How To Set Up A Customer Service Process Flow That Delights Your Ideal Customers

Customer service process flow, often known as flow charts, are documents that depict the many operations performed by a call center, whether it is in-house or outsourced. A consistent process flow helps smooth the high volume work that contact centers handle, whether it’s customer issue resolution, technical assistance, new account creation, or other activities. 

Process improvement in call centers, when properly designed, keeps mistakes to a minimum and enables flexible adjustments as needed.

As customer service workers, we are all aware that first impressions are critical. But what we might not understand is how little time we have to produce a good impression. We form opinions within the first seven seconds of meeting new individuals and facing new scenarios, according to psychological studies.

We may develop a strong impression of a person or brand in less than the time it takes to respond to a text message. Surprisingly, some studies show that a tenth of a second is all it takes to obtain a sense of qualities like trustworthiness and dependability.

Why You Need A Customer Service Process Flow

When a consumer approaches your company, they want quick responses. A few seconds isn’t enough time to discuss your company’s history, solve customer service issues, or express the entire scope of your brand’s capabilities. When time is of the essence and a quick response is required, your agents do not have the luxury of addressing misunderstandings.

So, what can you do to make a better first impression on customers? Create a smooth, straightforward, and intuitive customer service process flow.

Customer Service Process Flow Benefits

When adequately documented, flow charts and process documentation may enhance a call center’s efficiency and speed through conventional automation, or even robotic process automation. 

Customer service process flow may also guarantee that call center procedures and processes such as call processing, account creation or closure, tech assistance, and reporting are consistently followed by all workers. Other advantages of call center flow charts are as follows:

Procedures for Issue Escalation Assessment

Each inbound call must be evaluated to determine the best next actions, whether escalation or resolution. A structured, best practice problem assessment process workflow assists call center managers in ensuring that untrained employees follow established processes.

Efficient Call Processing

Customer service process flow chart analysis accelerates development, assures adherence to a standardized call process, and enables proactive call management, which aids in determining the optimal path for each call type and moving it ahead accordingly.

With the Use of Automation, Customers Save Time

Instead of having a human answer the phone to explain office hours, customer service process flows can produce automation that informs clients about important office hours and operations.

Make a plan for incoming calls.

You can make a timetable by utilizing a Call Flow. Based on the time of day, this schedule can provide the appropriate alternatives to the incoming call. For example, if someone calls after typical business hours, this can trigger a different call flow that directs calls to the appropriate voicemail.

Building An Efficient Customer Service Process Flow

1. Review Your Current Customer Support Process

It all starts with an examination of your present procedures. You can’t enhance something you don’t understand.

First, assess whether your team has been following any procedure documents. Look over the documentation to check whether it represents current systems if you can find them. Take some time to map out how your team presently handles various support responsibilities.

The most frequent customer service scenario that immediately comes to mind is issue resolution, in which the client phones in, sends a message with a specific inquiry, or requests assistance. Visualizing procedures will help you identify where your customer service is failing and what areas need to be improved.

Because this is a time-sensitive process, it is critical to visualize and improve it. The consumer expects a rapid and satisfactory solution. 

2. Identify Current Challenges 

If you can find portions of your process flow that can be automated, then the simplest solutions to adopt are frequently technological in nature.

Is your customer support team, for example, manually asking for client information when they contact you via live chat? Is the tool automatically guiding the consumer through a series of common inquiries, such as requesting their email address or customer ID?

Perhaps your workforce is wasting time attempting to connect to your clients’ computers in order to view their screens and assist them. In this scenario, incorporating browser recordings into your customer service workflow will vastly improve your operations.

A process works best with established goal-oriented metrics.  Otherwise, your staff will have no direction for their customer interactions.

Here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer service processes to add to your documentation:

• Average query processing time
• Customer satisfaction rating
• The total number of tickets resolved
• The time it takes to resolve tickets
• Types of tickets produced
• Number of jobs assigned to each staff member 
• Number of customer complaints received 
• Customer feedback after receiving service
• Number of escalated tickets/questions
• Percentage of jobs not performed or performed late
• Net promoter score (NPS)

Not all of these KPIs will be applicable to all businesses, but the majority of them are common for customer care teams.

Setting goals for metrics will make it simpler for teams to operate efficiently and handle client concerns.

3. Analyze Options To Improve Your Ticket Sorting Process

Incorrect ticket sorting and routing is a typical issue that adds time to ticket response timeframes.

When creating a process, you may specify that the agent should produce a ticket when the client calls in, and the team subsequently handles the problem. Is this, however, the most efficient method to go about it?

If you track your KPIs down to the rep level, it becomes a simple matter to answer this question and allows you to build rep levels. Furthermore, this pushes all support workers to improve their KPIs in order to advance up the tiers.

When evaluating individual rep performance, keep in mind that each person is unique. A representative who isn’t exceptional at giving assistance via chat might shine when it comes to phone support.

Similarly, you may discover that too much time is spent on a specific stage of the workflow. Find strategies to reduce or simplify waste.

4. Create/Optimize Workflows

Considering your customer support workflow within the context of your organization is also important. You should anticipate the possibility that your workflow will extend outside your department.

For instance, what would happen if your support staff discovered a network-wide software problem that affected all customers and caused a service outage?

Is there a component in your support pipeline that notifies the marketing team about this outage so it may be conveyed to all customers? Now may not be the greatest time to tweet about how great your software is.

These factors must also exist inside support teams, from invoicing to technical assistance and beyond. Always keep in mind that your customer support activities operate within the context of your organization.

5. Test and Refine

This might be the most crucial stage in the process. There is no such thing as a flawless customer support workflow.

Make it a weekly or quarterly habit to assess your existing customer support flows and identify opportunities for improvement.

You can discover this by putting a few solid alternatives to the test and obtaining more data and information.

Conclusion

Creating a procedure at this point will entail investigating any communications you have with consumers after they make a purchase.

Simply said, a customer service process flow is a road plan that instructs an agent on the path to take from the moment they answer the phone until the end of the call. This map contains instructions on what questions to ask, what steps to take, and if the call should be escalated to a manager.

Need a professional to help you navigate callers and companies seamlessly? Call Flow experts are here to help. Schedule a meeting now to learn more.