employee shares the same end goal, from start to finish. Not surprisingly, customers-first logic favours relationships that promote loyalty, i.e., customers who: know, appreciate and prefer the efforts of a trustworthy source, who then in turn promotes their wares and, crucially, designs those wares to be unsurpassably satisfactory to the preferred customers. This process results in products and services that nobody else can offer, those coveted bread-winning wares, with the potential to last decades. To keep the engagement, someone might make sure that every employee can see every customer review. Someone else might mandate ‘whole company’ support initiatives or schedule meetings where everyone sits down and discusses customers’ stories and feedback – doing so keeps the team current on what customers are or are not getting, and helps employees stay committed to providing great service in the first place. It also provides a nice ‘process boost’ to customers, showing them that you take their feedback seriously and are actually responding to it.