When customers interact with your frontline staff in a way that meet their needs and expectations whilst representing your brand, you can be guaranteed they’ll come back again.
According to research by HubSpot, 93% of customers who receive amazing customer service from a brand will make repeat purchases.
Brands that provide an excellent level of service will have well-defined service standards that have been embedded in the business. Frontline staff will have been trained in how to deliver them, and they’ll be measured to determine success.
Great customer experience (CX), supported by quality customer service will yield a high level of return on investment (ROI). In fact, Forrester says investing in a customer-first operation can yield up to a 700% ROI over 12 years.
To drive this return, businesses need to ensure they’re delivering customer outcomes that are defined by customers’ functional and emotional needs – because emotional needs can play a big part in ROI.
Put simply, service standards can transform the CX for your business as well as helping it to grow.
At Engine, we’ve worked with a number of big-name organisations like Heathrow Airport, Sainsbury’s and Logitech to establish a set of service standards for their business.
Here, we explain five ways that service standards can transform your CX and help your business grow:
1. Service standards enable staff to know what they need to do for customers
By delivering the standards effectively, your people will know how they can help customers, at what point in their journey, and to what level. Not only will this help create customer loyalty, but it’ll save cost impact from a poor CX.
It costs up to 25 times more to win a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Data shows that it can take 12 positive customer experiences to make up for just one negative one. (Source: Qualtrics: How to improve frontline customer service).
2. Service standards differentiate you in the market and bring your brand to life
Your staff are representatives and ambassadors of your brand. The interactions they have with customers reflect the way the brand speaks and feels, to create a connection.
The way it feels to interact with a member of staff at an Apple store is reflective of Apple’s whole brand and philosophy. The same will go for cabin crew on a Virgin Atlantic flight. These experiences are designed to create a positive outcome for the customer.
In cases where a customer is upset about the service, staff that are empathetic and well trained have the power to turn a customer’s negative experience into a positive one.
3. Service standards help recruit the right people for the job and know where they need to be
It’s likely that through the process of developing the service standards, you’ll identify specific customer needs that are best met by a person rather than another channel.
The standards should be designed to respond to those specific needs. Therefore, the roles that staff may need to adopt and deliver can be different to the ones they have today – or their role may slightly adapt or need changing.
This helps organisations identify the qualities needed to best fulfil these roles, which tend to have an impact on the profile required when recruiting for customer service roles.
4. Service standards contribute to your service culture
If you’re not already a fully customer-centric organisation, the standards will help you get there quicker. If you’re already there, the standards will ensure the conversation is elevated daily.
Your defined set of service behaviours should represent your brand’s personality and how it’s manifested through the service provided by your people. These are accompanied by a set of actions that help to demonstrate those behaviours, collected in a set of behavioural guidelines.
These behaviours, in a customer-centric organisation, tend to also be adopted by the business. The service culture starts to shine when the behavioural shift becomes fundamental to how the customer service and the business feels as an entity.
5. Service standards help identify the service KPIs for you to be able to measure and demonstrate success
Behaviours and actions can be observed, and therefore assessed and measured. The standards will also include the definition of the desired quality for each action – from unacceptable to excellent.
By using the standards, your organisation can start to turn these into KPIs that can be integrated into the performance tools and processes that will enable the business to report on how well the standards are being met, and therefore the quality of service being delivered to customers.
The result of the reporting should also help your organisation make informed decisions for improvements and changes accordingly.
In addition, technology is helping to optimise business operations and create efficiencies to deliver customer service and great CX. It’s therefore key for you to know exactly where staff really matter and how they can make a difference to customers, as well as using technology to support employees in providing excellent customer service to customers.
If you need help in designing a customer service standard that will help you create differentiation and loyalty to your brand, get in touch.
