- Whether you're a one person design company,
a 50 person software startup
or a global airline with thousands of employees,
you'll need a strategy for serving your customers.
Strategy is the bridge between your organization's vision
and mission and the specific decisions
required to make them a reality.
Whom will you hire?
What hours will you be open?
What technologies will you need and others?
As you develop customer service,
the need for a plan becomes clear.
Just think about a new product.
Will it affect recruiting, hiring or training?
How should these new customer service interactions
get routed?
In other words, what person or group will handle them?
How will the workload change?
Will that impact resources and budget?
You get the idea, there are many decisions
you and your team will need to make.
In customer service, strategy takes the form
of a specific plan which is often referred to
as a customer access strategy
or alternatively, a customer engagement strategy.
Some just call it a service strategy.
Let's look at what a customer access strategy is
and the components that make up an effective plan.
A customer access strategy can be defined as a framework,
a set of standards, guidelines and processes
describing the means by which customers receive
or are enabled to access the information,
services and expertise they need.
Now, that's the formal definition
and it sounds pretty formal
but I'd encourage you to not make this too formal
at least to begin with.
An effective customer access strategy
includes 10 components and my encouragement
is just begin thinking about them together.
First, consider customer segments.
In large organizations,
this is typically defined along with marketing
and it summarizes how customers are logically segmented.
For example, insurance companies will identify segments
by the policies needed or where customers are located,
whether they're businesses or consumers and so forth.
Even the smallest organizations have segments to consider.
Your restaurant may encourage special celebrations,
group functions and others.
Second, identify the types of interactions.
For example, placing orders, customer service,
technical support and others.
You can get as specific as you need
in order to later define the skills
that your team will need.
You then look at access channels.
Here, you'll identify how customer service is delivered.
That might include in person, phone, text,
social sites such as Twitter and Instagram and others.
Next, consider hours of operation
and how they may vary for different types of interactions.
Self-service such as through your website
should be available 24/7
but you'll need to decide on what makes sense
for other alternatives.
The next step summarizes the organization's objectives
for accessibility.
What goals do you have
for how long customers will have to wait,
minimizing wait times?
Next, you'll consider routing.
How is each interaction going to be routed
and distributed to the right place?
In other words, what person or what group will handle them?
In the next component, you'll consider the person
and the technology resources required,
which employees and which systems will come into play
for each type of interaction.
The eighth component of your plan
summarizes the information required,
what information on customers, products
and services will need to be accessible,
what information should be captured
during the service interaction.
This is a logical place to summarize
how the organization will comply with any privacy
or reporting requirements.
In the next step, analysis and improvement,
you'll define how the information captured
will be used to better understand customers
and to improve products and services.
In the final step, guidelines for deploying new services,
your plan should summarize technology needs,
investment guidelines and other considerations
as you bring new services into the mix
and you might be thinking, there's a lot to this
but I found without fail
that the thought you put into your strategy
will come back in both time and better decisions.
Just recently, I've seen the benefits
for a small catering company
as well as a large government service operation
with over 10,000 employees.
You'll find a summary of the 10 components
of a customer access strategy
in the guide to additional resources.
So just get started.
Start simple.
Begin to build out these 10 components.
You'll soon see the benefits
of having a common plan to work from.