Creating a Customer-Centric Support Team

What does it mean for your business to be customer-centric? Most businesses think it’s about giving your customers great customer service. That’s true. You should also be giving your customers great customer service all the time, every time you engage with your customer.  

First, let’s define Customer-Centric. It's defined as an approach to doing business that focuses on providing a positive customer experience both at the point of sale and after the sale in order to drive profit and gain a competitive advantage.

1. Customer empathy continuous training: Companies use the ongoing mantra to empathize with your customer to give great service. However, it’s easier said than done for many companies. To understand empathy companies must have ongoing training sessions not only with the customer support rep, but with leadership too. To truly instill customer empathy it must come down from top leadership as a company's mission. 
2. Hire customer-centric people: Finding the right people takes time. Finding customer-centric can be challenging. If your company is serious about the customer experience you must start with the right people. To do this everyone needs to be involved from your customer rep to top leadership. Co-interview with leadership and the customer rep asking questions relevant to their position. This gives you a well-rounded view of the candidate. How well the candidate will perform their daily job duties. How you can manage the employee. Making it easier to find the right candidate.
3. Transparency is key to building a customer-centric team: All relevant information relating to your customers including reports, app reviews, call metrics should be shared with your team. Keeping valuable information from your team will not help them grow and learn what changes or improvements they need to make to become customer-centric.
4. Compensation tied to customers:  The phrase “skin in the game” has become cliché business-speak. Think of it this way, your team put in an extra effort to grow the business. They deserve to share in that success. Your team has a reason to be customer-centric on every call. The better the team does the better company does. Your compensation plan should be fair to all team members. Money is an important factor for sure. Change it up so the reward is meaningful to the team.
5. Foster an open discussion through one on ones and team meetings: Communication is the only way to gain the information you’ll need as a company to keep the focus on being a customer-centric company. Make sure you as the leader are asking questions to your support rep and a team that helps you understand the issues, challenges, and tools your team needs to be successful. 

To be truly customer-centric it is important from top leadership down to foster the environment to be successful. It takes everyone to make the customer experience a customer-centric one.

John is the sales/marketing manager at Cygnus and has over twenty years of customer service experience. John is passionate about helping businesses give a superior customer experience.