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How to Create a Customer Service Strategy for 2024
Kicking off a customer service strategy can seem daunting, but it's really about making sure every customer feels heard and valued. Think about the last time someone truly listened to you — it felt good, right? That's what we're aiming for.
A solid customer service strategy isn’t filled with industry jargon or lofty goals — it’s grounded in simple, honest interactions. It simply needs you to show up for your customers, acknowledge their frustrations and fix what went wrong.
While a great customer service strategy does translate into business growth, your primary aim should be being human and making an impact, one conversation at a time. Let’s get into how we can craft a strategy that sticks and makes every customer feel like they matter because, honestly, they do.
What is customer service strategy?
A customer service strategy is a structured plan of action that helps businesses handle customer interactions. It’s a defined approach that consists of the methodology, contingent plans and technologies used to engage with customers and resolve their concerns. A successful digital customer service strategy helps you drive user happiness across all touchpoints in the customer journey.
Today, users truly value convenience and relevance. They want the context of their questions to flow between channels seamlessly – with customer service staying consistent no matter where they go. The best customer service strategies factor in the need for an omnichannel approach. The one that amalgamates information across all your digital channels into one manageable space.
Benefits of CX strategy for businesses
Nearly nine in 10 customers aren’t afraid to talk about the experiences they have with brands. In the case of a poor customer service experience, they will talk about it with 15 people on average. Negative word-of-mouth spreads fast enough to damage a brand image.
On the other hand, a well-thought-out customer service strategy will only help you brew happy anecdotes among your customers. Here are some more benefits of a customer service strategy.
1. Standardized customer service
An outlined framework for dealing with different levels of customer interactions provides clarity to your customer service teams. And so they can maintain consistent service quality with users, regardless of the channel or query.
2. More satisfied customers
When a strategy has all the key pillars of customer service, your agents are more equipped to deliver timely and relevant service experiences whenever a user raises a ticket. Such experiences harbor a positive brand perception within your target cohorts.
3. Higher customer retention
Over seven in 10 consumers find their experiences with brands influencing their buying decisions. An effective customer service strategy helps turn around or mitigate unhappy experiences to ensure more of your customers stay loyal to your business.
4. Streamlined feedback loop
A good customer service strategy includes a straightforward process for collecting and acting on customer feedback. This direct line from customer to the company helps you tweak your products or services in real time, keeping you agile and responsive to what your customers actually want and need.
5. Empowered employees
When you have a clear customer service strategy, your team isn’t left guessing what to do next. They know the steps to take and have the authority to make decisions that benefit the customer. The customer service strategy employs the right technology, making contact center agents more productive and customers’ lives much simpler.
Pro-tip: Use generative AI to improve agent experience. It cuts through the mundane, automating the repetitive cases so agents can get to the heart of real problems. It's smart with ticket tagging, learns on the go and keeps the information agents need right up to date. Plus, it makes training actually useful, prepping teams for the curveballs customers throw, ensuring the whole support gig becomes smoother and more human.
How to develop a customer service strategy
It's not the easiest task, but these detailed steps can certainly help you develop your customer service strategy.
- Building a united front 💪
Start by gathering your team for a series of honest conversations about what putting the customer first really means. It's about getting everyone on the same page, from the shipping clerk to the marketing manager. Empathize with your customers and think about the small things that make a big difference — like packing items carefully or offering flexible plan options. Remember, every department impacts the customer experience, not just those directly handling service requests.
Practice makes you perfect: Develop a brief, compelling manifesto that encapsulates your customer service vision, ensuring it's easy for every employee to understand, embrace and recall during their daily tasks.
This manifesto must keep data marriage at its forefront, too. As it turns out, 62% of customer service leaders struggle with inconsistent communication. So, at least to say, your experiences should not be broken — because customers don’t let that slide - so your customer service software must empower you to unify all your conversations truly.
2. Delineating channel command
Dive into your customer interaction points and ensure each has a dedicated champion. It's crucial that your customer service strategy defines the person in charge of each customer service channel, whether it's email, social media, or your help desk, is clear about their role and is ready to take the baton. This is ownership, but it ensures a personal touch and accountability at every customer touchpoint.
A lot to handle? If you’re tangled in delegating command, you can use a decision matrix or structure to make your job easier. For instance, you can consider the RAPID® Decision-Making Model. As developed by Bain & Company, RAPID® Decision Making defines roles — who Recommends strategies, who Agrees, who Performs the tasks, who provides Input and who Decides in the end. This clear-cut approach ensures everyone knows their part, streamlining how you manage customer service and making your teamwork more cohesive and effective.
3. Creating your customer journeys
Among those upping their game, a cool 45% of customer service leaders are betting on customer journey analytics to know their audience well.
So, it goes without saying that mapping out the customer journey as a part of your customer care strategy is key. It’s essentially walking a mile in their shoes. You need to get into their heads, understanding their needs and frustrations at every turn. This means looking at every interaction, from the initial product inquiry to after-sales service, as an opportunity to exceed expectations. Think of it as choreographing a series of moments in your customer service strategy that, together, compose a memorable experience.
Make it simpler: Consider automating your customer journeys for higher precision and channel-specific accuracy. If you’re a Sprinklr user, you can use the Journey Facilitator to build unified, omnichannel customer journeys using a visual, peerless flow builder. It can help you design entire journeys from start to finish, from bringing in leads for targeted outreach to evaluating the success of the journey you've set up.
4. Setting up SMART goals
Gather your team to define what success looks like in measurable terms. Translate your customer service vision into actionable, trackable objectives. Think SMART goals.
- Specific, ensuring clarity
- Measurable, allowing for tangible tracking
- Achievable, aligning with your capabilities
- Relevant, ensuring alignment with your broader objectives
- Time-bound, setting clear deadlines
By embedding SMART goals into your customer care strategy, you turn lofty ambitions into grounded, actionable paths forward. They help you not only just aim for better service but also set the stage for breakthroughs in how you connect with and serve your customers.
Our two cents on goal-setting
- Gamifying small wins: Split the big targets into manageable mini goals, then weave in elements of gamification to drive motivation. This strategic move could energize teams across the board and help to complete customer service objectives faster.
- Agile response teams: Mobilize a versatile, cross-departmental team geared to swiftly tackle complex customer service scenarios and capitalize on moments to drive happiness. By pooling diverse expertise, this team can swiftly devise and deploy innovative solutions, ensuring your customer service strategy adapts fluidly to come what may.
5. Optimizing for speed and collaboration
Examine the nuts and bolts of your current processes. Where can you cut the slack? Where can you add value? Empower your team with the right tools and workflow management to make magic happen. Sometimes, it's the small tweaks in your client service strategy, like using AI in knowledge base or insights from customer interaction analytics, that can turn a good service into a great one.
No one knows efficiency like generative AI: Your agents have hectic lives, so it only makes sense for them to employ a chum that primes up all your experiences. Sprinklr AI+, for example, helps agents keep the tonality, relevance and accuracy in their messaging in check and fetch or even curate answers from the help center on the fly.
Besides these key steps, you must ensure that your customer service automation helps you function at your very best. Whether it’s ensuring omnichannel customer service or solid voice analytics in IVR, make sure you have a state-of-the-art toolkit of service technologies.
Dive Deeper: Your Comprehensive Checklist to Choose Contact Center Software
4 tips to choose client service strategy
Let’s look at a few tips to ensure you choose and build the right customer care strategy.
🎯 Benchmark and go beyond: Look to the customer service models of industry leaders for inspiration. Identify elements of their strategy that align with your brand’s values and customer expectations. Dig deeper to find where your competitors are falling short. These gaps are golden opportunities for your customer service strategy to shine. Maybe they're slow to respond on social media, or their in-person support lacks customer empathy. Whatever it is, use this insight to carve out a niche where your service can truly stand out.
Learn More: What is And How to Get Started With Competitive Benchmarking?
💡Identify your team’s strengths: Your team is more than their job descriptions. Discover hidden talents that could innovate your customer service. Perhaps someone trumps at employee advocacy, or another is a tech whiz during particularly complex cases. Tailoring your client service strategy to include these skills can transform your service from standard to spectacular.
👛 Be your own secret shopper: Step into your customers' shoes but go further — become an undercover customer. Interact with your contact center agents as if you’re a customer, without your team knowing it’s you. This firsthand experience can surface insights you'd never see from data or customer surveys alone, guiding you to a customer service strategy that’s truly based on customer experience.
👬Use the community power: Your people are your strength. Use your customer community and user-generated content to fuel your customer care strategy. Use this space where your customers shape the service landscape with their stories and solutions. Engage, listen and evolve your approach based on this collective intelligence, making your service truly community-driven and authentically impactful.
Customer service strategy examples for industries
Many brands today are doing a great job at nailing their customer service strategies. Adobe, for instance, has a central X, formerly a Twitter account (@Adobe) and a dedicated account for customer support (@AdobeCare). Under the bio for @AdobeCare, the brand makes it clear that representatives are available 24/7 through this channel.
Some brands have even developed customer service strategies that let them boost their organic marketing exponentially. Just look at Vi, the partnership between Vodafone and Aditya Birla Group in India.
The pandemic caused the brand to rethink its customer service strategy. As the number of tickets knocked the door down, Vi worked on strengthening its customer service strategy. This began with analyzing consumer behavior from daily traffic of 500K tags on various channels. Vi was able to effectively identify top user concerns, address urgent tickets and proactively detect user concerns to avoid future escalation. Timely interventions helped the brand even boost its Net Promoter Scores by a whopping 500% within just six months of implementing the strategy.
Whereas some of them believe in keeping their The Xbox X, formerly Twitter team, called the “Elite Tweet Fleet” is one of the most responsive X, formerly Twitter feeds today.
That hard work pays off. The @XboxSupport X, formerly a Twitter account, has almost 2 million followers, with responses firing at warp speeds. They don’t just answer direct tweets, either. They scour the platform for people who mention Xbox and swoop in to help.
Helping customers out on social media is also not very private. So, if a conversation requires personal data, it’s best to shift to private messaging swiftly. Just look at how Spotify uses X, formerly Twitter’s DM prompt feature. The brand can invite people to join a Direct Message with the click of a button like this:
Customer self-service is unsurprisingly popular because who doesn’t want to find answers before they need to speak to someone? Hulu, the American streaming platform, is an example of a customer service strategy done right with a solid knowledge base. The interface of the Hulu Help Centre is quite simple. The search bar helps users to type in their query to filter out existing help articles.
For more personalized and directed help, Hulu encourages the user to log in to their account. What’s more interesting is that Hulu also encourages users to get involved and seek help through the Hulu Community – a collaborative pool of users to discuss, share tips, and help others along the way. And if the user is still not able to find answers, the option to reach out to Hulu directly is always available.
Check out how to build a comprehensive self-help repository for your business with Sprinklr Knowledge Base.
Want to stay ahead of the pack with a future-ready customer service strategy? Partner with Sprinklr – a brand that powers customer service for 9 out of 10 enterprises, enabling them to orchestrate memorable support experiences across phone, social, and digital channels. Sign up for a full-featured free 30-day trial today and deliver delight, one conversation at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
AI, particularly generative AI in customer service, influences modern customer service strategies by making automated responses more relevant, personalizing interactions and predicting needs, making every customer feel seen and heard. It offers smarter, faster and more intuitive support, reshaping how businesses connect with their customers.
Some potential pitfalls to avoid when implementing a customer service strategy are:
- Avoid sidelining human touch
- Overlooking detailed training
- Neglecting customer feedback loops
- Misaligning with broader business objectives
Gauge your strategy's success through improved customer response times, heightened customer satisfaction rates, loyalty upticks and meeting or surpassing specific KPIs that resonate with your business's heartbeat.
