Customer Service Business Plan Template

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. A customer service plan is the policy or contract that is included with the purchase of an item, typically for an additional fee. Using a template to develop the plan can help ensure all important factors have been included in the plan.

How to Create a Customer Service Plan

The first step in creating a customer service plan is to understand the needs and expectations of the customer. A proper service plan should address the client's immediate needs, as well as long-term needs. Considering both will help avoid any future issues for the customer. The next step is to utilize the feedback to create clearly defined steps for executing the service plan.

Advantages of a Customer Service Plan

There are numerous advantages to creating a customer service plan. Several of the advantages include:

  • Increased employee efficiency
  • Higher morale and employee satisfaction
  • Reduced confusion of expectations
  • Minimized stress from misunderstood expectations
  • Maintaining customer satisfaction
  • Competition with other businesses
  • Assessing customer opinions effectively
  • Creating a successful customer strategy

Steps to Create a Customer Service Strategy

1. Create a Customer Service Vision

It's important to begin by understanding the vision and customer service goals of the organization. This information should be communicated to the employees in order to help them provide the best customer service. The business should include all customer-facing employees in training that covers the expectations and company vision.

2. Assess the Customer's Needs

Assessing the needs and expectations is a vital part of business. Misunderstanding the needs of the customer, or blatantly ignoring them, can cause many problems for the business. Some of these problems includes:

  • Wasting valuable resources
  • Not meeting customer expectations
  • Not meeting customer needs
  • Creating unnecessary products or services
  • Loss of sales

There are a few ways to assess customer needs, such as sending out surveys, holding focus groups, or providing customer comment cards. Customer expectations and needs can change quickly and drastically, so it's important to pursue feedback regularly, and assess the results for changes. Using outdated feedback could be just as bad as not collecting feedback at all, or possibly even worse.

3. Hire the Right People

Not everyone has a customer service mindset, so it's important to search for potential employees who have strong customer service skills. Of course some skills can be taught through training and experience, but that's not the case in all situations. To avoid hiring delays or mistakes, the customer service expectations should be clear in the job description and verified during interviews. When going through the hiring process , managers should focus on hiring people of who already have the right skills.

4. Set Customer Service Goals

Understanding the company's goals will help the employee align their efforts with the most important areas. When employees understand how to focus their effort, they will be able to help the company achieve its overall goals . For example, if the company strives to resolve all customer service phone calls within 5 minutes, the employees should be aware of the goal and be held accountable. Creating an environment with recognition of meeting the goal is also a great way to motivate them.

5. Provide Customer Service Training to Employees

Customer service training should outline the expectations and criteria the employees should strive for. Training should be provided for all new employees. In addition, retraining should happen semi-frequently to keep the information fresh for all employees. Training should also be updated as changes are made to the expectations.

6. Hold Employees Accountable

As with providing recognition for success, it is also necessary to hold employees accountable for meeting the expectations. If employees are not meeting goals regularly, they should be notified and actions should be taken to help them achieve the goals effectively.

7. Recognize Employees for Good Service

It's important to provide recognition and feedback to the employees so they understand their situation and performance when it comes to customer service expectations. The frequency of this feedback may vary by business type, but at the very least should be given in a yearly review format.

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The Ultimate Guide to an Awesome Customer Service Strategy

customer service business plan

With more and more brands for potential customers to choose from every day, how can you make sure you stand out from the crowd? A well-thought-out customer service strategy may well be the answer. 

The quality of service you provide can mean the difference between a customer becoming a brand advocate or leaving unhappy to take their business elsewhere. 

To help you to reap the rewards of customer loyalty and improved business performance, we’ve put together this customer service strategy guide.

What is a customer service strategy?

A customer service strategy is a plan of action to deliver the standard of customer care you strive for, including the process and methods used to achieve that level of customer support.

An effective customer service strategy plan focuses on customer happiness and includes specific steps for dealing with customer interactions throughout the customer journey.

The best customer service strategies start with understanding what customers want, need, and expect from your business and then ensure all service and support initiatives, as well as the interactions themselves, align with that.

The benefits of adopting a customer service management strategy

Customer service is an integral part of a broader customer experience approach and strategy . And it needs to be, because 82 percent of consumers are willing to abandon a brand after a negative or rude support experience. 

The good news is that when you do implement successful customer service strategies, they come with a wealth of benefits for your business and your customers. Here are the most prominent.

Consistent customer experiences

Clearly established guidelines for how your support team deals with customer interactions, as well as measurable benchmarks to track the effectiveness of your customer support strategies, help ensure consistent service across the whole customer journey — regardless of the channels or team members involved.

Increased customer satisfaction

When agents have a customer support strategy to refer to and concrete processes to follow, they can solve customer issues faster without having to reinvent the wheel each time. 

And that’s crucial, because efficient service is a prerequisite to satisfaction when it comes to customer support — 27 percent of customers point to lack of effectiveness, with an additional 13 percent citing lack of speed, as the most common cause of customer service frustration.

Enhanced customer loyalty

Developing practical strategies to improve customer service quality leads to increased engagement and higher levels of trust in your brand. In turn, that means more customers who are happy using your product or service and a loyal customer following. 

In time, these loyal customers may even become brand advocates — 59 percent of which are willing to refer a brand to their friends and family, driving up your revenue.

WHITEPAPERThe Ultimate Guide to Customer Support

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customer service business plan

How to create a customer service strategy

Every business’ customer base and needs are different. So, there’s no single customer service strategy template that works for every brand. But, there are common elements of customer service strategy that will increase your chances of achieving success. 

Here, we’ll explore some of those key factors along with customer service strategy examples.

1. Define your vision for customer service

Your vision is an overarching principle that sets the tone for the experiences your customers have with your brand and the lasting impressions you want these interactions to create. Company leaders put this together based on the organization’s goals, values, and mission. It’s usually expressed in the form of a statement for the sake of clarity.

For L. L. Bean, the outdoor clothing and retail company, this means to “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings and they will always come back for more.”

2. Promote a customer-centric company culture

Quality customer service means putting customer expectations and needs at the heart of everything you do. 

From the top-down, every employee should understand your customer support goals and how they can contribute towards them.

Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert and Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations, says, “A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees.”

Unifying under the same vision is an important factor in this, helping remove silos and encouraging the kind of cross-department communication and collaboration required to achieve better customer service and support.

To reinforce a customer-focused mindset across your organization, make use of rewards, incentives, and recognition for employees who embody customer-first principles in their work. For example, you can give these employees bonuses or shout-outs through company-wide email or social media.

3. Create a customer journey map

Successful customer service improvement strategies hinge on a deep understanding of your customer journey. The best way to achieve that is by creating a customer journey map that outlines all the interactions and touchpoints your customers will encounter. 

You can start with a general customer journey map template and add details from stakeholder interviews, customer feedback, data, and first-hand purchasing experiences to fill in the specific customer touchpoints, emotions, and points of friction.

With this holistic view of the customer journey in place, you can identify processes to simplify, opportunities for automation , or pain points to address for improved customer engagement .

As an example, if this exercise shows that customers are constantly having the same product issue after purchase, you can proactively reach out to new customers with a solution before they even contact you.

4. Set measurable customer service goals

To make sure your service strategy hits the right marks, you want to set objectives that allow you to track progress. This way, you can see where and how to adjust and optimize your approach.

Some metrics you can use include:

  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). CSAT can gauge how your customers feel at multiple points in their journey and help you pinpoint where any issues are occurring. It can be particularly useful after customer support interactions. Use a customer satisfaction survey to gather this type of data.
  • Net promoter score (NPS). NPS asks customers to rate the likeliness of recommending your company to a friend, effectively measuring customer loyalty. This can alert you to emerging trends in customer sentiment.
  • Customer effort score (CES). CES gives you insight into the customer experience by measuring the difficulty level of using your product or service.

If you want to improve your customer service strategy using these metrics, set specific goals to improve by a certain amount each quarter and regularly check to see if you’re on track to meet those goals. 

5. Build your customer service team

A high-performing customer support team starts with hiring the right team members. 

So, when hiring, make sure to look for the appropriate skills and personality that will help deliver positive customer service interactions . 

Proper onboarding and training are also extremely important. The idea is to prepare team members to successfully meet the everyday challenges they will face in customer service and support exchanges. It’s also crucial the team understands your standards and processes, how they fit into the organization’s bigger picture, and the customer expectations they need to meet. 

Developing your team is a continual process and will require managing their performance, providing feedback, and honing skills to support their success over time. 

For instance, you can hold quarterly training to review the team’s progress, trends in customer support, common issues to troubleshoot, and approach and process updates. Activities such as role play scenarios can also be used to sharpen their communication skills.

6. Use the right tools

Today, there are plenty of tools out there offering the kind of features and capabilities that make streamlined customer support more achievable than ever. 

Live chat offers ready service with support agents at the click of a button. And in other support situations that require more of a visual or interactive element, video chat and cobrowsing can make for easier communication and faster resolutions. 

Sometimes, though, customers want to be able to find their own answers. This is where self-service customer support comes in. One increasingly popular method is through the use of chatbots to provide automated customer support for common issues around the clock. But you can offer self-service through a number of other channels too, such as help centers, knowledge bases, FAQs and how-to videos and tutorials. 

The biggest gain comes from bringing all this functionality together in a single platform. That way you can manage all your requests, automate workflows, and collect insights through feedback and analytics in one centralized space. 

Unifying your interactions and customer data in this way gives agents context — including customer history, preferences, and previous interactions — meaning all interactions can be stitched together into one continuous omnichannel conversational experience.

7. Empower your customer service agents

Giving your customer support team scope to take action based on their reading of a situation can really help personalize customer service. To facilitate this, set up policies and processes that increase agency and accountability. For example, agents could be given the power to offer bespoke solutions, such as discounts and bonus offers, or granted flexibility with returns and exchanges. 

Simplifying the approval processes agents have to go through to address customer issues may also help smoothen things. So, when a customer calls about a product or service complaint, reps can issue them a refund and a discount on their next purchase on the spot. 

8. Take advantage of feedback

Customer feedback is an invaluable source of information for improving your business, products, and services. There are a number of different places you can turn to — comments and suggestions from surveys, polls, as well as other places like social media and review websites, for example. 

Another source of feedback that is sometimes overlooked is your own customer service team. They’re perfectly placed to see any potential issues and areas to improve — they spend their whole time on the front line communicating with customers, after all.

Once you’ve gathered this information, use it to identify where you can refine your customer service strategy. And make sure to communicate feedback to your team as well — especially when it’s positive. 

Feedback is also a great opportunity to nurture customer relationships. Thank your customers for positive feedback and propose solutions to address any negative comments. In doing so, current and potential customers can see that you truly value them. This type of engagement, particularly on social media, has become a growing trend in customer service .

Customer service strategy is a marathon, not a sprint

When putting together your service strategy, it’s important you take into account the long term.

And that’s because, with time, your business and customers’ needs and expectations will naturally evolve, so your approach to customer support will have to as well. 

Whatever those changes may bring, though, there’s one thing that should always remain the same — keeping customers front and center of everything you do.

Related Articles

How to Create a Customer Service Plan

Digital library > defining and serving a market > customer service, “how to create a customer service plan”.

The fight for market share grows ever fiercer. How can you win and keep customers when the price wars never end? Provide better service! To do it most effectively, you’ll need a plan.

What is Customer Service?

"As the Interactive Age arrives, every enterprise will have to learn how to treat different customers differently." — Enterprise One To One , by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (Currency Doubleday, 1997).

How does your company meet a customer’s needs?

If you started a business 10 years ago, you’d probably give an indirect answer. You might say that by gaining market share and managing sales and distribution, you could satisfy your customers. If buyers’ needs were met, your business would presumably grow and prosper.

Today, however, meeting the needs and expectations of customers requires that you know your customers — as individuals. That means consistently collecting their input, removing barriers to communicate with them, and taking steps to foster a long-term relationship with them rather than just a limited, transactional one. If potential customers grow overwhelmed, confused, or simply can’t find what they want, your high level of service is the "ace in the hole" that’ll keep them from fleeing.

In creating and evaluating your customer service plan, avoid too much internal analysis. Instead, defer to customers’ perceptions of efficiency, responsiveness, and courtesy. Your own hunches, biases, or interpretations shouldn’t interfere with the unfiltered knowledge that your customers can provide. They are your ultimate judges.

Customer Service as a Competitive Advantage

With even small businesses investing heavily in technology — from database software to Web site development — traditional feature and cost advantages no longer provide a sustainable competitive advantage. More fast-growth companies are focusing on quality of service to distinguish themselves from the rest. They are talking to their customers to determine what’s important to them and how they can further add value. Smart companies now strive to be an extension of their customers, thereby fostering more loyal buyers who’re less apt to change vendors.

Benefits of an Effective Customer Service Initiative

Here’s how you and your business can benefit from a customer service plan:

5 STEPS TO CREATE YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PLAN [ top ]

While there’s no single blueprint for an effective customer service program, here are five steps that you can take:

Step 1: Assess Your Customer Service Quotient

In order to establish an effective customer service plan, you need a starting point. Use this self-assessment to map out your strategy. For each statement, rate your business based on the following scale:

        1—Are you kidding?         2—Hardly ever         3—Sometimes         4—Usually         5—It’s our way of life!

Source: Adapted from Forum Corporation’s Self-Test for a Customer-Driven Company

Now evaluate how well your organization focuses on customer satisfaction. Low scores suggest opportunities for improvement.

Step 2: Understand Your Customers’ Requirements

Sources of Customer Information

Once you launch a business, you might assume you know your customers’ requirements. You figure that your company’s small size lets you stay close to your buyers. But as you grow, you may need to conduct a more thorough analysis. Here’s how to tell:

If you answered no to any of these questions, that shows you may want to gather customer information more aggressively. Here’s where to look:

Surveys and focus groups are popular methods for gathering information on customer needs. Surveys are written questions given to individuals; focus groups are oral questions posed to groups. A broad questionnaire or focus group may give you lots of information, but you need to devise clear objectives from the outset so that you’re ready to act on what you learn.

As you review your internal data, your employees’ input, and the feedback you collect from vendors, identify the top three customer service issues that arise and compare them with the top three questions, comments, or complaints you’ve heard directly from your buyers. Do you find any overlap? Any surprises?

The Best Kind of Data

More is not necessarily better when it comes to customer data, but getting the right information is critical. Seek these elements in the data you measure:

Step 3: Create Your Customer Vision and Service Policies

When a Washington Post reporter returned from the 1999 PhoCusWright conference on the Internet travel business, he wrote about his experience watching a panel of 12 executives who run big online travel sites. When these CEOs were asked to declare his or her company’s "key distinguishing asset," only two of the 12 mentioned something they deliver to customers.

That’s a stark reminder of how few Internet executives understand and appreciate the role of the customer. An effective customer service plan must be built on a customer-centered vision for your company.

A vision consists of a vivid picture of an ambitious, desirable future state that’s linked to the customer and improves on the status quo in some important way, according to Richard Whiteley, an author and management consultant.

Your vision is what you want your company to become, what you want it "to grow up to be." A client-centered vision takes its direction from the customer and performs two critical functions:

When you craft a vision that spells out what the company seeks to become, you guide all your employees to make better decisions. After all, an employee who knows where the business is headed will probably make more effective decisions that reinforce that goal.

How do you create a vision? It’s easy. Vision statements need not be elaborate. Two examples:

Keep your vision concise. The shorter, the better. That helps you reduce the odds of misunderstanding. In their startup excitement, many entrepreneurs mistakenly write wordy paragraphs that run so long, no one really knows what the vision really means.

When creating a vision, you must decide how you want your company to evolve over time. Use this exercise to "see" the future:

  Customer-friendly Policies

Clear, straightforward customer-friendly policies should accompany your vision. While some bigger, bureaucratic companies use their policies as a weapon ("I’m sorry, Mr. Customer, but that’s our rule"), entrepreneurial firms can and should show more flexibility to please buyers.

Some well-intentioned entrepreneurs fall into the trap of adopting policies that clash with customer needs and expectations. If you left a job at a large organization, for example, you may enact certain rules or safeguards in your new business because "that’s the way I’ve done it before."

Take an inventory of your company’s policies. Do they facilitate customer satisfaction or do they only erect barriers and cause customer frustration? If you’re having difficulty identifying these "unfriendly" policies, review your customers’ comments and complaints.

A quick scan of the feedback will direct you to some of the most troublesome policies. Reassess whether such rules are necessary. What would happen if you eliminated such policies? As long as such a move wouldn’t jeopardize legal compliance or cause some other severe problem, then toss it out!

In some cases, you’ll discover some necessary policies that your customers may not like, but that you’re legally bound to keep in force. You can’t do much about these except make them as "friendly" as possible. For instance, if you’re cleaning health-care facilities, and your insurance company restricts you from disposing of certain medical wastes, let your customers know.

At the same time, investigate if there’s a compromise you can make, such as disposing of the waste once it has been properly contained.

Meanwhile, keep your "friendly" necessary policies and strengthen them, if possible. Use customer-friendly policies as a competitive edge to retain your current customers and attract new ones.

Step 4: Deal Effectively With Your Customers

Once you’ve established your customer-centered vision and created customer-friendly policies, you’re ready to sharpen your skills in dealing with your customers. These skills can be segregated into two areas: communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Communication Skills

How you communicate to your customers is just as important as what you say. Follow these guidelines:

Every time a customer interacts with your company, the message should be consistent: you want to provide top service. If a customer calls and gets lost responding to dozens of touch-tone commands (think of the I.R.S. help line), you must simplify the system. Testing a customer’s patience gives them a reason to leave and never return.

It all begins with the proper mind-set: A customer-focused organization is not in business to deliver a product or service, but to enable people to enjoy the benefits of its product or service. A temporary employment agency is in business not to fill job vacancies with temporary personnel, but to help their customers enjoy the benefits that their service provides — immediate placement of highly-skilled individuals. It’s a subtle but vital difference.

Here are some questions you can ask customers to show your eagerness to help:

To ensure you communicate effectively with customers, list three specific steps you and your employees can take to improve in each of these areas:

Build rapport with customers:

Show appreciation:

Seek ways to help customers:

Listen attentively:

Establish a long-term relationship:

Problem-solving Skills

Your customer service plan should include guidelines for your employees to problem-solve. When you take responsibility for a snafu, you can turn a negative customer into a raving fan. Studies show that if a problem is resolved quickly, 98 percent of your customers will buy again and even tell others of their positive experience.

But the longer the problem drags on, the more frustrated a customer becomes. So how do you address problems quickly? Use this four-step process:

Gather the facts. Let the customer speak without interrupting. Listen without getting defensive. Repeat your understanding of the problem to ensure you’ve got it right. Examples:

After you understand the problem, you’re ready to identify what triggered it. First, find out what actions the customer took. Then review with the customer what should have happened had everything run smoothly. Conclude by isolating what went wrong.

Before you suggest possible solutions, ask your customer for ideas. You may learn exactly what you need to do to fix everything. Agree on a course of action by hashing out options and working together to finalize the best one.

Step 5: Educate Your Staff

Now that you’ve learned to assess your customer service quotient, understand your customers’ requirements, create a customer-centered vision, and communicate well with customers, you need to educate your staff on how to carry out your customer service plan.

This involves two steps: communicate and train.

Don’t make this the only time that you talk to your staff about the importance of customers. Work it into your everyday management of the business.

THE FINAL PIECE OF YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PLAN [ top ]

When finalizing your plan, step into your customer’s shoes. Imagine what it’s like for a buyer who does business with your company.

Like an airline pilot preparing for take off, create a checklist so that you can confirm you’re ready to "fly right" and provide the kind of positive experience that will please your customers.

Here’s an example:

RESOURCES [ top ]

Sprint’s Customer Service Plan Pro software walks you through the steps to create a customer service plan.

Market-Based Management: Strategies for Growing Customer Value and Profitability , 3rd edition, by Roger J. Best. (Prentice Hall, 2002).

What Customers Value Most: How to Achieve Business Transformation by Focusing on Processes That Touch Your Customers by Stanley A. Brown. (John Wiley & Sons, 1996).

Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. (Doubleday, 1999).

Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet & Beyond by Patricia B. Seybold. (Times Books, 1998).

The Customer Driven Company: Moving from Talk to Action by Richard C. Whiteley. (Perseus, 2000).

Best Practices in Customer Service by Ron Zemke and John A. Woods. (AMACOM, 1999).

--> Web sites

" Developing Effective Customer Access Strategy ," by Brad Cleveland. Customer Interface 15:10 (November-December, 2002), 16+.

" Make No Mistake? " by Michael Schrage. Fortune 144:13 (December 24, 2001), 184.

" Cleaning Up the Customer Experience with Online Knowledge Bases ," by Ramesh Jayaraman and Rohit Kumar. Customer Inter@ction Solutions 20:4 (October 2001), 28.

" Tough Customers ," by Chris Penttila. Entrepreneur 29:5 (May 2001), 94-97.

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The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Customer Service

Jesse Short

With access to fewer resources and generally leaner teams, small businesses need to be more creative and tactful in their approach to customer service.

That's not to say they can’t provide a top-notch experience — they absolutely can. They just need to be a little more focused with their efforts.

In this guide, we cover some common topics surrounding small business customer service and provide some insights gained from our years of working in support — as well as insights from small business leaders who’ve created great customer service programs of their own.

Armed with those insights and learnings, you should be able to get started on — or refine — your own customer service program to start delivering consistently exceptional support.

The importance of customer service for small businesses

We all know that customer service is important, but if asked exactly why, we might struggle to come up with an articulate answer. But without a strong answer to the question, investing in customer service could be a tough sell, both internally and externally.

So why exactly is customer service important for small businesses? There are three main reasons:

It helps attract and retain customers.

It increases the lifetime value of customers.

It delivers insights that improve your product, marketing, and/or service.

Happy customers don’t tend to take their business elsewhere. And though there are a number of things that could cause a customer to become unhappy, a poor customer service experience seems to be the worst offender.

Research shows that a customer is four times more likely to switch to a competitor if their issue is service related, as opposed to product or price related. Conversely, 86% of consumers say a good customer experience can turn them from a one-time buyer to a loyal customer.

Loyal customers help you grow your business in a number of ways:

They’re around four times more likely to buy from you than a new customer.

They tend to spend more money than new customers.

They're a great source of referrals, which continue to be the highest converting cohort for most businesses.

Customer service is also important for small businesses because it opens a direct line of communication with customers. Those conversations can lead to product breakthroughs and insights — or even reveal a new customer segment you didn’t know existed.

For example, did you know Rogaine was originally created to help lower blood pressure? However, through customer feedback, they found out about a prominent side-effect: hair regrowth.

Though that level of insight isn’t the norm, learning how people use your products and services can help improve your efforts in many ways — down to how you position your product in the market and who you sell it to.

Recommended Reading

6 Proven Strategies for Building a Customer-Centric Company

6 Proven Strategies for Building a Customer-Centric Company

5 strategies and 13 tips for small business customer service.

In order to better understand how customer service acts as a competitive advantage, we reached out to three different small business leaders to get their insights. They offered advice, told stories, and revealed challenges they’ve faced along the way.

Though you may be in a different line of business than those interviewed, we’re confident the insights they shared can benefit any team. Below we share some of the big ideas from those interviews and show some real-world examples of how they look in action.

Strategy #1: Do what the incumbent can’t (or won’t)

As a small business, sometimes it’s easy to look at what larger competitors in your space are doing and try to mimic them. Though that’s needed on some level, matching them one-to-one with far fewer resources is quite the difficult task. However, there’s another side to the coin.

As a small business, you actually have some advantages over larger companies. Instead of trying to simply keep up, you should double-down on the things larger companies can’t do to get ahead. Here are a couple of examples that the small business leaders we interviewed shared.

Tip #1: Don’t worry if it doesn’t scale

At Workshop — a tool built to improve company culture through open and efficient internal communication — Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer Derek Homann is focused on using customer service as a differentiator.

One example he shared was solving a customer issue quickly, even though it was outside of standard working hours.

“The other night, a customer messaged me on Slack about a bug while I was at dinner. She told me not to worry about it and that it could wait until the next day. Instead of waiting, I contacted our CTO, and we did a rollback right away and solved the issue in 10 minutes.”

He admits it’s not something they’ll be able to do forever, but he knows how much of an impression it can make: “The issue could’ve waited, but when we do it right away, it has an impact.”

And the extra effort they put in is already paying dividends, “That customer has been a great source of referrals for us, and one thing she always mentions is how impressed with the service she is.”

9 Guiding Principles for Doing Startup Customer Service Well

9 Guiding Principles for Doing Startup Customer Service Well

Tip #2: let customers see behind the curtain.

Sometimes businesses are hesitant to commit to exact timelines — especially larger ones. And there’s some pragmatism for that: Issues come up, and deadlines get pushed. However, that can be a pretty frustrating experience for a customer.

At Fruitful Design & Strategy — an Omaha-based marketing agency — they do the exact opposite. Instead of being opaque about where they’re at on a project, they’re incredibly transparent. Ben Lueders, Co-founder and Lead Designer, explained their approach:

“Our first project manager — my wife Megan — started this really great thing we still do called 'The Monday Email.' In it, we tell the client what we worked on last week, what we’re working on in the upcoming week, and let them know if there’s anything we need from them.”

By doing so, they’re able to continually set expectations and keep customers in the loop: “We might be working hard on their project, but if they don’t know, then it doesn’t matter. It was our way to be proactive, keep people calm, and lead them in conversation.”

How to Get Started Delivering Proactive Customer Service

How to Get Started Delivering Proactive Customer Service

Strategy #2: invest in customer service early.

There’s a lot of focus on getting customers — but not always so much on keeping them. It’s a similar case with customer service. Most business owners know it’s important, but it’s not always one of the earliest functions people invest in.

However, when you dive into the data, it starts to become very clear just how important customer service is to any business’s success. Below are three ways you can get started with customer service early and set yourself up for success for the long term.

Tip #3: Decide which channels you’re going to actively cover

If you’ve looked at a couple different “customer support best practice” lists, you’ve probably seen the suggestion to “meet your customers where they are.”

In theory, it’s great advice. But in practice, it’s not always pragmatic. “At my previous company, we almost made ourselves too available," Homann says. "We wanted it to be really easy to contact us, but it wasn’t really possible to cover all the different channels equally."

Thinking back on that experience, Homann decided the Workshop team would clearly define where they talked to customers to ensure a consistent experience: “By focusing on a few channels, we’re able to create the best experience possible.”

The channels you cover are generally a reflection of your business and the resources available to you. If you want a little more guidance on the subject, check out this article on creating a multichannel customer support strategy .

Managing Social Media Customer Service: Strategies and Tips

Managing Social Media Customer Service: Strategies and Tips

Tip #4: create self-service content asap.

While deciding on which channels they were going to actively support took some consideration, the Workshop team knew they wanted to invest in self-service from day one: “We decided to have support documentation ready for launch,” said Homann.

It’s for good reason. Self-service options are quickly becoming the preferred support method for many customers, and they also help out your team. Self-service tools regularly reduce support volumes, letting your team focus on more complex issues and out-of-the-queue projects.

Homann suggests that for any new feature, product, or service, creating help documentation needs to be part of the pre-launch checklist. And self-service content shouldn’t be static. After making the content, review it every 6-12 months to ensure the information is up to date and as relevant as possible.

The Ultimate Guide to Knowledge Base Management

The Ultimate Guide to Knowledge Base Management

Tip #5: have some structure in place, even if it’s basic.

Keeping track of customer conversations and resolving issues is tough to do if you’re not organized in some way. Customers may get multiple responses or, worse, no response at all. It becomes very easy for things to slip through the cracks if someone’s not actively managing it.

First, someone needs to be the main owner for customer service. That’s not to say others don’t need to chip in — they absolutely do — but there should be someone steering the ship.

Second, you should invest in a customer service tool to help make things less hectic. For example, with Help Scout , you can manage customer conversations in one central place using the shared inbox tool.

Using workflows , you can automate certain manual tasks to make your team more efficient and provide an even higher level of service to customers. You’re also able to create and manage a knowledge base using Docs .

Lastly, you need to set some sort of metrics (more on that below) to measure performance and set standards for service. You don’t need to share them publicly, but they should be clearly stated internally.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

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Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Strategy #3: Involve the whole company

Though someone does need to be the owner and driver, good customer service should be the responsibility of the entire company. How that looks will vary based on your makeup and what people have capacity for, but there should be some way to get everyone involved.

If you’re looking for some inspiration on how to involve everyone in your customer service efforts, check out the two tips below.

Tip #6: Encourage ride-alongs

If you’ve ever worked in sales, you may be familiar with the idea of a ride-along. Basically, it’s where someone shadows a rep while they’re on a sales call. Sometimes it’s another salesperson — usually for training purposes — but other times it’s someone outside of sales.

The customer service equivalent could work a few different ways. If you do calls, then you could simply have someone sit in on the call just as they do with sales. You could also do a screenshare where someone else is able to see a rep responding to email and chat conversations.

In either case, what it’s meant to do is get the non-support person thinking about support issues. For example, you could have someone from the product team do one to get a better understanding of what issues customers are facing using the product.

Or you might want someone from marketing to shadow a rep for a day to better understand how people are actually using the product. Those insights can provide valuable information to make messaging as relevant as possible.

Above all, what ride-alongs do is allow people from multiple teams to connect and gain a better understanding of what customer service actually entails.

Tip #7: Have all-hands days

If you’re looking for people outside support to play a more active role than a ride-along, then you might want to consider some sort of whole company support . It’s actually something we do here at Help Scout.

Over the years, whole company support has changed some to best align with business needs. Initially, everyone regularly spent some time in the queue. But that evolved over time, and the current iteration is having all-hands days.

Once a month, there are a couple of days with two-hour blocks where people in the company can sign up to work in the customer service queue. While they’re logged in, they can grab whatever customer conversations they like and respond to them.

If someone isn’t confident about a response, they can ping our support team in a dedicated Slack channel to review the response and give feedback as needed. Once it has support’s stamp of approval, they can send it along.

At Workshop, they take a similar approach, just a little less structured: “Technically, on paper, I’m the only one in support right now, but people from engineering, design, and product all pitch in. It’s definitely a shared responsibility,” said Homann.

Doing all-hands support days not only provides some much-appreciated help for your support team, it also helps non-support folks connect with your customers and get a better understanding of your product or services.

Tip #8: Report on customer service metrics at company meetings

In journalism school, they teach you that the power of the press isn’t telling people what to think; rather, it's telling people what to think about. Though leaders may not be cognizant of it, on some level what they choose to talk about publicly also signals what’s important.

Since customer service teams tend to work behind the scenes, it’s not always the most visible business unit in the company. So if no one is talking about customer service on a larger company stage, it could seem less important than other business functions.

One way to remedy that is to shine a light on it, and company meetings are a great forum to do just that. By putting customer service stats like CSAT or NPS front and center with other high-level metrics like revenue or customer growth, it can signal just how important they are.

Another useful tool to put customer service in the spotlight is through a voice of the customer (VoC) report . A VoC report highlights the general sentiment among customers. Though a VoC isn’t completely metrics-focused, it is another way to show the company’s overall commitment to customer service.

11 Key Customer Service Metrics + 4 Real Example Reports

11 Key Customer Service Metrics + 4 Real Example Reports

Strategy #4: audit your efforts.

In a sense, metrics act a lot like a map for your team. They can tell where you are currently and provide some insight into how to get where you want to go. If you’re not measuring performance in any way, that’s an incredibly difficult task.

Being aware of where you’re succeeding and where you have room for improvement can serve you well in a multitude of ways. Below are three suggestions to help you get started.

Tip #9: Decide on baseline metrics and measure against them regularly

As they say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The same is true with metrics. There are lots to choose from, and which ones you focus on are somewhat dependent on your specific team.

Homann suggests posing this question to yourself: “What are the things that actually create a great customer experience?” After answering that question, you can start to decide what you want to track.

As Homann put it, “You need to quantify, on some level, what makes good service so as you grow, you’re able to track it and know whether you’re meeting your standards.”

For example, if you prioritize speed, then you might track first response time . You could also look at time to resolution , which is a measure of how long it takes for an issue to be completely resolved for a customer.

To have a better grasp on overall satisfaction, you might look to things like CSAT, CES , or NPS. All measure customer sentiment, though they do each have their own nuances.

After you decide on what metrics you’ll track, set a regular cadence to check in on performance. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly are pretty standard intervals.

That said, you do need to be careful to not “miss the forest for the trees,” meaning you should look for trends over a longer period and not worry too much about short-term changes.

4 Meaningful Customer Satisfaction Metrics, Compared

4 Meaningful Customer Satisfaction Metrics, Compared

Tip #10: be very honest about what’s working and what isn’t.

Customer service requires some amount of trial and error. Some stuff you do will work, and some stuff won’t. And that’s okay. But what you want to limit is how much energy you spend on things that don’t work.

Regularly reviewing projects, practices, and procedures is the first step in the process. But you also need to have a way to evaluate how effective something is. Putting together a basic scorecard can be useful to help you be more objective when measuring.

Include things like overall effort, impact, and cost. Each of those measurements is somewhat subjective, but they do provide a baseline to start a conversation. Also, by not being too strict, you give yourself some amount of flexibility.

It’s also important to recognize that how well something works exists on a continuum. As Homann pointed out, “There are some things we’re doing now that we might not be able to do 12 months from now.”

If you find something isn't working for your team, don’t hesitate to move on from it ASAP. Research shows we have a tendency to sink even more resources into something that’s not working to try and improve it — it’s called the “ sunk cost fallacy ” — but that’s almost always a mistake.

Admitting something isn’t working can be uncomfortable. If you struggle with that, try framing each new project or initiative as an experiment. By putting the focus on learning and not on an outcome from the start, you can limit pressure to succeed and make adjusting, or totally moving on, feel like less of an issue.

Foundations of Great Service

Discover the tools and techniques used by high-performing customer service organizations in our free, six-part video course.

Foundations of Great Service

Tip #11: Update when possible

As Help Scout CEO and Co-founder Nick Francis says, “Crafting an experience comes down to two things: the product and the service. You can make the best product in the world, but if you fall down on the service aspect, it’s not a good experience.”

As any business owner knows, customer expectations are a moving target. Take restaurants, for example. Just two years ago it seemed like only chains and larger restaurants offered online ordering. Now, even small mom-and-pop places offer it because that’s what’s required to compete.

Though we don’t always think about customer service as a competitive differentiator, it is. Francis pointed out, “Generally, there are still a lot of businesses that think of customer support as a cost center. That perspective is outdated. It’s really a growth engine.”

In fact, 67% of churn is avoidable if a customer’s issue is resolved in the first interaction. So just like any other aspect of your business, as you grow and have more available resources, you need to invest more into customer service and the overall customer experience.

There isn’t one right answer for every team on what the next step is to continue evolving their customer support. That said, a few common ways are improving self-service options, expanding coverage, or offering new channels through which customers can contact support.

The best thing you can do when deciding on a new initiative is to listen to your customers. Chances are there’s something they’ve been asking for. And if they’re not telling you verbally, looking at different metrics and data can help signal where you have the most opportunity to grow.

The Business Case for Support-Driven Growth

The Business Case for Support-Driven Growth

Strategy #5: listen to your support team.

If your marketing team talked to customers on a daily basis, heard how they were using your product, and learned about the challenges they face and successes they’ve had, you’d feel pretty confident in their ability to speak for that group, right?

Though the scenario described above is far from normal for a marketing team, it’s routine for customer service. So why wouldn’t you ask for their insights when making nearly any business decision?

As Francis put it, “Your customer support team is an incredible resource your business can leverage to build better products and do better marketing. To not unlock that resource is a missed opportunity.”

Below are two ways you can take advantage of customer service as a resource.

Tip #12: Give customer support a direct line to leadership

For many support teams, one the biggest challenges they face is simply being heard. Over the past few years, more and more companies have started adding roles like a Chief Customer Officer, which is a great idea — but it’s hardly the norm.

Though it may not be pragmatic to add a high-level position, everyone should be able to open the lines of communication to leadership in some way. For example, here at Help Scout, our VP of Customers, Abigail Phillips, reports directly to our CEO:

“Abigail has a seat at the table and reports directly to me. And it will stay that way as long as I’m around,” said Francis. You could also earmark time in leadership meetings for someone from the support team to share what’s been going on in customer support and success.

Being able to best serve your customers requires you to know what’s going on in their worlds. As Francis says, “You can’t build a product people really love unless you can finish your customers’ sentences.”

You can’t build a product people really love unless you can finish your customers’ sentences.

Without the insights from the people who spend the most time with your customers, it’s an incredibly difficult task to accomplish.

Tip #13: Allow them to influence business decisions

Creating a path for your customer support team to share information with leadership is a great first step. But in reality, that’s what it is: a first step. The next is to actually use the information they bring to affect high-level choices.

“Your customer support team is an incredible resource the business can leverage to build better products and do better marketing," Francis says. "To not unlock that resource is a huge missed opportunity.”

For example, if you’re planning a new marketing campaign, you could share the messaging with the customer support team prior to launching the campaign to get their feedback. Or if your product team is trying to decide on what new feature to build out next, consult your support team to get their input.

Really, it comes down to inclusion and taking the information they bring to the table seriously. Once you commit to doing that, you’ll unlock a whole new world of rich insights and information to help you create a better business.

3 approaches to scaling support for small businesses

Knowing why customer service matters for your small business and having strategies to deliver great service are both incredibly important. That said, in order to put those learnings into action, you need a great team.

But building a solid customer service team is easier said than done. There are a few different ways you can approach building out and scaling your customer service team.

Below we cover three common ways small businesses are scaling their support teams and offer some pros and cons for each approach.

1. In-house customer service

An in-house customer service team is one composed of permanent staff. They may be full-time or part-time employees, but they are directly employed by your business. For lots of small businesses, it’s the most common setup.

Permanent employees are able to get a deep understanding of your products, services, and business. As they continue to build knowledge, they become even more valuable assets to you and your team.

For companies that either have a very complex product or work very closely with a smaller number of clients, in-house staff is usually preferable. They’re able to learn more than outsourced staff generally do, and they provide consistency for customers.

However, permanent staff are generally more expensive because — in most countries — you have to extend benefits and perks beyond their salary. There’s also the cost to find and hire talent, which can be quite expensive.

How to Hire for Customer Service: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Hire for Customer Service: A Step-by-Step Guide

2. outsourced customer service.

Depending on your product and market, it may not always make the most sense to have all your customer service staff be permanent employees, e.g., if you work in a particularly seasonal industry or you’re a small business needing to serve international clients.

In those cases, outsourcing some or all of your customer service work can make a lot of sense. Outsourced staff are generally less expensive than permanent staff since you don’t have to extend them additional benefits.

Working with an outsourcer also means you don’t have to spend time and money on hiring since they already have people in place.

That said, there are some potential cons. For example, if you get lots of very technical requests, outsourced staff may not be able to handle those conversations since they generally have less training.

There’s also the possibility that outsourced staff you hire handle conversations for multiple clients, meaning they could have their focus split. It’s not always the case, but it’s a good question to ask when interviewing a potential outsourcer you’re thinking of partnering with.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Outsource Customer Support

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Outsource Customer Support

3. hybrid customer service.

Sometimes in-house and outsourced customer service are presented almost as a binary, as if you have to choose one over the other. However, that’s not the case. There are many teams that utilize both together to create an ideal situation.

In those circumstances, they usually have a core staff of permanent employees and work with an outsourcer to cover any areas outside the core staff’s purview. For example, you might use outsourced staff to answer more basic requests so core staff can focus more on complex issues.

Or perhaps you’re based in one country and looking to increase support coverage. With outsourced staff, you don’t have to worry about international hiring laws since you’re not employing staff directly.

How to Scale Customer Support Without Compromising Service

How to Scale Customer Support Without Compromising Service

Successful customer service for the long term.

Providing a great customer experience is a difficult task, but it's one you can absolutely accomplish. If you properly utilize all your available resources, make a plan, and execute on that plan, you’ll set your business and your customers up for success.

Do your best to stay diligent, and update your approach as needed. Remember, customer service isn’t a box you can check off as complete. It’s an ongoing process that will continue to grow and evolve with your business.

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Jesse short.

After spending a few years working as a support agent, Jesse made the switch to writing full-time. He is a Help Scout alum, where he worked to help improve the agent and customer experience.

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Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives

Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives

Running a successful customer service team requires careful planning and strategy. With ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives, you can create a comprehensive roadmap to achieve your customer service goals and ensure exceptional experiences for your customers.

This template empowers you to:

  • Define clear objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your customer service team
  • Develop strategies and tactics to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Outline training and development plans to equip your representatives with the skills they need to excel
  • Streamline and optimize your overall customer service operations

Don't leave your customer service success to chance. Get started with ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives today and take your customer service to the next level.

Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives Benefits

Customer service representatives are the frontline of your business, and having a well-crafted business plan template specifically for them can provide numerous benefits, including:

  • Clearly defining goals and objectives for your customer service team
  • Outlining strategies and tactics to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Identifying areas for training and development to enhance representative skills
  • Streamlining customer service operations for maximum efficiency
  • Ensuring consistency and quality in customer interactions
  • Providing a roadmap for continuous improvement and growth in customer service
  • Helping managers track progress and measure success in achieving customer service goals.

Main Elements of Customer Service Representatives Business Plan Template

ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives is designed to help you effectively plan and manage your customer service operations. Here are the main elements of this template:

Custom Statuses: Keep track of the progress of each task with statuses such as Complete, In Progress, Needs Revision, and To Do, ensuring that every aspect of your customer service plan is accounted for and easily managed.

Custom Fields: Utilize custom fields like Reference, Approved, and Section to add important details to each task, making it easier to categorize, track, and reference specific sections of your business plan.

Custom Views: Gain different perspectives on your customer service business plan with five unique views including Topics, Status, Timeline, Business Plan, and Getting Started Guide. Easily switch between these views to focus on specific aspects of your plan, track progress, and stay organized.

Project Management: Leverage ClickUp's powerful project management features including task dependencies, time tracking, collaboration tools, and integrations to streamline your customer service operations and ensure efficient execution of your business plan.

With ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives, you can effectively plan, manage, and improve your customer service operations, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction and business success.

How To Use Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives

If you're a customer service representative looking to create a business plan, follow these steps to make the most of ClickUp's Business Plan Template:

1. Define your mission and vision

Start by clearly defining your mission and vision for your customer service role. What do you aim to achieve? How do you want customers to perceive your service? Having a clear mission and vision will guide your business plan and help you stay focused on your goals.

Use the Docs feature in ClickUp to write down your mission and vision statements.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, identify your target audience for your customer service efforts. Who are your customers? What are their needs and preferences? Understanding your target audience will allow you to tailor your service to meet their expectations and provide a personalized experience.

Create custom fields in ClickUp to categorize and track information about your target audience.

3. Set customer service goals

Determine specific customer service goals that align with your mission and vision. These goals could include improving response times, increasing customer satisfaction ratings, or reducing customer complaints. Setting clear and measurable goals will help you track your progress and stay motivated.

Use the Goals feature in ClickUp to set and track your customer service goals.

4. Develop strategies and action plans

Once you have your goals in place, it's time to develop strategies and action plans to achieve them. Identify the key initiatives, processes, and resources needed to deliver exceptional customer service. Break down these initiatives into actionable steps and assign responsibilities to team members.

Use the Tasks feature in ClickUp to create and assign tasks for each initiative and action plan.

5. Monitor, measure, and adapt

Regularly monitor and measure your customer service performance to ensure that you're on track to meet your goals. Use metrics such as customer satisfaction ratings, response times, and resolution rates to evaluate your performance. If you identify areas for improvement, be willing to adapt your strategies and action plans accordingly.

Use the Dashboards feature in ClickUp to visualize and track your customer service metrics.

By following these steps and utilizing ClickUp's Business Plan Template, you'll be able to develop a comprehensive plan for delivering excellent customer service and achieving your customer service goals.

Get Started with ClickUp’s Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives

Customer service managers or business owners can use the ClickUp Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives to create a comprehensive plan for their customer service operations.

First, hit “Add Template” to sign up for ClickUp and add the template to your Workspace. Make sure you designate which Space or location in your Workspace you’d like this template applied.

Next, invite relevant members or guests to your Workspace to start collaborating.

Now you can take advantage of the full potential of this template to create an effective customer service plan:

  • Use the Topics View to organize different sections of your business plan, such as goals, strategies, and tactics
  • The Status View will help you track the progress of each task, with statuses like Complete, In Progress, Needs Revision, and To Do
  • The Timeline View will give you a visual representation of your plan, allowing you to set deadlines and milestones
  • Use the Business Plan View to get a holistic overview of your entire customer service plan
  • The Getting Started Guide View will provide a step-by-step guide for implementing your plan
  • Customize the Reference, Approved, and Section custom fields to add additional information and categorize tasks
  • Update statuses and custom fields as you work through your plan to keep everyone informed of progress
  • Monitor and analyze tasks to ensure maximum productivity and success in your customer service operations.
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  • Business Plan Template for Press Agents
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Sales | How To

5 Steps for Creating a Customer Service Strategy (+ Worksheet)

Published June 14, 2022

Published Jun 14, 2022

Jess Pingrey

REVIEWED BY: Jess Pingrey

Jillian Ilao

WRITTEN BY: Jillian Ilao

This article is part of a larger series on Customer Service .

A customer service strategy is an organization’s blueprint to provide customers with excellent and sufficient customer care—from pre-purchase to after-sales communication. Successful implementation of a customer service strategy entails setting goals on what you want to achieve and putting a customer service team in place. It also includes identifying your communication touchpoints, selecting your customer service tool, and evaluating your servicing quality.

Free Customer Service Strategy Worksheet

When you’re developing your customer service strategy, download our free worksheet and use it to take notes while you follow these six steps. It will help you list out the considerations and requirements to craft a sound plan, such as identifying your goals and objectives, choosing potential customer service team members, determining communication touchpoints, and selecting the best customer service software for your business.

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Download our free CRM strategy worksheet

Free CRM strategy worksheet template

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In this guide, we break down the five essential steps of how to craft a sound customer support strategy.

1. Set Goals & Objectives for Your Customer Service Strategy

A crucial first step in creating your customer service strategy is deciding what you want to achieve with your service efforts. While the overall objective of maintaining excellent customer service is to improve your relationship with your customers and increase retention, there are specific areas you need to identify. Understanding these areas helps you determine your success metrics and continuously improve your servicing quality.

Below are goals and corresponding plans of action that you can aim to achieve with your servicing activities:

Pro tip: It’s important to set SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This way, you ensure you create a customer strategy that is not open-ended, but rather something that will yield results you can evaluate to determine your success.

2. Build & Train Your Customer Service Team

Providing quality customer service entails effort and dedication. In most cases, you need a dedicated customer service team, unless you run a micro-business that only processes a small volume of customer tickets.

The size of your customer service team largely depends on the size of your business. Small businesses may only need one or two agents who report to a customer service manager. They might wear different hats within the organization. For larger businesses, a full-service department may be necessary to satisfy customer expectations. Regardless of your size, the sufficiency of team members ensures you can properly process all tickets in a timely manner.

Below are some of the most common members of a customer service team for small businesses:

  • Customer service agents: Your customer service team’s frontline and the ones dealing with customers and working on case resolutions.
  • Customer service manager: Oversees a team of agents and is typically responsible for training them; steps in when cases need to be escalated to someone with seniority.
  • Technical support agents: Agents with a more technical role, such as troubleshooting or diagnosing customer issues.
  • Customer success manager: Establishes long-term relationships with customers by rolling out activities that nurture your relationship with them.
  • Customer experience manager: Oversees customer service touchpoints and comes up with solutions on how to improve customers’ experience every time they interact with your company.

3. Identify Your Customer Service Touchpoints & Select Your Service Software

After determining your objectives, as well as the team members who will make up your team, determine which channels you want to communicate with your customers. Factors to consider when identifying your customer service touchpoints include the size of your team, their familiarity with using each tool, and your budget.

While it is ideal to have an omnichannel approach to help customers easily reach you on any platform, be mindful of your bandwidth and only activate channels you can maintain. For example, if you only have two members on your team who can work on customer service tickets, only choose one to two channels, like email or live chat. It’s not advisable to also activate a social media messenger if you won’t be able to check it and respond to customers regularly.

Below, we list the most common channels you can use:

  • Help desk and ticketing: Centralizes and collates all customer queries in one place. After an official ticket is raised, an agent can follow up with the customer to resolve the issue.
  • Live chat: Enables customers to get assistance in real time by starting a conversation through a live chat widget. This also allows agents to provide immediate assistance to customers by pulling the required information.
  • Chatbots: Similar to live chat but are run by chat robots. Chatbots simulate human conversations by answering common questions to reduce human interaction with agents. Response workflows are usually designed to lead customers to information or answers they need.
  • Shared inboxes: Helps expedite case resolutions as multiple team members have access to a shared inbox. When an email comes in, any readily available agent can respond. Email templates are also available for canned responses.
  • Social media messengers: In our digital age, many customers automatically search for a business or a brand’s social media page before their actual website. The most common channels are Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
  • In-app phone: Allows agents to make calls straight from their desktop while having access to all pertinent customer information, such as purchase history and personal profile.
  • Customer relationship management (CRM) software: Some of the top CRM solutions , such as HubSpot CRM and Freshsales , offer customer service communication channels, including an in-app phone, email, live chat, and chatbots.

Here are some samples of what these tools look like in actual customer service tools:

Zoho TeamInbox feature

A shared inbox allows teams to check all incoming emails in a centralized platform. (Source: Zoho TeamInbox )

Freshsales in-app phone recent activities.

In-app phones allow you to make calls straight from your desktop. (Source: Freshsales )

Screenshot of LiveChat integration with Facebook Messenger

Live chats allow your customers to ask questions in real-time about their potential purchases. (Source: LiveChat )

HubSpot CRM and Facebook Messenger integrations

Integrating your Facebook Messenger allows you to create auto-responses to customers’ messages. (Source: HubSpot CRM )

Once you’ve identified the channels you want your customers to reach you through, it’s easier to narrow down the customer service software you’ll use to centralize your servicing activities. Some software has a single functionality, while others offer an omnichannel and integrated communications approach. Below, we share the most popular customer service software and the communication channels that they offer.

*Based on annual pricing. **Users must subscribe to Really Simple System’s CRM tool and purchase the customer service tool for an additional $46 per month.

For a closer look at the features, strengths, and weaknesses of each provider mentioned above, read our guide to the best customer service software for small businesses.

4. Create Customer Service Information Resources

While having actual humans answer your customers is nice, keeping a repository of information your customers can refer to on their own helps your team save valuable time and resources. Below are samples of informational resources you can put up on your website so it’s easy for your customers to find answers and information independently.

  • Frequently asked questions (FAQ): A collection of common questions clients usually ask. These may include general product information and return or exchange policies.
  • Informative articles: These could be blog articles that elaborate on how to maximize the use of your product. A solid example is this article from HubSpot CRM that discusses sales territory planning to underscore the importance of their product offering.
  • Recorded product demos and webinars: Instructional videos that discuss the benefits and usage of your solutions, saving your agents time from doing live demonstrations themselves.

5. Regularly Monitor Your Customer Service Quality

Improving the quality of your customer service is a continual process, and it is crucial that you regularly evaluate its effectiveness. Doing so ensures that you’re giving your customers the highest servicing quality possible. There are many ways you can measure your customer support quality :

  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Rates quality of service with a customer satisfaction survey regarding the support they received after having their case resolved
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your business to their peers
  • Support and call abandonment: Determines the average number of users who drop out of your calls or queues while waiting for their case to be resolved
  • Social media sentiments: Reflects customers’ sentiments toward your business based on the tonality of their posts on various social media channels
  • Resolution and rate duration: Shows the average number of cases you can resolve in a given period of time, as well as the average duration of a case—from ticketing to closing
  • Customer churn and retention rate : Provides visibility on the reasons why customers continue to support you or why they abandoned your business for other options

Bottom Line

Creating a customer service vision is essential in making sure you have a blueprint of how to properly nurture and strengthen your relationship with your client base so they remain loyal customers. It helps set the goals you want to achieve, guides you on how to build your customer service team, and identifies servicing channels. Having a proper strategy also ensures you choose the right customer service software for your team and know how to regularly evaluate your servicing quality.

About the Author

Jillian Ilao

Jillian Ilao

Jill is a sales and customer service expert at Fit Small Business. Prior to joining the company, she has worked and produced marketing content for various small businesses and entrepreneurs from different markets, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. She has extensive writing experience and has covered topics on business, lifestyle, finance, education, and technology.

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How to Start a Customer Service Consulting Business

Customer service can make or break a business. When a customer calls in with a question, problem, or concern, the way they're treated often determined whether they will remain a customer or buy from a competitor. Service also determines how well a customer's problem is addressed and, ultimately, whether the business does a good job solving it.This is why a customer service consulting business is so valuable. It helps businesses and firms improve their customer service by doing customer surveys, offering customer service training lessons, examining the workflow of customer service processes, or trying to develop an improved culture of service.

Learn how to start your own Customer Service Consulting Business and whether it is the right fit for you.

Ready to form your LLC? Check out the Top LLC Formation Services .

Customer Service Consulting Business Image

Start a customer service consulting business by following these 10 steps:

  • Plan your Customer Service Consulting Business
  • Form your Customer Service Consulting Business into a Legal Entity
  • Register your Customer Service Consulting Business for Taxes
  • Open a Business Bank Account & Credit Card
  • Set up Accounting for your Customer Service Consulting Business
  • Get the Necessary Permits & Licenses for your Customer Service Consulting Business
  • Get Customer Service Consulting Business Insurance
  • Define your Customer Service Consulting Business Brand
  • Create your Customer Service Consulting Business Website
  • Set up your Business Phone System

We have put together this simple guide to starting your customer service consulting business. These steps will ensure that your new business is well planned out, registered properly and legally compliant.

Exploring your options? Check out other small business ideas .

STEP 1: Plan your business

A clear plan is essential for success as an entrepreneur. It will help you map out the specifics of your business and discover some unknowns. A few important topics to consider are:

What will you name your business?

  • What are the startup and ongoing costs?
  • Who is your target market?

How much can you charge customers?

Luckily we have done a lot of this research for you.

Choosing the right name is important and challenging. If you don’t already have a name in mind, visit our How to Name a Business guide or get help brainstorming a name with our Customer Service Consulting Business Name Generator

If you operate a sole proprietorship , you might want to operate under a business name other than your own name. Visit our DBA guide to learn more.

When registering a business name , we recommend researching your business name by checking:

  • Your state's business records
  • Federal and state trademark records
  • Social media platforms
  • Web domain availability .

It's very important to secure your domain name before someone else does.

Want some help naming your customer service consulting business?

Business name generator, what are the costs involved in opening a customer service consulting business.

Costs involved in starting an agency are minimal. You can start with less than $1,000. You will need a CRM system for managing your clients, a computer, and a phone.

What are the ongoing expenses for a customer service consulting business?

Ongoing expenses for a customer service consulting business are minimal. Basically, you have to cover rent and utilities and costs for whatever customer relationship management software you use.

Who is the target market?

Target market are successful businesses that have hit a sticking point in revenues and profit and need help improving customer relationships so they can break through to the next level.

How does a customer service consulting business make money?

Customer service consulting companies make money by charging clients fees for consultation services.

Most customer service consultants can charge clients between $100/hr and $300/hr for services. The exact charge depends on your experience in the industry and your name recognition. The more successful you are, the more you can charge.

How much profit can a customer service consulting business make?

Profitability is high. Most consulting companies can make a 20% profit margin if they hire assistants to help them with their consulting business. If you're working alone, your margin is higher, but your total income may be less. Average consultant income ranges between $60,000 per year and $150,000 per year.

How can you make your business more profitable?

Make your business more profitable by partnering with non-competing firms to offer ancillary services. For example, a company may need more than just customer service help. They may need a coordinated marketing and customer service overhaul. If you can provide that to them, then you stand to make more money by consolidating both services into one.

You can also try increasing your fees over time as you gain experience.

Finally, consider creating tiered service levels, where you hire assistants to perform routine consulting jobs based on a service template you design. These lower-cost services could add substantially to your base income.

Want a more guided approach? Access TRUiC's free Small Business Startup Guide - a step-by-step course for turning your business idea into reality. Get started today!

STEP 2: Form a legal entity

The most common business structure types are the sole proprietorship , partnership , limited liability company (LLC) , and corporation .

Establishing a legal business entity such as an LLC or corporation protects you from being held personally liable if your customer service consulting business is sued.

Form Your LLC

Read our Guide to Form Your Own LLC

Have a Professional Service Form your LLC for You

Two such reliable services:

You can form an LLC yourself and pay only the minimal state LLC costs or hire one of the Best LLC Services for a small, additional fee.

Recommended: You will need to elect a registered agent for your LLC. LLC formation packages usually include a free year of registered agent services . You can choose to hire a registered agent or act as your own.

STEP 3: Register for taxes

You will need to register for a variety of state and federal taxes before you can open for business.

In order to register for taxes you will need to apply for an EIN. It's really easy and free!

You can acquire your EIN through the IRS website . If you would like to learn more about EINs, read our article, What is an EIN?

There are specific state taxes that might apply to your business. Learn more about state sales tax and franchise taxes in our state sales tax guides.

STEP 4: Open a business bank account & credit card

Using dedicated business banking and credit accounts is essential for personal asset protection.

When your personal and business accounts are mixed, your personal assets (your home, car, and other valuables) are at risk in the event your business is sued. In business law, this is referred to as piercing your corporate veil .

Open a business bank account

Besides being a requirement when applying for business loans, opening a business bank account:

  • Separates your personal assets from your company's assets, which is necessary for personal asset protection.
  • Makes accounting and tax filing easier.

Recommended: Read our Best Banks for Small Business review to find the best national bank or credit union.

Get a business credit card

Getting a business credit card helps you:

  • Separate personal and business expenses by putting your business' expenses all in one place.
  • Build your company's credit history , which can be useful to raise money later on.

Recommended: Apply for an easy approval business credit card from BILL and build your business credit quickly.

STEP 5: Set up business accounting

Recording your various expenses and sources of income is critical to understanding the financial performance of your business. Keeping accurate and detailed accounts also greatly simplifies your annual tax filing.

Make LLC accounting easy with our LLC Expenses Cheat Sheet.

STEP 6: Obtain necessary permits and licenses

Failure to acquire necessary permits and licenses can result in hefty fines, or even cause your business to be shut down.

Federal Business Licensing Requirements

Certain state permits and licenses may be needed to operate a customer service consulting business. Learn more about licensing requirements in your state by visiting SBA’s reference to state licenses and permits .

State & Local Business Licensing Requirements

For information about local licenses and permits:

  • Check with your town, city or county clerk’s office
  • Get assistance from one of the local associations listed in US Small Business Associations directory of local business resources .

Most businesses are required to collect sales tax on the goods or services they provide. To learn more about how sales tax will affect your business, read our article, Sales Tax for Small Businesses .

Certificate of Occupancy

Businesses operating out of a physical location typically require a Certificate of Occupancy (CO).  A CO confirms that all building codes, zoning laws and government regulations have been met.

  • If you plan to lease a location :
  • It is generally the landlord’s responsibility to obtain a CO.
  • Before leasing, confirm that your landlord has or can obtain a valid CO that is applicable to a customer service consulting business.
  • After a major renovation, a new CO often needs to be issued. If your place of business will be renovated before opening, it is recommended to include language in your lease agreement stating that lease payments will not commence until a valid CO is issued.
  • If you plan to purchase or build a location :
  • You will be responsible for obtaining a valid CO from a local government authority.
  • Review all building codes and zoning requirements for your business’ location to ensure your customer service consulting business will be in compliance and able to obtain a CO.

Services Contract

Customer service consulting businesses should require clients to sign a services agreement before starting a new project. This agreement should clarify client expectations and minimize risk of legal disputes by setting out payment terms and conditions, service level expectations, and intellectual property ownership.

STEP 7: Get business insurance

Just as with licenses and permits, your business needs insurance in order to operate safely and lawfully. Business Insurance protects your company’s financial wellbeing in the event of a covered loss.

There are several types of insurance policies created for different types of businesses with different risks. If you’re unsure of the types of risks that your business may face, begin with General Liability Insurance . This is the most common coverage that small businesses need, so it’s a great place to start for your business.

Another notable insurance policy that many businesses need is Workers’ Compensation Insurance . If your business will have employees, it’s a good chance that your state will require you to carry Workers' Compensation Coverage.

FInd out what types of insurance your Customer Service Consulting Business needs and how much it will cost you by reading our guide Business Insurance for Customer Service Consulting Business.

STEP 8: Define your brand

Your brand is what your company stands for, as well as how your business is perceived by the public. A strong brand will help your business stand out from competitors.

If you aren't feeling confident about designing your small business logo, then check out our Design Guides for Beginners , we'll give you helpful tips and advice for creating the best unique logo for your business.

Recommended : Get a logo using Truic's free logo Generator no email or sign up required, or use a Premium Logo Maker .

If you already have a logo, you can also add it to a QR code with our Free QR Code Generator . Choose from 13 QR code types to create a code for your business cards and publications, or to help spread awareness for your new website.

How to promote & market a customer service consulting business

Promote your services locally through the newspaper, online on your social media accounts, and through pay-per-click advertising. Reach out to local businesses and ask them if you could conduct a free customer service study for them. If they agree, analyze their business and offer to improve sales through better customer service.

How to keep customers coming back

Retaining customers is easy. As long as you can improve profits for them, most businesses will be happy to keep hiring you.

STEP 9: Create your business website

After defining your brand and creating your logo the next step is to create a website for your business .

While creating a website is an essential step, some may fear that it’s out of their reach because they don’t have any website-building experience. While this may have been a reasonable fear back in 2015, web technology has seen huge advancements in the past few years that makes the lives of small business owners much simpler.

Here are the main reasons why you shouldn’t delay building your website:

  • All legitimate businesses have websites - full stop. The size or industry of your business does not matter when it comes to getting your business online.
  • Social media accounts like Facebook pages or LinkedIn business profiles are not a replacement for a business website that you own.
  • Website builder tools like the GoDaddy Website Builder have made creating a basic website extremely simple. You don’t need to hire a web developer or designer to create a website that you can be proud of.

Recommended : Get started today using our recommended website builder or check out our review of the Best Website Builders .

Other popular website builders are: WordPress , WIX , Weebly , Squarespace , and Shopify .

STEP 10: Set up your business phone system

Getting a phone set up for your business is one of the best ways to help keep your personal life and business life separate and private. That’s not the only benefit; it also helps you make your business more automated, gives your business legitimacy, and makes it easier for potential customers to find and contact you.

There are many services available to entrepreneurs who want to set up a business phone system. We’ve reviewed the top companies and rated them based on price, features, and ease of use. Check out our review of the Best Business Phone Systems 2023 to find the best phone service for your small business.

Recommended Business Phone Service: Phone.com

Phone.com is our top choice for small business phone numbers because of all the features it offers for small businesses and it's fair pricing.

TRUiC's Startup Podcast

Welcome to the Startup Savant podcast , where we interview real startup founders at every stage of the entrepreneurial journey, from launch to scale.

Is this Business Right For You?

This business is perfect for individuals with good people skills and a drive to facilitate good communication between two or more people.

Want to know if you are cut out to be an entrepreneur?

Take our Entrepreneurship Quiz to find out!

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What happens during a typical day at a customer service consulting business?

A day in the life of a consulting company consists of meeting with clients, following up with prospects and managing client attitude and behaviors.

Most consulting firms spend a lot of time researching their clients' customers and target market. This takes up the bulk of the time spend on a client's project. For example, a consulting company working with a coffee shop might spend a significant amount of time researching the local demographic, comparing it to how much the coffee shop charges for its coffee and teas, what type of clientele it is trying to serve, the coffee shop's location, and so on.

If a coffee shop owner is serving a high-end client, who demands microlots and custom brews, including hand poured coffee, then service should be focused on providing a unique experience for each customer. This is not the type of coffee shop that sells coffee as a commodity.

A consultant might stress the need for knowledgeable baristas with years of experience, education, and training.

If, on the other hand, a coffee shop is mass marketing its coffee to a middle or low-income market, then the customer service strategy might be more focused on providing  fast  and polite service.

Consulting companies must also document all recommendations to their clients, maintain excellent records and, of course, provide excellent service to its own clients. Consulting companies also typically provide monthly or quarterly reports to clients.

What are some skills and experiences that will help you build a successful customer service consulting business?

Excellent management, and customer service, is a must. If you do not know how to talk to people, you obviously cannot sell that service to others. Aside from that, you must have good organizational skills and the ability to communicate your message effectively to another company's management.

Working for another consulting agency helps you "get your feet wet," and also gives you the relevant experience.

A business degree may help, but customer service strategies are often driven by experience as opposed to academic theory or study.

What is the growth potential for a customer service consulting business?

Companies are typically run as small agencies. However, larger companies do exist. Some of them cross over from customer service to providing a blend of customer service and management consulting, like McKinsey & Co., Accenture and Marsh & McLennan.

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For fun informative videos about starting a business visit the TRUiC YouTube Channel or subscribe to view later.

Take the Next Step

Find a business mentor.

One of the greatest resources an entrepreneur can have is quality mentorship. As you start planning your business, connect with a free business resource near you to get the help you need.

Having a support network in place to turn to during tough times is a major factor of success for new business owners.

Learn from other business owners

Want to learn more about starting a business from entrepreneurs themselves? Visit Startup Savant’s startup founder series to gain entrepreneurial insights, lessons, and advice from founders themselves.

Resources to Help Women in Business

There are many resources out there specifically for women entrepreneurs. We’ve gathered necessary and useful information to help you succeed both professionally and personally:

If you’re a woman looking for some guidance in entrepreneurship, check out this great new series Women in Business created by the women of our partner Startup Savant.

What are some insider tips for jump starting a customer service consulting business?

Work in industries you understand. It helps to have experience in industries other than consulting. For example, if you've been a successful restaurateur in several different markets for 20 years, you probably have a good idea about how to improve customer service in that industry.

You understand the unique challenges of the restaurant business as well as the clientele that frequent various types of restaurants. A 5-star French restaurant, for example, will have a very different client base than an Italian sandwich shop.

How and when to build a team

Build a team only as and when needed. This is a business that's difficult to scale because it depends on your unique insights into a particular industry or business. Hire support staff (when you can afford it) to take over mundane tasks, like bookkeeping and HR.

Useful Links

Industry opportunities.

  • International Customer Service Association
  • Discover more Consulting based Business Ideas

Real World Examples

  • The Dijulius Group - Cleveland, Ohio
  • Andrew Jensen Consulting - New Freedom, PA

Further Reading

  • 11 Customer Service Fix A Consultant Would Make At Your Company
  • How To Deal With Challenging Clients
  • In Customer Service Consulting, Disney's Small World Is Growing

Have a Question? Leave a Comment!

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The 4 Essentials of a Customer Service Plan Customer service is one of the most overlooked priorities for growing businesses.

By Andrew Medal • Jan 20, 2017

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The founding team of every startup is generally concerned with the same few things: product and growth. However, there's one more thing that every team should be prioritizing, and that is customer service . It's all well and good to have an effective sales team, but if you don't properly take care of incoming and existing customers, not only will you miss out on sales, but your customer retention will soon hit rock bottom.

But how do you offer great customer service, especially when you have a "lean and agile" -- or, more commonly, understaffed -- team? There are a few things you can do that will likely fit into your budget, and a few that are so effective it will be impossible to grow without them:

1. Free: Offer multiple means of contact.

First and foremost, your company should be easy to get in touch with. Aside from having a (frequently checked) email and phone number on your website, make sure you're active on at least one of the major social networks. Not sure which one you want to spend the most time on? Twitter. Most complaints will be made there, and your thoughtful, tactful, possibly hilarious responses will be most visible to others on the platform.

Related: 4 Investments Brands Should Make to Upgrade Their Customer Service

2. Free: Respond to feedback quickly.

The next step, now that you have all of these wonderful forms of contact, is of course to actually respond to the feedback you get! While it's best if you respond to feedback of any kind immediately, it's critical that you do so within 24 hours, or risk customers think you aren't listening.

3. Free-ish: Train your staff to be great.

Customer service has a reputation of being difficult and emotionally trying as a profession, due to the fact that most people don't give feedback unless it's negative. So how do you keep your staff happy if they're undertaking this often-demoralizing task? Equip them with the mental, emotional, physical and digital tools to handle customer complaints with grace and easily find answers to questions and issues. Whether you have a small staff that takes turns handling customer support, or a growing company that hires a dedicated person -- or even a whole department -- to make sure your customers have the best experience possible, don't handicap your staff by skimping on proper training .

Unless you're a customer service professional -- which I doubt since you're reading this article -- it's likely worth it to bring in a training company, or pay for your team to take a course in customer service. These courses will not only answer questions about etiquette, but will also offer insight into how to respond in difficult and unusual situations.

4. Worth it: Chat on site.

If you have the budget, invest in a chat system right on your site. An ATG Global Consumer Trend study found that 90 percent of customers consider live chat helpful; further, an emarketer.com survey indicated that over two thirds were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

Related: 4 Ways Customers Need to See You Want Their Business

This ties into the principle of responding to feedback quickly, by giving your brand the capability of responding to feedback at the very moment that your users think it. What's more, you'll be able to avoid unpleasant customer experiences due to confusion and get a more granular level of information about how well your user experience performs.

If you aren't sure you have the bandwidth to accommodate customer service, ask yourself how important your customers are and how important your brand reputation is. If those two factors matter to you (spoiler alert: they should, a lot) then customer service is non-optional.

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IT, Staffing & Customer Service Business Plans

Did you know each of these plans was created in LivePlan? Learn More

Administrative Services Business Plans

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Customer Service Business Plans

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Employment Agency Business Plans

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IT & Tech Support Business Plans

  • Computer Consulting Business Plan
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Security Business Plans

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Digital is the future. If there’s not an online version of some shopping, communication, or entertainment experiences currently available, in a few years there will be. And while some are busy designing and developing these digital platforms, the most vital component for them to succeed is the IT and customer service employees maintaining it.

Launch your own IT, staffing, or customer service business to an ever-expanding market of companies with a business plan. Spend less time on the planning and financial components of your business and more time on maintaining your customers’ services by starting off with one of our sample plans.

If you’re looking to develop a more modern business plan, we recommend you try LivePlan . It contains the same templates and information you see here, but with additional guidance to help you develop the perfect plan.

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customer service plan

How to Create a Customer Service Plan that Drives ROI

You have the perfect product and competitive pricing to carve a special place for your brand in the market. The reactions and verdict from customers and critics are in, and your product is an instant favorite.

However, no matter how pathbreaking the product or service is, your company’s customer perception is only as good as the support you offer. So what’s the best way to increase the likelihood of your customers staying with your company? It’s all about your customer service plan. Let’s get to it.

What is the purpose of a customer service plan for your business?

When a customer has a problem, the support team is often the first line they reach out to. Without a well-oiled customer service plan in place, this interaction may become an overwhelming ordeal that leaves both sides dissatisfied.

We’ve all probably been in a situation where the responses from companies do not address your concerns effectively due to the lack of a support process in place. It’s utterly frustrating and it drives many customers to unsubscribe from all communication, write negative reviews on social, and ultimately switch to your competitor. This reactive mode of service delivery can put a dent in your overall market strategy, revenue goals, and other best-laid plans.

The most successful businesses are the ones that offer proactive service, make customers feel valued, and nudge them to keep coming back. It will need a comprehensive customer service plan that is clear-cut–one that serves as a playbook to handle issues within your company, foster a goal-oriented mindset, build a customer-centric company culture, and evaluate and invest in the right tech.

How to create the ideal customer service plan

The ideal customer service action plan will enable you to make customer-centricity and service a company-wide mindset rather than the responsibility of a single department. To create an action plan for customer service, support needs to become your workplace culture. That’s when things start falling into place. Let’s have a look at some of the important moving parts of any business that need to be fine-tuned, to create a superior customer service plan:

6 Steps to create a customer service action plan

  • Train employees in customer service
  • Establish concrete SOPs
  • Leverage technology to offer better service
  • Offer support on the channels your customers prefer
  • Monitor key metrics that help identify cracks and opportunities
  • Make service culture an organization-wide commitment

#1 Train employees in customer service

Right from the onboarding phase, give employees a glimpse of the service culture of your organization – irrespective of whether they’re a part of the support team. Inculcating a customer-first attitude at the organization level elevates the customer experience as it becomes a habit rather than a forced formality. 

Encouraging your employees to show empathy will help your company understand the lingo of customers and see where they are coming from. Empathy will humanize customer service interactions and hand out cues on what your customers want to hear. Give customers the impression that they’re not mere daily targets that need handling.

Showing empathy in customer service can set you apart from the competition. Kaushik Natarajan, a Senior Product Consultant in Freshworks, demonstrated how support is the key to building customer relationships and brand advocacy – so much so that our client mailed in her heartfelt appreciation for the exceptional support experience.

customer service plan - empathy

Product expertise and KPIs

Build resources, video tutorials, and product-walkthroughs around to make it simpler for support agents to understand and master the products. Think of the employees as your customers and do everything to ensure they gain complete knowledge about your products. Apart from following the end goal of resolving customer issues, align them with KPIs that reflect through every support interaction. This will give room to revamp or tweak your customer service plan when you see fit and go from “ticket closure” to “customer delight”.

#2 Establish concrete SOPs

Empowering your agents with clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) will create a sense of autonomy and inspire them to be confident in taking ownership. If your employees are going back and forth through the chain of command to resolve issues, it reflects poorly on your SOPs and an acute lack of employee engagement.

Giving your customer-facing employees a set of repeatable approaches or a playbook that they can refer to, will speed up resolution time and establish an evergreen support workflow to abide by. 

For instance, escalations form a major part of every customer service SOP. Because of the volatility and serious reasons as to why customers escalate issues, you need to follow a standardized workflow for them.

#3 Leverage technology to offer better service

Customer service is a function that faces a constant inflow of tickets on multiple channels, keeping agents on their toes. Without a proper tech stack in place, handling customers can get really tedious. So, adopt the right tools and technology to give your support reps a breather from technical complications that deter their work. 

Here are some basic functionalities you should look for in your customer service software:

Auto-assign and group tickets

Look for a customer service software that allows you to set up automation rules to route tickets based on availability, agent expertise, function, and much more. This will not just save time but also improve efficiency as support teams no longer have to go through every single ticket and manually assign it to the right agent. Omni Route is a great example of how intelligent ticketing and automation works.

Cross-team collaboration

Many customer service tools don’t consider processes that fall outside of the support team’s daily activities. Unfortunately, it is only when a support team is able to get internal cross-team collaboration right, that true impact can be seen on a larger scale. That’s why cross-functional communication on a helpdesk is a differential aspect that solves many issues.

Support reps sometimes get caught up on partner, developer, pricing, or legal issues raised by the customer with no direct accountability from these teams. Support agents have a bigger significance than being a communication facilitator between these teams and customers.

This is exactly why cross-team collaboration is a bare necessity in today’s support scenario of multiple external stakeholders.  Reps can tag external stakeholders within a ticket, discuss with them, share context about the issue, and divide the task so multiple teams can work on a ticket simultaneously.

Self service capability

According to The New Rules of Customer Engagement , a survey report from Freshworks, 76% of consumers globally prefer to first try to solve issues on their own before contacting support .

By creating a robust self-service portal, you not only save valuable time for your agents but also gain the trust of your customers. How? Empowering your customers with readily available content to help solve their issue by themselves, creates a positive perception about your products or services itself.

Self service can be implemented in the form of FAQs, solution articles, a knowledge base , or even a chat pop-up. Self service works wonders on the agent too, to make it easier for the agents to manually plug-in resources from the knowledge base as answers to customer queries. Take a look at this self service guide to understand how it works.

#4 Offer seamless support on all the channels your customers prefer

Customers expect support on a channel that they prefer, at any time that is convenient to them. So it’s critical for businesses to offer support in all major customer channels from email to instant messaging.

I recently faced a poor experience with a reputed retail store while I was trying to sort a few things out through their portal’s real-time chat support. After a few painstakingly detailed exchanges, the support executive simply directed me to mail the whole issue to a completely different person. 

Now, I have two grievances.

  • If this was never going to get resolved on chat by the agent, why put me through a grueling conversation that had no prior knowledge of my engagements?
  • I chose live chat as my channel of comfort to engage with a representative. Why not continue the conversation there? Also, I had to switch to a business-preferred channel and start all over again!

This is just an example of a major disconnect in multi-channel vs omnichannel customer service plans. While being on every channel can be achieved, your agents can’t keep using disparate tools to look after every channel. To be in the channel your customers want you to be is only the beginning. The experience is complete only when you unify their communication for all channels to offer a seamless experience across all channels. 

Going omnichannel should be a part of your customer service plan from the outset. It will help you deliver consistent support to your customers across channels with prior context about them. Avoid alt-tabbing between tools that don’t talk to each other. Give your agents a unified view of every ticket in the helpdesk and customer profile within a single page.

#5 Monitor key metrics that help identify cracks and opportunities

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their customer service plan to lower support costs and increase retention. It starts with tracking customer service metrics and KPIs, which act as an automatic feedback loop for your business to learn from.

customer service plan - metrics

Productivity Metrics : Identify customer pain points and evaluate your customer service quality by analyzing data from ticket inflow, number of tickets resolved, and the active time taken to resolve each issue. This will help you plan your staffing better, understand customer behavior, and train your agents. Other customer service metrics to track include first response time, resolution time, conversations per agent, and rate of ticket backlog, to name a few.

Quality Metrics : Quality metrics reflect where you stand as a customer-centric company. They showcase the quality of customer service your company has offered through benchmarks such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). NPS and CSAT are important factors that have a direct effect on ROI as they represent the likelihood of your customers staying with your company or advocating for it. 

Apart from improving the way your team handles customers, looking at these numbers will also enable you to identify revenue opportunities. One way is to find out what’s working best in support. On the other hand, ticket trends can serve as proof points to nudge customers for an upsell or recommend better packages.

#6 Make service culture an organization-wide commitment

Every successful customer service plan begins with listening and understanding your customers’ needs, and the rest is a process of optimizing your support setup for efficiency. But it’s not just the support team that’s responsible for a successful customer service plan. Customer service should be a mindset across all functions of your business, rather than a strategy that concerns just the support team.

Establishing a customer-first culture across functions in your workplace will amplify the support team’s efforts to delight customers and drive ROI. Involving product and marketing teams, and more importantly, integrating support issues within the sales funnel will provide better visibility into repetitive issues on the product side, identify sales-product-support disconnects and make customer interactions more personalized. 

To this end, CEO on Support by Freshdesk is an initiative that businesses can take inspiration from. It stresses the need for the C-suite and other major non-customer-facing functions to go on support to understand how customers feel about your business, identify problems around the product, and improve the overall customer experience.

Always Be Closing… on that feedback loop

Pretty early on, we combined quality assurance and customer support into one group that we called customer experience. They do everything from parsing customer feedback and routing it to the right people to fixing bugs themselves.

          – Stewart Butterfield, CEO & Co-Founder of Slack.

We’ve all swooned over Slack’s success story of growing into a customer-focused company. But it all started well before their beta launch, where they’d ask random teams of different shapes and sizes to try out Slack and evaluate it. According to Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, these dry runs helped them create a new (and better) product roadmap, and identify collaboration problems to solve for. Slack is one of the best customer service plan examples for a company built out of aligning sales, marketing, and product efforts to emulate their support strategy. And how? All they did was take feedback from their users seriously.

The right customer service plan will future-proof your business

If we’ve learnt anything from 2020, it’s that we always need to be prepared for uncertainties. A comprehensive customer service plan is similarly vital to thrive in unchartered waters. One of Freshdesk’s customers, Campaigntrack, a real-estate marketing company, transitioned smoothly into a remote work environment. Freshdesk was an integral part of their recovery plan as the agent and customer accounts were accessible virtually. They also used a help widget integration to get customers read more self-service articles and help in query deflection. Sounds like a customer service plan you want to implement as well? Read the full case study here .

customer service plan - case study

Speaking of ROIs and customer service plans…

Forrester Research conducted a Total Economic Impact study on behalf of Freshdesk and the results are staggering. Freshdesk Omnichannel has delivered a 462% ROI over a period of three years to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Download the entire report and see how we not only fill the gaps in your customer service plan, but also open up qualified revenue opportunities.

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14+ Customer Service Plan Examples in PDF | MS Word

Customer Service Plan Examples

Happy and satisfied customers equate to a flourishing business. Your company’s customer service is a significant factor in determining your success. Developing a rapport with your clients can be a lengthy and arduous process. To avoid losing your customers’ support, you need to start devising a detail-oriented customer service plan along with your business plan . 

14+ Customer Service Plan Examples

1. customer service improvement plan template.

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2. Customer Service Development Plan Template

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3. Customer Service Operational Plan Template

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5. Customer Service Plan

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6. Customer Service Action Plan

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7. Customer Service Improvement Plan

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8. Accessible Customer Service Plan

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What Is a Customer Service Plan?

A customer service plan is the summary of strategies a company or organization follows. It aims to reach the highest possible level of customer satisfaction. This plan mainly focuses on the details of how the company keeps their clients interested, as well as how they resolve complaints that come their way.

How To Devise a Beneficial Customer Service Plan

They say a good business follows the motto, about how the customers are always right. Despite that, you should know not to take that too literally. It simply means prioritizing their needs. Of course, there are times when they are wrong, and that’s when you should know how to handle the situation. Although you should dedicate your customer service plan to your clients, you should still consider how your strategy can prove to be beneficial to your business and employees. 

1. Ask For Feedback

The best first step to take in writing a service plan is to ask your customers for feedback. Ask them to give positive and also constructive feedback. That way, you know what they enjoy with your service, as well as their problems with it. To do this, you can give out a questionnaire or let your guests answer a survey online or by letting them answer a website survey.

2. Formulate a Strategy

After gathering and analyzing the data, it is now time to start your strategic plan. Adjust your business development strategy in a way that it can cater to the demands of your clients. Remember that it is destructive for your business to set your goal to please everyone. Come up with a more realistic aim that doesn’t strain and negatively impact your company. Focus on the issues that take top priority. After coming up with a strategy, compose an outline of your action plan .

3. Consult Your Employees

Your employees spend a great deal of time dealing with customers. Given that fact, they have the most experience in that area. Therefore their opinions should matter in the development of your plan. Your representatives will be directly affected whether your service plan turns out to be beneficial for your management or put you at a disadvantage.

4. Construct a Diagram

To avoid leaving out any details, creating a diagram would be helpful. A well-organized flow chart would help you determine the exact course of your plans. As a result, you can take into account all the details. Also, it will make it more comprehensive for both you and your customer representatives. 

What are the benefits of having a customer service plan?

One of the purposes of having a customer service plan is to minimize the confusion of your employees regarding how they should deal with customer issues. Besides, it would also help them understand the extent of their power and their limitations in dealing with the situation. Another benefit of the service plan is, it will benefit the maintenance of a good relationship between your clients and your company.

What are the essential skills of a customer representative?

Customer service representatives should be competent in persuading and communicating with clients. Some required skills in the job description of a representative include skills in practicing reflection, adapting to changes, decision-making, and empathizing with clients. Exercising patience towards problematic people is also a requirement for customer service representatives to implement.

What are the principles of customer service?

The first and most significant principle of customer service is to have a great extent of services and product knowledge . Another one is to listen to their concerns and respond to them respectfully. You also have to be honest and take accountability for your mistakes and the things you don’t know.

Sustaining and preserving stability in your relationship with clients, similar to other relationships, involves a careful process. A single mistake can end the relationship you tried so hard to maintain and cherish. As a person in the business profession, you need to consider a lot of factors. To achieve great heights in your business, compose a customer service plan that would satisfy your clients, protect your employees, and benefit your company all at the same time.

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Customer Service Improvement Plan For Small Business: Hit Your KPI

Customer service improvement plan for small businesses: Hit your KPI

Suppose you have the best product in the world, but when a customer wants to reach out to you or ask a simple question, she/he receives the reply after 3 days. This indicates, that your customer service needs improvement.  

If your customer service agents can’t handle a frustrated customer who wants to lash out, then you need to improve. 

With the rise of social media, after just one bad experience a customer can storm the feed, bashing your product. So be mindful of the quality of the customer service of your company. Good customer service ensures you stay ahead in the race with your competitors. 

63% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. So, if you think your customer service needs improvement, never hesitate to take action as it has long-lasting benefits. 

It’s the year 2024, and your consumers are more prone to digital-first experiences and also they will hold numerous types of expectations as the world is moving so fast. A customer-centric approach is what you should focus on. 

So, leveling up your business with an effective customer service improvement plan is a must. Don’t miss out on the fundamentals of a customer service improvement plan. It includes :

  • Personalization
  • Data-driven approach
  • Continuous improvement mentality within the plan
  • Focusing on the most impactful metrics 
  • Not to get stuck on getting the job done mentality

In this blog, we’ll try to cover the steps you can take to climb your way to create an impactful customer service improvement plan.

What is a customer service improvement plan?

A customer service improvement plan is a set of strategic steps that are required to achieve a measurable goal regarding customer service. It comes from thorough research on: 

  • What needs fixing
  • What deserves your priority
  • What are your tactics to achieve those steps

Your customer service improvement plan should contain the steps that’ll improve the ‘ Customer Satisfaction Metrics ’ like net promoter score (NPS) , customer satisfaction (CSAT), churn rate, ticket volume, response time, resolution time, etc. An effective plan should include a clear goal along with feasible key performance indicators (KPIs)  to measure.

Importance of customer service improvement plan

61.7% of surveyees believe that improving customer service is one of the most effective steps that enhance the customer experience. If your customer gets a bad experience then it’s done for you. 

Invoca says, 76% of consumers end relationships with a company after just one bad experience. According to 91.1% of surveyed businesses, a good customer experience brings in higher customer retention.

On the other hand, even after an error, 78% of consumers remain loyal to a brand that delivers exceptional customer service. So, great customer service is always your asset. Planning on customer service improvement leading to the right infrastructure creates a system in your business that provides customer service flawlessly. 

In terms of resources, if you are an owner of a small business you have your struggle. Customer service is one thing that you can use for your benefit and can get a jumpstart to your business. Because gaining new customers can cost you a lot more than keeping your old ones. 

The planning and its execution build a deeper relationship with your customers that generates word-of-mouth awareness. This is why we believe enhancing customer service shouldn’t just be tied to cost-effectiveness but also generate revenue. 

How to get started?

Before you jump into a customer service improvement plan, you need to tick some checklists and then proceed. They are:

1. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses

When you have a clear idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are, you expand your horizons. It helps you target your priorities and also paves the way for a variety of options you can work on.

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator – KPIs are quantifiable metrics that measure your growth towards a projected outcome.

Here are a few KPIs (key performance indicators) for customer service  that can help you in the process of evaluation:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Average Resolution Time
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

If you don’t have any idea what they are and how to measure them, then read our blog on how to measure customer satisfaction .

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2. understand your customer’s expectations.

Reviewing what kind of service you intend to provide your customers is a must. Have clarity about your responsibilities and set feasible expectations. Set timelines for diverse communication channels and communicate those to your clients in advance, which will help your customers set their expectations accordingly.

3. Set your goals

A customer service improvement plan works out only when you have goals. Your goals should be measurable. Having well-defined goals helps you direct your action regarding the improvement of overall customer service performance. 

The goals you would target should fit  the characteristics of the SMART approach, where SMART refers to:

  • S- Specific
  • M- Measurable
  • A- Attainable
  • R-Realistic

SMART goals for customer service improvement plan

As long as your goals are SMART, the possibility of you achieving those goals remains higher.

NOT a SMART goal: “Achieve 100% perfection in all tasks. A SMART goal: “Reduce errors by 25% through improved quality control measures in the next three months

4. Streamline your workflow

Before kicking off the customer service improvement plan, streamline your workflow. Cultivate the virtues of reliability and patience with your customer service representatives as they have to work with your company for a long time regardless of the complaints from the customers. 

Also, focus on organizing and preparing a client experience. Going through the company’s manual and product description can help you to stay ready with a solution as soon as the customer is facing issues. 

You should also learn the process and appropriate channels for escalating the issue regarding customer support when you don’t have a solution.

5. Establish an appropriate communication channel

A customer service improvement plan works properly when you have a robust communication channel for your customers. To create a seamless customer experience, it’s necessary to establish effective communication channels with clients throughout the entire engagement journey.  

Make sure your clients feel supported without even having to reach out for help after each step. Provide clear guidance throughout their journey, keeping them informed about their current stage, completed tasks, upcoming steps, and what to anticipate next.

6. Don’t miss the little things

Always look out for the opportunity to work on the little, simplest things. Those little things can be a game-changer for you to stand out in the competition. Establish clear and specific guidelines for your customer service agents, encouraging them to respond to calls and emails within a designated time frame. Guide your team to prioritize the customer’s concerns and offer valuable assistance. Encourage them to recognize and appreciate valued customers for their contributions. Also, implement a process to help identify and cater to VIP customers.

Putting these elements in order before crafting your customer service action plan can make a significant difference. Once the overall guidelines are set, your customer service agents can concentrate on the details of providing exceptional service with ease. 

Once you have gone through the checklists, you’re ready to dive into the further steps of the customer service improvement plans. Here are the ‘6 steps to building a customer service improvement plan’.

6 Steps to building a customer service improvement plan

Now let’s get straight to the steps that you have to take when building a customer service improvement plan.

1. Find what your customers want

Always keep track of what your customers need. Staying close to the customer allows you to stay in the competition. Understanding your customer is the first and foremost step to offering great customer service. 

Acquiring new customers is a tougher and costlier task than keeping one. So, your existing customers should always be at the center of your focus. Try to reach them in any channel possible and stay in touch. You can take surveys or ask them to fill out feedback forms .

Don’t depend on guesswork as it can lead you to terrible decisions. Talking to your customer is what you should always choose. Take a moment to go through past customer inquiries and data; it can offer valuable insights into understanding your customer’s expectations. Your plan should always include finding the unmet customer needs and thus uncovering the opportunities for improvement. 

2. Check what’s working and what’s Not

Check which parts of your internal processes are going well. Which customer service operations have achieved praise from your customers and where they have bashed you. 

Creating a visual chart would help you to understand the whole scenario. Check if you have ample personalization in customer service. Find out if there is room for improvement. Include it in your plan.

3. Understand your customer service touchpoints

Customer service touchpoints are those moments when customers might hit up your support team for buying tips, questions, or a follow-up after making a purchase.

What are customer touchpoints

In the journey that starts from people deciding to buy and eventually becoming a customer, you and your team have windows of opportunity. Here you can put your efforts to leave a positive impression on the customer’s experience.

Listing down all the touchpoints before kicking off your plan is a must. To illustrate, contacting customer service is a touchpoint. Within this one, there are many different touchpoints. By labeling the journey a customer takes from one touchpoint to another, you can create a journey map. It must include what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing. 

4. Identify underperforming touchpoints

You can run audits to get an estimate of your performance on all touchpoints. Digging through all your communication platforms and going through customer feedback thoroughly would also help in the process.  

You have to measure customer feedback. Run surveys if necessary. Go through conversational feedback if possible.  

Compare different platforms in various metrics i.e. CSAT score, wait time, resolution time, and cost per contact. For the sake of demonstration, imagine your live chat has a significantly higher CSAT score compared to phone calls. These phone calls are underperforming and you should take the opportunity to dig deeper.

Ask questions like: 

  • Why are phone calls underperforming?
  • Is it because the phone calls take too long?
  • Is it because the phone calls get transferred from one agent to another? 
  • Is it because your agents don’t listen to the problems properly and the customer gets frustrated? 

Breaking down your touchpoints like this can route you to the root cause of why they’re underperforming. Once you have found that, create a customer improvement plan that revolves around those touchpoints. 

Follow the process for all your touchpoints. We suggest you pick the improvement areas that are easy to resolve and can have a high impact. Find which best aligns with your ultimate strategic direction.

Set your SMART goals focusing on them. 

5. Create strategies you’ll follow to improve the touchpoints

When you have finished identifying your goals and areas of improvement, the next step is to define your actions to achieve that goal.

Your planning of action should be highly personalized to the goals and touchpoints you identified. Your plan should include steps for tackling these issues, which employees will be involved, what steps you will take to resolve it, and the timeframe within which everything must be accomplished.

When do you expect to see it change? What’s the earliest duration to know what you’re doing is having an impact? These questions should be answered regarding your ultimate strategic goal. 

Running a small-scale experiment before you set out projects for your entire team is recommended. Thus you can measure ROI and impact on your metric.

Your customer service action plan can be:

  • Know where you wanna go
  • Create measurable goals
  • List the tasks that need to be performed
  • Divide big tasks into smaller, more manageable parts
  • Decide on deadlines for daily deliveries
  • Create a visual representation for your action plan
  • Track your actions regularly

6. The best time to take action is, now

If you think only having the best plan can help you achieve your goal and then get stuck in the planning mode, then there’s no way out. 

Just jump in and don’t be afraid of experimenting. 

It’s a fast-paced world and the earlier you start, the faster you understand what will work and what won’t. This helps you to adjust your plans faster and again jump into action to hit your goals. 

If you plan to excel in customer service you should move fast, take action, learn, and repeat. Relying on guesswork or past data won’t help you go a long way. Keep seeking to collect a lot of data with consistent action. This ensures the possibility of delivering exceptional customer service. 

Best customer service companies you can Follow

Take advantage of the chance to learn from the best customer service when your goal is to deliver an excellent customer experience. Follow which companies match your niche or at least try to learn about their intent. That’ll help you in the long run. 

The best customer service companies are recognized because of their replicable support processes and customer-centric culture. 

Here we listed a few companies with the best customer service that you can and you should follow if they have similar goals aligning with you.

We don’t need to imagine how successful Amazon is because it’s real. Behind its success story, there can be many pillars but one of them is their extraordinary customer service. 

To ensure a seamless buyer’s journey, Amazon assembled a list of questions that are related to general information about shipping, refund, delivery, etc. that assures customers of their purchase in uncertain times.

Amazon customer service example

So the learning from Amazon you can take is, that self-service is the first step when serving your customers. You can also make documentation, videos, or dedicated FAQ pages on your website to ensure that the customer can help themselves when facing minor issues.

2. Starbucks

Starbucks always aims to provide top-notch personalization on its mobile app. Customers feel delighted when they can play with your product according to their choices. 

This personalized experience from Starbucks gave customers a joyous feeling when they had their usual order ready even before they reached the outlet. These little moments are the assets that Starbucks is utilizing. 

So, always check if you have possibilities to change even a little experience that can build stronger bondings between you and your customers.

Starbucks customer service example

3. Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A is an America-based chicken restaurant chain. It’s renowned for extraordinary hospitality towards its customers as well as employees. This brand is determined to provide exceptional services. 

They foster a culture of empathy in their business. Their staff never hesitates to carry the heavy baggage of old people or offer fresh pepper to the customers dining in. All these gestures create a welcoming environment for all the customers.

customer service business plan

4. Freshworks 

Freshworks is a company that offers intuitive customer experience SaaS solutions. They have reliable, technically competent support teams and customer success managers. 

They put their efforts into customer relationships that improve customer lifecycle value. Customer-facing teams at Freshworks break their bounds to fulfill customization requests and take on complex technical requirements without hesitation even after the sale’s completion. 

You can learn from them how a customer-first approach can be a path to stand out from your competitors. 

customer service business plan

A perfect customer service improvement plan doesn’t exist theoretically but it becomes perfect by numerous executions and its consistency. It’s up to you to find out which suits the best by trial and error. 

So, never be afraid to run trial and error with your plans.

Stay connected with us on our social media channels as we’ll never stop helping you. Have a beautiful journey with your customers. 

Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. Leave a comment below.

Sumit Karmakar

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8 SMART Customer Service Goals [With Real Business Examples]

Target and arrow with pound sign, chart, and graph

The right customer service goals can help your brand boost customer satisfaction, increase loyalty, and create new conversions. 

But where do you get started?

Which metrics should you be tracking, and what strategies should you put in place? 

In this article, we’ll be looking at 8 SMART customer service goals championed by real companies. We'll cover:

  • SMART framework for customer service goals
  • 8 examples of critical customer service goals
  • The next step to achieving your customer service goals

Happy customer and contact center agent

  • What is a SMART goal in customer service?

One of the worst mistakes companies make when setting customer service goals is creating vague or unrealistic objectives. 

The SMART framework helps you avoid this. 

By setting goals that are S pecific, M easurable, A ttainable, R elevant, and T ime-bound, you can make sure you’re on the road to customer service perfection. 

To show you how you can put this framework into action, we’ve included examples in our customer service goals list below.  Customer service goals examples

Graphic detailing the SMART framework

  • Key customer service goals

Whether you’re an established customer service manager or just starting to focus on your customer service efforts, take a look at the following goals and question which will work best for your business.

1. Reduce customer wait times

KPI: First Response Time (FRT) and Average Response Time (ART)

There’s many customer service goals and performance metrics to track, but one hugely important goal for your customers is reducing how long they wait for a response. 

The longer you keep customers waiting, the more frustrated they are going to get. 

In fact, a slow response time is one of the biggest indicators of poor customer service overall. 

So, how do you tackle this customer service goal and improve you response times? 

Solution:   One of the best ways to reduce customer waiting time is to get serious about your contact channels . 

By adopting an omnichannel customer experience , you’ll be able to respond to your customers quickly and efficiently - however they get in touch. 

You should also focus on how you’re measuring the improvements made to your response speed.

Mark Daoust at Quiet Light suggests using flow charts to track the company’s average response time, and they’ve seen some very impressive results.

From using these tracking methods, the company has gone from an average of 1.5 business days down to 0.8 FRT.

‘Our customers are consistently impressed with the speed at which we get back to them.’ 

Another smart way to reduce your customer wait times is to actually display your average wait time to your customer.

‍ It's the same with your open and close times too.

Doing so will allow you to manage customer expectations and give them the chance to choose a different channel if their query isn't urgent - lowering wait times once more.

Thankfully, with Talkative, you can do this automatically from your no-code chat widget designer .

Graphic of waiting customers and timer icons

2. Improve turnaround times

KPI : Average Handle Time (AHT)

Much like long response times, slow turnaround times are another huge digital customer service mistake . 

Customers hate having to endure unnecessarily long interactions, especially when they’re kept on hold for a quick query. 

It’s why improving your AHT is another crucial customer service goal. 

The problem with this goal is that customers can be incredibly demanding: they want their answers fast. 

So, how do you effectively tackle this challenge and improve your AHT? 

Solution: Like improving your FRT, one of the best ways of improving your AHT is to take a look at the communication channels you use. 

From there, you can start to examine how your staff use these channels, and how you can incentivise them into delivering a stronger performance .  

Austin Fain from Perfect Steel Solutions took this double-headed approach and saw some great results: 

‘Most of the companies in our industry provide customer support primarily through email or phone calls - which means long waiting periods. We shook things up by adding a live chat feature onto our website.’ 

Next, the company introduced a bonus for their contact centre agents, offering incentives for the staff with the lowest AHT. 

Thanks to this strategy, the company has seen a 55% improvement in their turnaround times, and a much happier customer base overall.  

Smiling contact center agent on laptop

3. Improve employee skill and satisfaction ‍

KPI: AHT, Employee Feedback, & Staff Turnover  

This customer service goal and it’s solution is closely linked to improving turnaround times. 

While improving your AHT can be achieved by adopting new contact channels, improving your employee’s troubleshooting skills and overall job satisfaction will also make a big difference too. 

Despite what you might be thinking, the answer doesn’t just lie in training.

Solution: Achieving this customer service goal requires a multifaceted approach once again.

While staff training is incredibly important for a reliable and capable customer service team, employee satisfaction and wellbeing are also paramount. 

Thomas Fultz recognised this in his role as CEO at Coffeeble .

He notes that the company’s entire customer experience hinges on staff wellbeing: 

‘The best tools I found to support proper customer service & retention were the ones that supported the lives of our staffers.’ 

To make sure staff were working to their best ability, the company hired a wellbeing manager and treated their staff to meditation app subscriptions and more regular breaks. 

In turn, their revitalised staff were better equipped to tackle their workloads with skill and focus, helping the company to further their online success. 

It’s proof that when it comes to acing your customer service goals, supporting your staff is just as important as supporting your customers. 

Happy call center agent

4. Improve customer satisfaction  ‍

KPI: Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Average Review Ratings 

Achieving this customer service goal offers a whole host of benefits to your company, from improving customer retention and loyalty to creating customer advocates. 

The hard part about improving your CSAT score is that customer satisfaction can be fickle.  

In fact, every step of the customer experience can affect how the customer feels overall. 

So, how are you supposed to know which areas of customer experience are succeeding and which are failing? 

Solution:   The fastest way to achieve this customer service goal is by using website engagement tools to survey and monitor your customers. 

For instance, Todd Ramlin of Cable Compare notes that they’ve had great success from using CSAT surveys and social listening tools.

CSAT surveys allow direct feedback from their customers while they are on their site. 

Social listening tools allow the company to monitor social mentions and direct feedback. Todd explains: 

‘This tactic also gives us an opportunity to interact with these customers again, either to thank them for positive comments or offer to resolve any negative issues they have with our service.’ 

To further improve on this strategy, you could also take things one step further by reviewing public rating sites too. 

This is just what Maddy Brown from Spacer did to improve their customer service efforts.  

By checking in on these sites, you’ll be able to develop an average review rating from truly unbiased feedback.

Customer on laptop

5. Increase customer advocacy  ‍

KPI: Net Promoter Score (NPS) & positive survey feedback

What separates improving customer satisfaction from this customer service goal is the metrics and indicators you use to measure success. 

CSAT scores can measure your customers’ satisfaction during their time on your site.

On the other hand, NPS scores  allow you to understand which of your customers are most likely to recommend your business to others in the future. 

The better your NPS score, the more proof you have that you’re offering the best customer service possible. 

But how do you really make sure you’re improving your NPS and turning your customers into advocates?

Solution:   To achieve this customer service goal, there’s two main actions you’ll want to take. 

Firstly, implement NPS surveys throughout your site. 

Secondly, it’s a great idea to start ongoing conversations with your current customer base. Ask them what is working for them and what could be improved.

Andrea Barnhill of Socratik Agency took this approach when seeking to improve their customer service. 

She notes that the company conducts an annual feedback survey with their clients to understand what they appreciate about their partnership, and where they can improve. 

Barnhill says  that some of this feedback has proved so important, it’s become a core part of the company’s mission moving forward. 

In turn, their customer service has always remained on point, earning more repeat business and more customer advocates in the long run. 

Happy customer on smartphone and laptop

6. Increasing customer loyalty

KPI : Customer Retention Rate (CRR) & Customer Churn 

One of the best ways to know if your customer service efforts need improving is by measuring how many customers are leaving you for your competitors. 

If you’re seeing a low CRR and a high amount of churn, chances are that you need to focus on this customer service goal the most. 

But how do you make sure your customers want to keep coming back for more? 

Solution: One of the best ways to increase your customer’s loyalty is to ensure that your company follows a customer-centric philosophy. 

This is what Roy Morejon from Enventys Partners suggests for improving low CRR and decreasing churn.

He notes that a double-headed approach works best:

Firstly, companies should always strive to offer as much value to their customers as possible. 

Secondly, companies need to show appreciation for their customers whenever possible. 

For instance, if a customer has a complaint, Morejon suggests ‘actively listening and offering value back to the customer with your resolution (a free deal/service, a thorough explanation of the problem, and how you can solve it, etc.).' 

Next, when it comes to showing appreciation to your customers, strive to create real and lasting relationships with them:

‘Offer special deals for birthdays, loyalty points, free surprise items, etc. These are all great ways to remind the customer that you are always appreciative of their support.’ 

However you go about providing value and showing your appreciation, creating a customer-first approach means you’ll achieve higher levels of customer loyalty with ease. 

Magnet attracting customers

7. Promote self-service and increase efficiency 

KPI:  Interaction Queues & Abandonment Rates 

Sometimes, customers just want to help themselves. They know the problem they are looking to solve is a simple one. 

This is where self-service tools like chatbots , knowledge bases, and FAQ pages come in. 

The only problem with this approach is knowing which tools are going to be the most effective for your customers. 

So, how do you tackle this customer service goal and increase your team’s efficiency? 

Solution: The best approach to promoting more self-service amongst your customers is to take a look at your website’s digital journey . 

By doing so, you can identify the pain points your customers will face along the way. 

For instance, say you offer live chat, but your live chat queues are clogged by customers with simple queries. 

You could deploy a chatbot to deflect queries that don’t require a human response to solve this problem

Once you’ve done so, check your chatbot analytics to review just how much more efficient your customer service efforts have become. 

Another tip is to start anticipating customer needs by putting more information at your customer’s disposal. 

For example, Francesca Nicasio of Payment Depot took this approach when considering how best to curate the company’s marketing content. 

After coming to the realisation that the site’s content should be as helpful to customers as a customer service representative, Nicasio made sure to double down on their site’s offering. 

She notes that, ‘ultimately, content should serve to help meet the goals of your business and give people the best customer experience possible.’

So make sure your content offers as much useful information as possible, right up front. 

Couple this approach with smart contact channels, and completing this customer service goal will be a breeze. 

Chatbot graphic

8. Humanize the customer experience 

This customer service goal might not come with an easily defined metric, but taking a holistic approach to humanizing your customer experience can yield some fantastic customer service results. 

Websites are no longer a static brochure for your products or services. They are now an integral part of the customer journey. 

As such, not only do you need to offer a seamless customer experience , you also need to bring a human element to your online customer service efforts. 

But how do you make sure your customers receive the same experience online as they would in store? 

Solution: One of the best ways to humanize the customer experience is to start prioritising personalization and convenience for your customers. 

For instance, Laura Blackwell from Vape Town has recently seen a boost in sales after providing local customers with a click-and-collect service - a tactic that bridged the gap between the company’s in-store and online experience. 

That said, there are many other tactics you can use to offer your customers sterling service - wherever they’re based. 

One of your best options is video chat . 

The use of video chat for customer service has exploded by 400% over the last few years, and there are some good reasons why. 

Not only does it provide your customers with a convenient and personalized way to engage with your company, it’s also proven to be more effective than live chat as a communication tool. 

For instance, while video chat immediately helps to create a personal connection between customers and advisors, it also allows you to give customers instant answers. 

In fact, video sessions tend to last around 6 minutes - which is actually shorter than the 10 minute average length of live chat! 

It means that video chat is not only the smart choice in terms of humanizing your website, but also in terms of achieving customer service efficiency too. 

Video chatting customer and store assistant

  • The takeaway

Undoubtedly, working to improve customer service is an important endeavor for any business.

In an increasingly saturated market, offering outstanding service is the only sure-fire way to stand out from your competitors.

A positive customer experience is also proven to increase customer retention, brand loyalty, and conversions.

With the SMART customer service goals covered in this article, you can take your brand’s customer experience to the next level.

But in order to achieve these goals, you also need the right customer service technology to facilitate them.

And that's where Talkative comes in.

With our innovative digital engagement platform, you can provide superior service and personalized experiences through all of your customers' favorite channels.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with Talkative today and discover how we can help you exceed all your digital customer service goals.

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Smiling customer on a smartphone

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  2. Customer Service Plan Template Unique Customer Needs and Wants Analysis

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  3. Planning Customer Service Process

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  4. Customer Service Plan Examples

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  5. Customer Service Business Plan Template

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  6. FREE 12+ Service Plan Samples & Templates in PDF

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COMMENTS

  1. What is a customer service plan? + Template, tips, and examples

    A customer service plan is a detailed strategy guide that outlines how your business intends to deliver an exceptional customer experience consistently. Simply put, a customer service plan serves as a roadmap for streamlining and strengthening customer support.

  2. How to create an effective customer success plan (+ a template)

    A customer success plan is a strategic framework (document or visualization) that ensures a customer's long-term success and satisfaction. It explains what customer success looks like at your organization and empowers your customer success teams by outlining goals and objectives, strategies, key activities, and resource allocation.

  3. Customer Service Business Plan Template

    1. Create a Customer Service Vision It's important to begin by understanding the vision and customer service goals of the organization. This information should be communicated to the employees in order to help them provide the best customer service.

  4. 9 steps to create a customer service plan

    1. Create a customer service strategy The customer service strategy should include the development of a vision and policy. The vision should identify the type of customer service the organization will use, while the core policies direct how the customer service department operates.

  5. How to Create a Customer Service Strategic Plan

    Build a better customer service strategy for your business. Work Email By clicking the "Continue" button, you are agreeing to the Gartner Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Effective customer service strategic planning connects your enterprise strategy to specific initiatives for your function.

  6. How to Build an Award-Winning Customer Service Strategy

    How? Let's find out. Step #1: Make customer happiness the end goal A successful customer service strategy focuses primarily on customer happiness and starts with ingraining that vision deep into your teams. At first thought, keeping customers happy is up to the frontline staff. But what about those who never face a customer?

  7. Customer Service Business Plan Examples

    Learn More Call Center Business Plan Vashon Solicitation Services is a start-up business providing clients with top quality call center services 24 hours-a-day. Personal Shopping Services Business Plan Buy the Time is a start-up personal shopping service based in Seattle, Washington.

  8. Business Plan Template for Customer Service

    A customer service business plan template can provide numerous benefits for businesses focused on customer service, including: Clear definition of customer service objectives, ensuring alignment with overall business goals Effective strategies and tactics to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty

  9. Customer Service Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

    An effective customer service strategy plan focuses on customer happiness and includes specific steps for dealing with customer interactions throughout the customer journey. The best customer service strategies start with understanding what customers want, need, and expect from your business and then ensure all service and support initiatives ...

  10. How to Create a Customer Service Plan

    Here's how you and your business can benefit from a customer service plan: Minimize stress — If you're dealing with customers directly, especially unhappy ones, some stress will naturally result. You can reduce it if you develop a systematic way of dealing with your customers.

  11. The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Customer Service

    Strategy #2: Invest in customer service early. There's a lot of focus on getting customers — but not always so much on keeping them. It's a similar case with customer service. Most business owners know it's important, but it's not always one of the earliest functions people invest in.

  12. How To Improve Customer Service In 2024

    Here are 10 tips to improve customer service. 1. Make it personal. What truly separates successful brands from their competitors is offering a high level of personalization as part of their ...

  13. Business Plan Template for Customer Service Representatives

    Custom Views: Gain different perspectives on your customer service business plan with five unique views including Topics, Status, Timeline, Business Plan, and Getting Started Guide. Easily switch between these views to focus on specific aspects of your plan, track progress, and stay organized.

  14. How to Create a Customer Service Plan

    Create Support Materials. Using the information you gather during your research and employee interviews, create customer service materials and tools you send customers or post on your website or ...

  15. 5 Steps for Creating a Customer Service Strategy (+ Worksheet)

    Download our free CRM strategy worksheet. Download as PDF. In this guide, we break down the five essential steps of how to craft a sound customer support strategy. 1. Set Goals & Objectives for Your Customer Service Strategy. A crucial first step in creating your customer service strategy is deciding what you want to achieve with your service ...

  16. How to Start a Customer Service Business

    By Tara Duggan. Starting a customer services business typically involves conducting market research, writing a comprehensive business plan, hiring staff to handle customer needs and marketing your ...

  17. How to Start a Customer Service Consulting Business

    Plan your Customer Service Consulting Business Form your Customer Service Consulting Business into a Legal Entity Register your Customer Service Consulting Business for Taxes Open a Business Bank Account & Credit Card Set up Accounting for your Customer Service Consulting Business

  18. Small Business Customer Service: How to Plan, Set up and Kick off

    It also brings multiple benefits for customer service, especially in small businesses: Live chat raises customer engagement. By creating real-time interactions, live chat involves customers in active communication and allows you to present yourself as a competent and flexible pro. Live chat improves team efficiency.

  19. How to write a customer service plan

    Step 1: Set customer service goals. Your customer service plan should have goals that are tied to the overall business strategy. We'll need those goals to perform a gap analysis and ultimately write the plan. I've seen the examples below in many plans. These are definitely not goals: Improve customer service. Conduct customer service training.

  20. The 4 Essentials of a Customer Service Plan

    While it's best if you respond to feedback of any kind immediately, it's critical that you do so within 24 hours, or risk customers think you aren't listening. 3. Free-ish: Train your staff to be ...

  21. What Is a Customer Service Plan? (Definition and Tips)

    A customer service plan is a thorough strategy that companies implement to handle customer interactions. An effective customer service plan provides guidelines that help team members provide a consistent customer experience throughout every stage of the customer journey.

  22. How to Build a Customer Care Plan for Your Small Business

    Create an effective customer care plan by following the steps below. 1. Evaluate your current process. Instead of building your customer care plan from scratch, study how you're currently ...

  23. IT, Staffing & Customer Service Business Plans

    Customer Service Business Plans Call Center Business Plan Personal Shopping Services Business Plan Employment Agency Business Plans Attorney Employment Agency Business Plan Employment Agency Business Plan Exec Employment Agency Business Plan Teachers' Employment Agency Business Plan IT & Tech Support Business Plans Computer Consulting Business Plan

  24. How To Create A Customer Service Strategy That Helps Your Business Grow

    Feb 22, 2023,07:15am EST Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Founder & Head Coach/CEO, The Funds2Orgs Group. getty Customer service is one of the most critical functions of any...

  25. How to Create a Customer Service Plan that Drives ROI

    6 Steps to create a customer service action plan. Train employees in customer service. Establish concrete SOPs. Leverage technology to offer better service. Offer support on the channels your customers prefer. Monitor key metrics that help identify cracks and opportunities. Make service culture an organization-wide commitment.

  26. Eight Tips For Providing Excellent Customer Service

    1. Treat customers with respect. Customers want to feel valued and appreciated.

  27. Customer Service Plan Examples

    1. Customer Service Improvement Plan Template Details File Format MS Word Google Docs Apple Pages PDF Size: 38 KB Download 2. Customer Service Development Plan Template Details File Format MS Word Google Docs Apple Pages PDF Size: 28 KB Download 3. Customer Service Operational Plan Template Details

  28. Customer Service Improvement Plan For Small Business: Hit Your KPI

    Here are the '6 steps to building a customer service improvement plan'. 6 Steps to building a customer service improvement plan. Now let's get straight to the steps that you have to take when building a customer service improvement plan. 1. Find what your customers want. Always keep track of what your customers need.

  29. 8 SMART Customer Service Goals [With Real Business Examples]

    Thanks to this strategy, the company has seen a 55% improvement in their turnaround times, and a much happier customer base overall. 3. Improve employee skill and satisfaction. KPI: AHT, Employee Feedback, & Staff Turnover. This customer service goal and it's solution is closely linked to improving turnaround times.

  30. Best Business Cell Phone Plans of February 2024

    24/7 customer service; International use is for U.S. Only; Pros. Unlimited talk and text; Great customer service; ... If you're bundling five lines on your business plan, for instance, you might ...