Customer Service Priorities in Times of Crisis, Part 1: Strategies for Stagnating Industries
Turbulent times call for change in an organization’s strategy and focus. Regardless of whether your business is imploding and grappling to survive, or explosive growth has caught you unawares, today customer service should be a key element in a leadership’s action plan to strengthen a company’s core, stabilize operations, and ensure success.
Customer service is always important and plays a key role in the overall user experience with a product or service, but it perhaps is never more important than when companies need to support their customers during a time of crisis. Yet this is exactly when customer support teams are having to rapidly adapt amid ticket spikes, customer complaints, and business uncertainty. Planned investments that are intended to drive business growth like hiring, training and productivity tools, are on the table for discussion again as leadership is forced to reevaluate what needs to be done to stay out of trouble.
When the industry is stalling, customer retention is king
When panic and uncertainty settle in, sales usually contract. Focusing on building loyalty among existing customers and prolonging their lifetime value (CLTV) is the one thing organizations can do to not only survive in an uncertain climate but also to come out of the crisis ready to hit the ground running. If your business is about to implode, be sure to step up your customer success initiatives. Change your focus from new customers acquisition and up-sell/cross-sell to the existing ones, to showing them how they can get more value from what they’ve already purchased.¹
Here are 11 steps to take to prepare your customer service team to deliver in crisis in order to build trust in customers and ensure their loyalty:
- Safeguard your own people
We have touched on the importance of employee experience before. The image an organization is trying to project to external stakeholders like customers, partners, and suppliers, should be a mirrored one of the company culture and values. Leading companies have correctly deduced that happy employees create better customer experiences.
Your employees hold the key to creating and maintaining successful customer relationships. In times of crisis, employees can also be vulnerable, concerned, and frustrated. They may be struggling with private matters or stressing about finances. Whatever the reason, companies should plan to take care of their employees first. Offering empathy and support to help people go through these challenges will go a long way.
2. Safety first
Whenever the situation puts customers’ health and well-being at risk, organizations should prioritize taking measures to keep them safe by adapting their service, daily working practices, product/services delivery; in essence, every operation that might be casting a shadow of doubt on the company brand and image. Safety is a primary need that’s foundational for a customer experience to take place.
3. Show customers empathy and respect
Unlike the financial crises over a decade ago, today people’s lives are at stake. The sensitive nature of the situation requires that we address individuals’ problems with empathy and understanding. Customer support needs to show its human face to clients, offer them compassion, and try to walk in their shoes to gain their trust.
Boyan Barnev, Head of Support at GTMHub, the leading SaaS OKRs platform, on their effort to show empathy and commitment to their customers:
“We sort of doubled the number of online meetings and the time we spent with customers on a call. Working from home posed some challenges right from the start — like trying to screenshare while your baby is crying, or your cat is walking in front of the camera. We gradually relaxed and let go, as our customers were facing the exact same issues, too. That even brought us closer together! In times of isolation, I believe this went a long way to showing our commitment as customer service agents, and even empathy, on a purely human level.”
4. Keep communication transparent and consistent
We see this now and then: a company makes a mistake and tries to sweep it under the carpet. Leadership goes silent and completely mishandles the entire situation. Their stakeholders — customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, require that they quickly and thoroughly assess the aftermath, provide an explanation, and outline an action plan to resolve the situation. Shortage of facts is the number one cause of distress for people. An official and sincere apology will help un-demonize your company and leadership while clarifying the steps taken to start mending.
Honesty goes a long way — never promise more than you can provide. It’s far better to exceed expectations than under-deliver on your commitment.
5. Personalize your approach
Not all customers will be equally affected by a global crisis. As is the case today, some industries thrive, and others have taken a blow. Custom-craft your communication strategy accordingly — some customers would need to be supported to stay in business and deal with personal, financial and existential hardships, while others might be on the look to leverage your product and services even more. Ensure smooth customer service and success practices for everyone.
6. Set the right expectations — especially on average wait times
At the start of the outbreak this year, Intercom surveyed some 400 support managers across B2B and B2C industries. 57% of B2B support teams reported slower response times, whereas 70% of B2C teams admitted their response time was slower.
“Wait times have increased by 27 minutes, on average, across both B2C and B2B businesses.”
One customer support metric that is certain to be negatively impacted by the inevitable spike in the volume of requests, tickets and complaints, is the average time clients would have to wait for a response. Be sure to take the necessary measures to minimize support wait times.
7. When possible, shift customers to а single support channel
And preferably, an online one. An online support channel allows you to acquire more information from the customer before taking on their case, to more accurately understand and prioritize it.
No matter how large your support team is, all support agents will likely feel a bit stretched trying to handle the spike in customer requests. To avoid spreading your resources too thin across various support channels such as live chat, phone, email, social media — funnel all requests into one channel.
8. Empower support teams to deviate from their scripts
We wrote about the role of Control Quotient in empowering customer service agents to rely on personal judgment rather than escalate issues to management. Agents with high CQ are capable of remaining in control and have the authority and toolset to resolve a customer issue on their own. Some agents are just hands-on, yet in most cases, it is support managers who need to facilitate this type of behavior. In times of crisis, many support agents’ hands remain tied by the standard customer service policies (such as lack of access to extending subscription plans, for example).
Giving agents the power to solve issues as they see fit will help reduce customer frustration, too.
Customer support productivity solutions like SessionStack help support teams improve their agents’ CQ. By empowering reps to understand what lies behind every customer request and visually validate it, SessionStack allows agents to take control over a situation and resolve customer issues with confidence. This way, support teams not only improve their first touch resolution rate, but they also cut the back-and-forth between agents and customers, saving valuable time and increasing customers’ loyalty.
9. Arm support agents with collaboration tools to boost knowledge sharing
Fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing between customer service agents is key at all times. With the outbreak causing teams to work remotely, however, sharing experiences and tips & tricks daily is the only way agents can stay on top of things. Organizations that encourage agents to tap into one another’s expertise perform 50% better organizations that force reps to stick to the script and seek answers only from management, according to the Harvard Business Review.
For example, the team at Progress, a B2B software vendor who’s managed to build a competitive advantage by offering outstanding customer service, enabled customer support agents to work on a flexible schedule. This way, they managed to cover a wider range of time zones more effectively. Teaming up with support colleagues from other geographies got much easier, too, as their shifts started to overlap more often and they could chat more frequently.
10. Join forces with product and marketing management to improve the customer journey touch-points
To accommodate existing customers, facilitate their product use, and improve their satisfaction with the product, marketing and product teams would need to step in, too. This means using polls, surveys, customer experience data analysis tools to gauge loyalty, product stickiness, and surface any issues that may affect renewal. To get serious retention optimizations, consider collecting feedback about and analyzing each step of the user journey — product onboarding, support communication, feature use, etc.
11. Accelerate onboarding and product adoption, and reduce friction
All business functions would need to focus on keeping the existing customer base. Product experience is one key driver of customer fulfillment, so to boost customer usage and loyalty, product teams would need to reorganize their roadmaps to facilitate current users’ needs.
If your product ambassadors are struggling to convince teammates in their company to use your product, you may need more accurate/better in-app tips and guides to make it easier for them. If you manage to release that small feature a customer has asked for, you’ve won that customer for real.
Are you operating in a stagnating industry or one that’s experiencing exponential growth? What is the one thing that you had to change about the way you do customer service? Share your experience in the comments below. Thank you!
Sources:
https://customerthink.com/customer-retention-in-a-time-of-crisis-10-action-steps-for-saas-companies/
https://hbr.org/2020/04/supporting-customer-service-through-the-coronavirus-crisis
https://www.northridgegroup.com/blog/delivering-customer-experience-in-times-of-crisis/
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4217-customer-service-tips-during-crisis.html
https://customerthink.com/customer-retention-in-a-time-of-crisis-10-action-steps-for-saas-companies/
https://www.accenture.com/bg-en/about/company/coronavirus-responsive-customer-service
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/
https://www.intercom.com/blog/covid-19-customer-support-report/
https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-service-crisis-management/
