After serving solutions to difficult customers, there is still one crucial step that needs to be acted upon: the follow-up.
The follow-up, or post-resolution system, is critical because it is the extra effort that indicates to the customer that the company values not only their business, but also their understanding and support. A post-resolution system provides either the epilogues to a happy ending, or the opportunity to further assist a customer if the resolution wasn’t as effective as first imagined.
Deliver Follow-Ups
After every interaction with an unhappy customer, operators should be required to systematically report the aggravation and solution used to address the issue. Whether this information is forwarded to a supervisor or kept for the operators’ own records is dependent on the size of the team and the amount of traffic the operator is likely to receive.
At the end of a shift or at the start of the following, operators should be required to send out emails to the difficult customers as a follow-up — with an apology that references the specific issue, and a question to ask if the problem has ultimately been resolved or not. As a team, you should make sure that all the unresolved issues are followed up on appropriately until they are resolved to customers’ satisfaction.
Collect Customer Feedback
Soliciting customer feedback is another way to gauge the quality of a solution and chat.
Consider including a survey at the end of a live chat session, or following up with a
feedback request via email. This had better be used after an effective resolution is
implemented, and the language attached to the survey should make it clear that feedback is used to improve future customer service scenarios.
Create and Maintain Metric Systems
Outside of directly reaching out to difficult customers, there is another internal aspect to the post-resolution system: collecting and maintaining metrics that enable continual improvements to customer service strategy.
Metric Check List:
- Collecting transcripts from difficult conversations, or when solution was not successfully implemented
- Average response time
- Average resolution time
- Number of chats operators handle per hour
- Number of chat requests per hour
- Number of low-value requests vs. high-value requests
Metrics are crucial to help your support team make decisions that affect the future of
your customer support strategy. Create a periodic metric review meeting with supervisors and managers where metrics can be discussed, and actionable decisions can be
made. All operators should be made aware of any changes made to the strategy, and
should be informed of what metrics informed these decisions — a good team communicates goals and plans for success to every operator.
