How engaged will your team be with the community and company?

Many companies are asking themselves how they should interact within social media channels. How should they engage with their existing community and build-up their community? Not by sheer quantity of interactions, page views, members or other metrics but by improving the quality of their interactions and providing value to a customer to gain and keep the customer’s loyalty.

In order to successfully interact with a community, a company must determine what role they wish for their “Community Team” or “Customer Support/Service Team” to fulfill. The characteristics of an effective team and the success of the team’s ability to execute successful customer service engagements is greatly dependent on how much the company supports the “Community Team”.

Characterists of an effective team to successfully interact with customers:

Purpose: What is the Customer Service (CS) Team’s purpose? Company’s? Customers? This will impact driving priorities, decisions and investments. Will this change as the community change and how will it change? (Focus on brand vs. CS)

Empowerment: Employees need to be trusted and trained to provide decision making solutions that will drive C-Sat without escalations. CS Team needs to provide expedient, efficient, pro-active and meaningful interactions. Customers need to feel empowered with up sell decision making. (Email signature line, inside product, remain unobtrusive – suggestions, deals and short-term offers)

Relationship: Focus on acknowledging customer needs, concerns and issues. They should remain transparent and communicate in a clear and ‘down to earth’ manner. Within the company, the CS Team needs to be active with, informed on and have a voice in company decisions that impact customers.

Flexibility: Providing flexible solutions to customer’s needs and issues. Interactions can be based on ‘cookie cutters’ but need to drive individuality. Company should support employees by providing ongoing training, insight into process improvements and company or employee demands. 

Optimal Performance: Focus on continual improvement by maximizing performance output through tools, cost-saving methods, having adequate support for demand and staying cohesive as ONE entity across all products and services (per company goals). Access to tools and resources that will meet or exceed the company’s needs will prove to be highly beneficial and cost worthy.

Recognition and Rewards: CS Team needs to feel supported, feel valued and be rewarded for meeting or exceeding requirements which can include: a handwritten note, certificate or newsletter/site highlight.

Morale: Happy employees will better engage with the customer. Many times they are the first impression into the company through their CS interaction. Team building events and recognition/rewards will keep employees engaged in the company and provide value in return.

What do you think about my ideas? I’d love to hear how your team interacts with your specific community and company for a follow-up post. Please let me know:

What works well?

Why it is successful?

What are the challenges?

How do you wish to change your engagement opportunities going forward?

Has anything been implemented (positive or negative; tools or resources; procedures or policies) that have increased or decreased your team’s success?

How can companies enrich their existing customer service experience?

It’s all about the customer but are companies focused on the customer nowadays or is it all lip service? Are they looking at all their processes, employees, company culture and customer feedback to improve their customer service interactions?

Some thoughts I have regarding how companies can deliver exceptional customer service or enriching their community interactions are:

Employees are key: Happy employees engaged with the company will successfully engage with the customers.

Consistency: Provide proactive and efficient quality of interactions and solutions.

Transparency: Customers want to feel involved in and have a voice into the company. Also, not feeling blindsided by changes in products/services and company interactions. Clarity of brand, value, customer centric and clear communications.

Enjoyability: B2C experience. Employees and customers love the products and want to stay loyal to them.

Customer Needs: Voice of Customer needs to be strong within the organization. Customers need to be a driving force within the company. Providing adequately trained and knowledgeable customer support teams. What are the company’s goals & objectives? What are the companies needs and desires? These need to be aligned with the customer needs as the focus.

Easy to work with: Positive attitude of CSRs. Ability to quickly resolve escalations, drive value of products & services, personalize support, power of decision making, have supportive tools in place and be well informed of issues.

Seamless automation: Provide more automated support with minimal problems, such as: templates, CRM system, clear & detailed instructions, ability to track previous customer interactions. Templates should help but not everything falls exactly into the script, need personalization.

Easier to reach someone: Accessibility of website links, communication channels and proper workload ratio.

Less repetitive: CRM system to track previous customer interactions to avoid repetition. UI design and decrease user experience of repetitively logging in, going thru click-thru’s to access account or redemptions and application features.

As a customer advocate, I am incredibly conscientious, pro-active and highly productive while being customer focused. I love to learn and listen to the customer to address their needs and work with internal stakeholders to determine areas of improvement. My ability to teach enables me to create dynamic knowledgebase documents and videos to empower customers to find many of their own resolutions based on user needs. I believe a self-sustaining community can be more valuable both to the customers and the company than a hand-holding one. 

My ability to work well with internal stakeholders by communicating the voice of the customer and prioritizing issues has proved effective in delivering quick and corrective resolutions. I have been able to retain many customers that would otherwise have left a company based on their previous customer service experience. I have a keen sense of what customers want and I am diligent in delivering what they want within the parameter’s of a company’s objectives.

Over the years, I have been able to successfully interact with customers and communities. With that being said, it makes my job much easier and more fulfilling when the employer supports the personnel that are on the frontline to interact with the customers and communities. Many companies are not providing their Customer Support or “Social Networking” team the proper support to successfully engage with their customers or community. In my next post, we will look at:

How engaged will your team be with the community and company?