Customer Service from Scratch: Contact Types & Establishing your Service Voice

In this series, I will walk through my process for setting up a Customer Service team for your business. There are 5 key building blocks and we’ll go into depth on one at a time. Stick with me through the whole series to up-level your customer service expertise.

For the purposes of these articles, I am going to be using a fictional business called “Synergy Wellness”, which is an online retailer of health & wellness product subscriptions.

Let’s get started with building block 1: Contact Types & Establishing your Service Voice.

Contact Types

Considering this type of business model; B2C, e-commerce, subscription model, health/wellness product, there are going to be a few main contact types from customers. These contact types are Order Fulfillment/Status, Subscription, Payment, Quality Control & Reverse Logistics, and Medical Advice.

For each contact type, I’ve listed out the type of customer questions I would anticipate receiving from your customer. You need to define policies for each of these examples, and implement them for your team. These may evolve overtime, but you must set them up and hold the support team accountable to uphold them. It is important that the team upholds these policies even when there is pressure to make exceptions. It will set the tone for your customers and protect your business in the long run.

For each contact type, there is also a list of items to consider from agent tooling, policies, and processes to build over time. The most important thing you can do from the start is listen to the customer feedback and inquiries to determine the gaps in your business. The second most important thing you can do is set the right customer expectations consistently across your business materials and support team processes.

Order Fulfillment/Status

Type of customer questions:

• What is the status of my order? (Placed, shipped, in transit, stuck)
• My order status hasn’t changed — what is going on?
• Where’s my order?
• How long does it take to fulfill?
• How long does it take to ship?
• Can I pay for expedited shipping?
• Can I cancel my order, I just placed it (if you will allow this you need to determine the window with warehouse for cancellation and when it’s too late)

Items to consider:

• Customers need to have consistent expectations set from FAQs through to delivery.
• Create a customer journey map and make sure messaging is consistently from site through fulfillment.
• Customers & agents must have the ability to independently access their tracking numbers or 70% of your volume will be WISMO (Where is my order?).
• Make sure you send tracking status to customers upon shipment.
• Agents should have a back end cancellation option for orders if you will allow that.
• Agents need tools to confirm if an order is stuck — why it is stuck — and how to resubmit.

Subscription

Type of customer questions:

• How many days do I need to cancel before my next subscription?
• How do I pause/cancel/restart my subscription?
• When is my next subscription date and how can I change the date?
• Is the subscription cheaper than the single purchase option?
• My subscription went through and I do not want it — how do I cancel it?
• I never signed up for this — how did you get my credit card information?
• My [family member] used my credit card to sign me up and I never want to do this — I want to cancel and get a full refund.

Items to consider:

• Customers get extremely emotional over payment, especially recurring payment.
• Even if they read the T&Cs (which they won’t) and click the box confirming they are signing — there will be issues.
• Make sure there is consistent messaging on the site & via email on their subscription status, dates and management. This will reduce confusion of dates or surprised shipments.
• Cancellation date for recurring subscription purchase
• Be ready to answer the questions above.
• Make sure agents can change the subscription date or know how to direct customers to do so.

Payment

Type of customer questions:

• My payment failed — how can I update it? How will this impact my shipment date?
• I updated my payment — when will my next order ship?
• What kind of cards do you take?
• I’m confused about my bill — can someone explain it to me?
• I want to cancel the order I just placed and use a different card, how do I do that?

Items to consider:

• Regardless of the POS you are using, you need to ensure you equip your agents with visibility into payment status. If you do not want them taking credit card via their contact channels (which I would not recommend) — make sure you equip them with a link or way to direct customers to the payment link to re-submit.
• Agents need to know if payment is taken at purchase point or upon fulfillment — this will 100% come up.
• Agents need to know where and how customers can update their billing and have clear visibility into the date of the next subscription.
• Agents should have access to the subscription tool.

Quality Control & Reverse Logistics

Types of customer questions:

• My product looks/smells/feels/different from the last time I got it, I want a new one.
• My product is damaged, I want a new one.
• My capsules/pouch are broken — can I still use it?
• I found a [weird item] in my bottle — can I still use it?

Items to consider:

• Until you have 100s of orders under your belt, if something is off, make sure you offer a quick replacement for your customers.
• If you need the product back for testing — you will most likely need to offer them a discount on the next shipment to incentivise the return.
• However, you should not hold the replacement product as incentive to return the old if there really needs to be a product anomaly.
• You may have bad batches — you need to make sure there is a way for recalls and contacting customers that have received certain batches or dates so that you can mass contact them to retrieve products.
• If you have any anomalies in the product — you will want to have a quick and dirty way to get a courier to their home, take the product and get it to a location (manufacturer, lab, etc). Long term — you will want to have an easy automated way for agents to click a button in the CRM — send a return label for the customer & reship.
• These will be required for EFFA (early field failure analysis) which I imagine you will want/need to do.

Medical Advice

Types of customers questions:

• I am having a bad reaction to the product and I have used it in the past with no issues. What should I do?
• I am having a bad reaction to the product and I have never used the product. What should I do?
• I am taking XYZ medications — can I take this too?
• I am having these symptoms — what should I do?

Items to consider:

• Something we developed at a previous skin care company I worked with was a ‘nurses line’ where we started out having actual nurses to talk to and help people find the right products and then had trained product specialists on that line and rebranded it to “Product Specialist’ line.
• Make it very clear what your support team is allowed to answer and what they are not — or else people will feel pressured to make something up and then you will have people giving medical advice that are absolutely not qualified to do so.
• I would suggest your board members (if they are doctors) or the key medical professionals you worked with develop a set of FAQs agents can use to respond to these questions.

Establishing your Service Voice

This is sadly overlooked by many new businesses, even more mature brands that have other challenges distracting them from creating the right Customer Experience. Putting a time bound, concentrated effort to defining your Customer Service voice can yield you a strong reputation while you work out the ‘kinks’ of your evolving business. Two main questions to ask yourself about establishing a support voice are listed below.

Who do you want to be for your customers?

Are you patient and soft, are you serious and humble. It is important for you to define what this should be to match your product brand. Your front line team drives this culture for your customers and if the team knows what the vision is they are more excited to and successful in maintaining it.

What is your tone?

The templates you build for your support team, and their freeform responses should all be in sync. This should also match your website and your Help Center. This can be defined in partnership between Marketing & Support.

In summary — outline the parts of your customer facing business, anticipate what can go wrong and be ready with a solution, don’t forget that what you say is just as important as how you say it when it comes to customers.

We’ll be covering building block 2 next time: Submission Channels

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