What is customer service

Customer service is customer support at every stage of the purchase. The stages of purchase for a customer can be, for example, as follows:

• choosing a product or service
• choosing a way to receive a service
• order and payment
• waiting for delivery /provision of a service
• purchase feedback
• solving problems at every stage, including with the participation of third parties (for example, a marketplace provider)

The client may have a good or bad impression from interacting with the company. Every company that works with people has a customer service, and it is especially important for b2c companies that interact a lot with consumers through online banking, online stores. How much effort the client will need to solve the problem depends on his desire to work with the company further.

Elements of the customer service:

• the client is the core around which the service is built
• the client agreement is the main “law” by which the service operates
• business processes are everything a company does to deliver results to a client
• Client agreements regulate all the company's work with clients. They can be both external and internal.

External is what we broadcast to clients. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a client and a company that regulates the parameters of a service or product. It can be concluded with each client or, with a mass service, it can be a public offer.

With the help of such agreements, the company warns the client in advance about its capabilities in the service. For example, it stipulates the working hours, deadlines for processing applications, the procedure for resolving incidents, and so on. This allows you to manage the expectations of customers, on which the result of your work largely depends. So, if you specified in the agreement that you work from Monday to Friday, then an adequate client will not expect the order to be completed on a day off.

Internal agreements — here we are talking about an operational level Agreement (OLA, Operational Level Agreement). In other words, how the company's employees decide among themselves what actions they will take among themselves to solve the request of an external client for them.

Why automate Customer service

As a rule, the heart of the automation of the main customer lifecycle is a CRM system in which information about the customer, his orders and his calls to the support service is aggregated. On the Jira Service Desk, however, they most often make a portal for processing complaints about problems. It can be either accessible to the user (and be part of the client's personal account), or it can be an internal system where calls from the call center, from the website and from other sources are collected. As soon as the company receives a call or message, all the collected information is “pulled up” by the phone number and becomes available to the operator. And he understands how to work with this client, where to direct him and what to offer.

What does the automation of the customer service provide in the aggregate:

Business efficiency is growing. The resources of any company are limited, the flow of requests is large, it is impossible to attach a specialist to each client in order to immediately process the request. Automation allows you to reduce the number of employees involved (reduce the cost of a photo), as well as use the time of the rest as efficiently as possible.
Saves time. This is due to the fact that the share of manual labor is minimized as much as possible. That is, employees are connected in extreme cases, all typical operations are performed by the system — both processing and decision-making. Accordingly, customer requests are processed faster.
The human factor is minimized. Company managers just get tired of managing a crowd of people. You need to find an approach to people, they get tired, get sick, are in a bad mood. And as a result, the management wants to replace them with a system. Probably half of our projects start with just such a request.
Customer retention. The task of the service is to make the purchase process simple. Then it will be convenient for customers to make repeat orders.
Income growth. The customer service does not just increase sales, it helps to increase the amount of the minimum order and the average receipt, and it can also be sold as a separate service. We tell you about each method further on the examples of different companies.

In addition to the above: the company, through automation, can regulate the quality of customer service and correlate it — through the evaluation of NPS*, repeat orders, recommendations — with business costs and sales volumes.

*NPS Index (Eng. Net Promoter Score) is an index for determining consumers' commitment to a product or company (an index of willingness to recommend), used to assess readiness for repeat purchases. It is one of the main indices for measuring customer loyalty.

The main processes of customer service

Focusing on the problem-solving environment, the typical processes will be the processing of technical incidents (and here everything is very similar to ITIL processes), and disputes between the supplier and the end customer (the order did not arrive, the wrong thing came, the service was rendered impolitely or untimely, etc.), as well as the processing of feedback on the service itself (it was impolite, waited a long time and so on. information that comes from feedback collection terminals, the organization's website, customer chats and other points of contact).

Customer service reference books

Obviously, the main directory will be the customer directory:

If the business is b2b, then the contract directory will also be important:

In all cases, a directory of orders is required (this is not necessarily an Insight object, but any order should be found by ID and subsequent customer requests linked to it):

Quite often, all sorts of additional directories appear - sales channels, legal entities of the CRM owner organization, etc.

In addition, in many cases, the CRM system is integrated with external directories to fill in detailed data about the counterparty (partner, supplier) based on the TIN or reliability scoring (evaluation) based on data from the tax service, as well as on open court records and the activities of the organization in the last year- two.