When you think of the word ‘iconic’, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

For many people, it’s famous logos they see every day. From the golden arches of McDonald’s to the purple camera of Instagram, these logos are well-known all over the world and can be recognized at a glance by anyone who’s used the company’s products before.

These kinds of highly iconic logos are the perfect demonstration of what makes branding so powerful.

We’ll be exploring the topic of branding at length below, going into deep detail on what it is and why it matters to your business. After that, we’ll share some best practices for your branding, so you’re a true expert by the time you finish reading this article.

What is branding in business?

First, of course, we’ve got to establish a definition of the topic. Branding itself is the act of creating a strong identity for your company (more on this shortly).

Good branding should cover every possible area of your company. For example, if you’re branding yourself as an eco-friendly cleaning company, all your social media accounts need to make this clear. Your website should detail how you secure eco-friendliness. Your logo should instantly make people think of both cleaning and eco-friendliness.

In short, it’s about putting together a holistic image for your brand that’s more than just a facade. The best examples of branding all involve reflecting brand values, not just aesthetics, in all aspects of the brand itself.

What’s a brand identity?

A brand identity is a summary of who you are as a company. Maybe you’re friendly and approachable; maybe you’re witty and full of dry humor; maybe you’re serious and knowledgeable.

Brand identities are essential to successful branding. You can’t create or push an image for your brand if there’s no substance to that image, or if it’s very two-dimensional.

Let’s contextualize that with a good example of using your brand identity for branding purposes.

A quick glance at the RealVNC homepage reveals that it’s a piece of remote access software (RAS) that places a heavy emphasis on safety. This is a direct statement of the brand’s identity; it’s the first thing you see when you look them up. 

That focus on safety carries on throughout the rest of the page. Directly below the banner stating that they’re the safest RAS is the following image:

The familiar security shield icon beside the words ‘certifiably secure’ brings the idea of safety back up, both through words and visuals. The same effect is achieved again directly below, with the following visuals:

Consider the words that jump out right away: ‘secure’, ‘encryption’, ‘verification’, ‘safe’. These are all associated with increased digital protection, which helps highlight and shape the brand identity RealVNC communicates as one that centers on security.

What are some real-world examples of branding?

Following on from our RealVNC example, we’ll do a quick breakdown of a few other companies that really get their branding right.

8×8

Virtual communications solution 8×8 highlights their major focus on customer satisfaction right from the get-go when you click on their website. They show this in a few ways, most notably in how they treat you, the prospective customer viewing their content.

The language and iconography in the above screenshot both communicate their customer-centric brand identity. Rather than a bot or brand logo, the images associated with their chat feature are real humans (who look happy to be talking with you), paired with the green dot that indicates being available online.

This immediately creates an air of approachability.

The phrase ‘how can we help’ also puts customers’ needs first. Their priority is to offer help to you, not to get anything from you. Then there’s the fact that they use the word ‘chat’ twice, suggesting casual and friendly conversations between customers and the brand.

Facebook

Even when it’s blurry and at an angle, the icon that represents Meta’s flagship product is instantly recognizable.

Whether it’s conscious or not, you’ll likely have recognized the specific shade of blue used by the brand, as well as the font of the letter ‘f’. Plenty of people will also have specific feelings tied to that icon, whether those are more along the lines of ‘I chat to my friends there’ or ‘that’s where I go to talk about my hobbies’.

From just the combination of that icon and the name, you’ve also got a good idea of how Meta wants you to use their product. Facebook is for connecting with people, and it involves sharing, well, your real face (hence the name).

Dr. Martens

The work boot shape. The iconic yellow stitching. The thick rubber soles. The leather. These are the things that help make any pair of Dr Martens instantly recognizable, even in the absence of a visible logo.

Docs are a great example of visual branding, in no small part because they’re still identifiable regardless of how many different models and colors they come in. Their identity as a pair of shoes made by an iconic English retailer is always indisputable.

Nike

The Nike ‘tick’ logo has become an enduring symbol among major sports brands globally. Similarly, the ‘Just do it’ slogan is widely recognized as one of the most iconic slogans you’ll ever come across. Providing an inspirational message based around achieving your goals has helped Nike connect with leading athletes and contributed to their own goals of becoming one of the largest sports brands in the world.

Apple

The famous ‘apple with a bite taken out’ logo has become synonymous with cutting-edge technology married with sleek designs. At the heart of Apple’s branding is it’s simplicity and user-friendly products. They make you feel like you’re part of an exclusive club with every new product launch, and that’s what sets them apart in the tech world.

Top reasons why branding matters

Now that we’ve seen how branding looks in practice, it’s time to consider the reasons why you’d want to implement it in your own company. These are listed below in no particular order.

Establishing who you are as a brand

First and foremost is the fact that branding lets you essentially hold up a banner that says ‘here’s who we are, and what we stand for’. And the best part? You get to customize every part of that banner.

Doing this right lets you send out constant signals to anyone who sees your content, increasing your brand awareness. These inform viewers of your brand identity, letting them be drawn in without any direct interaction between yourself and the prospective customer.

Connecting with the right customers

When asking questions like ‘what is vendor risk management’, it’s always important to also ask how you can mitigate risks. One great way to do this is to make sure you’re appealing directly to the kinds of people you’re deliberately trying to target.

Broadcasting your brand identity is a fantastic plan to achieve this.

Showing the world who you are lets the right people flock to you. That’s true for both humans and brands, and is another solid argument in favor of using branding.

Standing out

In a world in which everyone can make their website and social media profiles look nice, it’s important to be more than just nice. You’ve got to be unique as a brand if you want to stand out, and that’s where branding is so great.

Consider the branding in the following HelloFresh image:

From the cheese to the chicken to all the vegetables, the lack of plastic packaging makes the whole box look more ‘fresh’, as the brand name suggests. Competitors looking at this image will know that the ‘fresh’ aspect of ready-to-cook meal boxes is fully associated with HelloFresh, just as customers will.

Retaining customers

A company with a strong brand identity is likely to deliver the same standard of excellence in its CX (customer experience) over time. This means that customers who are happy with your services once will be likely to return.

There’s also the fact that the kinds of customers who seek you out for your specific brand identity are likely to be interested in precisely that. This means they’ll stick with you after a successful purchase because they like your brand more than a one-off product.

Driving sales

Well-designed branding is a sales tool in its own right. That’s because it’s going to help you attract and retain customers who care about your message and identity, as laid out above.

And of course, with loyal customers come more sales.

As a bonus, your customers will know to come to you for any products that fit your messaging. If you usually sell comfortable and supportive boots, for example, customers will be more likely to think of you when they’re after equally excellent fancy dress shoes.

What is a branding strategy?

Next, we’re going to talk about ways to take the theoretics of branding and apply them in practice by means of a branding strategy.

Essentially, your branding strategy is your plan for turning your branding ideals into an observable reality. It should address how you’re planning to roll your branding out, what that branding looks like, and who’s involved with which aspect of the overall strategy.

For example, let’s say you’re looking to brand your contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution. Your branding strategy would outline which colors and designs your official media will use, as well as how you’re going to make sure you stand out as the best CCaaS provider on the market through those design choices.

Branding best practices

Lastly, we’ll go through some of the most important best practices associated with branding. By following these, you can ensure you’ll get your branding right every time.

Be consistent

Above all else, consistency is key when it comes to branding. This is because branding is all about creating an identity, and that identity needs to be recognizable if it’s going to have any impact on customers.

And recognition comes from repetition.

Or, well, not exactly repetition. You don’t want to just say the same thing over and over. What you do want is to make sure that every branded message is internally consistent, so your brand values and aesthetics stay the same.

Keep it simple

Consider the following image:

You’ll likely know the company behind the product within a second of glancing at the iconic Apple logo. That quick recognition comes, in part, from the fact that Apple’s famous logo is equal parts simple and effective. They use a basic apple outline instead of something photorealistic.

To put that into perspective, it’s always good to keep to a simple, strong concept. When things get complicated, you start to lose people–and, crucially, you miss out on that first-impression instant recognition that all branding should aim for.

Train employees

Even the strongest branding isn’t always fully intuitive. For example, is your brand ‘powerful’ or ‘strong’? What’s the exact color palette you use?

These are the kinds of questions every employee should be able to answer easily.

The best way to spread this knowledge is to take special care when you’re training newbies at your company. Make sure you give them extensive training on the topic of your branding, so any new employee can spot potential errors in branded content and come up with helpful branding suggestions.

Be accessible

While it’s good to have a clear idea of your target audience, you’ve got to make sure your branding is accessible to a broad variety of people. This helps you draw in more customers without alienating anyone.

For example, if you suspect that prospective customers might not all be familiar with the term VoIP, you’d be better off advertising your product as a voice-over IP phone system. Anyone who does regularly use the term VoIP will know what they’re dealing with, while people who don’t are still included.

Also, you may want to consider creating a product video that showcases your brand’s values and services. A well-produced product video can resonate with a wide audience, including those who prefer visual content over other formats.

Check on your progress

As we’ve established, branding doesn’t happen on its own, and it doesn’t always go quite the way you’re planning. Some things are bound to slip through the cracks, no matter how vigilant you are, but too many slips create a less unified brand identity.

Thankfully, there’s something you can do about it.

As long as you conduct an audit regularly enough, you’ll be able to catch any mistakes or incongruities before they become a problem. Make sure you’re always monitoring your progress with regard to branding, and you’ll be more likely to succeed in that department.

Final thoughts

Getting branding right takes time, as well as hard work.

You may have to go through a few different iterations of your company’s brand identity before you arrive at the best one. Just look at how many times the Google logo has been redesigned if you’re feeling unsure about reworking an existing image!

There’s also, of course, the matter of making sure that all your company content is branded uniformly. This is perhaps the most time-consuming part, simply because you’ll often have to filter through a lot of content, especially if your company has been around for a while.

However, branding is always worth it.

When you’re able to make that first impression on customers and leave a lasting mark in their minds, you’ll be able to rise above the competition. The companies that do branding well can carve out a name for themselves.

The post What is Branding and Why is It Important? A Detailed Explanation appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Quotes can be powerful reminders. They’re short, impactful, and can quickly bring us back to what’s important.

Customer satisfaction is at the heart of successful Customer Experience (CX). In today’s market, consumers have more options and expect more from brands. They want quick solutions, personalized interactions, and genuine engagement. Meeting these demands isn’t just a strategy; it’s essential for building trust and growing your brand.

But staying focused on customer satisfaction can be tough with so many daily tasks and goals. So, how can we keep this critical aspect front and center? The answer is simple: words. Quotes can be powerful reminders. They’re short, impactful, and can quickly bring us back to what’s important.

For those in the CX field, these quotes can serve as daily motivation. Let’s dive into a list of customer satisfaction quotes, meant to inspire and keep you rooted in the importance of great customer experience.

Why Customer Satisfaction Matters for CX Professionals

Customer satisfaction isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the compass by which successful businesses steer their strategies and actions. For CX professionals, understanding its weight is crucial. Let’s break down the reasons.

Quick Stats and Figures

• Loyalty and Trust: A study by Bain & Company showed that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profits. Satisfied customers stay loyal, and trust translates into a solid bottom line.
• Referrals and Growth: According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising. Happy customers are the best brand ambassadors, driving organic growth.
• Reduced Churn: Research from Esteban Kolsky highlights that 67% of customer churn is preventable if the concern was resolved at the first engagement. Addressing satisfaction proactively keeps customers onboard.
• Feedback is Gold: In a survey by Microsoft, 52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers. It’s a clear indication that customers value their voice and want to be heard.

Unique Challenges and Opportunities

• The Digital Shift: The move to digital has revolutionized how customers interact with brands. While this brings efficiency, it also introduces the challenge of maintaining personal touch and warmth in a largely virtual space.
• A crowded marketplace: With numerous brands fighting for attention, consumers today have an abundance of choices. As a result, businesses must consistently exceed their customers’ expectations.
• Data Overload: The availability of vast amounts of data can be a double-edged sword. While it offers insights, sifting through it to find actionable intelligence is a challenge for many CX professionals.
• Embracing Feedback: Negative feedback, while hard to digest, is an opportunity in disguise. It provides businesses a chance to identify gaps, rectify them, and turn detractors into promoters.

Customer satisfaction isn’t just a metric; it’s the basis of sustainable business growth. By staying on top of this pulse, CX professionals can not only thrive in their roles, but also steer their businesses in a direction of unprecedented success.

The Power of Words: How Quotes Can Inspire Action

Quotes can pack a big punch. Even though they’re short, they often capture big ideas that can stick in our minds and motivate us. They work because they can quickly remind us of what’s important.

For many people, a good quote can help them refocus or see things in a new light. For CX professionals, quotes about customer experience can serve as daily nudges. They remind us why we do what we do: to make customers happy.

In short, while they might seem like just words, quotes can be powerful tools. They help keep CX pros & customer service agents on track and inspire them to always put the customer first.

Customer Satisfaction Quotes

Dive into these curated quotes, categorized to offer insights, motivation, and reflections on the essence of customer satisfaction.

Foundational Beliefs

A few of our favorites

“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It’s the customer who pays the wages.” – Henry Ford

“The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates

Other great quotes

• “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts.” – Jeff Bezos
• “The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
• “Make the customer the hero of your story.” – Ann Handley
• “The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Richard Branson
• “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter
• “Excellence in customer service is the most enduring competitive advantage.” – Derek Williams
• “It’s customers that made Dell great in the first place, and if we’re smart enough and quick enough to listen to customer needs, we’ll succeed.” – Michael Dell

B2B SaaS Specific

A few of our favorites

“In the SaaS world, monthly recurring revenue is the king. But customer satisfaction is the queen.” – Anonymous

• “Customer feedback is the lifeblood of the SaaS evolution.” – Aaron Levie

“The beauty of SaaS is that it’s all about relationships, not transactions.” – Lincoln Murphy

Other great quotes

• “SaaS is not a product; it’s a relationship.” – Brian Halligan
• “The SaaS model demands that we flip the company. The power is with the user.” – Stewart Butterfield
• “In the world of SaaS, it’s not just about getting a customer; it’s about keeping them.” – Des Traynor
• “In B2B SaaS, customer success determines your success.” – Byron Deeter
• “A SaaS company can grow recurring revenue over time as long as it continues to keep its current customers.” – Tomasz Tunguz
• “In SaaS, your customers define your product’s success.” – April Oman
• “Churn is the silent killer of SaaS. Prioritize satisfaction and watch retention rates rise.” – Neelie Kroes

From Industry Leaders

A few of our favorites

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs

“In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” – Doug Warner

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh

Other great quotes

• “Customer experience needs to be the backbone of your entire business model.” – Tony Hsieh
• “Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps
• “To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your customers, you first have to respect those customers.” – Colleen Barrett
• “Your culture is your brand.” – Tony Hsieh
• “Customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” – Jerry Gregoire
• “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” – Roger Staubach
• “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt

The Global Perspective

A few of our favorites

“To win the market, you must win the heart of your customer.” – Korean Saying

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf

“To understand the customer, walk a day in their shoes.” – Japanese Proverb

Other great quotes

• “Listening to the customer is most important when they are telling a story from across the world.” – Chinese Proverb
• “There is only one boss. The customer.” – Sam Walton (US perspective)
• “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.” – Mahatma Gandhi (Indian perspective)
• “Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy.” – African Proverb
• “In the world market, the voice of the customer is the loudest.” – Brazilian Saying
• “A customer’s gratitude is the heart’s memory.” – French Proverb

Future-forward

A few of our favorites

“The future of commerce is about creating experiences, not just selling products.” – Brian Chesky

“Tomorrow’s customer journey will be less about brands and more about personalized experiences.”

“In the evolving digital landscape, the line between products and experiences will blur, but the essence of customer satisfaction will remain constant.”

Other great quotes

• “In today’s digital age, the customer voice is louder and clearer than ever before.”
• “As technology evolves, so does the customer’s demand for an enhanced experience.”
• “In an AI-driven world, human touch in customer service will become a premium.”
• “The future of customer satisfaction is deeply intertwined with personalization at scale.”
• “As virtual realities become more prevalent, creating genuine, human-centric experiences will be the challenge and opportunity for brands.”
• “The next horizon of customer satisfaction will be led by anticipatory experiences; knowing and serving the customer even before they know it.”
• “The digital future of customer satisfaction is about merging empathy with automation.”

• “The companies that win tomorrow are the ones that deeply understand their customers today.”

How to Use These Quotes in Your Day-to-Day

Integrating motivational quotes into your routine can serve as constant reminders of your mission in customer experience. Here’s how you can embed these pearls of wisdom into your day-to-day activities:

1. Start-of-Day Motivation: Kick off team meetings by sharing a quote. It sets a positive tone, aligns the team, and brings focus to the importance of customer satisfaction for the day ahead.
2. Email Signatures: Incorporate a rotating set of quotes in your email signature. It not only inspires your team but also anyone you communicate with, emphasizing your dedication to customer satisfaction.
3. Office Decor: Print some of your favorite quotes and place them in high-traffic areas of your office. This can be in the form of posters, wall decals, or even desk calendars.
4. Presentation Anchors: Starting or ending your presentations with a relevant quote can be powerful. It reinforces your message and leaves a lasting impression on your audience.
5. Digital Reminders: Set up weekly notifications or desktop wallpapers that cycle through these quotes. This digital nudge can be an effective motivator, especially when tackling challenging tasks.
6. Social Sharing: Share a quote on your company’s social media platforms once a week. It not only motivates your team but also showcases your commitment to customer satisfaction to your followers.
7. Training Sessions: Incorporate quotes into training materials. They can serve as discussion points, encouraging team members to reflect on their meanings and implications in real-world scenarios.
8. Personal Notebook: Keep a dedicated section in your work notebook for these quotes. Jotting them down or reviewing them during a break can be a source of personal inspiration.

By embedding these quotes into your routine, you ensure that the essence of customer satisfaction remains at the forefront, inspiring continuous dedication to excellence in customer experience.

Bonus: Ensuring Customer Satisfaction is at the Center of Your Business

Making customer satisfaction the cornerstone of your operations isn’t just about adopting a mindset; it’s also about employing the right tools and strategies. Here’s how to ensure that customer satisfaction remains at the forefront:

1. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture: From the top management to the front-line staff, ensure that everyone is aligned with the goal of customer satisfaction. Regular training sessions, workshops, and reminders can help instill and reinforce this value.
2. Implement Feedback Mechanisms: Active listening is key. Set up channels through which customers can easily provide feedback. This can be through surveys, feedback forms, or even direct interactions.
3. Act on Feedback: Collecting feedback is only half the battle. The real challenge is acting on it. Prioritize feedback, address concerns, and continuously iterate your products or services based on customer inputs.
4. Invest in CSAT Tools: Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) tools can be game-changers in this journey. Here are a few to consider:

• Surveys & Feedback Forms: Tools like Nicereply can help gather customer feedback post-interactions or transactions.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) Tools: Platforms like Nicereply NPS software gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking how likely they are to recommend your service or product.
• Helpdesk Solutions: Tools such as Zendesk or Freshdesk not only assist in managing customer queries but also gather insights on customer satisfaction levels.
• Live Chat Tools: Platforms like Intercom or Drift facilitate real-time interactions with customers, ensuring immediate feedback and prompt issue resolution.

5. Continuous Monitoring and Improvement: Regularly assess your customer satisfaction levels and identify areas of improvement. This ongoing cycle ensures that you’re always aligned with customer needs and expectations.
6. Celebrate Successes: When customers express satisfaction or when teams go above and beyond to ensure this, celebrate these wins. It reinforces the importance of customer satisfaction and motivates teams to continue prioritizing it.

In the end, ensuring that customer satisfaction is at the core of your business is a continuous journey. With the right mindset, tools, and strategies, you can make this journey both impactful and rewarding, paving the way for lasting success.

Summary

It is both challenging and rewarding to navigate the realms of customer experience. We’ve seen that customer satisfaction is more than a metric or a fleeting goal; it’s the foundation of sustainable business growth. We often lose sight of this cardinal principle in the midst of daily tasks and challenges.

This is where the power of motivation, especially in the form of these curated quotes, becomes invaluable. They serve as a compass, pointing us back to our core mission whenever we might stray. Staying motivated and aligned with the ethos of customer satisfaction ensures we not only meet but exceed the expectations of our valued customers.

So, as we wrap up this collection, our final call to you is simple: Stay engaged. Embrace continuous learning. And above all, always place your customers at the heart of everything you do. Their satisfaction is the truest measure of your success.

The post Customer Satisfaction Quotes: Fuel Your Motivation with These 51 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Customer Success Platforms are here to make your (work)life easier. Firstly, you need to know how to use them. Get some inspiration!

You have many customers, across many segments, using your tool for many use cases. How do you manage that complexity to make sure they all are successful with your products?  

The Customer Success function has gained momentum over the past decade and is now, more often than not, an integral part of the customer journey within a SaaS company.

Gunjan Nichani, Senior Manager of Customer Success Systems at Amplitude and self-professed “Customer Success Operations Nerd,” knows CSM inside and out. 

In this chat, she shares her thoughts on what Customer Success teams should be doing and the benefits of customer success platforms.

What are the goals of Customer Success?

Gunjan: The ultimate metric of success for any SaaS organization is net retention. 

A truly effective customer success team could keep the business healthy and growing even without a direct sales team. Net retention is the measure of success of the trifecta: good product, great service surrounding that product, and the right market fit.

We are seeing an increasing number of SaaS organizations facing churn like never before, and this is, at least partially, because of the product fit. Although, some may stay because of a strong Customer Experience. 

Even with a great product, customers struggle to get value quickly and effectively from these subscriptions. This is where a great customer experience comes into play. The role of Customer Success is to help customers derive measurable outcomes from their investments and paint that picture to prove it out for them.

An effective CSM or account team member should work with champions in customer orgs to create that focus and unquestionable stickiness of their product. Those products are the ones that stay through these sorts of economic downturns, as the customer’s org cannot function without them.

These are often lofty aspirations. How do you feel these goals are best achieved?

Gunjan: Constant data analysis to validate the right signals of attention, measures of customer health, and types of engagements required.

First, it’s important to develop an understanding of customer segments. This may go beyond firmographic or contractual information like a number of employees or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Fundamentally, it comes down to what level of engagement and support is needed.

There will never be a one-size-fits-all strategy across customers or even within each segment. The best thing a customer success operations team can do is review the validity of each segmentation strategy. This is one of the main benefits of a customer success platform.

From there, it’s about finding the sweet spot of human touch, assessment of maturity, and digital touch. As companies develop a long tail of customers, there is no way every single one can get human interaction at the same cadence as higher-spend customers. A tech-touch strategy to help scale customer success is a must-have at that stage. 

Understanding the customer lifecycle and the motions required at each stage by segment can help uncover the need for different levels and methods of engagement. Working with a product analytics or business intelligence team, we can identify the appropriate trends in product usage and adoption. This helps measure customer health at different phases of their journey. 

Combine these strategies to develop playbooks for CSMs, customer health scorecards, and digital programs to get to the right customers at the right time with the right messaging. And then reevaluate.

Markets change, and CS needs to respond appropriately. Constantly reevaluate and iterate.

With the amount of data, and so many different segments and playbooks, can tooling increase the chances of success?

Gunjan: We should never go off of a gut feeling. That’s the benefit of a customer success platform. Data-driven designs are bound to be far more accurate in determining the right engagement strategy. Beyond that, standardization, continuity, and documentation of customer engagements need to be a priority.

With the right tooling, organizations can not only guide CS professionals in the right direction with standardized playbooks and expectations of capturing key activities, but they can also report on these motions to help validate that they are working. This is a prerequisite to be able to calibrate strategy and iterate appropriately. 

As soon as there is too much flexibility or lack of direction on how to operationalize these strategies, information is lost, whether in sticky notes, Google Docs, Evernote, Slack, or anywhere else that is just not systematic. Technology will never solve a strategy problem, but the strategy needs the right technology to be successful.

What types of tooling exist and how does a leader go about making tooling decisions?

Gunjan: There are hundreds of tools out there that solve different elements of the customer lifecycle and often specialize in certain areas. These themes can range anywhere from:

• Sales to CS Handoff
• CSQL
• Success Planning
• 360 customer views
• Engagement playbooks
• Customer marketing
• NPS
• CSAT
• Support
• Education
• Professional services
• Conversational intelligence
• The list goes on…

Imagine being a CSM trying to understand the full picture of just one customer, let alone the other 49 in their portfolio (often more)? It’s a nightmare. Certain in-house existing platforms such as Salesforce can do the job with the right resourcing and focus to try to consolidate these insights and solve these problems.

Many orgs will opt for a Customer Success Platform that does this more easily with OOTB functionality, and plenty more customization to help solve for multiple of these points in a single platform. The options are plentiful and growing, with platforms like Totango, ChurnZero, ClientSuccess, PlanHat, my personal favourite, Gainsight, and many more. 

As for how a leader should go about making a tooling decision – let’s first start with what role that leader is in and what kind of resourcing they have. A platform decision is not just about the subscription; it’s about the work that goes into making it successful. 

Certain tools that are hyper-focused on specific outcomes may even be able to be managed by business leaders directly. Other tools like Gainsight require a dedicated administrator – and often more, spanning out to a specialized team. A CS leader may focus more on the outcomes they are looking for, but need to ensure they have the right systems & IT buy-in to support making this happen.

A Systems & IT leader may want to consolidate tools and make their day-to-day more streamlined. All-in-all, it takes a village to make a platform effective, involves identifying the right outcomes that it should deliver, and the right resourcing plans to make that happen. Remember: technology cannot solve a strategy problem.

How do you justify the ROI on tools in this space?

Gunjan: It comes back to outcomes identified. It is ill-advised to even begin a tooling procurement evaluation, let alone an implementation, without understanding the specific outcomes and value it should result in. To get the real benefits of your customer success platform, go back to the basics: SMART goals, with an emphasis on the M and the T. Measuring success involves a benchmark, and it is often difficult to even gather that benchmark.

Too often, leaders will go off of a feeling – which is usually accurate – when deciding to purchase a strategic CS tool. However, they fail to prove the ROI when facing an economic downturn or questions from the CFO on their investment decisions. They must show an improvement; not just a number achieved. It is all relative, and relating it back to industry or even board expectations is key.

The T is focused around ensuring you are not trying to move too quickly or judge too soon. Usually, ROI in CS is a long game, and so understanding both lagging and leading indicators is important. Hint: leading indicators are usually not good enough for the CFO or board, but are a good stepping stone to ensure you’re on the right track.

The post Support Talks: Benefits of Customer Success Platforms appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

A strong customer service team culture is the direct result of trusting, engaged employees.

Team culture has become a bit of a buzzphrase over the past few years, but for good reason. People spend a lot of time at work and walking into a nightmare environment with a team you don’t really jive with can take its toll.

On the other hand, being part of a team that fosters a positive attitude and believes in the company’s vision and goals, can be an amazing experience.

But a positive, motivated, goal-chasing team doesn’t just form overnight. It takes deliberate action, honesty, and people that care enough to make it work.

If you’re a team leader who knows their team has what it takes but is just lacking a little direction, here are a few steps you can take to begin creating a positive, growth-driven customer service team culture.

We also share great insights from our beloved colleague, Katarina Javorcikova, on how to build a strong and long-lasting team culture within your company.

Gratitude And Attitude

Maybe you read that headline and rolled your eyes a bit. But let me stop you there. Gratitude and a positive attitude don’t mean your team needs to walk around with a smile plastered on their face, praising each other 24/7 and having collective gratitude journaling sessions (but if that’s your thing, more power to you).

It only means that it’s ok to loosen up and step back from the high-stress, competitive, and thankless environment that so many workplaces consist of. Sure, it might be getting things done, but are your people happy?

Psychologists Adam Grant and Francesca Gino conducted a series of experiments and discovered that receiving a simple “thank you” from a supervisor boosted employees’ self-worth and self-efficacy. And the cherry on top? These experiments also revealed gratitude has a spillover effect and people become more trusting and are more likely to help each other out in that type of environment.

It could be as simple as telling someone you appreciate their work or complimenting something they’ve recently accomplished. Showing a little gratitude for your team can go a long way – people always want to know that they’re valued.

But be aware not everyone likes to be thanked in the same way. Yes, some people love public recognition and praise or gifts. But for others, those acts of gratitude could make them uncomfortable. Customize how you show your gratitude to each individual. Which means you actually have to get to know them on a more personal level.

On a larger scale, employee benefits totally count as a gesture of appreciation. Here are a few of the most popular employee benefits:

• Flexible or remote work schedule
• Healthcare
• A generous amount of vacation time (especially if it’s paid)
• Stock options
• 401K, pension, and/or retirement plans
• Team trips
• Employee education and development stipend
• Gym memberships
• Free meals

Whichever direction you choose to take, just remember to be genuine in your efforts. An office party is no substitution for true employee appreciation. Just like you can’t buy love, you can’t buy employee trust or engagement. No amount of free coffee, ping pong or team trips can create that.

Keep People Engaged

A strong customer service team culture is the direct result of trusting, engaged employees. To reach this level of team engagement, there need to be clear expectations and communication from team leaders.

If employees can’t answer questions like, “What exactly are you trying to achieve and why?” or they don’t understand what purpose they serve on the team and how they can contribute, it’s time to get everyone on the same page.

As CX specialist Jeff Toister put it in his interview with Zendesk, engagement is when employees understand what a company is all about and decide they’re passionate about that purpose too. It’s not that everything is rainbows and sunshine every day because that’s unrealistic. Instead, it’s about having employees that come to work every day to work towards the same goal and have the desire to improve the company’s overall bottom line.

Additionally, this means that as a leader, being receptive to feedback, questions, and ideas from others is important. Otherwise, it’s more like barking orders than setting expectations.

Encourage people to work together and also contribute their own individual skill sets and knowledge to create an overall stronger team. Give your team ownership over whatever goals you’re attempting to achieve and trust that they can handle their mission.

Does Your Team See The Vision?

On that note, finding people who fit with the culture your company is building, see the vision and want to be a part of it doesn’t just happen without intention. It requires hiring the right people and assessing your current team culture.

Your company vision and mission are the statements that attract the right (or wrong) people to your business on both a customer and employee level. If it’s disjointed that could mean not everyone on your team is aligned with the business, which can actually be quite costly in the long run.

Examining your current culture and the type of people it has attracted can be eye-opening. Take a look at the performance you see from your team.

• How do they handle challenges and how often do they pop up them?
• Is your team growing or are things stagnant?
• Do people seem to be excited about their work or are they just there because they need the money?

Those are just a few of the probing questions to understand where your customer service team culture stands. You could also choose to have deliberate conversations around culture with your employees. Or send out surveys to better understand people while allowing them to remain anonymous.

If things are off and people aren’t ultimately aligned with your business and its vision you may notice there are people with toxic, negative attitudes and who don’t really care about their job or the team. Even worse, employees you thought were happy just suddenly quit.

Having open conversations about the overall company vision and thoroughly vetting new hires can save the company from high turnover and toxic, unengaged teammates.

Keep It Real

Pulling back the layers of your team and how they work requires transparency and honesty on both sides. Your team has dedicated their working days to you and the overall company dream, it’s only fair to be real with them.

Not only does enforcing honesty as a policy avoid general confusion but it makes leadership and management easier to trust. Secrets and avoidance only make room for false assumptions, rumors, anxiety, and an overall negative vibe.

Becoming disconnected from your team because you’re at a leadership level can make people feel separated. It creates an us vs. them environment that’s the very opposite of a strong customer service team culture.

Take notes from a page in Kayako’s team handbook: “We work hard to ensure we keep our internal information flowing clearly and smoothly through all-hands meetings, lunch learns, and internal newsletters, preferring open Slack channels to direct messages. Encourage team leads to use regular 1:1’s with their teams. Or take it further, our PeopleOps teams ensure everyone has a sounding board outside of their team or their immediate manager to voice their issues or concerns.”

Get in touch with what’s going on behind the scenes in a genuine way. It doesn’t need to be formal or serious but have conversations with people. Get to know them and their work and learn to understand the people on your team – it works wonders at breaking down barriers.

Take Ownership

As a team leader, you must realize that it’s on you to do just that – lead the way. Take ownership of the customer service team culture you want to create and then put that vision to work. It’s easy to get caught up in daily to-dos and deadlines but making sure your people are taken care of and can count on you as well as each other to work towards common goals will be a lot more satisfying.

Nicereply’s Team Culture by Katka

Katarina Javorcikova cares about the happiness of our clients at Nicereply, as a Head of Customer Success. We asked her how she perceives the importance of team culture. Her smart tips will help you keep your relationships at the workplace healthy and strong.

“When defining the team culture, every team leader should ask this question: What it feels like to work on my team? By putting themselves in the shoes of the team members, they are able to define the behavior that drives high performance and satisfaction for the whole team.”

We can’t describe the culture in one word. Team culture is how team members do their job, how they show up, what energy and values they bring to the team, and how they treat each other.

Especially in Customer Support, agents are faced with different types of issues, clients, challenges, behavior, and emotions day in and day out. A supportive culture can prevent burnout, help agents overcome thought days, support their professional and personal development and enjoy the daily work.

I recommend identifying the key behaviors that create a culture inside your team. Key behaviors people want to live, experience, and maintain daily.

Questions that help you identify the key behaviors

• What it feels like to work on my team?
• Do we give and receive feedback? What do people think of feedback?
• How do I want to treat my team members?
• How do I support the mental health of agents?
• How do we support each other? Do we share our daily experiences and listen to each other?
• How do I want to level up agents’ skills?
• How do agents perceive the daily challenges? Do they see challenges as a path to progress?
• How do you approach failure? Do agents feel safe making a mistake?
• How do you navigate conflicts?

With more and more support teams working remotely, leaders should think about how to build and maintain remote team culture.

From my experience, the backbone of the remote culture is transparent communication. Moreover, people should feel visible and part of the team. Furthermore, I would invest in creating a sense of community and belonging because agents feel engaged and connected to something.

To give you one tip on how to learn to communicate effectively, our team participated in the workshop about critical thinking and argumentative techniques. Compared to typical communication training, we learned how to offer credible facts and sufficient evidence to support the worthiness of our argument. After this training, our team meetings became more productive.

Last but not least, the best way to contribute to camaraderie in the team is merch (hoodies, cups, t-shirts, stickers, caps, etc.) Attending an all-hands meeting in a team t-shirt is fun.

The post What It Takes To Build a Strong Customer Service Team Culture appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

With customer experience as today’s business benchmark, delivering top-notch customer service is crucial for any business.

According to Gartner, up to two-thirds of companies compete on customer experience, making the experience more important than product and price. One of the surest ways to deliver consistent quality service is to develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for customer service teams.

What are SOPs?

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are detailed guidelines to assist an employee in performing specific tasks smoothly. Their main objective is to ensure uniform and quality service. By using a step-by-step guide, SOPs provide employees with information they need to effectively perform a task without confusion or ambiguity.

While some minor errors are inevitable in any workplace, standard operating procedures are a great way to minimize them, creating a culture of quality control and dependability.

SOPs help:

• Document detailed internal processes
• Describe the best actions to be taken in a scenario
• Define a specified timeline for each action
• Outlines the expected results of a task

SOPs are targeted to achieve maximum efficiency and quality output, while reducing miscommunication and confusion about a company’s quality standards.

Let us take a look at seven key benefits of creating standard operating procedures in customer service processes.

1. Ensures quality support 

The experience that customers have with a company, including what they hear from their friends and family, determines the perception they have of the company. This is why it is critical to deliver top-notch customer service consistently.

An ideal SOP uses identifiable KPIs and metrics to assure quality. By setting a non-negotiable standard for the product/service that your business offers, SOPs for customer service processes help maintain the quality of service consistently.
For example, standard operating procedures can have instructions for call representatives to not put a customer on hold for more than 3 minutes or to increase the net promoter score by 10% for the next quarter. Using the analytics collected after each call cycle, supervisors can analyze the metrics and give feedback to support agents to improve accordingly.

2. Prevents knowledge loss

For any business, one of the biggest challenges is the loss of knowledge due to employee exit.

With every employee’s exit, unrecorded knowledge can lead to information gaps across your team. When crucial knowledge is missing, different versions of the truth emerge. As a result, team members receive inconsistent information that affects their performance.

In addition, when information is scattered, accessing relevant information at the right time becomes a big challenge. Employees spend valuable time trying to find the information instead of focusing on solving service-related issues.

By organizing SOPs in one place, knowledge loss can be prevented with employee exit. Having all facts and processes collated in one standard format minimizes the risk of transmitting false information through word of mouth or hearsay.

Standard operating procedures can ensure process efficiency as well as ready access to essential information any time.

3. Reduces Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average handle time (AHT) is a customer service metric used to measure the average amount of time that it takes for a support agent to handle a customer’s query, from the time of contact to the time of resolution. It is typically measured in minutes and is used to evaluate the efficiency and productivity of customer service operations.

Knowledge management for customer service is becoming an increasingly essential focal point for effective operational efficiency for organizations across industries. SOPs are a great way to store organizational knowledge as they help retain detailed step-by-step instructions for employees.

SOPs for customer service processes are especially useful in call centers as they help reduce the average handle time (AHT). This parameter determines the time taken to resolve a customer’s query effectively. 

By using standard operating procedures to create guided workflows with interactive decision trees, the agents are empowered with the next best action at their fingertips. This helps reduce the time an agent takes to solve a customer problem effectively, reducing the AHT.

In a call center, the goal is to reduce the average handle time to as low as possible while still ensuring high-quality customer service. Including standard response templates in SOPs can save an agent’s time in solving common customer issues. This allows agents to spend more time on critical and complex tasks. 

Additionally, SOPs in call centers will also ensure that your support team follows your business’s communication guidelines, tone, and overall brand identity.

4. Minimizes error while maximizing productivity 

SOPs work as a ready reckoner for minimizing the chances of committing mistakes at your call center. 

While mistakes are inevitable, doubts and confusion can affect an agent’s confidence and impact his/her performance. Adopting standard operating procedures in customer service processes is a great way to ensure that customer service representatives can cross-check for solutions in case of doubts or confusion. This reduces the time and energy spent shuffling around to get the relevant information.

SOPs are also very helpful in decision-making and strategic planning. In the case of bigger organizations, responsibilities often get blurred and might even overlap. Clearly-defined SOPs allow you to structure your team’s scope of work systematically to ensure that work is distributed equally across employees without duplication of efforts.

In addition, clear SOPs reduces the risk of miscommunication and misinterpretation of information to facilitate smooth operational efficiency. In effect, you can maintain uniform service and business value irrespective of how many customers you serve.

5. Simplifies customer support training  

SOPs are a great way of training employees faster and more effectively. They provide an overview of the company’s operational preferences and standards.

New employees do not have to solely rely on memory retention of information briefed during the onboarding process. Instead, new employees can conveniently refer to the step-by-step guide in the form of standard operating procedures that have every detail for the best steps in any situation. 
This reduces the likelihood of making mistakes, enhancing the quality of customer service overall.

6. Improves employee performance 

At any job, employees have certain work targets to achieve regularly. These are KPIs that employees have to meet for their performance to be reviewed.

However, if there is no definitive framework for expectations and targets, supervisors and employees have no qualitative and quantitative standard to measure performance. This makes the employee review process an ambiguous and complicated one.
By having SOPs, agents have a clear understanding of the metrics and goals that are set for them. This way, there is a transparent and just method of reviewing any employee’s performance. Consequently, top performers can be rewarded while training can be provided to low-performers.

7. Ensures brand consistency

In an organization, multiple employees mean multiple work styles. While this is only natural, extreme variation in communication techniques and work systems would translate as inconsistent experience across contact channels to customers. Such inconsistencies could affect the quality of service that customers receive.

For example, a customer can get two different solutions to the same problem on the phone and on email, making them confused and frustrated.

To avoid such problems, having a ready source as a reference point would ensure a standardized response for a particular problem. SOPs can help you set up a knowledge management system to ensure the delivery of consistent communication and service. 

In addition, as standard operating procedures are well-thought-out guidelines, minute details like brand voice and tone are also highlighted, ensuring that customers get a unified brand voice across touchpoints.

8. Boosts agent autonomy 

Asking for help in situations of doubt and confusion is normal in any workplace. It happens with both new and existing employees. 

While colleagues readily help their coworkers with the necessary information and assistance, it isn’t without a cost. Research says that for every distraction, the human brain takes up to 23 minutes to fully get back to focus mode! 

This reality is especially alarming in a fast-paced ecosystem like a contact center, as such interruptions could impact your support team’s overall productivity and slow down turnaround time. In effect, the quality of customer service also gets affected, leaving customers dissatisfied. 

However, with SOPs in place, your agents have ready access to the information they need at all times. This reduces their dependence on colleagues in case of any doubts about processes and policies. This way, your agents become efficient problem solvers providing support that delights your customers

Summing up

Creating SOPs can be a long and intensive process. However, the effort is critical to set your organization up for success in the long run.

Companies create SOPs to help employees provide consistent quality service, irrespective of how many customers they have to serve. They also help standardize routine activities such as onboarding processes or project management for employees to execute, thus boosting operational efficiency. 

SOPs in customer service also help eliminate any guesswork in support processes and empower your representatives with the right information to handle difficult situations and solve complex issues confidently.

The post 8 Benefits Of Creating SOPs In Customer Service Processes appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

It can be overwhelming to sit down and start thinking about all of the things that you need to do to sort out the growth of your support team in the new year.

If you’re growing your number of customers or orders in the next year, you’ll need to plan how to support them. In an ideal world, your self-service support would scale so effectively that you’d never have to hire another support person ever again.

Customers would be able to find all of their answers on their own, and never have to reach out via email, chat, or phone. Honestly, it would be better for them, and better for you.

Unfortunately, though, we don’t live in an ideal world, and so it’s very likely that, as you move into a new financial year with your company, you’ll need to figure out what the growth of your support team will look like.

This can include anything from knowing how many people you need to hire and knowing exactly what metrics you need to hit, to determining if there are new tools that you’ll need to use in order to accomplish your goals.

Looking at it that way, it can seem like a pretty daunting task.

Luckily, we’ve got a few things to recommend that can make the whole process much easier.

Take a look at your history

Depending on how long your company has been in business, you’ll likely have some historical data about things like response time, number of conversations, and other important inbox metrics. If you can take a look at these things over time, especially in combination with one another, you can get what is the support equivalent to year-over-year growth—instead of finance, though, it’s what’s been growing and improving (or degrading) in your support team’s performance.

Several years’ worth of data can be useful in knowing what was just a flash in the pan, and what actually has been a trend that you can use to predict future growth and hiring.

For example, if one year you had a huge surge in ticket growth, but otherwise your ticket volume has grown by about 25% year over year, you can likely predict that it will follow that pattern, rather than the one-off surge.

Beyond ticket volume, metrics like first response time, contact ratio, and time to close can all be helpful for forecasting trends when paired up and looked at together—especially when considering how much you need to hire for to specifically push those metrics down or boost them up. For example, does hiring new people drop first response time, but not make any impact on contact ratio?

If so, what are some levers you might be able to pull to shift that metric, too? Taking a look at other company metrics might help.

Forecast on Company Metrics

Take a look at the metrics that you are using as a company—perhaps you’re using OKRs across teams to set the company direction—and correlate them with your past year’s metrics. Rather than performing in a silo, if teams collaborate and share knowledge, you create a much stronger impact on your company goals.

Combining support metrics helps to show how customer support can help other teams reach their goals.

If partnering with your marketing team, you could examine the correlation between NPS and response time, or NPS and CSAT to get a better handle on how people’s impression of the brand changes with how quickly they hear back, or if NPS and CSAT are positively aligned.

Understanding metrics contextually within the grand scheme of your company can help support make a much wider impact, beyond where they would usually be able to. Instead of just making changes that affect the inbox, for example, your reach can extend to make shifts and pushes on customers on your company’s marketing strategy, product strategy and beyond.

Think about the big changes you need to make

After you’ve compiled both your team’s metrics, especially comparing them to the past several years, and looked over company metrics to see where you might be able to pair with other departments, it’s time to look at the data and see where your suppoer team might be able to make improvements.

Despite, according to HBR, 80% of companies refer to their support offerings as “superior,” only 8% of their customers agree. Much of this is due to the perceived lack-of-value in support tooling and functionality—why pay more for a better help desk, for example, when you can put money into marketing and see the results in the number of leads going up?

Taking a more data-based approach will allow you to argue for the changes that you need to make to be a truly great team.

For example, if you notice a correlation between your customer’s satisfaction and the time it takes you to respond, try to track that a little bit more deeply: how can you maintain that speed as you move into the new year, especially with a potential forecasted growth of 25%? You need to hire more customer support agents.

For another example, perhaps you notice that your customers reach out most frequently within the first three weeks of using your product. When you take a look into the tagging in your helpdesk system, you notice that most of the conversations are about three key issues.

People who received a response to their question on these issues within a few hours had a much higher NPS and CSAT rating than those who don’t.

Though you’ve never had onboarding before, the data in this example suggests that maybe you should invest in some, especially if your customer base is growing and you need to scale.

Make a hiring plan

A study done by PLOS discovered that the larger the support team, the better their ability to handle complex inquiries and tackle larger scale issue—the reason being that more diversity on a support team allows for more diverse thinking and problem-solving.

So, while it’s excellent to stay small and lean in order to be able to move quickly, in order to be able to move with more intelligence and intention diversifying your support team is the way to go.

Take a look at the goals that you determined from the above step, and see if you will need to hire an additional role that you don’t already have on your team.

For example: if you are going to be building an onboarding strategy, you may need to hire an onboarding specialist or someone whose job it is to specifically focus on that subset of customers.

If you’re planning on changing your helpdesk so that you can get better analytics, you may need a support engineer to build out things like macros, or more functional API connections than you already have.

These kinds of niche hires are just as important to consider as the bulk hiring you’ll need to do just to keep up with volume.

For customer support volume just based on annual growth, use a model similar to the one that Bill Bounds created to chart your needs and be able to explain to your executive team where the exact numbers are coming from.

Get going!

It can be overwhelming to sit down and start thinking about all of the things that you need to do to sort out the growth of your support team in the new year.

But, if you take a look at your historical data for what you’re support team has done in the past, and then match it up with the metrics that your company is using to gauge success you’ll have a powerful indicator of where you need to go. From there, consider any specialists that you may need to hire—do you need someone more technical?

Do you need someone to design onboarding?—and add them to your model for hiring, along with the traditional support representatives that you will need to cover your predicted growth in volume.

Metrics and having a thumb on the pulse of what your company needs makes forecasting and hiring for growth infinitely easier.

The post 5 Tips for Planning the Growth of your Support Team in the New Year appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

A seasonal rush is about to begin. Plan your seasonal staffing well with the advice of our support experts.

Seasonal hiring is a common practice in many industries. Whether it is for a special holiday, or for a time of year, many businesses experience volume fluctuations in their customer care needs.  Staffing for these fluctuations is a difficult task. There are many considerations and departments involved in ensuring your customers continue to receive the service levels they expect. From forecasting to product changes to training and tooling, seasonality combines all aspects of workforce management and beyond. 

Matt Dale,  Founder of Moxie CX and former VP of Support at Illuminate Education, has dealt with some of the most extreme seasonality a team could face: 50% of all yearly volume comes in 2 months of the year!  In our interview, he highlights the areas you should consider as part of planning your seasonality.

Matt, Let’s start with breaking down just how seasonal Illuminate was and some of the main challenges you faced.

Matt:  The business focused on software for K-12 schools. So our seasonality, which was extreme to say the least, found 50% of all annual volume coming in September and October as classes ramp up.  It is an extreme swing. July has basically no volume, and August starts the trend, but by mid-September, it is all hands on deck.  This type of swing is common in e-commerce, Black Friday through Christmas, and the tax industry in early spring.

For us, a lot of planning happens in the preceding October and November, almost a year in advance, to predict the following September. This includes process, staffing, volume expectations, budgets for overtime, and of course training for product changes.

A year in advance?! There must be a lot of unknowns to navigate. How do you prepare with those constraints?

Matt:  This planning often involves guessing as we don’t have the sales pipeline clearly outlined. The entire off-season is used to prepare for the busy season. We look at peak volumes and set a staffing target about 15% less than that (Staffing to 100% might be hard to justify to finance), and we focus on overtime as a planned, budgeted spend for peak season. Account churn and response times need to be considered as part of these numbers too. Combining these factors helps us to define the levers of the service that can be pulled and the impacts of those.

For example, where is the tradeoff between customized customer experience and things like bulk responses? Trading off some personalization for response time might be a good idea. However, you have to be cognizant of the issues that you have and how you might be able to bucket or slice and dice by customer segment. For example, high ARR customers.  Plan in advance what tradeoffs you are willing to make. We don’t want to have different processes, we want the same processes that scale and have thresholds that dictate when we use them.

In addition, we use the off-season to optimize. We look at where self-service options may be possible and assess the main ticket drivers from previous years. Because we have multiple products, if we see a trend where the main driver is easier on one product, we can cross-train those agents to handle other types of issues on other product lines.  

All of this to say is every year informs the next, and we refine over the lengthy off-season to make sure we are fully prepared for the next.

You mentioned staffing levels and overtime as key planning considerations. How do you structure a team knowing the drastic changes in volume?

Matt: It is important as a leader to know what type of seasonality you are dealing with. Is it short-term? 4 weeks? 4 months?  And what sort of effort is needed to ramp agents up?  If we get 1000 tickets during this time, but they are straightforward, then we can potentially bring in temp workers for a very focused support service. If your onboarding is 1 week it is easy to do this. But if onboarding is much longer, temp hiring may not be feasible.

Working with outsourcing companies or temp agencies is a great way to solve this issue. For example, through a BPO, we hire a team that can handle chat full-time, even if they may not be as productive in the off season, but also the cost is typically reduced and they can remain constantly trained.

We have to plan a year in advance for staffing. We hire a couple cohorts, one earlier to train them up based on projections and then one closer to the seasonality to adjust for new information or handle attrition.  Something we tried this year, was we pre-hired team members, and then if people left we were okay. Understanding why people leave is key to being prepared. This can make a difference in your team’s ability to succeed and not burn out.

You called out chat, but I imagine these considerations are harder for different channels. Any thoughts on how to manage this with other channels?

Matt: We get tickets via email/web, chat, and phone calls. Phone calls are harder to staff for when volume scales given their real-time nature. The phone channel works well for more detailed tickets that take 15-20 mins to handle and therefore the wait times can be longer than chat, but the complexity often necessitates it.

Our chat teams are more generalist. Focus on immediate response to people who cannot wait for a day or two turnaround time and we have email channels for those asynchronous communications that have an acceptable higher response time.  Across these, we use Forethought to bring in AI components that can be automated before the agents look at it.

And finally, another idea is self-service. We make sure that it is robust and usable and constantly evolving.

Inevitably you miss something. What happens when those curveballs come at you?

Matt: If curveballs are thrown in the peak season, you might have to just let it run course. If you don’t have a plan, it’s difficult or impossible to do it in the heat of the moment. Planning in the offseason is critical. I like to ask: “What are the insurance policies that you need to take out to ensure you aren’t caught flat-footed?” 

Last year things went very sideways due to a bad release, so this year we made a new plan called the “What-happens-when-things-go-very-sideways-plan.”  This happened in the product team, so we didn’t see it coming.  To solve this, we listed people from other teams that could help out with tickets or as subject matter experts in case of these exceptions, and we set thresholds when this became, “support tickets are more important than what you are doing” level criticality and bring people from other teams into the queue. Having others on standby and knowing the thresholds to bring them in was a good insurance policy for this type of catastrophic issue.

If you assess risk based on impact and likelihood, you can catch many curveballs, but not all.

How does this expand in the future? What can you do to constantly re-enforce the structures you have already built?

Matt: Certainly, improvements in technology will allow us to do a better job in the future. This could be in automation or product enhancements. The company has to evolve in their stage of growth too, not just the support team. In an early startup environment, you are likely doing things that don’t scale well because you want to keep clients happy to maintain that revenue, but a mature company may not be as concerned there.

As you grow, you need to look at the types of tickets, is it training/knowledge related? Or is it a product issue that needs to evolve? What is causing the volume and what can we reduce and how can we reduce it? Does it need human beings or something else?

Another thing that has to evolve is building an understanding of what is okay and what is not. What is the company strategy for support? Example: Are we in a cost-cutting mode and need to run lean? Or is support a differentiator and we want to use that as a unique selling proposition to our customers? This can change as a company matures and knowing the current company strategy will help you to create new and improved services to offer to create positive Customer Experiences.

The post Support Talks: Support Staffing for Seasonal Volume appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

When we asked our networks who people were grateful for, there was such an amazing outpouring of kindness…and far more people than we could include in one blog post.

Support, as an industry, grows more each day. It used to be that when you were sitting at the dinner table over the holidays and people asked “how’s work going?” us customer support folk wouldn’t know what to say. I know, at least, that when I tried to explain to my parents what I did, it went in one ear and out the other.

But those times are no longer. Now everyone, at least tangentially, knows and understands customer experience and its importance. As the industry has grown, so have the amazing leaders within it. People that all of us in the world of support learn from each and every day.

Let’s take the time to recognize some of those leaders, especially the ones that the community found to be the most impactful in their lives and growth within the support.

So, check it out! Our 20 support leaders that we are grateful. If you’re a Twitter person, I’ve also created a handy dandy list that you can follow!

Camille has an impressive background in customer success and advocacy leadership. Not only is she committed to consistently learning and bettering herself and her team, but she documents all of it. Her LinkedIn is a treasure trove of insights, as are any of the multiple talks she’s given. Go, Camille, Go!

While she originally started her career as a developer, Kathy Sierra has written a number of hugely impactful books, including Badass: Making Users Awesome. Numerous people listed her and her texts as immensely influential in their career in support and how they think about customer experience overall.

Angela is an excellent resource when it comes to learning more about the intersection between product management, support, and development. You can check out her Twitter here.

Abby is a pro when it comes to working and managing remotely. She’s also worked in support for over 10 years, and tech for 7. Beyond that, she cohosts the Support Driven podcast and is an active member of the Support Driven community. Needless to say, there were lots of people thankful for her this year. I’m especially thankful for her 1D tweets, though.

If you’re looking to get to know someone consistently caring and insightful, Sarah is your person. She’s worked in a variety of different support roles across industries and, because of that, brings a unique perspective on customer support and success. Best of all, she is humble and always willing to have deeper conversations about her reasoning and thought process. Her Twitter is excellent.

It feels like Chelsea has done a little bit of everything, and is always willing to share her varied expertises with those around her. From her insightful and informative newsletters when she managed the community at Support Driven, to her encouragement and leadership of the support and success teams at Recruiterbox, there are tons of people who are grateful for Chelsea.

Diana is a successful consultant, cohost of the Support Driven Podcast, and a support leader. She’s a huge influence in the Support Driven community and is always willing to lend her deep insights whenever she can. If you’re looking to better your email marketing or website copy with the customer’s experience in mind, she can help!

Chase has had his hands in almost everything support related. Whether that be working on the community over at Support Driven, helping run the Support Ops podcast, or leading his team at Basecamp, he does so with humility and insight. He’s also excellent at homesteading and a number of other things that you can learn about on Twitter.

Personally, I’m grateful for Andrew because of the care that he puts into everything he does. It feels like everything that he touches, he does so with the utmost consideration. This was echoed by all of the people that said they were grateful for him this year. Thanks, Andrew. You’re the best.

Antonio shows all of us what it means to be excellent. Providing support, humanly and with a sense of humor is not easy. You can frustrate customers, use the wrong words and come off as uncaring. Tones have taught all of us that that doesn’t have to be the case.

Mo has done support at some of the best companies in the game and brings a TON of insight into every conversation about the customer experience that she has. Her enthusiasm is unparalleled and her writing is clear, concise, and informative. Basically, she’s just the best.

Sarah runs a conference series that has given many of us our first taste into the community behind support and customer experience. She also organized and co-authored The Customer Support Handbook, which serves as an excellent guide for anyone looking to break into, or better understand the concept of success in this career. She’s also hilarious and kind, to boot.

Ben is kind, funny, and humble—which says a lot because he’s also excellent and informative when it comes to customer support. From the numerous talks that he’s given professionally, to the pep talks that he’s given many of us personally, Ben is an all-around Good Egg to that so many of us are grateful.

Adrian is an all-around boss. He’s published books (a new one just came out), runs a successful CX newsletter, and serves as an advisor for companies looking to grow their customer experience. He’s informative, intelligent, humble and very, very funny. Check out his Twitter.

Waldo is excellent at providing support and has made a huge impact on people that have worked with him. But, beyond that, he makes an impact on strangers by sharing candidly, encouragingly, and openly about his own journeys and work in life. If you’re looking for a way to cultivate gratitude and live a more present life (while also totally slaying the CX game), Waldo is a great person to know.

Ana is all about empowering her team to make the right decisions on their own. Her tweets are inspiring, especially for those of us still looking to grow and open up opportunities for ourselves and others. Pay attention, especially, to what she shares about her own personal experiences with leadership and growth.

Scott gave the Support world one of the first online communities where we could come together and learn from each other. For that, all of us are grateful.

Mat went from managing support teams and leading departments to write about how to do those things at Help Scout. He’s funny, informative, and, most importantly, willing to share his knowledge through talks, blog posts, and on his Twitter.

Is there a more thoughtful and intentional person alive? We’re not sure. Jim is great at sharing unique, kind, and gentle perspectives about support interactions and how we’re doing them. Another one of those people that make your life better just by following them.

No matter where she is working, Andrea is thoughtful, kind and never hesitant to reach out with a kind word. People are particularly grateful for the effort that she puts forth to help individuals work through career challenges. Overall, we love her for all of the work that she’s put into making the support ecosystem kinder and more intentional with her work.

When we asked our networks who people were grateful for, there was such an amazing outpouring of kindness…and far more people than we could include in one blog post. To see some of the others, check out this LinkedIn post or this Twitter thread.

A big thanks to everyone that reached out and shared a little gratitude this season, and to all of the people on this list. We’re grateful we get to learn from and grow with you every single day.

The post 20 Support Leaders That We are Grateful For appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Customer service trends of 2023! Learn from the best ones and find out what support leaders see as the biggest challenge of the upcoming year.

As we approach 2023, it’s time to reflect on everything you’ve learned and develop your strategy for next year. There’s an important key to creating a successful plan that’s often overlooked: understanding the context in which you’re operating. 

We reached out to seven customer service experts to understand what’s just over the horizon in the customer experience world. We wanted their perspective on the challenges customer support teams are facing and the things they need to know before starting a new year. 

To that end, we asked them one simple question: what will be the customer service trend in 2023?

At a high level, next year’s uncertain economic forecast will require more focus than ever from companies. This means that customer service teams around the world will need to focus on becoming more efficient, frequently through the use of AI to improve deflection. Smart use of the latest technology will keep customer service teams prepared to deal with evolving customer demands. 

Just as importantly, customer service leaders will need to focus on keeping their teams engaged to improve employee happiness and retention, while also maintaining a high-quality support experience. 

Top customer service trends of 2023

Josh Magsam

Vice President of Partner Operations at PartnerHero

The trend for 2023: With the economic forecast looking rough in 2023, it’s more important than ever to establish a baseline of metrics and work with your team to align those metrics as goals. For success in 2023, look for ways to humanize your support. You’ll be creating more loyal customers and employees.

With the economic forecast looking rough in 2023, it’s more important than ever to establish a baseline of metrics and work with your team to align behind those metrics as goals.

Human contact will also be more important than ever. A lot of fascinating work is being done in the broad world of A.I.-enhanced software and automation applications. Many of these tools can really be a lifesaver for your team, but customers still want quick and effective access to a friendly, knowledgeable human who can understand their problem and help troubleshoot. 

For success in 2023, you have to look for ways to humanize your support – whether that’s training for phone agents, dialing back the use of macros and allowing for unscripted responses, or some other solution unique to your ecosystem. Your customers will thank you (and your amazing team) if you put people first.

Hilary Dudek

Senior Director of Customer Support at Sana Benefits

The trend for 2023: Leveling up the AI paths of a customer’s support journey to improve deflection and focus more on retaining strong support agents. 

Next year, there’ll be a focus on humanizing AI components of customer support. Yes, AI is key to scaling effectively as it allows for deflection opportunities via self-service. However, I think we negatively impact CX when AI doesn’t function intuitively. I anticipate a focus on leveling up the AI paths of a customer’s support journey. This will involve two components: taking AI/intent recognition to the next level and a heavier blend of human support with the AI.

As a byproduct of the first focus, the second focus will really be on internal retention – especially with the Great Resignation and the high levels of disengagement we see in the workplace. Attracting, hiring, and retaining strong support agents is not a new goal for most companies, but I think in 2023, companies will finally see what it takes to do this successfully. Competitive compensation, flexibility, a strong emphasis on work/life balance, and defined clear growth paths will have to become a standard part of the package, and I’m here for all of this!

Nouran Smogluk

Director of Customer Support at Komoot 

The trend for 2023: Next year will be the year to learn to do “more with less.”

The biggest trend I see is “how to do more with less.” Considering the world’s state of affairs and the shrinking economy, there’s a major focus on customer experience being a competitive differentiator. Still, there isn’t as much capital available to invest in support teams (or executives aren’t willing to make those investments). 

So the question will be: How can we maintain great service at a lower cost? The answers will likely range from automation to AI-driven self-service to outsourcing. Support leaders will need to be creative and find new ways to create great experiences for customers without requiring significantly more resources.

Brendan Ledger

Director of Support at 7shifts

The trend for 2023: Leaders will need to focus on using technology to scale operations while keeping up with higher demand during economic uncertainty. 

Many industries are facing economic uncertainty in 2023, which means businesses will be focusing on costs to protect their bottom line and/or burn. Support teams often feel the blunt end of this switch in focus—being considered a Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) on the balance sheet—and will be pushed to keep costs low. 

Next year, I see support leaders focusing on operating costs and ways to scale their operations to keep up with customer demands while achieving strong unit economics. Uncertainty in markets doesn’t necessarily mean fewer customers or fewer support requests; for some industries, this might lead to more volume. So leaders will need to focus on best-in-class technology solutions for their support tech stack; contact deflection and operations are two key areas to invest in. 

Camille Emefa Acey 

Vice President of Customer Success at Disco

The trend for 2023: It’s time to show customers that you’re addressing their pain points by using targeted messaging. 

Targeted tech touch messaging will be big in 2023. By now, most of us should know enough about our customers to be able to craft and trigger messaging that goes out to the right person at the right time about the right product or feature to solve their problem. We’ve been hitting our customers up for feedback for years.

Now is the time to show them that we’ve been listening to them, that we know and understand them, and that we are addressing their pain points and know what to do to deliver an exceptional user experience. CX teams will need to partner with stakeholders across all the major functional areas of the business to make these efforts successful.

Tim Jordan

Manager of Customer Support at Cars.com

The trend for 2023: 2023 will be a year where companies switch from focusing on their customers to focusing on their employees to, in turn, create a better customer experience.

Highly engaged customer service employees always lead to higher satisfaction. 2023 will be a year where companies realize they need to invest way more in their employees, which will lead to their employees taking better care of customers. 

In 2023, I think we’ll see an increased focus on employee engagement and employee development. These two things are closely related, and both are critical to high performance and employee retention. In a tougher economic climate, every business needs to be proactive about keeping employees happy, productive, and growing.  

Paul Tucker

Director of Product Support at EveryoneSocial

The trend for 2023: Budget cuts will pressure teams to “do more with less.” Companies that succeed will be those that focus on building strong teams and not AI as “the solution.” 

With staff and budget cuts rising, I believe 2023 will mark a pressure increase on Support to “do more with less” overhead. To further complicate things, this “do less with more” endeavor will take place in the climate of admirable yet ever-ballooning customer expectations. Today’s customer expects a human, helpful, speedy, one-team-does-everything experience—which is challenging to deliver with a substantial budget, much less a modest or shrinking purse.

I believe the companies that double down on automation and AI as “the solution” for Customer Support will suffer. In contrast, companies that focus on building teams of empathetic, engaged, and skilled communicators will succeed. Automation or AI may help, but it’s not the solution in and of itself.

Know your customers in 2023

There are some strong parallels across these predicted customer service trends for 2023. If automation, human-centeredness, employee engagement, and efficiency aren’t yet incorporated into your annual plan, now’s the time to make adjustments. 

If you’re not sure what your customers think of your current customer experience, you should start a free trial of Nicereply today. Nicereply enables you to gather constant customer feedback, which should be the foundational layer of your 2023 customer service strategy.

The post We Asked Experts: Customer Service Trends of 2023 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

What does being customer-centric really mean today? Find out here and learn what are the essentials of
a healthy customer-centric culture.

The concept of customer-centricity and customer-centric culture has been around for nearly 20 years now. Some of the world’s most well-known brands like Apple, Starbucks, Ikea, and Airbnb to name just a few, have adopted the customer-centric approach in the way they run their businesses. Today, they owe a great deal of their success to putting their customers first.

Though there’s certainly more to customer centricity than just delivering exceptional customer support, it’s definitely a significant contributor to it. Let’s explore how to ensure your customer support team truly reflects your organization’s customer-centric culture.

What does being customer-centric really mean today?

You might have seen various definitions of customer centricity. Whether you call it customer centricity or customer obsession which is a newer concept that takes customer centricity even further – it’s all about placing the customer at the core of your business. That means being able to deeply understand your customers, their needs, preferences, and expectations and deliver consistently positive customer experiences based on that knowledge.

Real customer centricity must be embedded in your business strategy, goals and priorities, corporate culture and values, as well as the day-to-day activities of your employees. Every business decision and the strategic move must be made with customers in mind.

Why being customer-centric is critical for every support team

Being customer-centric brings undeniable benefits to your bottom line and your ability to attract and retain customers. Forrester’s report revealed that customer-obsessed companies have 2.5 times higher revenue growth and 2.2 times better customer retention. Another research by Deloitte claims that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to those that aren’t.

Since today’s consumers are knowledgeable, empowered, and have a wide array of options for just about anything they want, it’s obviously getting harder for businesses to compete and win over the fierce competition. No wonder customer service often becomes a deciding factor for the majority of consumers. According to a recent CX Trends 2022 report by Zendesk:

• 70% of consumers claim they have made purchase decisions based on the quality of customer service.
• 81% of consumers will likely purchase from a brand again following a positive service experience.
• 74% of consumers will forgive a company for its mistake after receiving excellent service.

The perceived quality of your customer service largely depends on how customer-centric your front-line team is. Are your agents genuinely committed to prioritizing customers’ needs? Are they empowered to do whatever it takes to provide outstanding service experiences and exceed customer expectations?

5 Ways to ensure your support team is truly customer-centric

Here’s what you can do to ensure your customer support team employs a customer-centric approach when dealing with customers.

1. Embed a customer-centric mindset through onboarding and training

It goes without question that having the right people in your customer support team in the first place is the key to delighting customers. These people should naturally be customer-oriented and possess a number of certain soft skills to be successful at their roles. However, if your organization is striving for customer-centricity, make sure everyone on your support team has a clear understanding of the customer-centricity concept and is trained to be customer-centric in all engagements with customers.

In the customer support realm, having a customer-centric mindset means being able to show empathy to customers and demonstrate empathetic behaviors in customer interactions. That allows agents to deliver personalized customer experiences while making customers feel heard, understood and cared for. In fact, empathy is the cornerstone of the customer-centric mindset. Training empathy should be part of your agent onboarding process and soft skill training initiatives.

2. Give agents access to the right customer data, analytics and tools

Is your support team well informed about your customers and equipped with the right technology to deliver personalized experiences? A study by the CMO Council found that some of the major challenges faced by companies struggling to become customer-centric are:

Functional silos prevent customer data sharing (52%)
Missing key technology platforms to manage data (35%)
Support not equipped to manage customer issues (28%)

For your support team to adopt a customer-centric approach, make sure agents have easy access to comprehensive customer data and insights and are using the right tools (CRM and Helpdesk) to efficiently manage, analyze and apply that data. It will give them a deeper understanding of your customers, help make more informed, data-driven decisions and create better customer-centric experiences.

3. Encourage agents to collect and leverage customer feedback

Customer feedback is another valuable source of information about your customers that significantly adds on to your team’s ability to satisfy customers and live up to their expectations. Encourage your agents to proactively gather customer feedback to keep tabs on customers’ perceptions of your brand. But it’s not only important to consistently collect customer feedback, your team should be able to leverage that feedback into actionable change and improvement.

There are numerous ways to collect customer feedback – from customer interviews and email surveys to on-site and in-app feedback forms. Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are some of the most commonly used, simple yet highly efficient surveys you can use to solicit customer feedback a non-intrusive way and see if you are on the right path to becoming more customer-centric. Tools like Nicereply make it easy to uncover customer feedback through one-click surveys that can be created in minutes.

4. Empower agents to go above and beyond when it feels right

In order to demonstrate the ‘Customer First’ attitude, your agents should be empowered and authorized to go beyond expectations to delight customers and deliver wow experiences. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos which is considered to be one of the most customer-centric brands, says: “At Zappos, we encourage employees to stay on the phone for as long as the customer wants, even if it’s over 10 hours long.”

And that actually happened. A Zappos employee took a customer service call that lasted over 10 hours – a story that is known by nearly everyone working in customer service and one of the brightest examples of employee empowerment and prioritizing customer happiness.

5. Recognize and reward those who demonstrate customer-centric behaviors

Numerous studies have proved the undeniable link between employee recognition and employee performance. According to the Deloitte survey, organizations with employee recognition programs see a 14% increase in employee productivity, performance, and engagement. Proper recognition and appreciation improve employee motivation, engagement, and willingness to perform better.

Make sure you appropriately recognize, praise, and reward your support agents whenever they deliver outstanding service experiences and go the extra mile in satisfying customers. It shows that their commitment and contributions to your company’s customer-centric values are appreciated and encourages them to continue exceeding customer expectations.

Wrapping Up

Since having an exceptional customer support team is crucial to maintaining the long-term growth and success of your business, it’s important to build your customer support strategy around customer-centric values.

To ensure your support team is truly customer-centric, help them develop a customer-centric mindset through training, equip them with the right tools and provide easy access to customer data, encourage them to collect and act on feedback, empower them to go above and beyond customer expectations and consistently reward customer-centric behaviors.

The post Customer-Centric Culture: Does Your Support Really Care? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.