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This is the first post in a series of tips for companies who are looking to increase their customer satisfaction and retention. The first post of the series will address the process of creating and managing an effective documentation process of any customer interactions whether they are questions, comments, or complaints.

Without customers there is no reason for your job or your organization to exist. The term “customer” can be defined very broadly including: people/companies who pay you money for a product or service; co-workers who rely on you and your team to provide a reliable service; or generous donors keeping your not-for-profit running.

“Customers First” has been a mantra since the beginning of business, but many organizations’ actions and results do not reflect this idea.

All of the well-intended effort in the world cannot cultivate true client fulfillment without the proper tools and processes. Achieving a Zen state of ultimate client fulfillment can only be achieved when you combine the right intentions with the right people and processes; then provide them with the proper tools to execute.

A successful support process always starts with the same step: Record

If your customers do not have a consistent and reliable method of contacting you that they trust will be followed through with, you have already lost. Recording the communication between you and your customer is the cornerstone for the rest of your support process. Without this step, your customers are not only is left confused as to what will happen next but your team is given the unnecessary task of remembering the details of multiple conversations at once.

Interactions between you and your customers typically centers on three key areas: Questions, Comments, and Complaints. The variation in how you handle each of these is not great but very important.

Questions

Questions from your customers are often easier to just quickly answer then to take the time to record. This is a trap you really want to avoid with the main reason being pretty simple. If one customer has a question then there is a good chance another customer will have the exact same question. You need to need to optimize your staff and having them continually provide answers to similar questions creates more time then it would be for them to actually record the questions and responses. Maintaining a list of these questions and answers is most commonly done with a knowledgebase system. You can display the information from your KB system via a FAQ, Q&A page, or a user-friendly searchable KB, but ultimately it needs to be a living process. As your organization grows so will it’s products, offerings, and services. The knowledgebase system needs to be easily accessible, it needs to be intuitive for the customers to use and search, and it needs to be current with up to date information with the ability to comment and edit. Recording questions is a great way to give your customers the ability to learn more about your offerings as well as show the depth in your offerings.

Comments

Comments are the most overlooked communication from your clients. Comments can be as simple as a “your product rocks” or “I didn’t know I could do that here.” Multiple instances of the first add up to a great list of mini-testimonials for credibility on your site and other marketing material. Instances of the latter are a great resource for Quality Assurance and User Experience teams for future product development.

Successfully recording these key pieces of information comes down to training the staff who interacts with the customer to listen to what they are saying. People who are on the front line of your organization need to learn to garnish as much as they can when they are working with your customers as the customer’s time is valuable and you get very few moments when their time is dedicated to you and your organization.

Complaints

Ah! Complaints! Too often support personnel loath when a complaint is being registered. This should only be the case when complaints are consistently repeated or are stemmed from poor ethics and improper business tactics. Other then a few random reasons complaints should be embraced. Complaints are a special gift your customer is presenting to you and allows a window on where your organization can improve your product offering or service. When a customer takes the time to let you know that your product/service is not living up to their expectation. This can be due to improperly setting expectations, not delivering a satisfactory product, or simply a mistake made by your team. The key, though, is how your team handles that complaint.

A help desk system can serve as the backbone of your team’s ability to record the complaint and deliver it to the person in your organization best suited to resolve the issue. Proven help desk applications provide you a process to begin recording complaints as they are received and help move these complaints through to resolution (we will discuss this further in the future post ‘Resolve’). It is very important to have many ways for your customers to contact you and record their complaint. Nothing is worse when you have an irritated customer who gets trapped in a phone tree, who doesn’t have access to a computer and fill out a web request, or who doesn’t use email (there are people out there who still don’t). Once complaints have been recorded then it becomes easy for the organization to begin getting visibility on what their customers are saying. The worse thing to experience is complaints being said about your organization without any knowledge about the complaint.
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