Remote operations
Marc Prempain
15 April 2024
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Developing a customer service roadmap may seem like a daunting task at first. It requires a lot of planning and a realistic look at how the industry and your company will develop and change in the next 3, 6, and 12 months. There are several milestones to analyze and develop plans around in order to future-proof your business and customer service roadmap.
A customer service roadmap is a high-level overview of how your company’s customer care will evolve in the short and long term. These roadmaps are important for ensuring that your customer service agents continue to provide the best customer experience possible. Creating this strategy is important for all companies, but especially those that focus largely on customer support, such as call centers.
Defining your KPIs will help you guide your strategic planning in order to meet those goals. Some KPIs that you can measure in a customer service environment include:
• Net promoter score
• First call resolution
• Average abandonment rate
• Average time in queue
Each industry targets different customer bases, and therefore each industry will have different customer support trends. Companies need to follow these trends and plan to adapt their support teams based on how customers want to interact with support agents. This may include planning to develop a multi-channel support system where customers can access support agents through various means such as email, call, chatbot, and social media.
As your company grows, you need to consider how your support team will be impacted. Will you expand internationally? In that case, you may need to consider hiring local support teams for each of your company bases in order to ensure that a support team is always available regardless of time zone.
Rapid growth can cause many problems for companies, so it is important to anticipate what kinds of managerial and organizational challenges will arise with that growth. For example, you can tier your support teams to handle different levels of tickets, where one team responds to basic questions that can be answered with a simple email, while another team handles more complex issues that require a full phone call or video assistance call to resolve the issue remotely.
One way to help with powering your business to ensure that organizational changes and new employees don’t result in lost internal knowledge is to create a knowledge base. Storing internal knowledge based on past experiences can be used to train new employees and empower agents who find themselves facing new incidents that they have never resolved in the past.
In the future, it may be useful to integrate external solutions into your existing workflows to help optimize processes and fill gaps. These can be internal collaboration tools, customer feedback services, or tools that create new channels through which your support agents can help customers. For example, video assistance solutions like ViiBE offer a more advanced customer support solution so agents can clearly see the environment of the person needing assistance, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to resolve the issue. ViiBE is compatible with any existing CRM including Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, IBM Maximo, and more. As a result, it integrates directly into the support agents’ tickets, so all they have to do is click a simple button to escalate the support and launch a ViiBE call. On the customer’s side, they receive a link by email or SMS and can access the video assistance call with an agent in one click and without download.
By considering these various elements, you can design an effective customer service roadmap. Planning for the future may take up some time here and now, but it will be worth it in the long run. With a well-designed plan, you can stay ahead of the competition and navigate any major changes as your company develops.
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