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

COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR TEAM

Time is money, right? In fact, the time of some members of your team is potentially worth quite a lot of money. It might seem silly to include an engineer in a conversation about customer care standards, but situations do arrise where you’ll be glad you did. With that in mind, though, it’s important that everyone understands the fundamental customer care goals of the company. This will help every layer of your organization package their work with the customer in mind.

When features are delivered to your sales and customer support teams (often one and the same), even if it’s just an improvement to a back-end process, your staff on the front-lines should be able to answer the question “How will the make my customer’s lives better?”. When all levels of the organization have this in the back of their minds, the information that is delivered down into the trenches of customer care will be much more valuable to your end-users.

You might even find yourself in a situation, as I recently did, where a developer or engineer will interact directly with one of your customers. Whether it’s scoping a new feature with input from a power-user, or getting feedback from an early adopter, these situations do happen - especially in small organizations. You’ll be glad that your entire team already shares your company-wide philosophy towards customer care. Fostering an environment where your customers can be part of the process can be very effective for both providing good support and building customer evangelists.