This week is Customer Service Week – an international celebration of the importance of customer service and of the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis. At TeamSupport, we honor our employees who work hard every day to ensure that our customers have a smooth, easy customer service experience. However, getting our organization to run like a well-oiled customer service machine didn’t happen overnight. Here are our 5 steps to creating a truly customer-first team.

People do business with people they like. That’s about the oldest known business strategy! And it still holds true today, particularly in B2B environments, although it may look a little different today than it did back when (quarterly business reviews over a Zoom call versus a two-martini lunch, for example). Just as any relationship takes time to build, developing a trust with your customers that feels almost like a friendship will take time as well.

Customers deserve your attention. If you start neglecting your customers, then they’ll disperse to your competitors. On the other hand, if you send too many emails, then people will unsubscribe from your emailing list. How do you strike the right balance? It will be different for B2C businesses than for B2B. Here are 7 types of follow-up emails that help improve customer loyalty in either case.

“You’re not paying close enough attention to your customers.” That’s how TeamSupport CEO Pete Khanna and ProfitSword VP of Sales and Marketing Paul Bennie began their speaking session at the recent TSIA Interact annual conference. This blog provides the highlights from their talk. It was a provocative statement to introduce the session. What did they mean?

Artificial Intelligence has had a massive influence on everything related to business. It’s not just the tech industry that has felt its impact, but also pretty much any other industry thanks to the versatility that is so characteristic of AI. Likewise, the B2B sector has also been affected by the spread of AI and its common usage by business owners and marketers alike.

The current marketing environment has changed drastically. Customers are often in need of assistance and expect smooth interactions with the company. Hence, leading businesses are focused on using technology to humanize their labels and develop service models to withstand this ever-changing business environment. Surveys show that 86 percent of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Industry research has shown the increasing popularity of self-service from both company and customer perspectives. One report from Software Advice validates that self-service really does have a positive and measurable impact on both quality and quantity of customer service issues requiring an agent’s attention. Over 75% of respondents confirmed that First Level Resolution, First Contact Resolution, Cost Per Contact, and Cost Per Incident were improved.

Gone are the days of siloed customer support, successful organizations can and must collaborate to truly enhance the customer experience.

Self-service is still good customer service. Offering an option for customers to help themselves can give your customer support reps more time to focus on improving the big-picture aspects of your service strategy. And the right customer support software makes it easy to give customers what they want when they need it.

A customer can be very satisfied with the products and services of a company, but that doesn't mean they’ll remain loyal. Competitors can attract them by offering better customer benefits, including proactive customer support. Customer experience is decisive for both satisfaction and loyalty. However, most companies do not offer great customer experiences.