Courteous and prompt service is an invaluable part of the customer experience. Without a process or workflow in place for your customer service and customer support teams, your customers’ overall experience with your organization is almost certain to suffer.
That, in turn, can manifest itself in several other ways, including damage to your organizational reputation and loss of business. Thankfully, instituting customer service and support workflows in addition to client retention strategies and customer retention software can streamline everything from customer onboarding to customer complaint resolution.
Customer Service vs. Customer Support
The difference between customer service and customer support is, as defined by Indeed Career Guide:
- Customer Service: “The collection of methods designed to improve customer experience throughout the entire purchasing process.”
- Customer Support: “The set of processes some customers request to solve specific problems with a company’s goods or services.”
In other words, customer service is more generalized. Customer support pertains to the actions of and interactions between customers and organizations in resolving issues specifically surrounding product or service output.
Looking for workflow ideas to empower your customer support teams and promote a superior customer experience across the entire customer journey? Here are three customer support workflow ideas worth implementing to keep both your customer-facing personnel and customers satisfied.
1. Customer Onboarding Workflow
“86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought”, according to Wyzowl.
Customer onboarding, when done right, is about more than just making customers feel comfortable and welcome. It’s also about educating your customers about the value of your product(s) or service(s). More than that, it allows you to tailor your service or product offerings to the client and their unique needs, goals, and expectations, according to Court Bishop’s article for Zendesk, “Customer onboarding guide for 2023 (+6 best practices and examples)”.
So if your approach to onboarding is anything but systematic, intentional, and standardized, then you’re missing out on the chance to not only make a good first impression, but also to ensure that your customers are fully aware of all the ways you can provide them value.
In designing a customer onboarding workflow, Bishop suggests focusing on the following:
- The sign up process
- The welcome email
- First log-in
- Integrations
- Product or service tutorial
- Follow-up emails
2. Customer Support Workflow
In an effort to support customers, some organizations are tempted to provide more service channels. But as Jordan Bryan notes in an informative piece published by Gartner entitled “Rethink Your Customer Service Strategy to Drive Self-Service“, this could be a big mistake if not done carefully:
“Gartner research finds 56% of service leaders are adding new channels or features within their existing channels, but customers are still calling for live support — adding cost and complexity to service operations.The problem: Leaders depend on self-service and digital channels to solve customer problems without a clear approach.”
Designing and implementing a customer support workflow can provide that “clear approach”.
An effective customer support workflow should include the following steps:
- Receive customer inquiries
- Categorize inquiries
- Assign inquiries
- Investigate and resolve inquiries
- Follow-up and feedback
- Reporting and analytics
3. Product Feedback Workflow
Getting feedback from your customers is an important part of improving your customer support process as well as improving the overall customer experience.
Ultimately, as MonkeyLearn suggests, “Every product decision you make should reflect your customers’ needs, and collecting product feedback can help you understand what those needs are.”
Product feedback loops can help in this regard. Here’s what you need to establish one, according to MonkeyLearn:
- Gather Feedback: What are customers saying about your products?
- Analyze Feedback: What do customers love or hate about your products?
- Act on Insights: What should you prioritize first? Once you act on these insights, are customers happy with the changes?
The process by which you standardize gathering and analyzing feedback and acting on insights is what you create via a product feedback workflow.
A Note on Customer Workflow Automation
Implementing a customer service chatbot can help you automate the process of gathering customer feedback. This is in line with Gartner’s recommendation to empower your customers to provide self-serve support.
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