business plan for customer service department

Customer Service Business Plan Template

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. A customer service plan is the policy or contract that is included with the purchase of an item, typically for an additional fee. Using a template to develop the plan can help ensure all important factors have been included in the plan.

How to Create a Customer Service Plan

The first step in creating a customer service plan is to understand the needs and expectations of the customer. A proper service plan should address the client's immediate needs, as well as long-term needs. Considering both will help avoid any future issues for the customer. The next step is to utilize the feedback to create clearly defined steps for executing the service plan.

Advantages of a Customer Service Plan

There are numerous advantages to creating a customer service plan. Several of the advantages include:

• Increased employee efficiency
• Higher morale and employee satisfaction
• Reduced confusion of expectations
• Minimized stress from misunderstood expectations
• Maintaining customer satisfaction
• Competition with other businesses
• Assessing customer opinions effectively
• Creating a successful customer strategy

Steps to Create a Customer Service Strategy

1. Create a Customer Service Vision

It's important to begin by understanding the vision and customer service goals of the organization. This information should be communicated to the employees in order to help them provide the best customer service. The business should include all customer-facing employees in training that covers the expectations and company vision.

2. Assess the Customer's Needs

Assessing the needs and expectations is a vital part of business. Misunderstanding the needs of the customer, or blatantly ignoring them, can cause many problems for the business. Some of these problems includes:

• Wasting valuable resources
• Not meeting customer expectations
• Not meeting customer needs
• Creating unnecessary products or services
• Loss of sales

There are a few ways to assess customer needs, such as sending out surveys, holding focus groups, or providing customer comment cards. Customer expectations and needs can change quickly and drastically, so it's important to pursue feedback regularly, and assess the results for changes. Using outdated feedback could be just as bad as not collecting feedback at all, or possibly even worse.

3. Hire the Right People

Not everyone has a customer service mindset, so it's important to search for potential employees who have strong customer service skills. Of course some skills can be taught through training and experience, but that's not the case in all situations. To avoid hiring delays or mistakes, the customer service expectations should be clear in the job description and verified during interviews. When going through the hiring process , managers should focus on hiring people of who already have the right skills.

4. Set Customer Service Goals

Understanding the company's goals will help the employee align their efforts with the most important areas. When employees understand how to focus their effort, they will be able to help the company achieve its overall goals . For example, if the company strives to resolve all customer service phone calls within 5 minutes, the employees should be aware of the goal and be held accountable. Creating an environment with recognition of meeting the goal is also a great way to motivate them.

5. Provide Customer Service Training to Employees

Customer service training should outline the expectations and criteria the employees should strive for. Training should be provided for all new employees. In addition, retraining should happen semi-frequently to keep the information fresh for all employees. Training should also be updated as changes are made to the expectations.

6. Hold Employees Accountable

As with providing recognition for success, it is also necessary to hold employees accountable for meeting the expectations. If employees are not meeting goals regularly, they should be notified and actions should be taken to help them achieve the goals effectively.

7. Recognize Employees for Good Service

It's important to provide recognition and feedback to the employees so they understand their situation and performance when it comes to customer service expectations. The frequency of this feedback may vary by business type, but at the very least should be given in a yearly review format.

If you need help with a customer service business plan template, you can post your legal need on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel accepts only the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.

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Business Plan Template for Customer Service

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In the fast-paced world of customer service, having a well-defined plan is essential for success. That's where ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service comes in handy!

This template is specifically designed for business owners and entrepreneurs in customer-focused industries like retail, restaurants, and call centers. It provides a comprehensive framework to define your customer service objectives, strategies, and tactics.

With ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service, you can:

• Outline your service training programs to ensure consistent and exceptional customer experiences
• Establish complaint resolution procedures to address customer concerns promptly and effectively
• Implement customer satisfaction measurement strategies to gauge and improve your service quality

Don't leave your customer service success to chance. Get started with ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service and take your customer experiences to the next level!

Business Plan Template for Customer Service Benefits

A customer service business plan template can provide numerous benefits for businesses focused on customer service, including:

• Clear definition of customer service objectives, ensuring alignment with overall business goals
• Effective strategies and tactics to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Comprehensive training plans to equip employees with the skills and knowledge needed to deliver exceptional service
• Streamlined complaint resolution procedures to address customer issues promptly and effectively
• Measurement strategies to track customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement
• Consistent and exceptional customer experiences, leading to increased customer retention and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Main Elements of Customer Service Business Plan Template

ClickUp’s Business Plan Template for Customer Service provides entrepreneurs and business owners in customer-oriented industries with the tools they need to create a comprehensive and effective customer service plan. Here are the main elements of this template:

Custom Statuses: Organize your tasks with statuses like Complete, In Progress, Needs Revision, and To Do, allowing you to track the progress of different action items within your customer service plan.

Custom Fields: Use custom fields like Reference, Approved, and Section to add additional relevant information to your tasks, such as document references, approval status, and categorization based on different sections of your business plan.

Custom Views: Access various views such as Topics, Status, Timeline, Business Plan, and Getting Started Guide to visualize and manage different aspects of your customer service plan. From a high-level overview of topics to a detailed timeline view, ClickUp has you covered.

Collaboration and Communication: Utilize ClickUp's collaborative features like comments, assignments, and notifications to keep your team on the same page and ensure seamless communication throughout the execution of your customer service plan.

Integrations: Connect ClickUp with other essential tools, such as communication platforms like Slack or project management tools like Jira, to streamline your workflow and improve efficiency in executing your customer service plan.

How To Use Business Plan Template for Customer Service

Crafting a comprehensive business plan for your customer service department is crucial for success. With ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service and the following steps, you can streamline your operations and elevate your customer experience:

1. Outline your customer service goals

Start by clearly defining your customer service goals. Determine what your team aims to achieve, whether it's improving response times, increasing customer satisfaction ratings, or reducing customer churn. Having specific goals will help guide your strategy and keep your team focused.

Use Goals in ClickUp to set and track your customer service targets.

2. Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience is essential for tailoring your customer service approach. Analyze your customer base and create buyer personas to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. This information will enable you to provide personalized support that resonates with your customers.

Utilize custom fields in ClickUp to store and categorize customer information.

3. Develop your customer service processes

Build a framework for your customer service processes. Outline how your team will handle inquiries, complaints, and requests. Determine the channels you'll use for communication, such as email, phone, or live chat. Additionally, establish guidelines for response times, escalation procedures, and customer satisfaction measurement.

Visualize your processes with a Gantt chart in ClickUp to ensure smooth and efficient operations.

4. Implement feedback and continuous improvement

To continually enhance your customer service, establish a feedback loop. Regularly gather feedback from customers through surveys, reviews, and support interactions. Analyze this feedback to identify areas for improvement and implement necessary changes to enhance your customer experience.

Automate feedback collection with Automations in ClickUp and use Dashboards to monitor customer satisfaction metrics.

By following these steps and utilizing ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service, you can build a strong foundation for your customer service department and deliver exceptional support to your customers.

Get Started with ClickUp’s Business Plan Template for Customer Service

Business owners or entrepreneurs who operate businesses focused on customer service, such as retail stores, restaurants, or call centers, can use the ClickUp Business Plan Template for Customer Service to define their customer service objectives, strategies, and tactics.

First, hit “Add Template” to sign up for ClickUp and add the template to your Workspace. Make sure you designate which Space or location in your Workspace you’d like this template applied.

Next, invite relevant members or guests to your Workspace to start collaborating.

Now you can take advantage of the full potential of this template to create a comprehensive customer service business plan:

• Use the Topics View to organize different sections of your business plan, such as customer service objectives, strategies, and tactics
• The Status View will help you track the progress of each section, with statuses including Complete, In Progress, Needs Revision, and To Do
• The Timeline View will allow you to set deadlines and milestones for each section of your business plan
• The Business Plan View provides a holistic overview of your entire customer service business plan, allowing you to see all sections at once
• The Getting Started Guide View will help you outline the steps and resources needed to implement your customer service strategies
• Utilize the custom fields Reference, Approved, and Section to add additional information and categorize different aspects of your business plan
• Update statuses and custom fields as you work on each section to keep team members informed of progress
• Monitor and analyze your customer service business plan to ensure it aligns with your overall business goals and objectives.
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Customer Service Business Plans

Call center business plan.

Vashon Solicitation Services is a start-up business providing clients with top quality call center services 24 hours-a-day.

Personal Shopping Services Business Plan

Buy the Time is a start-up personal shopping service based in Seattle, Washington.

Effective, efficient, and personable customer service can sometimes make or break a business. If you have ideas for new methods of providing in-person, online, or phone-based customer service, you may consider establishing a customer service business.

And in order to provide the best service possible, you’ll need a business plan to do it. Check our library of sample plans to ensure you have everything you need to launch your business.

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7 Steps to Build a Thriving Customer Service Team

I recently put together a bookshelf for my office. No instructions needed for me, as I confidently wielded the allen wrench. Halfway through, though, when the pieces stopped fitting together, I realized I’d made a critical early error and had to undo it all and start over.

Building a customer support team is best done with a clear plan. You can wing it, but you will find yourself having to undo mistakes at tedious length later.

Whether you’re starting a support department from scratch or have been managing customer support for a while and want to ensure it is structured to succeed, these seven building blocks make for a solid foundation.

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1. Define "great customer service" for your company

Nearly every company claims to provide great customer service. But not all customers have a great experience, so clearly there’s opportunity for improvement. That improvement begins with defining “great.”

When building a support department, you need to decide on the specifics of service quality you will provide and include your entire team in crafting that definition. Once you have defined what “great service” is for your company, you have a standard against which to measure your support team.

Foundations of Great Service

Discover the tools and techniques used by high-performing customer service organizations in our free, six-part video course.

Deliver on your company values

One of software company Atlassian’s core values is “Don’t #@!% the customer.” They are an Australian company, which explains a lot. This very direct definition of “great service” means the support team (and the whole company) is taught to never break that value, and because it is a public value, their customers expect to be cared for.

If your company values integrity or speed, for example, those values should inform your definition of great service, and you should set your team up to deliver on those values.

Keep in mind that customer service teams can only offer service as good as the rest of the company will allow. If your CEO is Michael O’Leary , you’ll have some pretty clear upper boundaries to your level of service.

Recommended Reading

How to Create an Inspiring Customer Service Philosophy

Consistently exceed customer expectations.

If you want to stand out from your competitors, consistently exceed your customers’ expectations:

What are the typical response times in your industry — and of your biggest competitors? How can you improve on those times?

What level of service are your prospective customers used to, and how can you repeatedly exceed their expectations to delight them over time?

When you think in this way, you establish your company’s unique definition of great service, a level that your competition will then have to attempt to match.

Set internal expectations by asking the following questions:

How quickly will you respond to customers?

How will your team behave when dealing with customers (tone, language, attitude)?

How will you handle disagreements with customers?

What (if anything) are you not able to support?

Who in the company is responsible for customer service?

What ethical principles will you hold to?

These high-level expectations can be used to create style guides and standards of service.

Campaign Monitor, for example, created a simple checklist to standardize what a great reply to a customer should include. Southwest Airlines created a Customer Service Commitment that makes an extensive (and public) list of promises to their customers.

Your definition will give you a benchmark to measure your support against, to determine whether it is delivering on your standard of customer service.

Examine legal requirements

In Australia, a government customer service guarantee for telephone users sets out response time requirements for phone connection and repair. Do service level regulations apply to your industry?

If so, you can create your own definition of customer service that you will commit to following and, in some cases, use as an upsell opportunity for higher-priced or pay-to-play business models.

2. Decide which channels to support

When you’re committed to providing great customer service, it is tempting to say, “We’ll be available on every channel all the time!” But small teams almost certainly can’t provide consistently great support across all possible channels and timezones.

It’s far better to provide quality customer support on a few channels than to spread your team too thin and give inconsistent service. So how do you choose which channels your support team will monitor?

Find out what your customers are using

Look at what your existing customers naturally gravitate toward, and do some research on your target audience to make sure you are available on the platforms they're already using.

Do your customers contact you primarily by email, or is phone support the standard for your product or service type? Perhaps social media is an important channel for your audience. Find out which platforms are most popular and start by supporting only the top one or two.

Make the call

Different products and services fit more naturally with different support channels:

Technical support is often best done over email, but it can be frustrating over the phone.

Live chat is fantastic for retail products like clothing or banking where back-and-forth discussion with a knowledgeable agent is often required.

Keep this in mind when you’re deciding which channels you support.

The pros and cons of online customer service channels

Whichever channels you choose, it’s best to start with fewer channels and add more later than to offer too many and have to close some down .

How to Determine Your Company’s Multichannel Customer Support Strategy

Capitalize on your existing skill sets.

Do you have great writers or outgoing social influencers on the support team? Looking at your existing team’s strengths can help you decide what form of support to focus on in the early days and what gaps you need to fill in the long run.

3. Hire the right people

Providing high-quality, reliable customer support means that finding and hiring a great customer support team is crucial. Some key questions you should ask when hiring support team members:

What is the ideal support personality? Start with emotionally intelligent, empathetic, resourceful communicators , and then add factors specific to your company culture.

What skills should your support professional have? Do they need specific technical skills, licenses, or software knowledge? Ensure your job description , screening process, and interview questions list any necessary skill requirements and clearly differentiate them from the “nice-to-haves.”

How will you integrate them into your team? Once you’ve hired team members, plan out their first few weeks to teach them about your company culture and your approach to service, as well as the products and services they will support.

How do you keep them? Smart, engaged team members will want to continually grow and learn in their roles. Consider giving them a career path to follow and regular feedback so they know they’re on track.

Customer Support Hiring Calculator

See how changes in your customer growth, ticket volume, and self-service uptake affects your customer support hiring needs.

4. Measure the right data

Many customer service activities are easy to measure. Your customer service software will produce detailed reports, but it can’t tell you which numbers really matter to your team and what you need to do about them.

In my experience, there are three big questions that will help you decide which metrics matter most to your situation:

Why are you reporting? Start with understanding the questions you’re trying to answer. For example, answer the questions “Do we have enough support staff?” or “Where do most of our support requests come from?” and work back to the right metrics.

Who are you reporting to? The level of detail and timing of your measurements should suit the different people to whom you’re reporting. Your team leads need different reporting than your COO.

What do you want the outcome to be? Report on the numbers that correlate with the change you want to see. If you want to make a case for more support staff, focus your reporting on trends in case volume per agent and the correlation between speed of reply and customer satisfaction.

The metrics you choose to report should be meaningful and authentic — there is no value in trying to present a false picture, because the customers will eventually reveal the truth. They should also be measures that your team can impact, or they risk being useless at best and outright demoralizing at worst.

Once you’ve selected your initial metrics, take baseline measurements and set some internal targets for your team to work toward.

11 Key Customer Service Metrics + 4 Real Example Reports

5. pick your tools.

Battling with slow or unhelpful tools is a costly waste of your support team’s time and energy that would be much more usefully spent helping customers. However, customer service tools are often low on the priority list for companies that have limited budgets.

Your team will use these tools every day, for every customer interaction. Even small improvements in speed, accessibility, and comfort will quickly add up. Customer service software includes your help desk, but also any internal tools the team uses and individual productivity tools (like text expansion or screenshot managers).

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

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Selecting customer service software

Your customer service software is your primary platform for customer conversations. This is the tool you will use the most, so select it with the most care.

If you’re not regularly answering customer questions yourself, it is easy to underestimate the value of a smooth workflow and a pleasant, efficient tool . Be sure to involve the people who will be using the help desk and weight their input accordingly.

Key questions when selecting customer service software:

What functionality do you need? How many people need to use it? What sort of conversations will it be handling? What platforms does it need to support? What do you want to report on?

What are your “nice to have” features versus necessary features? Try to differentiate between the “it would be nice if” features and the “everything will break if it does not do this” features. It’s far better to pick a tool that does the essentials really well than one with more features that your team struggles to use.

What apps do you need to integrate with? Do you have a requirement to connect with your CRM or your social media tools? Do you need API access for critical functions?

Even a small improvement in usability, performance, and functionality can make a huge difference when you multiply them by all the hours your support team will be using them.

The 16 Best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024

Internal tools and systems.

Have you ever walked around to the back entrance of a fancy store? Suddenly the sleek design and beautiful lighting is replaced with overflowing trash bins and exhausted employees sneaking a quick cigarette.

Software tools built in-house are often the back alleys of a company, given little attention or effort and built by people hurrying to get back to the “fun” work.

Customer service teams are often heavily dependent on internal systems like custom database searches, configuration pages, and logging systems to access customer information, fix issues, and report back to the company.

If you truly value their contribution, spend some time and effort to make those tools efficient and, if not attractive, then at least not actively painful to use.

Individual tools

Allowing your customer team some flexibility in which tools they use to get their job done will help them be more effective.

Provide budget for individuals to purchase small pieces of software and hardware that suit their requirements. Leave your team with flexibility everywhere you can because you will gain back much more than it costs you.

Buyer's Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool

6. create your knowledge base.

Developing a knowledge base is time consuming, no doubt. But your investment will be rewarded tenfold when your customers can find answers on their own, lessening the strain on your support team. They also allow for faster onboarding and greater consistency of support.

A knowledge base will also save time when responding to common customer questions. Not only is the customer service team able to quickly answer the question, it also helps the customer learn that there is a knowledge base available to them at any time.

Most knowledge base software offers reporting tools, which are valuable for successfully scaling your support. It will show you where your customers are getting stuck, what documents need updating or adding, and how to prioritize product improvements.

Internally, taking the time to write down how certain issues are handled and how to use different tools will let new team members grow their skills without needing to disrupt the existing team.

You don’t need to do this all at once. You can build your knowledge base as you go, either as demand arises or by working from a support content calendar. Here are some great knowledge base examples if you’re looking for some inspiration.

Quick Start Guide to Creating a Knowledge Base in 6 Steps

7. integrate support into your product and company.

No matter how nice the person at the counter is, a disappointing product won’t attract loyal customers. No matter how great your frontline staff is, their experience is inevitably shaped by what the rest of the company does, too.

The goal of a customer-focused company should be to build in systems across teams that support great service so that delighting customers is more of an automatic outcome of doing business rather than an occasional, heroic feat. Support managers can take these steps to build systems into their teams:

Push decision-making to the front lines. Don't make your support team ask for permission to issue a refund or bend a rule. Give them tools and information to make better decisions, and back them up on it.

Automate customer-friendly processes. This ensures a more consistent customer experience and requires fewer decisions, which saves time for everyone involved.

Create feedback loops. Actionable input from customers needs to make it past support to be useful. Make sure you are providing a framework for your support team to share customer feedback with your product team and others.

Support your team. Your customer support team is fielding the good, the bad, and the ugly day in and day out, so treat them with the respect they deserve. They are also the voice of your customer, so involve them in product and strategy meetings. Celebrate their successes, and hold them accountable for their work.

Do the work

Customer service is not like a project that has a beginning, middle, and end. It is ongoing work that must adapt over time as the market, your customers, and your team change, and as you learn.

You may decide to add new channels of support, select new tools, or set new targets, but always remember to define good customer service for yourself and build out from there.

Your execution will need to adapt to the changing environment, but your principles of customer service will hold true.

Customer Service Interview Builder

Good interviews are at the heart of great hires. This tool makes it quick and easy to build a thoughtful interview process, from crafting job descriptions to asking the right questions.

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Mathew patterson.

After running a support team for years, Mat joined the marketing team at Help Scout, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn .

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How to Create a Customer Service Plan that Drives ROI

You have the perfect product and competitive pricing to carve a special place for your brand in the market. The reactions and verdict from customers and critics are in, and your product is an instant favorite.

However, no matter how pathbreaking the product or service is, your company’s customer perception is only as good as the support you offer. So what’s the best way to increase the likelihood of your customers staying with your company? It’s all about your customer service plan. Let’s get to it.

What is the purpose of a customer service plan for your business?

When a customer has a problem, the support team is often the first line they reach out to. Without a well-oiled customer service plan in place, this interaction may become an overwhelming ordeal that leaves both sides dissatisfied.

We’ve all probably been in a situation where the responses from companies do not address your concerns effectively due to the lack of a support process in place. It’s utterly frustrating and it drives many customers to unsubscribe from all communication, write negative reviews on social, and ultimately switch to your competitor. This reactive mode of service delivery can put a dent in your overall market strategy, revenue goals, and other best-laid plans.

The most successful businesses are the ones that offer proactive service, make customers feel valued, and nudge them to keep coming back. It will need a comprehensive customer service plan that is clear-cut–one that serves as a playbook to handle issues within your company, foster a goal-oriented mindset, build a customer-centric company culture, and evaluate and invest in the right tech.

How to create the ideal customer service plan

The ideal customer service action plan will enable you to make customer-centricity and service a company-wide mindset rather than the responsibility of a single department. To create an action plan for customer service, support needs to become your workplace culture. That’s when things start falling into place. Let’s have a look at some of the important moving parts of any business that need to be fine-tuned, to create a superior customer service plan:

6 Steps to create a customer service action plan

• Train employees in customer service
• Establish concrete SOPs
• Leverage technology to offer better service
• Offer support on the channels your customers prefer
• Monitor key metrics that help identify cracks and opportunities
• Make service culture an organization-wide commitment

#1 Train employees in customer service

Right from the onboarding phase, give employees a glimpse of the service culture of your organization – irrespective of whether they’re a part of the support team. Inculcating a customer-first attitude at the organization level elevates the customer experience as it becomes a habit rather than a forced formality. 

Encouraging your employees to show empathy will help your company understand the lingo of customers and see where they are coming from. Empathy will humanize customer service interactions and hand out cues on what your customers want to hear. Give customers the impression that they’re not mere daily targets that need handling.

Showing empathy in customer service can set you apart from the competition. Kaushik Natarajan, a Senior Product Consultant in Freshworks, demonstrated how support is the key to building customer relationships and brand advocacy – so much so that our client mailed in her heartfelt appreciation for the exceptional support experience.

Product expertise and KPIs

Build resources, video tutorials, and product-walkthroughs around to make it simpler for support agents to understand and master the products. Think of the employees as your customers and do everything to ensure they gain complete knowledge about your products. Apart from following the end goal of resolving customer issues, align them with KPIs that reflect through every support interaction. This will give room to revamp or tweak your customer service plan when you see fit and go from “ticket closure” to “customer delight”.

#2 Establish concrete SOPs

Empowering your agents with clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) will create a sense of autonomy and inspire them to be confident in taking ownership. If your employees are going back and forth through the chain of command to resolve issues, it reflects poorly on your SOPs and an acute lack of employee engagement.

Giving your customer-facing employees a set of repeatable approaches or a playbook that they can refer to, will speed up resolution time and establish an evergreen support workflow to abide by. 

For instance, escalations form a major part of every customer service SOP. Because of the volatility and serious reasons as to why customers escalate issues, you need to follow a standardized workflow for them.

#3 Leverage technology to offer better service

Customer service is a function that faces a constant inflow of tickets on multiple channels, keeping agents on their toes. Without a proper tech stack in place, handling customers can get really tedious. So, adopt the right tools and technology to give your support reps a breather from technical complications that deter their work. 

Here are some basic functionalities you should look for in your customer service software:

Auto-assign and group tickets

Look for a customer service software that allows you to set up automation rules to route tickets based on availability, agent expertise, function, and much more. This will not just save time but also improve efficiency as support teams no longer have to go through every single ticket and manually assign it to the right agent. Omni Route is a great example of how intelligent ticketing and automation works.

Cross-team collaboration

Many customer service tools don’t consider processes that fall outside of the support team’s daily activities. Unfortunately, it is only when a support team is able to get internal cross-team collaboration right, that true impact can be seen on a larger scale. That’s why cross-functional communication on a helpdesk is a differential aspect that solves many issues.

Support reps sometimes get caught up on partner, developer, pricing, or legal issues raised by the customer with no direct accountability from these teams. Support agents have a bigger significance than being a communication facilitator between these teams and customers.

This is exactly why cross-team collaboration is a bare necessity in today’s support scenario of multiple external stakeholders.  Reps can tag external stakeholders within a ticket, discuss with them, share context about the issue, and divide the task so multiple teams can work on a ticket simultaneously.

Self service capability

According to The New Rules of Customer Engagement , a survey report from Freshworks, 76% of consumers globally prefer to first try to solve issues on their own before contacting support .

By creating a robust self-service portal, you not only save valuable time for your agents but also gain the trust of your customers. How? Empowering your customers with readily available content to help solve their issue by themselves, creates a positive perception about your products or services itself.

Self service can be implemented in the form of FAQs, solution articles, a knowledge base , or even a chat pop-up. Self service works wonders on the agent too, to make it easier for the agents to manually plug-in resources from the knowledge base as answers to customer queries. Take a look at this self service guide to understand how it works.

#4 Offer seamless support on all the channels your customers prefer

Customers expect support on a channel that they prefer, at any time that is convenient to them. So it’s critical for businesses to offer support in all major customer channels from email to instant messaging.

I recently faced a poor experience with a reputed retail store while I was trying to sort a few things out through their portal’s real-time chat support. After a few painstakingly detailed exchanges, the support executive simply directed me to mail the whole issue to a completely different person. 

Now, I have two grievances.

• If this was never going to get resolved on chat by the agent, why put me through a grueling conversation that had no prior knowledge of my engagements?
• I chose live chat as my channel of comfort to engage with a representative. Why not continue the conversation there? Also, I had to switch to a business-preferred channel and start all over again!

This is just an example of a major disconnect in multi-channel vs omnichannel customer service plans. While being on every channel can be achieved, your agents can’t keep using disparate tools to look after every channel. To be in the channel your customers want you to be is only the beginning. The experience is complete only when you unify their communication for all channels to offer a seamless experience across all channels. 

Going omnichannel should be a part of your customer service plan from the outset. It will help you deliver consistent support to your customers across channels with prior context about them. Avoid alt-tabbing between tools that don’t talk to each other. Give your agents a unified view of every ticket in the helpdesk and customer profile within a single page.

#5 Monitor key metrics that help identify cracks and opportunities

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their customer service plan to lower support costs and increase retention. It starts with tracking customer service metrics and KPIs, which act as an automatic feedback loop for your business to learn from.

Productivity Metrics : Identify customer pain points and evaluate your customer service quality by analyzing data from ticket inflow, number of tickets resolved, and the active time taken to resolve each issue. This will help you plan your staffing better, understand customer behavior, and train your agents. Other customer service metrics to track include first response time, resolution time, conversations per agent, and rate of ticket backlog, to name a few.

Quality Metrics : Quality metrics reflect where you stand as a customer-centric company. They showcase the quality of customer service your company has offered through benchmarks such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). NPS and CSAT are important factors that have a direct effect on ROI as they represent the likelihood of your customers staying with your company or advocating for it. 

Apart from improving the way your team handles customers, looking at these numbers will also enable you to identify revenue opportunities. One way is to find out what’s working best in support. On the other hand, ticket trends can serve as proof points to nudge customers for an upsell or recommend better packages.

#6 Make service culture an organization-wide commitment

Every successful customer service plan begins with listening and understanding your customers’ needs, and the rest is a process of optimizing your support setup for efficiency. But it’s not just the support team that’s responsible for a successful customer service plan. Customer service should be a mindset across all functions of your business, rather than a strategy that concerns just the support team.

Establishing a customer-first culture across functions in your workplace will amplify the support team’s efforts to delight customers and drive ROI. Involving product and marketing teams, and more importantly, integrating support issues within the sales funnel will provide better visibility into repetitive issues on the product side, identify sales-product-support disconnects and make customer interactions more personalized. 

To this end, CEO on Support by Freshdesk is an initiative that businesses can take inspiration from. It stresses the need for the C-suite and other major non-customer-facing functions to go on support to understand how customers feel about your business, identify problems around the product, and improve the overall customer experience.

Always Be Closing… on that feedback loop

Pretty early on, we combined quality assurance and customer support into one group that we called customer experience. They do everything from parsing customer feedback and routing it to the right people to fixing bugs themselves.

          – Stewart Butterfield, CEO & Co-Founder of Slack.

We’ve all swooned over Slack’s success story of growing into a customer-focused company. But it all started well before their beta launch, where they’d ask random teams of different shapes and sizes to try out Slack and evaluate it. According to Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, these dry runs helped them create a new (and better) product roadmap, and identify collaboration problems to solve for. Slack is one of the best customer service plan examples for a company built out of aligning sales, marketing, and product efforts to emulate their support strategy. And how? All they did was take feedback from their users seriously.

The right customer service plan will future-proof your business

If we’ve learnt anything from 2020, it’s that we always need to be prepared for uncertainties. A comprehensive customer service plan is similarly vital to thrive in unchartered waters. One of Freshdesk’s customers, Campaigntrack, a real-estate marketing company, transitioned smoothly into a remote work environment. Freshdesk was an integral part of their recovery plan as the agent and customer accounts were accessible virtually. They also used a help widget integration to get customers read more self-service articles and help in query deflection. Sounds like a customer service plan you want to implement as well? Read the full case study here .

Speaking of ROIs and customer service plans…

Forrester Research conducted a Total Economic Impact study on behalf of Freshdesk and the results are staggering. Freshdesk Omnichannel has delivered a 462% ROI over a period of three years to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Download the entire report and see how we not only fill the gaps in your customer service plan, but also open up qualified revenue opportunities.

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How to Create a Customer Service Plan

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• Customer Service
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How do I Create Customer Feedback Loops?

Performance improvement plans for customer service complaints, how to train employees to deal with & handle customer complaints.

• Telecommunication Plans for Businesses
• How to Start a Webinar Business

Small-business owners can maintain their customer bases and increase sales by creating proactive customer service plans to keep buyers happy. Just because you’re not receiving complaints or returns doesn’t mean your customers are 100 percent satisfied with what you offer. Developing a customer service implementation plan is an inexpensive way to keep customers and boost sales and profits.

Look at Internal Data

To determine where you might be falling short of meeting customer expectations, look at internal data that can help you. For example, look at the number of returns you have and identify any patterns. Find out how many calls you’re getting for support issues and if there are any patterns there.

If possible, track same-customer or repeat sales. If you have to spend marketing dollars to attract new customers for each sale, your customer-acquisition costs will be a burden. If people who buy from you aren’t buying again, that’s a sign you might have customer-satisfaction issues.

Talk to Your Staff

Talk to your employees who either work directly with customers or have insight into how they are purchasing. Find out what questions customers ask before and after they buy. Don't overlook involving staff in customer service planning. You might hear great ideas for developing customer-service programs you hadn’t considered.

Perform Customer Research

The customer service industry creates many of its programs after researching what motivates customers to buy and what causes them to leave, explains UpCounsel . Use tried-and-true methods to find out where you can improve your customer service.

Use focus groups, online surveys, email questionnaires and phone calls to clients to determine where your customers are satisfied and where they’d like to see improvements. Ask them about their experience with your competitors and see if you can find out your competition’s strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of your customers.

Create Support Materials

Using the information you gather during your research and employee interviews, create customer service materials and tools you send customers or post on your website or social media channels. For example, create a Frequently Asked Questions page customers can use after hours.

Create instructional videos for your website, YouTube channel or other platforms. Provide written support materials you include in your packaging to help customers better understand how to use and troubleshoot your product.

Provide In-Person Support

If possible, provide human support for your customers. It’s often the quickest and most satisfying method for buyers to get help. If your budget allows, use a call center or a tech contractor to provide telephone support 24/7.

Appoint one or more employees as customer service representatives or agents and assign them to big clients. Have them call and introduce themselves before problems arise to let customers know they have support available and who to contact. The Edward Lowe Foundation recommends building a rapport with customers so that buyers have a personal relationship with you.

Monitor your online reviews and assign your marketing staff to respond to negative reviews and offer personal support to disgruntled customers. With many online review platforms, you can challenge reviews and have them removed.

Assess Your New Plan

After your new plan has been in place for 30 days, meet with your staff to determine the response, or meet sooner if you have a large customer base and many responses within the first week or so. Find out what types of emails and phone calls you have been getting. Compare the return rates to your pre-customer service plan rates. Check the analytics to see how much traffic you’re getting at your customer support pages, videos and posts.

• Edward Lowe Foundation: How to Create a Customer Service Plan
• UpCounsel: Customer Service Business Plan Template
• Gaebler: Customer Service Tips
• Develop new customer service plans at regular intervals to ensure that your company remains at the top of its industry in customer satisfaction.

Steve Milano is a journalist and business executive/consultant. He has helped dozens of for-profit companies and nonprofits with their marketing and operations. Steve has written more than 8,000 articles during his career, focusing on small business, careers, personal finance and health and fitness. Steve also turned his tennis hobby into a career, coaching, writing, running nonprofits and conducting workshops around the globe.

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Sales | How To

6 Steps for Creating a Customer Service Strategy (+ Worksheet)

Published February 22, 2024

Published Feb 22, 2024

REVIEWED BY: Charity May Amancio

WRITTEN BY: Lorraine Daisy Resuello

This article is part of a larger series on Customer Service .

• 1. Set Goals & Objectives
• 2. Build & Train Your Team
• 3. Identify Touch Points
• 4. Select Software
• 5. Create Information Resources
• 6. Regularly Monitor Quality

Free Customer Service Strategy Worksheet

Bottom line.

When creating a customer service strategy, the first step is to set goals and objectives or determine what you want to attain with your service efforts. The next step is to build and train your customer service team to equip them with the right knowledge and skills. Identifying your customer service touchpoints and choosing your service software then follow. Also, you must create a resource for customer service information and monitor service quality regularly.

In this guide, we break down the six essential steps of how to craft a sound customer support strategy.

Step 1: Set Goals & Objectives for Your Customer Service Strategy

A crucial first step in creating effective customer service strategies is deciding what you want to achieve with your service efforts. While the overall objective of maintaining excellent customer service is to improve your relationship with your customers and increase retention, there are specific areas you need to identify. These may include the turnaround time agents resolve customers’ concerns, customer retention rate, and the utilization of helpful resources.

Understanding these areas helps you determine your success metrics and continuously improve your servicing quality. Below are goals and corresponding plans of action that you can aim to achieve with your customer support activities:

Step 2: Build & Train Your Customer Service Team

Providing quality customer service entails effort and dedication. In most cases, you need a dedicated customer service team, unless you run a micro-business that only processes a small volume of customer tickets. That way, you can develop an effective customer service management strategy for all types of customer service issues, from general product inquiries and order tracking to ticket follow-ups and service calls.

The size of your customer service team largely depends on the size of your business. Small businesses may only need one or two agents who report to a customer service manager. For larger businesses, a full-service department may be necessary to satisfy customer expectations. Regardless of your size, having an adequate number of team members ensures you can properly process all tickets in a timely manner.

Below are some of the most common members of a customer service team for small businesses:

• Customer service agents: Your customer service team’s front line and the ones dealing with customers and working on case resolutions
• Customer service manager: Oversees a team of agents and is typically responsible for formulating customer service training ideas , and steps in when cases need to be escalated to someone with seniority
• Technical support agents: Agents with a more technical role such as troubleshooting or diagnosing customer issues
• Customer success manager: Establishes long-term relationships with customers by rolling out activities that nurture your relationship with them
• Customer experience manager: Oversees customer service touchpoints and comes up with solutions on how to improve customers’ experience every time they interact with your company

Step 3: Identify Your Customer Service Touch Points

After determining your objectives, as well as the team members who will make up your team, determine which channels you want to use to communicate with your customers. Factors to consider when identifying your customer service touchpoints include the size of your team, their familiarity with using each tool, and your budget.

While it is ideal to have an omnichannel approach to help customers easily reach you on any platform, be mindful of your bandwidth and only activate channels you can maintain. For example, if you only have two members in your team who can work on customer service tickets, only choose one or two channels, like email or live chat. It’s not advisable to also activate a social media messenger if you won’t be able to check it and respond to customers regularly.

Step 4: Select Your Customer Service Software

There are many types of customer service tools available in the market that you can choose from. You can also combine or integrate them with your other sales tools to streamline your sales operations. Below, we list the most common channels you can use:

• Help desk and ticketing: This tool centralizes and collates all customer queries in one place. After an official ticket is raised, an agent can follow up with the customer to resolve the issue.
• Live chat: This customer service tool enables customers to get assistance in real time by starting a conversation through a live chat widget. This also allows agents to provide immediate assistance to customers by pulling the required information.
• Chatbots: Similar to live chat but are run by chat robots, chatbots simulate human conversations by answering common questions to reduce human interaction with agents. Response workflows are usually designed to lead customers to information or answers they need.
• Shared inboxes: These inboxes help expedite case resolutions as multiple team members have access to a shared inbox. When an email comes in, any readily available agent can respond. Email templates are also available for canned responses.
• Social media messengers: In our digital age, many customers automatically search for a business or a brand’s social media page before their actual website. The most common channels are Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
• In-app phone: This tool allows agents to make calls straight from their desktop while having access to all pertinent customer information, such as purchase history and personal profile.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software: Some CRM solutions , such as HubSpot CRM and Freshsales, offer customer service communication channels, including an in-app phone, email, live chat, and chatbots.

A good example of a CRM is Freshdesk, which is equipped with an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered rephrase feature that helps improve support quality responses. On the other hand, HubSpot Service Hub allows sales agents to call customers directly via the app. Here are some samples of what these tools look like in actual customer service tools:

Freshdesk AI-powered Rephrase feature improves support quality responses. (Source: Freshdesk )

HubSpot Service Hub lets you call customers directly via the app. (Source: HubSpot )

Salesforce Service Cloud voice and phone support using AI (Source: Salesforce )

Zoho Desk tickets dashboard showing ticket status (Source: Zoho Desk )

Once you’ve identified the channels you want your customers to reach you through, it’s easier to narrow down the customer service software you’ll use to centralize your servicing activities. Some software has a single functionality, while others offer an omnichannel and integrated communications approach. Below, we share the most popular customer service software and the communication channels that they offer.

*Based on annual pricing.

For a closer look at the features, strengths, and weaknesses of each provider mentioned above, read our guide to the best customer service software for small businesses . This will help you develop the best customer support strategy for your business.

Step 5: Create Customer Service Information Resources

While having actual humans answer your customers is nice, keeping a repository of information your customers can refer to on their own helps your team save valuable time and resources. Below are customer service strategy examples of informational resources you can put up on your website so it’s easy for your customers to find answers and information independently.

• Frequently asked questions (FAQ): A collection of common questions clients usually ask. These may include general product information and return or exchange policies.
• Informative articles: These could be blog articles that elaborate on how to maximize the use of your product. A solid example is this article from HubSpot CRM that discusses sales territory planning to underscore the importance of their product offering.
• Recorded product demos and webinars: Instructional videos that discuss the benefits and usage of your solutions, saving your agents time from doing live demonstrations themselves.

Step 6: Regularly Monitor Your Customer Service Quality

Improving the quality of your customer service is a continual process, and it is crucial that you regularly evaluate its effectiveness. Doing so ensures that you’re giving your customers the highest servicing quality possible. There are many ways you can measure your customer support quality :

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Rates quality of service with a customer satisfaction survey regarding the support they received after having their case resolved
• Net promoter score (NPS): Measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your business to their peers
• Support and call abandonment: Determines the average number of users who drop out of your calls or queues while waiting for their case to be resolved
• Social media sentiments: Reflects customers’ sentiments toward your business based on the tonality of their posts on various social media channels or the effectiveness of a social media strategy for customer service
• Resolution and rate duration: Shows the average number of cases you can resolve in a given period of time, as well as the average duration of a case—from ticketing to closing
• Customer churn and retention rate : Provides visibility on the reasons why customers continue to support you or why they abandoned your business for other options

As you’re creating a customer service strategy, download our free worksheet and use it to take notes while you follow the six steps above. It will help you list the considerations and requirements to craft a sound customer service plan and strategy for your business.

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Frequently asked questions, what are strategies for customer service.

One of the best strategies for customer service is leveraging the right technology, such as a customer service software, to help reps determine which channels to choose to communicate with customers. It’s also crucial to monitor relevant metrics like net promoter score or customer satisfaction rating to ensure you provide your customers with excellent quality service.

What are the 6 core principles of a successful customer service strategy?

The six core principles of a successful customer service strategy include the following: putting yourself in the customer’s shoes (empathetic), making follow-ups accordingly (consistent), responding quickly (responsive), treating customers as individuals (humane), not over-compromising (considerate), and asking for feedback (objective).

What is an example of customer-based strategy?

A good example of a customer-based strategy is regularly evaluating the effectiveness of your customer service to give your customers the highest service quality possible. You can measure your team’s customer support quality in terms of customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), call abandonment rates, social media sentiments, resolution and rate duration, and customer retention rates.

Creating a customer service strategy is a critical aspect of business operations. Setting the right goals and metrics for creating and evaluating a customer service management strategy can be enhanced by choosing the right customer service software. This helps you build a well-trained customer service team and ensure the regular assessment of your servicing quality so customers remain loyal to your business.

About the Author

Find Lorraine Daisy On LinkedIn

Lorraine Daisy Resuello

Lorraine Daisy Resuello is a specialist at Fit Small Business who focuses on Sales and Customer Service topics. Before joining FSB, she worked as a freelance writer covering technology, digital marketing, and business topics. She collaborated with companies in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, and the Philippines. Additionally, she has experience in customer service in business process outsourcing (BPO). At present, she uses her decade-long writing experience to provide FSB readers with the best answers to their questions.

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Insight to drive subscription growth

Establishing a Customer Service Department

Customer service, at its core, is ensuring that your customers are happy with your products and company so they will continue doing business with you. Seems simple, right? Yet it’s becoming increasingly complex as the responsibilities of customer service change, the number of customer service channels expand and customer expectations increase. When you consider that 82% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company because of bad customer service, you begin to understand the scope of the issue. Poor customer service ultimately means lost customers and lost revenue.  Even worse, given the information sharing tools available today, unhappy customers can impact the choices of prospective customers more than ever before.

The good news?  Customer service still comes down to prompt, honest, empathetic communication with your customers, and even small companies can do it well.  The question is – how?  We are tackling this question on our Focus On: Customer Service series, where we’ll explore planning for, implementing and scaling customer service for your subscription business.  The full series includes:

• Customer Service: The Basics
• Outsourcing Customer Service
• Handling Common Customer Service Questions
• Your First Customer Service Hire
• Scaling Your Customer Service Team

The  Establishing a Customer Service Department   primer below provides you with the details you need to consider in setting up your own customer service department.

Whether you’re new to running customer service or at a growing company that is just building out a formal customer service department, preparing a customer service plan for your company should start with what you already know. Like any journey, the secret to creating an effective Customer Service department is starting with a compass and a map – and refining as you move forward.

Understand What You Need and Want from Customer Service

Map external touchpoints to your company, creating your customer service response plan.

• Activating Your Customer Service Plan

Answer these six questions to understand how you needs and philosophical approach for setting-up your customer service team.

1. How accessible can you be?   As a sole proprietor, or even with a small staff, there’s no way you can offer 24-7 response, respond to emails within minutes or always answer the phone.  Larger organizations may need to grapple with specific support skill sets, such as technical expertise or subject-matter knowledge, language and time-zone issues. So, before you begin to staff up, ask yourself what service level you can offer to be responsive to customers, produce your product and leave time to sleep?

2. Who are you providing Customer Service to? Most subscription businesses sit in the middle of a complex network of subscribers, gifters/non-user buyers, advertisers, sponsors, and investors.  Each of these audiences will need help – often very different kinds of help.  And it’s wise to include the press, analysts and agencies in your plan, too. Will they be using all or one particular communications channel that you mapped out earlier?

3. What sorts of issues will your customers have?   Some common, subscription-oriented customer-service challenges include:

• Inability to access subscription/didn’t receive subscription box
• Billing inconsistencies (double-billed/credit card billed after cancellation)
• Gift subscription not delivered
• Forgot ID and/or password
• Forgot security question
• Unsure how to comment, share or like an article

4. What is the solution to each of these issues?   Having well-thought answers to your most common questions at the ready will save you time and effort when you need it most.

5. How do your subscribers define good service? Many definitions are universal, such as prompt refunds when overbilling occurs, or being treated pleasantly and offered a sincere, “I’m sorry” when problems pop up. But your customers may prefer text messaging to email, live chat to telephone calls or require live help access on the weekend, versus a Monday-through-Friday schedule. Establish a customer service standard that meets the known or estimated needs of your market, and adjust as you come to learn more about them.

6. What automation do you have in place to help?   Are you using a live-chat or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system already? Have a contract with a call center? Take an inventory of the response and routing options you have at your disposal today.

We recommend an audit of all touchpoints and identify who is getting in contact with your company, and how they are doing so. Depending on its size, you should revisit this on at least an annual basis. What channels (e.g. phone, email or social media) is the public reaching out to you on, and in what volume?  Are there ways your customers will contact you in the future that you need to think through? Are there ways you do NOT want customers contacting you?  To help you get started, figure #1 below shows the number of ways and different types of inquiries you should be thinking about as you map this out for your company.

There is no one right way to set up Customer Service. Budget, scale and volume of your business, industry specific requirements, how your subscribers or members prefer to interact with your business (e.g. online, mobile, social) and even how quickly you need to respond (minutes, hours, days) all determine the best plan and approach specifically for your company.

To create a customer service response plan, take the information you identified on running your customer service function as well as your map of how people are contacting you.

It’s important to note that this plan should be company-wide, not just for your customer service team. Having a company-wide blueprint avoids mishandled customer service inquiries that result in poor customer service and an angry customer or partner, potential lost revenue, or a “helpful” employee unwittingly providing information to an investor, reporter or even customer that you want to keep confidential.

Your company’s customer service response plan will include an availability schedule, issues map, executive issues escalation map, and a repository of reference docs for those who are handling the inquiries, as well as links to any resources such as pricing, policy guidelines and escalation contacts.

1. Identify Common Problems and Their Resolutions

Once you have identified how you want to run your customer service functions and have documented how customers, partners, media and others are reaching out to you, you are ready to create the customer service blueprint for your company.

Essentially what’s needed is a combination of your common questions and answers into a fact sheet that will become the customer service blueprint for everyone in your company.

Think through how quickly you want each touch point ideally handled:

• Who or what team in your company is the “owner” for following up?  For example, who do media inquiries go to and what are your expectations for that follow-up?
• Who handles questions from potential customers who may subscribe or join your service and how quickly do you expect to get back to them?
• If a visitor or customer has a technical issue, who does that issue go to, how to you respond to the customer, how to you address or fix that technical issue and ultimately close it out?
• Is there a difference between the communications channels in the follow-up that you need to plan for?  For example, should inbound phone calls be treated differently from email, which are treated differently than social media?
• Are there ways your customers will contact you in the future that you need to think through?

Your company customer service blueprint also should have links to any resources such as pricing, and include policy guidelines and escalation contacts.

Here is an example of some issues and items that would be included in a customer service company blueprint:

2. List of Executive Issues

In addition to the frequently-asked questions, you should also make a list of those instances when a call should be routed directly to an executive.  Depending on the size of your business, this may be the owner or CEO, the legal department or head of PR or investor relations.  Some examples of these questions include:

• Call from a b oard member or i nvestor
• Press inquiry
• Service of subpoena or other legal notice, or contact from an attorney representing a client against your business
• Accusation of plagiarism, fraud or other illegal activity
• Threat to personal safety of the c ustomer service representative, other employees , or the company as a whole

3. Availability Schedule

This is a simple spreadsheet of who will cover what media at what times, and how that person can be contacted if a customer inquiry comes in another part of the company.  There are certainly tools you can leverage as your team gets bigger, but a simple document outlining who is covering what and when works whether your company is two people, one hundred or more.

We recommend you set up:

• Who is covering what by inbound channel (e.g., phone, social media or email)
• What is the expected service level (SL) of that channel (e.g. goal of how fast your response is)
• Specifications for the types of customers

4. Repository of Materials

Make sure your customer service team has access to the most recent technical specifications, policy guidelines and special offers by centralizing these materials in one place. Whether that includes binders on a shelf, files in Dropbox or a sophisticated Business Information (BI) system, appoint someone on the team to make sure the repository is current and complete.

Activating Your Customer Service Plan – 12 Best Practices

With your customer service plan now in place, make sure your team is following these foundational 12 customer service best practices, if they are not doing so already:

• Make sure your website makes it easy for customers to get help.  Your help phone number and email should be visible everywhere on your website, invoices and shipping materials if needed.
• Be transparent about limited availability, or risk disappointing customers. Communicate hours of operation to manage expectations that you won’t have customer service reps available 24/7.
• Set up multiple emails such as “info@” or “helpdesk@” or “media@” other email based on source, issue or destination that delivers right to one (or more if you have a larger team) group inbox, so you can prioritize answering.
• Establish an FAQ page with answers to the questions you already know might come up. Make sure your customer service team is pulling from an internal FAQ and answers list so your company is providing consistent answers to questions and saving valuable time.
• Make sure calls go straight to voicemail when your offices are closed and set a different greeting. Leveraging a good cloud-based phone system makes this easier.
• Set extended-absence email replies when you will be unavailable to respond within a day.
• Consider setting an ongoing “extended absence” greeting on your “Help@” or “Info@” email address, with the reply, “Thank you for your message. ABC Subscription will get back to you within 1 business day.”
• Invest in a toll-free number for subscribers who might be using a land line.
• Expect and plan to answer the phone as many customers still believe it to be the quickest way to get an issue resolved.
• Set up automated responses to customers who fill out forms on your website. These are easily set up via most Forms plugins, and ensure that your subscriber knows you’ve received their question.
• Establish and maintain a “Do Not Send” list. Failure to respect DNS requests could land you on the bad side of the CAN-SPAM folks, hindering delivery not only of marketing but business emails as well.
• Maintain a “bug” log. Log all requests from customers including bug fixes, pricing questions and ideas for enhancement. These are excellent drivers of new product development, pricing and refund policies.
• By Diane Pierson
• October 1, 2019
• Filed in Best Practice and How To , Business Operations , Customer Service , Start Here , Subscriber Only

Diane Pierson

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How to Create a Customer Service Plan

Digital library > defining and serving a market > customer service, “how to create a customer service plan”.

The fight for market share grows ever fiercer. How can you win and keep customers when the price wars never end? Provide better service! To do it most effectively, you’ll need a plan.

What is Customer Service?

"As the Interactive Age arrives, every enterprise will have to learn how to treat different customers differently." — Enterprise One To One , by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (Currency Doubleday, 1997).

How does your company meet a customer’s needs?

If you started a business 10 years ago, you’d probably give an indirect answer. You might say that by gaining market share and managing sales and distribution, you could satisfy your customers. If buyers’ needs were met, your business would presumably grow and prosper.

Today, however, meeting the needs and expectations of customers requires that you know your customers — as individuals. That means consistently collecting their input, removing barriers to communicate with them, and taking steps to foster a long-term relationship with them rather than just a limited, transactional one. If potential customers grow overwhelmed, confused, or simply can’t find what they want, your high level of service is the "ace in the hole" that’ll keep them from fleeing.

In creating and evaluating your customer service plan, avoid too much internal analysis. Instead, defer to customers’ perceptions of efficiency, responsiveness, and courtesy. Your own hunches, biases, or interpretations shouldn’t interfere with the unfiltered knowledge that your customers can provide. They are your ultimate judges.

Customer Service as a Competitive Advantage

With even small businesses investing heavily in technology — from database software to Web site development — traditional feature and cost advantages no longer provide a sustainable competitive advantage. More fast-growth companies are focusing on quality of service to distinguish themselves from the rest. They are talking to their customers to determine what’s important to them and how they can further add value. Smart companies now strive to be an extension of their customers, thereby fostering more loyal buyers who’re less apt to change vendors.

Benefits of an Effective Customer Service Initiative

Here’s how you and your business can benefit from a customer service plan:

5 STEPS TO CREATE YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PLAN [ top ]

While there’s no single blueprint for an effective customer service program, here are fivesteps that you can take:

Step 1: Assess Your Customer Service Quotient

In order to establish an effective customer service plan, you need a starting point. Use this self-assessment to map out your strategy. For each statement, rate your business based on the following scale:

        1—Are you kidding?         2—Hardly ever         3—Sometimes         4—Usually         5—It’s our way of life!

Source: Adapted from Forum Corporation’s Self-Test for a Customer-Driven Company

Now evaluate how well your organization focuses on customer satisfaction. Low scores suggest opportunities for improvement.

Step 2: Understand Your Customers’ Requirements

Sources of Customer Information

Once you launch a business, you might assume you know your customers’ requirements. You figure that your company’s small size lets you stay close to your buyers. But as you grow, you may need to conduct a more thorough analysis. Here’s how to tell:

If you answered no to any of these questions, that shows you may want to gathercustomer information more aggressively. Here’s where to look:

Surveys and focus groups are popular methods for gathering information oncustomer needs. Surveys are written questions given to individuals; focus groupsare oral questions posed to groups. A broad questionnaire or focus group maygive you lots of information, but you need to devise clear objectives from theoutset so that you’re ready to act on what you learn.

As you review your internal data, your employees’ input, and the feedback you collect from vendors, identify the top three customer service issues that arise and compare them with the top three questions, comments, or complaints you’ve heard directly from your buyers. Do you find any overlap? Any surprises?

The Best Kind of Data

More is not necessarily better when it comes to customer data, but getting the right information is critical. Seek these elements in the data you measure:

Step 3: Create Your Customer Vision and Service Policies

When a Washington Post reporter returned from the 1999 PhoCusWright conference on the Internet travel business, he wrote about his experience watching a panel of 12 executives who run big online travel sites. When these CEOs were asked to declare his or her company’s "key distinguishing asset," only two of the 12 mentioned something they deliver to customers.

That’s a stark reminder of how few Internet executives understand and appreciate the role of the customer. An effective customer service plan must be built on a customer-centered vision for your company.

A vision consists of a vivid picture of an ambitious, desirable future state that’s linked to the customer and improves on the status quo in some important way, according to Richard Whiteley, an author and management consultant.

Your vision is what you want your company to become, what you want it "to grow up to be." A client-centered vision takes its direction from the customer and performs two critical functions:

When you craft a vision that spells out what the company seeks to become, you guide all your employees to make better decisions. After all, an employee who knows where the business is headed will probably make more effective decisions that reinforce that goal.

How do you create a vision? It’s easy. Vision statements need not be elaborate. Two examples:

Keep your vision concise. The shorter, the better. That helps you reduce the odds of misunderstanding. In their startup excitement, many entrepreneurs mistakenly write wordy paragraphs that run so long, no one really knows what the vision really means.

When creating a vision, you must decide how you want your company to evolve overtime. Use this exercise to "see" the future:

  Customer-friendly Policies

Clear, straightforward customer-friendly policies should accompany your vision. While some bigger, bureaucratic companies use their policies as a weapon ("I’m sorry, Mr. Customer, but that’s our rule"), entrepreneurial firms can and should show more flexibility to please buyers.

Some well-intentioned entrepreneurs fall into the trap of adopting policies that clash with customer needs and expectations. If you left a job at a large organization, for example, you may enact certain rules or safeguards in your new business because "that’s the way I’ve done it before."

Take an inventory of your company’s policies. Do they facilitate customer satisfaction or do they only erect barriers and cause customer frustration? If you’re having difficulty identifying these "unfriendly" policies, review your customers’ comments and complaints.

A quick scan of the feedback will direct you to some of the most troublesome policies. Reassess whether such rules are necessary. What would happen if you eliminated such policies? As long as such a move wouldn’t jeopardize legal compliance or cause some other severe problem, then toss it out!

In some cases, you’ll discover some necessary policies that your customers may not like, but that you’re legally bound to keep in force. You can’t do much about these except make them as "friendly" as possible. For instance, if you’re cleaning health-care facilities, and your insurance company restricts you from disposing of certain medical wastes, let your customers know.

At the same time, investigate if there’s a compromise you can make, such as disposing of the waste once it has been properly contained.

Meanwhile, keep your "friendly" necessary policies and strengthen them, if possible. Use customer-friendly policies as a competitive edge to retain your current customers and attract new ones.

Step 4: Deal Effectively With Your Customers

Once you’ve established your customer-centered vision and created customer-friendly policies, you’re ready to sharpen your skills in dealing with your customers. These skills can be segregated into two areas: communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Communication Skills

How you communicate to your customers is just as important as what you say. Follow these guidelines:

Every time a customer interacts with your company, the message should beconsistent: you want to provide top service. If a customer calls and gets lostresponding to dozens of touch-tone commands (think of the I.R.S. help line), youmust simplify the system. Testing a customer’s patience gives them a reason toleave and never return.

It all begins with the proper mind-set: A customer-focused organization is not in business to deliver a product or service, but to enable people to enjoy the benefits of its product or service. A temporary employment agency is in business not to fill job vacancies with temporary personnel, but to help their customers enjoy the benefits that their service provides — immediate placement of highly-skilled individuals. It’s a subtle but vital difference.

Here are some questions you can ask customers to show your eagerness to help:

To ensure you communicate effectively with customers, list three specific stepsyou and your employees can take to improve in each of these areas:

Build rapport with customers:

Show appreciation:

Seek ways to help customers:

Listen attentively:

Establish a long-term relationship:

Problem-solving Skills

Your customer service plan should include guidelines for your employees to problem-solve. When you take responsibility for a snafu, you can turn a negative customer into a raving fan. Studies show that if a problem is resolved quickly, 98 percent of your customers will buy again and even tell others of their positive experience.

But the longer the problem drags on, the more frustrated a customer becomes. So how do you address problems quickly? Use this four-step process:

Gather the facts. Let the customer speak without interrupting. Listen withoutgetting defensive. Repeat your understanding of the problem to ensure you’ve gotit right. Examples:

After you understand the problem, you’re ready to identify what triggered it. First, find out what actions the customer took. Then review with the customer what should have happened had everything run smoothly. Conclude by isolating what went wrong.

Before you suggest possible solutions, ask your customer for ideas. You maylearn exactly what you need to do to fix everything. Agree on a course of actionby hashing out options and working together to finalize the best one.

Step 5: Educate Your Staff

Now that you’ve learned to assess your customer service quotient, understand your customers’ requirements, create a customer-centered vision, and communicate well with customers, you need to educate your staff on how to carry out your customer service plan.

This involves two steps: communicate and train.

Don’t make this the only time that you talk to your staff about the importance of customers. Work it into your everyday management of the business.

THE FINAL PIECE OF YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PLAN [ top ]

When finalizing your plan, step into your customer’s shoes. Imagine what it’s like for a buyer who does business with your company.

Like an airline pilot preparing for take off, create a checklist so that you can confirm you’re ready to "fly right" and provide the kind of positive experience that will please your customers.

Here’s an example:

RESOURCES [ top ]

Sprint’s Customer Service Plan Pro software walks you through the steps to create a customer service plan.

Market-Based Management: Strategies for Growing Customer Value and Profitability , 3rd edition, by Roger J. Best. (Prentice Hall, 2002).

What Customers Value Most: How to Achieve Business Transformation by Focusing on Processes That Touch Your Customers by Stanley A. Brown. (John Wiley & Sons, 1996).

Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. (Doubleday, 1999).

Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet & Beyond by Patricia B. Seybold. (Times Books, 1998).

The Customer Driven Company: Moving from Talk to Action by Richard C. Whiteley. (Perseus, 2000).

Best Practices in Customer Service by Ron Zemke and John A. Woods. (AMACOM, 1999).

--> Web sites

" Developing Effective Customer Access Strategy ," by Brad Cleveland. Customer Interface 15:10 (November-December, 2002), 16+.

" Make No Mistake? " by Michael Schrage. Fortune 144:13 (December 24, 2001), 184.

" Cleaning Up the Customer Experience with Online Knowledge Bases ," by Ramesh Jayaraman and Rohit Kumar. Customer Inter@ction Solutions 20:4 (October 2001), 28.

" Tough Customers ," by Chris Penttila. Entrepreneur 29:5 (May 2001), 94-97.

All rights reserved. The text of this publication, or any part thereof, maynot be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from thepublisher.

What is Customer Relations? Everything You Need to Know

Updated: June 24, 2022

Published: November 02, 2021

Your relationship with your customers is directly tied to the financial well-being of your business. Building strong customer relations will develop customer loyalty and retain valuable, long-term clients, increasing revenue from repeat purchases.

You might’ve heard of customer relations. You might even have been on the opposite side of it as a customer.

If you're looking to improve the customer experience and increase revenue, it helps to understand what successful customer relations look like and how you can create it at your business.

Customer Relations

Customer relations refers to the methods a company uses to engage with its customers and improve the customer experience. This includes providing answers to short-term roadblocks as well as proactively creating long-term solutions that are geared towards customer success.

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Importance of Effective Consumer Relations

Developing an amazing product is one of the hardest challenges that a company can overcome and one of the biggest predictors of success. But strong customer relations is what will truly determine the success of a business.

Today's consumers have more industry influence than they've ever had in the past, allowing them to focus on more than just the product that you're selling them. Now, consumers are interested in what you're selling them, how you're selling it, and what happens after you've sold it to them.

The shift has placed pressure on companies to invest in their customer service teams and meet rising customer demands. In fact, a Microsoft study showed that 55% of consumers have higher expectations for customer service year-over-year. Businesses are now facing the challenge of creating an excellent customer experience that's consistent across every interaction.

To achieve this, many companies are now focusing on how they manage their customer relationships. And that’s where customer relations comes in.

Customer relations aims to create a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer that extends beyond the initial purchase.

Customer relations is present in all aspects of a business, but it's most prevalent in the customer service department. Customer service teams, customer support , customer success , and product development all play important roles in building a healthy customer relationship.

Customer relations also extend to marketing and sales teams as well, since these departments have a significant influence over the company's interactions with the customer.

What functions does customer relations include?

Customer relations includes both the reactive and proactive functions performed by your customer service teams.

Reactive functions are the efforts made by your team to solve issues that are reported by customers. This includes tasks like responding to customer complaints and solving problems with the support team. Being able to solve unexpected customer roadblocks is essential for brands that are looking to build strong customer relationships.

Proactive functions are the measures taken to ensure a long-term relationship with customers. These efforts are aimed towards fostering customer success by consistently satisfying evolving customer needs . Customer success teams do this by providing information about products and updates, as well as by promoting discounts and exclusive offers. This type of long-term customer relationship management helps companies create lasting impressions on customers who eventually become loyal to the brand.

Customer Service vs. Customer Relations

You may think they're one and the same, but customer service and customer relations are two very similar concepts with one distinct difference. Customer service is what your company provides to ensure customer success. It is an inbound function that's now expected by customers at the first point of interaction with your business. Companies can provide proactive customer service features, but most customer service functions are delivered in response to customer action.

Customer relations differs because it consists of both the inbound and outbound measures taken by your company. It considers your organization's ability to react to present issues as well as your approach to bettering future experiences. Customer relations focuses on the proactive steps you're taking to engage customers and improve the customer experience .

Customer relations encompasses all of the important functions that customer service performs, but also includes the efforts made before and after customer interactions. While responding to immediate customer needs is a great way to provide excellent customer service , searching for solutions to future roadblocks is how your company can build positive customer relations.

What are positive customer relations?

Positive customer relations are long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between a customer and a company. These relationships are built by creating a stable environment of trust that results in the continued growth of both the customer and the organization.

Positive customer relations include consistent quality of what the business is offering as well as how they are offering it to the customer.

Benefits of Positive Customer Relations

Positive customer relations can result in an array of benefits for your company, including more potential leads and higher customer retention rates. To narrow it down, here are several top benefits that positive customer relations can provide for your company.

Increased Customer Retention

Companies that do a better job of managing customer relations are more likely to see higher customer retention rates. In fact, studies show that 61% of customers stop buying from a company if they have a poor customer experience.

Customers know when your company is being genuine and are willing to overlook your mistakes so long as you demonstrate a dedication to their success. That type of transparency is essential when reducing churn as well as when you're building a positive customer relationship. It can also be financially beneficial too, as studies show increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

Increased Customer Loyalty

When you have a good history with your customers, it makes it more difficult for your competitors to lure people away from your brand. Customers loyalty is highly valuable for businesses, as repeat customers are more likely to buy from you than leads that have not yet converted.

Building positive customer relations drives customer loyalty because it creates an intangible incentive for the customer to return to the same business. While it may cost more for companies to invest in building positive customer relations, the payoff in customer loyalty can be instrumental for generating consistent revenue over time.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Often times, it can be hard to tell whether your customers are truly happy with your business or not. In fact, 58% of unhappy customers simply don't return to a company for another purchase. Having strong customer relations can act as your insurance policy for preventing these unidentified customers from churning without warning.

Increased Customer Feedback

Positive customer relations give companies more insight into their customer's problems because it creates an open channel of communication for relaying customer feedback . This leads to better individual interactions with customers, which builds up trust over time and influences their buying decisions.

Studies have even found that consumers believe that a good experience with a company has more influence over their purchase decision than advertising does. So while the commercial of the cute dog may get a smile or two from your target audience, customer satisfaction actually is the result of your brand creating memorable customer experiences.

Every company should aim at building positive customer relations, but hitting your target can be a lot easier said than done. It takes effort from the entire company to build a long-lasting and trustworthy customer relationship.

In the next section, we break down the most important components for fostering positive customer relations at your company.

Building Positive Customer Relationships

• Invest in employee training.
• Create a fulfilling workplace for your customer service reps.
• Improve first call resolution rate.
• Leverage software to increase efficiency.
• Create opportunities for self-service.
• Be accessible.
• Show appreciation.
• Measure and improve customer satisfaction.
• Create an online community for customers.
• Provide education programs that help your customers grow better.
• Be personable.
• Create a customer-first culture.

Since customer relations considers all of your customer interactions, there are a lot of factors that can influence a customer relationship.

When building positive customer relations, organizations need to take a company-wide approach that's focused on promoting customer success. To do that, here are several key factors that any business should consider when pursuing positive customer relations.

1. Invest in employee training.

A great customer experience comes not only from the product being sold, but also from the employees who interact with the customer. Your reps must be highly skilled in their trade and motivated by quickly solving customer problems.

Customer service training may include developing some of the "soft" skills such as improving active listening, developing a professional communication style, and how to solve problems efficiently in your organizational framework.

While you might expect your reps to have these skills when you bring them on, continual training helps align the entire team to your organization's brand standards, policies, and procedures, resulting in a more consistent experience across the board.

2. Create a fulfilling workplace for your customer service reps.

Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines famously said, "If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients." This seems intuitive: If a customer service rep is having a bad enough day that the customer perceives this, it can change the tone of the experience.

Studies have also shown that happy workers are also 12% more productive , and in the service world, productive reps and quicker resolution times lead to higher rates of customer satisfaction.

3. Improve first call resolution rate.

86% of customers will pay more for a better experience , and great customer experiences are becoming the norm in today's marketplace. One of the metrics to look at when creating a frictionless service model is first-call resolution (FCR). FCR refers to the percentage of calls that get resolved with no follow-up or additional touchpoints needed.

It's a critical metric that improves satisfaction (no one wants to call multiple times about one issue, and more calls equate to more frustration) and your team's internal efficiency.

The more calls that are resolved completely, the less your system is taxed by call volume.

Your service and support teams should be equipped and enabled to handle the majority of issues that customers present.

4. Leverage software to increase efficiency.

Speaking of enablement, companies faced with higher volumes of support and service cases should consider adopting customer service tools to help manage customer relations. Adding a help desk software can significantly help customer service, support, and success teams monitor interactions with customers over time.

A customer relationship management tool, or CRM , can help your team expand its bandwidth and create satisfying experiences for every person that interacts with your business.

5. Create opportunities for self-service.

You may not have the bandwidth to provide on-demand one-to-one support at all hours of the day. Ensure that you're providing the tools for your customers to get help when they need it, even without the help of a rep.

Chat bots can help disseminate information and guide website visitors to the right areas on your website. Knowledge bases can address some of the most common questions customers have.

Even though some customers will prefer calling in, these simple steps can address the problems of your more self-sufficient customers and increase satisfaction by continuing to solve problems on demand.

6. Be accessible.

That isn't to say that you should replace reps with self-service solutions altogether. To provide an excellent customer experience, your service and support teams need to be readily available to help. A Microsoft survey revealed that over a third of consumers reported that their biggest complaint with a company is not being able to get help from an agent when needed to.

While it helps to have things like self-service help desks , your team still needs to be there when the customer has a problem.

Technology can help ease some of the stress for your customer service team, but it can never recreate the memorable experience that a live rep can provide. This human interaction is crucial to creating a meaningful relationship between a company and its customers.

7. Show appreciation.

Part of creating a great customer experience is providing small moments of delight where you exceed their expectations. This is particularly important as our culture is shifting away from brand loyalty and more toward loyalty to the brands that provide the best experience. Consider rewarding your best customers with a loyalty program or other small token of your appreciation.

8. Measure and improve customer satisfaction.

Making your customers happy doesn't have to be an intangible effort. Ask for feedback from your customers and develop a system for measuring that feedback. This could be in the form of customer satisfaction surveys and NPS scores .

If you do, also ensure that you're committed to acting on the feedback you receive. As you see scores improve and feedback get better, you know you're on the right track.

9. Create an online community for customers.

There’s no better way for improving customer relations than by allowing your customers to connect with one another — and with specialists on your staff. By creating an online community, whether by a forum on your website or a Facebook group, you ensure your customers continue engaging with your brand and with your products. They’ll also feel supported along the way by other users of your products.

Ensure that if you create an online community, an employee manages it and responds to queries that require their expertise. That way, customers don’t feel they’re posting on a board or forum that you don’t look at. The customer-relationship-building aspect comes in when you’re active as well.

10. Provide education programs that help your customers grow better.

Educating your customers to help them grow their business is one of the best ways to improve customer relations. If your product has a steep learning curve, for example, you can create a series on YouTube that walks new users through the platform or the installation process.

Alternatively, you can create education programs that don’t refer to your product, but that help your customers with problems and issues they face at their business. For instance, if you sell flowers for events, you might provide customers with a course on how to work with wedding clients.

Even though that topic doesn’t immediately have to do with the flowers you sell, you’re helping your customer win a client. Your customer will thus have a much more positive relationship with you.

11. Be personable.

Perhaps the most important tip is to be personable in all of your interactions with your customers. That means that every email, chat, or interaction with your company should be with an actual representative who signs off with their name. The exception is, of course, automated service email campaigns , but even those should have an alias of someone who works at your company.

Giving your company a human name and face is one of the best way for costumers to connect with you and continue buying from you.

12. Create a customer-first culture.

Companies that want to create positive customer relations need to install a customer-centric culture into the organization. This culture has to be focused on customer success as well as creating long-term solutions for every customer.

Companies can do this by creating a customer journey map that outlines the buyer's journey for a target consumer. Employees will be more motivated to help customers as they can see exactly where they play a role in the customer's success. It also helps to hire a customer relations executive who can lead the development of customer relationships.

What's a Customer Relations Executive?

A customer relations executive is an upper management customer service employee who oversees all interactions between a company and its customers. These employees manage and develop strategies for building relationships and aim to provide a consistent, positive experience to every customer.

Customer relations executives motivate employees to deliver products and services that will enhance the customer's interactions with the brand. If they also manage the entire customer relations team, they may be called a customer relations manager.

Customer Relations Manager

A customer relations manager oversees the entire customer relations team, including executives who interact with customers during their day-to-day. Customer relations managers provide strategic direction and generate new ideas for improving customer relations. At an enterprise firm, a customer relations manager may also oversee the firm’s relationships with its most valuable clients.

Customer Relations Manager Skills

A successful customer relations manager or executive possesses a diverse range of skills that will help them manage a team and improve the company’s relationship with external parties. When you’re interviewing candidates, ensure they have the following:

• Problem-solving skills : When the customer relations program isn’t working or when brand sentiment takes a turn for the worse, a customer relations manager should be able to work through the issues and find a solution. They should also solve problems for customers.
• People skills : Customer relations managers work with people all the time. They are either managing them or they’re interacting with customers online. Your candidate must have people skills to be successful in a customer relations role.
• Data analysis skills : Customer relations manager should continually be collecting feedback from the company’s customer base. They should be able to analyze the data from the surveys and glean actionable insights.
• Creativity : Customer relations is an ever-evolving process that will require new ideas, new initiatives, and new programs as time progresses. As such, a customer relations manager should be creative enough to come up with initiatives that retain more customers and increase loyalty.

Hiring a customer relations manager is important if you want to improve your company’s relationship with your customers. That said, you can start improving those relationships right now by always putting your customers first.

Customer Relations is the Key to Your Business’ Success

Start listening to what your customers have to say and remove the points of friction that cause dissatisfaction. A great customer relations and retention program doesn't happen on its own. Creating a thoughtful customer experience begins with always prioritizing the customer’s needs and exceeding their expectations. Do that, and your customer relations will improve exponentially.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Customer Service Plan

Happy and satisfied customers equate to a flourishing business. Your company’s customer service is a significant factor in determining your success. Developing a rapport with your clients can be a lengthy and arduous process. To avoid losing your customers’ support, you need to start devising a detail-oriented customer service plan along with your business plan . 

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What Is a Customer Service Plan?

A customer service plan is the summary of strategies a company or organization follows. It aims to reach the highest possible level of customer satisfaction. This plan mainly focuses on the details of how the company keeps their clients interested, as well as how they resolve complaints that come their way.

How To Devise a Beneficial Customer Service Plan

They say a good business follows the motto, about how the customers are always right. Despite that, you should know not to take that too literally. It simply means prioritizing their needs. Of course, there are times when they are wrong, and that’s when you should know how to handle the situation. Although you should dedicate your customer service plan to your clients, you should still consider how your strategy can prove to be beneficial to your business and employees. 

1. Ask For Feedback

The best first step to take in writing a service plan is to ask your customers for feedback. Ask them to give positive and also constructive feedback. That way, you know what they enjoy with your service, as well as their problems with it. To do this, you can give out a questionnaire or let your guests answer a survey online or by letting them answer a website survey.

2. Formulate a Strategy

After gathering and analyzing the data, it is now time to start your strategic plan. Adjust your business development strategy in a way that it can cater to the demands of your clients. Remember that it is destructive for your business to set your goal to please everyone. Come up with a more realistic aim that doesn’t strain and negatively impact your company. Focus on the issues that take top priority. After coming up with a strategy, compose an outline of your action plan .

3. Consult Your Employees

Your employees spend a great deal of time dealing with customers. Given that fact, they have the most experience in that area. Therefore their opinions should matter in the development of your plan. Your representatives will be directly affected whether your service plan turns out to be beneficial for your management or put you at a disadvantage.

4. Construct a Diagram

To avoid leaving out any details, creating a diagram would be helpful. A well-organized flow chart would help you determine the exact course of your plans. As a result, you can take into account all the details. Also, it will make it more comprehensive for both you and your customer representatives. 

What are the benefits of having a customer service plan?

One of the purposes of having a customer service plan is to minimize the confusion of your employees regarding how they should deal with customer issues. Besides, it would also help them understand the extent of their power and their limitations in dealing with the situation. Another benefit of the service plan is, it will benefit the maintenance of a good relationship between your clients and your company.

What are the essential skills of a customer representative?

Customer service representatives should be competent in persuading and communicating with clients. Some required skills in the job description of a representative include skills in practicing reflection, adapting to changes, decision-making, and empathizing with clients. Exercising patience towards problematic people is also a requirement for customer service representatives to implement.

What are the principles of customer service?

The first and most significant principle of customer service is to have a great extent of services and product knowledge . Another one is to listen to their concerns and respond to them respectfully. You also have to be honest and take accountability for your mistakes and the things you don’t know.

Sustaining and preserving stability in your relationship with clients, similar to other relationships, involves a careful process. A single mistake can end the relationship you tried so hard to maintain and cherish. As a person in the business profession, you need to consider a lot of factors. To achieve great heights in your business, compose a customer service plan that would satisfy your clients, protect your employees, and benefit your company all at the same time.

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Get pricing that works for your business, with mobile plans as low as $30/mo. Per line with 5 lines on Business Unlimited Start 5G smartphone plan. Select customer agreement required. Includes Auto Pay and paper-free billing discount. Taxes, fees and Economic Adjustment Charge apply.

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Have a device you love? Save $600 when you switch to Verizon 
and bring your compatible smartphone and number. New line w/month-to-month agmt & Business Unlimited Plus 5G or Unlimited Pro 5G plan req’d. Cust must transfer smartphone & number to VZ; new line activation & number transfer must be completed in one transaction. Smartphone must be compatible w/VZ network. $600 credit applied to acct. over 24 mos; promo credit ends when eligibility requirements are no longer met. Credits begin in 1-2 bills, will include appropriate credit amounts from order date & do not appear in Biz Unlimited 5G plan fee section of your bill. Biz Unlimited 5G plan fee increases in month 25. Cust must retain smartphone & remain on selected plan in order to receive credit(s). Cannot be combined with other device offers. Business Unlimited 5G plan terms apply. Limited time offer.

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Don’t let a lost, stolen or damaged device destroy productivity. Because your business can’t wait. Verizon device protection options are available for eligible Verizon business wireless lines and devices. You must enroll within 30 days of device activation or during another qualifying event. Certain benefits are available with select plans. Claims limitations, line limits, deductibles, taxes, fees and terms apply.

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Taxes & fees apply. New line w/device payment purchase agmt & Business Unlimited Pro plan req’d. 0% APR. Up to $1,000 (iPhone 15 Pro Max, Pixel Fold, Galaxy S24 Ultra or Galaxy Z Fold5) credit, varying by smartphone trade-in, applied to acct over the term of your agmt (up to 36 mos); promo credit ends when eligibility requirements are no longer met. Credit will not exceed device price. Monthly credits begin 2-3 bills after trade-in is received by VZ. Smartphone trade-in must be received by VZ w/in 90 days & meet program requirements. Most trade-in device conditions accepted; exclusions apply. 10-line trade-in limit per order. Cannot be combined with other device offers. Limited time offer.

New Verizon customers can get $100 off a new smartphone.

New line w/device payment agmt & $34.99 or higher price plan req’d. 0% APR. $100 credit applied to acct after 2-3 bills. Can be combined with select offers. VZ reserves the right to charge back to your acct all or a portion of the value of any promotional credit you received as part of this offer in the event you no longer meet the eligibility requirements. Any such charge back may be subject to the terms of your VZ agmt. Offer available online only for a limited time.

Switch with your phone and number. Save $600.

New line w/month-to-month agmt & Business Unlimited Plus 5G or Unlimited Pro 5G plan req’d. Cust must transfer smartphone & number to VZ; new line activation & number transfer must be completed in one transaction. Smartphone must be compatible w/VZ network. $600 credit applied to acct. over 24 mos; promo credit ends when eligibility requirements are no longer met. Credits begin in 1-2 bills, will include appropriate credit amounts from order date & do not appear in Biz Unlimited 5G plan fee section of your bill. Biz Unlimited 5G plan fee increases in month 25. Cust must retain smartphone & remain on selected plan in order to receive credit(s). Cannot be combined with other device offers. Business Unlimited 5G plan terms apply. Limited time offer.

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Hochul announces plan to overhaul DMV technology

A pr. 4—ALBANY, N.Y. — According to a news release from the governor's office, Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a multi-year project launched by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to replace and modernize a significant portion of its aging technology systems.

The project is part of an ongoing effort to deliver best in class customer service to New Yorkers. It will provide DMV customers with more efficient, secure, and convenient services, and will enable the agency to implement future technology advancements more efficiently.

"As a former County Clerk, I know first-hand the importance of the DMV in providing critical services to New Yorkers," Hochul said in the release. "These investments are a major step forward in the DMV's strategic modernization as we look to create a quicker, easier and more convenient experience for everyone."

The DMV has entered into a contract with world-class software company FAST Enterprises, LLC, which has successfully implemented similar systems in more than 15 other states and will help DMV modernize its technology platforms and service delivery in two major stages over approximately the next four years.

"Throughout this project, we will be replacing a patchwork of outdated computer systems, software and databases that account for about 70 percent of DMV's business volume. This is a strategic investment and a huge undertaking, but we know the important role our agency plays in the lives of New Yorkers, and this project will help us serve them better, faster, and will make our customer's lives easier. It will also put our agency on a better footing for future upgrades, so our services can continue to evolve as technology improves," Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Mark Schroeder said in the release.

"We're excited to partner with the state DMV to change the way New Yorkers view driver and vehicle services. Our FastCore platform prioritizes efficiency and accessibility, so that all customers can access services in a time and place that suits their needs," FAST Managing Partner Martin Rankin said in the release.

The new technology will replace and consolidate a significant portion of DMV's legacy technology footprint, some of which are over 50 years old, and will make DMV more secure, stable, and agile. Computer and system outages that have caused delays and long lines in DMV offices will become a thing of the past with the introduction of modern applications and proven successful solutions. Whether calling the DMV, going online or visiting an office in person, every customer will notice more reliable, responsive and faster service.

Through this project, DMV will introduce automation that will speed up processing times and eliminate paper forms wherever possible. It will also allow the DMV to offer more online and self-service options. The creation of comprehensive customer profiles will enable DMV staff to see customers' information in one place, allowing them to provide a more personalized experience and proactively flag upcoming issues and expirations. This project will continue DMV's efforts to focus on the customer experience in order to deliver first class service for all New Yorkers.

These major changes are part of a broader initiative to re-imagine the way DMV does business, which has included dozens of improvements such as greatly expanding online live chat and enhancements to the DMV online transaction portal. DMV also introduced online pre-screening for some of the most complicated transactions like applying for a REAL ID or Enhanced ID and exchanging an out of state license and implemented a robust appointment scheduling system to significantly reduce the amount of time customers wait to be served in an office. The average wait time for a customer is now a record low of 15 minutes.

(c)2024 The Oneida Daily Dispatch, N.Y. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.