For your startup business to grow, customer service should go to the next level. And one of the aspects that you would want to look into is efficiency. Let’s look at what this means exactly and how you can pull it off.
Defining Customer Service Efficiency For Your Startup Business
Simply put, efficiency in customer service means being able to accomplish customer goals with the least amount of effort. For instance, being efficient lets you facilitate customer reservations in as little as three steps on the phone.
Efficient Vs. Effective Customer Service
Considering that they have similar root words, you might think that efficient customer service is the same as an effective one. But as it turns out, they aren’t. The main difference is how they achieve results.
Image from LinkedIn.
Effective customer service achieves the desired results no matter how long it takes. Meanwhile, efficient services deliver the same faster and with less effort. Because of that difference, you might wonder which way you should go. Should you always strive to be more efficient?
The answer is not always. An amazing customer experience does not always mean you have to do it fast and easily. In fact, some customers would not care about how long you take assisting them as long as they know you can help them accomplish their goals.
The Importance Of Customer Service Efficiency
Nevertheless, efficient customer service is still significant in the overall customer experience. People want to accomplish transactions as quickly as they can. After all, they have other things to do. If they see that you can provide that efficient customer service, they are happy to return for more.
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Greater customer service efficiency also helps your team. The team can go through the customer queue faster using a streamlined process. There are also fewer backlogs and bottlenecks that can hamper their performance. That results in stress-free work, encouraging them to provide more to customers.
Ultimately, this boosts your startup business bottom line. Happy customers are more likely to return and spend more. You save a lot on costs, letting you provide more services.
Making Your Startup Business Customer Service More Efficient
But where do you begin in the effort to make your customer service more efficient? The first place to work on would be redefining your customer service goals. Think about your team and the customers.
Consider how both sides’ goals are interconnected. For instance, your customers’ main goal is often to finish their transactions quickly. Your team goals should center on how to facilitate that quick transaction.
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However, also think about the team-centric goals. Those include such things as improving internal communications or ensuring updated data stacks. While such do not immediately influence customer goals, they ensure that your team can perform all its duties.
Some of the vital customer service goals that you should take into account include:
- Improving customer service metrics
- Speeding up response times
- Developing an omnichannel customer experience
- Tracking product usage metrics
- Improving ease of repeat transactions
Each of these goals can be complex. As such, you need to break them into smaller subgoals. From there, you can determine how to tackle each subgoal and decide your strategy.
Streamlining Your Customer Service Workflow
A major aspect of improving customer service efficiency is decluttering the various workflows. These workflows contain too many steps that slow down customer progress. Determining which of these steps results in such issues. On the other side of the equation, you would also want to know what areas your teams struggle in.
Use various visual tools to understand the structure of these workflows. You can even use these to visualize what kind of improvements can be done. For instance, you can see how removing some steps influences the overall process.
Image from Integrify.
You should also look at this work from both sides of the customer service equation. Certain processes might seem natural to you, but that might not be for customers. Here, weigh both sides. Think about why the step is essential for your side and why customers struggle with it. You can refer to their feedback to understand the issue.
Using automation also helps in the process of streamlining your workflows. But you should carefully plan its implementation. Make sure that it integrates seamlessly into your team’s work process and that transitions to and from it are effortless.
Providing Proactive Support
Another way to increase customer service efficiency in your startup business is by providing proactive customer support. By providing ready solutions for your customers, you lessen their need to go through your support process. That increases customer service efficiency by as much as 7%.
The key to effective proactive support is getting more information about your customers. Virtua Solutions can help you by conducting customer research work on your behalf. We can also help you organize all of this information for better use.
Our team can also assist in handling these proactive support channels. As it is, these channels still require constant maintenance to ensure that customers can use them effectively. Our work happens in the background, allowing you to focus on more immediate customer service work.
Improving The Skills Of Your Customer Service Team
Your customer service team’s capabilities will also play a significant role in improving overall efficiency. Go beyond just improving their service metrics. You would also want to impart new skills they can use to help customers.
When you partner with us for customer support, we can also help here. Our team is composed of skilled agents that have worked in different industries. We are ready to impart these skills to your in-house team while also using these to help your startup business respond more to customer needs.
Boost Startup Business Success Through Efficient Customer Service
Improving the efficiency of your customer service team is not a one-off project. You should constantly review and refine everything. But with the help of the right partner, your startup business will be on the right track. Contact us today and we will be ready to lend you a hand.