How To Build Innovation with Customer Service

The Relationship Between Innovation and Customer Service

Your brand’s Innovation is determined by the extent to which people feel your brand is forward thinking. Brands with high Innovation are always iterating and discovering new and original ways of doing things.  

You can drive Innovation through Customer Service by focusing on three areas: the format of your Service channels, the speed and accuracy of your response to customers, and your internal feedback loop (the way you get customer feedback to internal teams to advance your product or service).   

If you’re looking to increase your Innovation through Customer Service, consider the following:  

1. Where do your customers go to experience your product or service? Innovative brands embrace a multi-channel delivery approach and intersect seamlessly with consumers’ lives. Customer Service should be multi-dimensional and the optimum mix of channels for your brand should be determined by the types of customers you have and the way they engage with you. For your Customer Service, you could leverage in-app messaging, social media channels, live chat functionality, co-browsing video calls, support forums, message boards, web forms, and video conferences.

2. Who is best placed to answer customer queries quickly and well? In some instances, the answer may be ‘no one’. Innovative brands harness the power of automation to direct customers quickly and seamlessly to answers without human intervention. For instance, multi-media knowledge bases enable customers to find answers for themselves while automated bots and canned replies, when done well, can quickly surface accurate responses to customer questions. If the types of queries your customers have are too nuanced or technical for automated bots, you can also leverage your own customers in the design of a service solution. Building a customer community can fast track your Customer Service by enabling customers to answer each other’s queries.

3. Who needs to action customer service requests? Every customer interaction provides a vital clue about what’s working well about your brand and what needs work. Building feedback loops to get these insights back to your product, strategy, marketing, and content teams will help embed Innovation within your business strategy. Ultimately, people will see your responsiveness and progression, and feel the brand itself is more Innovative, too.  

What should you do next?

• Get every single member of your company to try a stint in Customer Service. It could be, for instance, that your Head of Finance fields a customer question and conceives of a great new payment plan. Your Head of Product might come up with a great new flavor range based on their customer interaction. People with different skill sets solve problems differently and getting team members in front of customers will provoke fresh ideas and put customers at the heart of your business.  . 
• Map out your customer touchpoints against your existing Customer Service function to identify missing channels. 
• Enable customers to “self-serve” by exploring automated service solutions, like chat bots, FAQs and knowledge centers.
• Design your customer feedback loops to funnel frequent questions and concerns back to the relevant internal teams.

How to determine if it’s working.

• You should see a gradual rise in your Innovation scores as you demonstrate to consumers how responsive you can be to feedback. If you make substantial progress in this area, it’s likely that you’ll see a rise in Empathy, too.  

• Track the ticket volume across your service channels. A steady flow of tickets across channels shows that your multi-channel strategy is working. Review and refine channels with lower than average volume.

• Monitoring your Average Resolution Time will enable you to understand how quickly customers are getting responses to their queries. Driving down this metric will show that your brand is getting faster at dealing with Customer queries.

  
  
  Guidance from:
  Annie Henderson | Head of Customer Success, ProQuo AI
  

  
  Annie is customer-obsessed. She's always worked with how people think about companies, and now she turns that expertise to making sure customers get the best from brands.