Laying the Customer Care Groundwork  — This is the final part of a three post series explaining the essentials of starting out on the right foot with customer service. You can find the first post here and the second here.

BUILDING ON SUCCESS

Now that you have established your procedures, and then ensured that your entire team is capable of executing them, you’ll want to get the most out of the work you’ve done. Follow up with customers, especially if they contact support a lot. Make sure that you answered their questions, find our if your solution worked. This will do two things: help with market research and foster evangelist customers.

When you follow the solutions your customer care staff responds with, you’ll be able to understand whether or not the customer was successful after they contacted support. This will tell you a bit about your support process, but also should grant insight into the original issue itself. Why did the customer have a hard time finding that setting under their preferences? Maybe there is something unique about that user’s behavior that will help inform a future change. Perhaps everyone struggles with a certain feature, but you’ve never been able to figure out why. Getting in a customer’s shoes is essential here, and once they’ve broken the fourth wall by engaging your support staff, they’ll be much more eager to open up than a randomly selected population of customers would be.

Having a support inquiry answered effectively and getting your user on the road to success with your product will change the relationship that user has with your company forever. Ensuring that this process is both pleasant and effective will ultimately yield customer evangelists. These are customers who will go out and spread the good word for you. We all know that a bad review can be devastating, but some good word of mouth and a true believer out there working for you can pay dividends. When this happens, you have a lot to be proud of. You converted a moment of struggle for your user, into a positive experience that will retain that customer and help attract new ones. Best thing of all? It’s free.

THE END GOAL

This is going to be different for every company, but it usually involves enriching the lives of your customers in some way. Whatever goal you have, it will drive your product, and your company, forward. Good customer care is essential. There’s a lot more to say on the topic, but these are some good ideas to start out with. After all, your end user is what it’s all about.