Customer Service Strategy: Your Brand in Action

If you ask your marketing team, “What’s our brand?” they’ll give you principles wrapped up in a snappy slogan. Ask them how they allocate their budget, and they’ll list ads, social media, and conference costs. But if you ask them what their customer service strategy is, you’ll probably get blank stares.

Here are two realities worth pondering:

1. Every company communicates something about itself through customer service.
2. Customers remember how they were treated far more than they remember your images and ads.

After all, what do your customers reflect on? Your cardboard cutout with “We Care!” printed across it, or a phone call with a customer service associate who understood their complaint, solved their problem, and showed patience, kindness, and courtesy?

Customer service is especially important for B2B companies, where expectations are high because both the customer AND the company are sizably invested in the relationship.

So, What’s a Customer Service Strategy?

A customer service strategy is a blueprint to boost loyalty—through the interactions frontline reps have with customers.  A wide variety of customer-facing teams could be involved, such as Tech Support, Repairs, Warranties, and more. A strategy provides specific guidelines and examples explaining how your frontline staff should:

Taking a Step Back

Marketers and Strategists: let’s take a step back. If you want to beat your competition, you have two main options: lower your prices or build a brand based on intrinsic, distinctive qualities.

If you are building a brand, the typical way is through promotions, advertising, and social media. Generally, companies with big budgets take this marketing approach.

• Nike doesn’t shout that they have the best shoes, but they show athletes like Lebron James wearing them—demonstrating their unique brand value.
• Mattel and Warner Bros. reportedly spent $150 million to advertise “Barbie” more than the cost to make the movie itself. If you have the budget, showcasing your distinct brand via advertising is the way to go.

Core Model

Here are the five basic steps to any good customer service strategy model.

1. Take Inventory: Start by listing all the different types of questions reps answer and the issues they solve. Discuss this list in detail with your managers and reps because it should be complete and not based on slapdash assumptions.
2. Determine the Baseline: Document the status quo by:
   • Examining a statistically significant corpus of your emails, chats, and call recordings.
   • Mystery shopping your company to document what happens when critical issues occur. You need to know how you perform when the pressure is on.
   • Mystery shopping your competitors and comparable companies. It’s essential to know how your performance stacks up in the marketplace.
3. Develop a Playbook: Set the bar for how reps should handle interactions when confronted with a range of customer personalities, situations, and needs. While these are guidelines, not word for word scripts, you need to be specific and show copious examples. At Interaction Metrics, the average length of our Playbooks is 168 pages.
4. Measure Customer Service Quality: Set your KPIs so you can monitor interaction quality and continually gauge areas, reps and situations that need to be improved. This article in The Harvard Business Review reviews some of the customer service metrics that matter most.
5. Leverage Customer Feedback: Use Customer Service Surveys and Customer Interviews to gather insights into how your service quality is perceived so you can continually update and refine your customer service strategy.

Customer Service is About Both Policies & Interactions

The late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Charlie Munger said, “It’s a real pleasure to earn the trust of customers slowly over time by doing what’s right.”

Policy describes a company’s operational standards. For instance, Nordstrom allows customers to return anything for any reason, demonstrating their flexibility and customer focus.

Interaction describes how employees relate to customers and the information and cues they convey. For example, Apple’s ‘Geniuses’ are trained to explain technical solutions in simple language that any customer can understand.

Here’s how three companies have integrated both policy and interaction decisions into their customer service strategies.

• The Ritz-Carlton is famous for its employee empowerment policy that lets employees make decisions to resolve customers’ problems without needing a supervisor’s approval. Its customer service strategy is led by its representatives’ stellar communication, guided by a robust policy.
• Amazon combines its policy of easy returns and competitive pricing with clear, proactive communication. Customers are kept informed through accurate notifications about order and delivery statuses, ensuring a seamless shopping experience.
• Starbucks balances its customer service strategy between its communications and processes, creating a welcoming “third place” between work and home. Their policy of consistent beverage quality is reinforced by friendly, personalized interactions between baristas and customers, creating a familiar and comfortable experience at every location.

Building a Customer Service Strategy: Considerations

Should your company be policy-driven, interaction-driven, or both? And where do you start when building a customer service strategy? Here are four considerations for your strategy:

1: It’s ALL About the Details: When it comes to customer service, “a little bit” is key; too much, and your customer service comes across as inauthentic and forced. Think about subtle touches that you can implement consistently.
Examples:

• Be sure to end conversations on a polite, positive note instead of letting them fizzle out. The words and tone we end a customer service encounter on become lasting impressions. This is known as the peak-end rule, where we all judge experiences by how they felt at a peak moment and how they felt at the end of an interaction.
• If a customer gives you their phone number, email address, or a part or order number, offer to read it back to them. They may accept your offer to confirm that you got it right, or they may be in a rush and not want to spend the extra time. Either way, it’s courteous to ask.
• If you need to put a customer on hold, explain why you need to do so and for how long.

2: Consistency Matters: Customers should be able to expect the same quality of service regardless of whether it’s Monday or Friday, the morning or the afternoon, or if they reached Sally or Bob—every experience should be consistent. Consistency ensures that every interaction meets the same standard and builds trust and reliability with customers. If only Sally gives great customer service, or great customer service only happens on Mondays, you don’t have a customer service strategy – and you’re failing to show your brand in action!

3: Personalize Interactions: Tailor your conversations (whether by chat, email, or phone) to individual customer preferences, past interactions, and personal needs. Address customers by name. Suggest products based on customers’ previous purchases and use customers’ preferred communication channels.

4: Rely on Best Practices: Here are just a few examples of some of the many best practices that you could fold into your customer service strategy:

• Encourage customer service representatives to make decisions that prioritize customer happiness within clear boundaries. Empowerment can lead to quicker problem-solving and better customer experiences. This is something you will need to role-play.
• Establish protocols for responding to customer inquiries and complaints. Clearly outline escalation paths for complex problems.
• Send follow-up messages after resolving an issue or receiving feedback. This reinforces your brand’s commitment to customer listening and shows you genuinely care about the experiences your customers have. You can automate some of this, of course, but you’ll also need templates that customer service reps can use.

Earlier in 2024 Martha Brooke discussed customer service strategies with Jason Bader on the podcast Distribution Talk. Check it out here. It’s a primer on how to evaluate and elevate call center interactions.

Customer Service as a Branding Superpower

When you implement a customer service strategy, you turn your customer service from a business expense into a valuable asset that drives growth.

Each positive interaction leaves customers with a lasting, favorable impression of your brand—without the need for a large marketing budget.

Whether it’s refining your policies or improving communication, subtle changes can have an outsized impact on the customer experience. Isn’t it time for a customer service strategy?

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Would you like to set your company apart with a customer service strategy? Get in touch!

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