It’s that time of the year. Most wonderful and happening time. Everyone is thinking of spending happy times with family and friends, a season of love, gifts and laughter. As we step in to the new year with a hope for more prosperous and productive 365 days, lets not forget the reason for our prosperity and well being –Our beloved customers.

On behalf of all of us, I thought of giving a shot at 2016 new year customer service resolutions for organizations to watch out for based on the customer service industry trends observed in 2015. (Trend source here: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3). This will probably end up where numerous 2015 customer service resolution articles / posts ended up in 2016. Hey, but worth a shot!

Here they are…

1. Help your customers in their preferred channel and not yours.
2. Stop viewing customer service as a low hanging fruit during cost reduction initiatives and the first place for headcount reduction without analyzing brand impact.
3. Stop looking at customer service teams as conventional cost centers, view them as strategic enablers to gain competitive advantage.
4. Make a conscious effort to make customer service team as a talent factory for the larger organization. Having folks who have talked to the customers first hand move to other internal departments (IT, sales, quality, process, finance, marketing, product, leadership) will drive the culture of customer centricity in all the decisions.
5. Don’t look at every customer as a “CSAT machine” to help achieve your annual bonus, view every customer service interaction as a brand building opportunity. CSAT is not just a metric it’s how your customers perceive your brand.
6. Don’t push up-selling your products as part of a customer service transaction unless it is really meaningful to your customer and necessary to complete the transaction inline with customer’s needs.
7. Keep your IVR as simple as possible for the customer. Don’t make reaching a customer service representative an impossible task (Press 1, Press 2 and on and on). Give customers easy access to your customer service folks.
8. Call the customers back on time as promised. Measure it, drive it.
9. Have a meaningful and articulable customer segmentation strategy for your contact centers.
10. Learn from the customer service industry, don’t re-invent the wheel.

Wish you all a very happy new year!

About the Author: For more information, contact Balakarthik Venkataramanan at vbkarthik123@yahoo.com. LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/balakarthikv.