Customer service and customer experience success depends on more than smiling and using the right words (though those elements are essential as well), it also depends on innovation. Timely innovation is appreciated by customers and employees alike. In other words, customers grow weary of doing business with a company where things are cumbersome. At the same time, employees grow frustrated and irritable when they have to spend their days attempting to carry out their customer-facing duties in the face of clunky, illogical back-office set ups.
Innovation within customer service
For innovation to catch on and be sustained over time, these five conditions must be met. For instance:
1. You need to build a company culture where innovation is welcomed as part of the work, rather than as an interruption of it.
2. Employees need to know where to innovate. There are three areas where you should be welcoming innovation:
- Product: what you sell or make
- Process: how you make it/how you sell it
- Business model: how your company is conceptualized and organized.
3. Innovations need to be captured and reviewed for possible implementation in a process that is transparent to all.
4. Innovations that succeed in one part of an operation (one location, one division) need to be spread to other corners of the operation.
5. There needs to be breathing space.
If an operation is chronically understaffed, employees who are overworked and metric-ed to death on call lengths and the like, won’t ever find the time to involve themselves in innovation.
The hi.guru Advantage
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