Coffee Chat on June 15 at 11:00 AM EST: Using customer service for growth

Looking forward to this one! :) 

looking forward..

What would be nice ; is that we could have an outlook calendar invite to save ..

Thanks for chiming in Rhea.

Linda, this is great feedback. I’ll explore an option to use a calendar link in the email. 

Excited to get things started! I love talking about customer experience! :) 

Hello all :)

Hey everyone! welcome to our coffee chat about using customer service for growth. I’m super excited to have @Jeannie_Walters for this session. Feel free to pick her brain on all things CX as she shares insights to our prompts. 

As always, here’s reminder about a few things to keep in mind.

Six important things to know before we get started on our coffee chat 

1. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering the first question Q1, start your answer with A1 and use the Quote option 

2. If you cannot make it at 11:00 am EST or even if you’re past time, you can still post your answer to a particular question.

3. You can reply to each others threads/posts to keep the conversation going.

4. Be polite and respectful of other people’s opinions.

5. Most importantly, have a great time here!

6. Lastly, I will make sure to engage with all of you to make this interesting.

Excited to hear from you, @Jeannie_Walters :) 

A1. There’s nothing wrong with a casual conversation. It’s wonderful to invite Sales leaders and teams to participate in the Contact Center for a day. Listen to calls, talk to Customer Support team members.

Sales needs to understand what the customer experience is and how to set expectations.

According to Forrester Research, 77% of executive buyers claim salespeople don’t understand their issues and where they can help, and 78% claim salespeople do not have relevant examples or case studies to share with them. If sales teams don’t truly understand their customer’s experience, how can they help their customers?

It’s important to understand each team’s goals and how they’re all connected in the customer’s journey.

A1 - more thoughts! 

The best organizations create a cycle of feedback internally and externally. That product team and sales team constantly at odds need productive and empowering ways to communicate to one another about what’s realistic and what’s not. It’s also important to consider how to weave in the customer feedback beyond just the sales team or tech support. What are we hearing from customers, and what can we all do about it? Getting your sales leaders on board with seeing themselves as customer experience leaders will help empower your organization to make the right promises to your customers.

A1: I’m going to quote some insights from the Freshdesk blog: 

10 Tips for Aligning Functions

When people align, it means they have a common purpose they are all passionate about and a reason to work together and achieve goals in line with that purpose. In the case of a growing company, alignment can help you not only accelerate growth but improve profitability and long-term success. Here are 10 tips for aligning your sales, marketing and customer support functions

1. Focus on the customer – provide a unified experience for identifying, understanding and fulfilling customer needs
2. Take a One Team approach – the customer should see your company as a single coordinated entity
3. Understand end-to-end processes – look for points of friction and processes getting backed-up
4. Encourage collaboration – your team can better address customer needs if they work together and share ideas
5. Align performance metrics and rewards to common objectives – don’t let your rewards program undermine success
6. Encourage excellence in individual roles – give team members the training, tools and support they need to excel.
7. Soften boundaries between functions – don’t let org structures create barriers
8. Share data across functions (avoiding siloes) – cross-functional data leads to better quality insights
9. Think long-term – focus on lifetime value and customer retention
10. Keep growth balanced – ensure that growth in one area doesn’t cause problems in another.

Through building alignment amongst your business functions and providing the right set of tools to enable and sustain that alignment, your company will be better positioned to turn this exciting time of rapid growth into sustainable and profitable customer engagements that will delight your customers, your employees and your shareholders.

You are VERY right. It’s not just handy, it’s imperative! Product teams often develop roadmaps in isolation. The best product teams actually develop sprints based on customer feedback, issues, and requests. This is where best practices like customer journey mapping and service blueprinting can be really great to get everyone on the same page.

A1: For me it starts with everyone understanding the corporate “reason for being” and what the entire customer lifecycle entails. Common goals help too. As does the appreciation of the value chain(s) and the roles different teams and people play in it. I could keep going but will finish this post on appreciating the many hindrances that colleagues face, especially those that are avoidable by your actions.