Make customer service a pillar of your company culture and success will follow
It’s no secret that top-notch customer service needs to be a mainstay in any organisation. Check out this guest post from G2 on the importance of integrating customer service as a pillar of your company culture.
Your current customers are your biggest growth potential, so you need to treat them as such. Your company’s main goal should be to ensure your customers get the best experience out of your product or service. The easiest way to do so? Implement customer service as a pillar of your internal company culture.
Making customer service a top priority in and outside of customer relationship management will not just benefit your level of customer service, you’ll reap a number of other benefits too.
So, here are 10 reasons how instilling customer service in your company culture helps you scale success:
1. You’ll bring everyone together
When putting customer service culture at the heart of your company, it’s imperative that you implement it across all departments—not just the customer-facing ones. Each department provides your company value in a different way. By making good customer service a company culture standard, you can ensure that in spite of vastly different roles, each employee is working toward the same goal—customer satisfaction.
For example, at G2, one of our core company values is “buyers come first.” This means that each department has our customers in mind in everything we do, and we reward work done to achieve the goal of customer satisfaction, regardless of whether the work directly affects customers.
2. You’ll learn more about your product or service
Prioritizing customer service at your business means constantly listening to your customers. Whether it’s through informal feedback, NPS surveys, comments on an online community, or product reviews, there’s always something to learn about how to research, develop, market, and sell your product or service.
Don’t underestimate the power of customer service for ideation and product development either, especially in B2B SaaS companies. Remember, your users are the ones who are using your product everyday, and while you cannot take every single one of their suggestions into account, it’s important to prioritize their requests and make sure you are building a product that suits the needs of your customers. Put simply, if you’re a good listener, you’ll gain an even better understanding of your product and how it’s used, and thus how you can make improvements.
3. You’ll promote empathy inside and out
One of the most important elements of the customer service mentality is empathy. Those who already work in customer-facing roles know this very well. Even if you can’t solve a problem for your customer, by treating them with empathy you can show them that you understand their issues and hear their concerns.
Empathy also happens to be the key to harmony amongst employees. If everyone at your company has a customer service mindset, they will treat each other with empathy, just as they would a customer with a complaint.
4. You’ll prioritize people not personas
While categorizing your customers into various personas to consider their needs has its benefits, having a customer service mentality for your business means that your employees will approach issues on a more individualized, ground level. Every customer and their individual situation matters and every employee should be working toward making them feel that way.
Rather than placing each customer into a box, ask your employees to dive deeper into who they are, what they need, and why they need it beyond the surface-level persona.
5. You’ll be continuously building a good reputation
We all know the ramifications of being rude to customers or providing poor customer service. Not only is it hugely damaging for your business, it spreads like wildfire, and rightly so.
Be sure to work up your reputation as a friendly and dependable establishment. Your company has a reputation, whether you like it or not—keeping customer service at the forefront of your company culture will ensure yours is a good one. It will pay dividends. You’ll earn the priceless word-of-mouth marketing your product deserves. What’s more? You may even turn your customers into brand advocates!
6. You’ll increase customer retention
In addition to giving you free publicity by word-of-mouth and great reviews, your company’s customer service culture will benefit you in another important way—customer retention. When you consider that it can cost up to five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one, It’s easy to see why customer retention is the holy grail of B2B SaaS companies. So, surely it makes sense to keep your customers happy? The more satisfied and successful your customers are, the more likely they will want to stay happy with your product. Without them you have nothing, so why wouldn’t you prioritize their satisfaction?
If you don’t, there’s a chance your customers will leave for a company that puts more weight on customer service. By making customer service one of your core values, you’ll give them a reason to stay when they realize your employees’ genuine interest in their satisfaction.
Ultimately, without great customer service, you’ll have a hard time keeping, or acquiring new customers.
7. It’s easier to evaluate employee performance
Placing quality customer satisfaction skills at the top of your list of priorities makes it easier to evaluate employee performance and success. Ask employees how their work benefits the customer and gauge their success off it. It’ll create a more informed culture surrounding company goals and the meaning behind them.
Get your employees excited about customer service by rewarding them when they do work that greatly benefits the customer. This way everyone benefits—employees and customers alike.
8.Your employees will stay with you
This one should go without saying at this point—if your employees catch on to your customer service mentality and the success it brings to your company, they’ll want to stay longer. Who wouldn’t want to work for a customer service-oriented business that promotes empathy, gets high ratings and retains their customers? Not to mention the flip side—if employees see that your company lacks a customer service culture or sees your company treating its customers negatively, they may leave.
9.Your business will grow faster
According to Survey Monkey, companies who have a high NPS will grow two times as fast as their competitors. If that doesn’t make you want to provide good customer service, I don’t know what will! Get that NPS score up by promoting a customer-service oriented company culture.
As a customer service-oriented company, it shouldn’t be hard to make a good NPS a company-wide goal that each team can work toward. Just make sure to remind them that the more customers recommend the business, the more new customers there will be, and the quicker the company can grow.
10.You’ll create a customer service community
In the fast-paced world of B2B tech, the mantra “work smarter, not harder” rings in many ears. Creating a customer service community is a great way to do just that, and it all starts with your company’s customer service-oriented culture.
Motivate your employees to engage with your customers beyond the standard feedback form. When you create and maintain a customer service community, you’ll help customers and inform employees. This can take the form of an online community forum or even a space you maintain on social media.
With an online community, not only can you engage with your customers, let them share best practices with each other and create customer advocates on a secure platform—you can drastically reduce pressure on your support teams as customers self-serve by finding answers on your community. Customer service starts with putting the customer first, listening to their needs and engaging with them, all of which is at the core of online communities.
Always remember, the customer’s happiness is the most important because they are the ones paying the bills. They are the whole reason you and your employees are there in the first place. This is as true for B2B companies as it is for B2C organizations. Help yourself and your company and make customer service a pillar of your company culture.
The bottom line is that customers have the power to make or break your business, so having a customer-service company culture should be a no-brainer.
Download 10 Steps to Community Success in B2B Software
Find out the 10 steps needed for a successful B2B customer community.
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