I am extremely proud of the accomplishments and positive impacts my teams have made over the past 10 years. The International recognition they have received is well deserved and I have been honored to accept a number of these awards on their behalf. The support teams I have hired, trained, and mentored across two companies have been awarded more than 9 Stevie Awards for Excellence in Customer Service since 2014, with 4 awarded just in 2020. These teams are the industry leaders in customer success and satisfaction in their respective markets, each with over 99% CSAT scores year over year.
The keys to successful customer relationships, retention, and growth starts with hiring quality people with passion to serve customers, train them to know your products, services, and technologies inside and out, provide them with the best tools to be be efficient and productive, encourage and mentor them to do their best, and empower them to make decisions that serve the customer and the company well.
To enable continual team improvements it is imperative to measure all customer engagement KPIs and metrics. Providing regular surveys to customers on your teams' interactions with them enables you to measure CSAT and NPI scores that reflect the customers' true satisfaction with your company. Building out the product/service's knowledge base of support articles, enrich it with how-to videos, and adding features and tools that allow customers to easily interface with the company for self-service, offering feedback, and submitting feature requests (in addition to traditional channels of chat, email, phone, tickets) provides your customers with flexibility in how they engage with your organization.
Setting high standards and reinforcing a positive attitude culture with customer centric policies, processes, communications, and outreach helps create and sustain a positive feedback loop of customer success engagement. Through these and other initiatives, with the right leadership and vision, it is possible to recreate this level of performance and customer success results in any organization.
Industry leading customer satisfaction adds competitive advantage to the new sales process, makes retention and upgrades much easier, and turns existing customers into product advocates. No amount of marketing can recreate the value that customer advocates bring when recommending your products/services to their peers. Industry leading Customer Success/Support teams are in fact customer growth and profit centers for their organizations.