Month: May 2019

Building Systems

A few weeks ago, someone asked me how I design customer care systems from the bottom up, and it really got me thinking. Most of the time, even when I’m coming in on the ground floor, someone somewhere has some idea that customers require specific assistance. This means that it’s pretty easy to identify the high level pain points, and (hopefully), there will be a pretty good customer profile available, too.

^^ Pain point.

Those two things are where I start: I find out where the customers hurt, and by looking at who the customers are, figure out the best way to ease that pain. Sounds easy, right? Here’s the thing: the more problems you solve, the more you will find. This isn’t a bad thing. This is where you get to refine the experience you’re offering your customers.

Ideally, designing customer care processes will follow a linear progression:

  1. Identify the pain point
  2. Create a short-term fix that works for your particular customer
  3. Work with other departments to actually solve the problem

For example, let’s say people are having trouble signing in to your web site. That’s your pain point. Your short term fix might be writing a detailed step-by-step guide that will walk your customer through the process, especially if your customer isn’t very familiar with create logins for websites. But that’s not a great long-term fix — that hasn’t solved the problem, just slapped a band-aid on it.

Your next step is to work with the UI people and create a sign in process that doesn’t cause the customer pain. Solving the problem is your end game — customer care is all about making sure the customer is cared for throughout the company. Remember, you are the customer’s voice within the company.

Relieving pain points may take several iterations, and some things you try might not make the process better (or might even make it worse!). Don’t be afraid to make the changes you need to make to provide great customer care. And don’t get frustrated when new pain points rear their heads. It is completely normal — expected, even — that as you solve the bigger problems, you’ll start seeing the smaller problems.

Going back to our example above, let’s say you’ve solved the sign-in problem. Now, suddenly, you’re inundated with complaints from customers that they’re having trouble finding a particular type of product or piece of information on your site. You haven’t changed the site…why weren’t you hearing about this before?

Well, first, you probably were, you just didn’t notice it because this complaint was drowned out by the people who couldn’t get signed in. But also, now you’ve got a bunch more people who are signed in and eager to use your site. So now, this is the problem you need to solve.

This cycle will continue to happen — don’t panic! The more your refine your systems, the easier and faster steps 2 and 3 will be to implement. Plus, barring a huge relaunch or something like that, the problems will get smaller and smaller. Even if/when you have a relaunch or introduce a new process to your customers, now that you’ve developed your systems, it will be relatively painless to handle the problem solving.

Please do not build THIS system.

What will your system look like? I can’t answer that…it’s going to be tailored to the needs of your customer and your company. The systems I built for dealing with parents purchasing tutoring services for their kids are vastly different from the ones I’ve built for dealing with retail customers. And even within those systems, there are different components for handling bargain shoppers vs. those who require white-glove service. I deal with issues that require Marketing to make changes differently from those that require tech changes.

You should always be refining these systems to make them as efficient and tailored as possible. Don’t get so attached to your systems that you stop making them better. These are tools for different jobs. If you’re tempted to try to use the same system for everything, try to remember the old chestnut about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer. You should have an entire tool chest at your disposal if you want to provide really great customer care.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

When your company launches a new promotion or marketing campaign, how involved is your customer care team? What about when they make changes to the UI or product features? It seems to be a very cultural thing…at some companies, someone from customer care is involved in all marketing/user/product initiatives from the get-go, while at others it’s the customers themselves who end up telling the CSRs that a discount is being offered or a product has been changed, and of course there are many companies that are somewhere on the spectrum between those two extremes. I’ll bet you can guess where I stand.

At a previous job, we had a sign on the customer care department door that said, “Remember, if it touches the customer, it touches us (but not in a creepy way).” It was our lighthearted way of reminding the tech and marketing teams that not only did we have valuable information to share with them about the customers, but that we needed to know what our customers would be experiencing in order to provide them with the best possible service.

Sharing is caring.

I have also worked at companies where everything is done very secretively, so when customers would contact us about a promotion that wasn’t working or a feature they couldn’t find or get to work properly two things would happen. First, we would sound like idiots, denying that we were running that promotion or had that feature. Then, provided with evidence from the customer (or, occasionally, being overheard by a member of the team who implemented the campaign or change), we would have to hunt down the details, sometimes learning new product features or layouts on the fly so we could teach them to customers.

Which do you think resulted in happier customers and happier CSRs? To provide the best possible customer care, someone from your customer care team should be involved in processes and planning meetings from the beginning. We can pinpoint where customers are going to experience pain, and suggest ways to minimize those pain points. Even when there’s no way around a certain amount of customer angst, having your customer care team involved from the beginning will ensure that they are able to guide the customer through the issues that arise as smoothly as possible.

Sorry if I earwormed you with that title…here’s the video so you can sing along to the whole song:

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.