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.
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.