Make Every Week Customer Service Week as the Holidays Approach

Customer Service Week is an excellent opportunity to celebrate your employees’ customer-centric efforts and refocus on your customer experience (CX) initiatives. Here are three customer service week ideas to help you kickstart this special week and continue your CX efforts all through the year.

Customer ServiceOpens a new window Week was established in 1992, by the U.S. Congress and then President, George H.W. Bush, who emphasized, “The most successful businesses are those that display a strong commitment to customer satisfaction.” And now that customer experience is a competitive differentiatorOpens a new window of brands, exceptional customer service is more important than ever.

Typically, customer service is associated with after-sales service, when customers have complaints or issues or when a product needs maintenance or repair. But we are witnessing a paradigm shift, because customer service moments happen throughout the customer journey – even before and during the buying process. Online buyers may have a final question before they are ready to hit the buy button, or some equipment needs to be set up for a customer to test it before they make a purchase. Organizations must be ready to make every service moment a perfect moment as it can make or break a relationship and it can have a direct revenue impact.

~ Manuel Grenacher, General Manager, SAP Service Cloud

Here is a quick look at what customer serviceOpens a new window week signifies:

• It is a celebration of customer satisfaction and service and all the people who work to serve customers better.
• It is celebrated during the first (full) week of October (this year from Oct 7 – Oct 11).
• The Customer Service GroupOpens a new window since 1991 has sponsored official Customer Service Week programs, across companies globally.
• This year’s official theme is The Magic of Service.
   

Learn More: Does Customer Service Improve Customer Experience?Opens a new window

Customer Service Week Celebration Map
 

In this article, we discuss three customer service week ideas to make every week customer service week with the holiday season coming up.

3 Customer Service Week Ideas for the Holiday Season

With the holidays approaching, it will be even more difficult for marketers to break through the noise. Many will look to do so by offering deals, ala Cyber Monday. However, what shoppers really want is a personalized experience that is consistent across touchpoints. In fact, consumers are even willing to pay more for experience. Ultimately, retailers need to go beyond only using episodic, transactional data to personalize engagement. They need to understand their consumers more deeply, including their interests, preferences and behavior. To win this holiday season, retailers must know all that is knowable about each consumer and personalize experiences throughout the entire year – not just this season.

~ John Nash, Global Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, RedPoint ​​​​​​

The annual celebration of Customer ServiceOpens a new window Week kicks off on October 7, 2019, and here are our three tips that can help continue your customer service focus and celebration throughout the year.

1. Celebrate
 

Customer Service Week is meant to celebrate and appreciate everyone who has contributed to serving customers, adding value to their lives, and making their experiences simple and memorable.

Delivering exceptional customer service is an ongoing process that requires dedicated effort, week after week. Therefore, appreciating and motivating your team should be a continuous process too.

• Recognizing your employees’ efforts go a long way in motivating them to always have a customer-centric focus. A note of appreciation, recognition emails for the top performer(s) of the week, or celebrating team success in resolving critical customer problems, can be morale boosters.
• Occasional team outings, which can be as simple as a Pizza Party or as lavish as inviting employees’ families for a weekend getaway, will ease the pressure from your team and help them bond when they spend time together in a relaxed environment.
• A Reward Program that incentivizes staff for their customer focus will go a long way in establishing customer-centric culture across the organization.

Learn More: 

Customer Service Vs Customer Experience (CX): Key Differences And SimilaritiesOpens a new window

2. Go Agile
 

The Agile methodology has been successful across industries as it encourages collaboration, responsiveness, and ownership. It helps your teams break up customer service activities into smaller parts, while the Scrum approach focuses on accountability, teamwork, progress towards a well-defined goal, and delivering value in the shortest possible time.
 

According to McKinsey & CompanyOpens a new window , “Agile has tremendous potential to revolutionize customer care and unlock the value of frontline employees, who represent a huge untapped resource. By empowering agents through an agile approach, organizations can infuse customer ownership and creative problem solving in customer care.”

American ExpressOpens a new window has outlined a very interesting ‘Agile’ approach –

• Prioritizing people by streamlining and unifying communication across teams and with customers.
• Empowering staff by eliminating the barriers in customer service with access to customer data and enabling and training them to make customer critical decisions in real time.
• Listening to the voice of the customer by tracking customer issues and recording feedback to fill the gaps, remove customer pain points, and continuously improve the customer service process.
• Educating and collaborating with customers to understand their issues and expectations and informing them about your offerings, which can add value to their lives.
   

The Agile Scrum approach can equip your team (employees) to define their sprints and goals, identify issues and devise mechanisms to resolve them. The teams now have the flexibility to prioritize issues and set turn-around-times based on severity or which service will add more value to the customers. This helps them drive how they serve customers and thus be more effective in delivering quality customer service, week after week, sprint after sprint.

3. Pick a Theme
 

A theme-based customer service week or month will help your organization focus on one idea (process or issue) at a time. The theme of the week (or month) helps your entire organization align their activities with the chosen process. Every employee across the verticals is on the same page and presents a unified view to the customer. Also, the theme draws focus on a particular aspect of the customer service, and everyone can brainstorm to provide an end-to-end resolution for the said issue.

Identifying themes can help:

• Create awareness among employees. Organizing training, group discussions, or launching new initiatives based on the theme will enable knowledge sharing and hence improve customer service efforts.
• Work as a team to solve a common problem. Instead of a siloed approach, teams can now collaborate to identify the root cause of customer issues and offer the best resolution. This not only saves time but also helps deliver better service to customers.
• Themes can help the management devise processes, organize workflows, and streamline activities to expedite services and reduce redundant employee efforts.
   

The Next Step

Customer Service Week is imperative to provide meaningful recognition to customer service providers. It also provides an opportunity to create awareness among employees about why customer service is a core element of customer experience and in turn, business success. Customer Service Week serves as a reminder for businesses (and management) to find time to acknowledge their customer service teams. Regularly celebrating exceptional efforts, empowering your customer-facing personnel and creating awareness will help you delight your customers all year round.

Do share your Customer Service Week Ideas with us on TwitterOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window ; we’re always listening!