The customer service plan is a document alternative to One Ring from the J.R.R. Tolkien universe, bringing together all aspects of the team training, processes, and customer knowledge. 

For your agents, it gives a clear knowledge on how to provide an exceptional customer experience at each step of their journey. For marketing — the key to unlocking the minds of your audience providing insights into campaign personalization. For product — ideas on new features. 

In each case, a customer service plan increases customer satisfaction, retention, and sales. 

This is your guide to mastering this power. Learn what a customer service plan is, how to build one, and best practices for implementing it. 

What is a Customer Service Plan?

A customer service plan is a list of step-by-step instructions for your agents on delivering service to customers considering their needs at each step of their journey. 

As a result of clear guidance for customer service, your audience enjoys the best possible experience at each interaction with your company and agents. Guidance on how to act in different cases combined with scalable customer service software provides a smoother workflow, leading to growing performance metrics, such as:

• faster response times,
• increase in first-contact resolution rates,
• reduced training time for new agents since the plan serves as a ready reference, 
• lower stress levels because they know exactly how to approach each case.
  ‍

Here is a case from my experience 👇 

Once, my team noticed an increasing number of customer complaints to our customer support on G2, like “they never respond to my queries.” But our stats were totally opposite; all the queries were replied to within an hour.  

I wish it were a competitor's campaign... 

But it is only the result of our chaotic processes. After reaching out to those unsatisfied clients we discovered that they messaged our support on facebook and linkedin — channels we weren’t monitoring.

That's the moment we started working on the customer support plan. 

We conducted new ICP research and updated buyer profiles; Scaled our list of communication channels — so no client request would slip by us anymore.

The result? 

25% growth of happy users!

But that’s only one of numerous examples of how its implementation results for business.

4 Benefits of a Customer Service Plan

Having a clear strategy for customer support influences much more than just team metrics. For example:

⭐ Customer Satisfaction Growth

Clear instructions for the service team streamline their workflow, improving the quality of their customer interactions. For instance, elements like:

• Faster Response Time leads to a 20% customer satisfaction growth. 
• Consistency in customer interactions across multiple touchpoints prevents consumers from feeling confused or frustrated (Shopify.)
• Proactive Support meets the expectations of 87% of customers and results in 68% growth in the satisfaction rate.
  ‍

The better their experience, the more substantial and long-term customer relations with business. 

⭐ Brand loyalty

Happy customers are a great base for building brand loyalty. According to stats, 96% of users consider customer service as one of the key factors defining their loyalty to a brand. 

When you consistently provide a high level of service, audience trust is inevitable. In addition, people tend to tell others about the positive experience they had with a brand. 

⭐  Customer retention

The result of an increasing number of loyal customers is a constant flow of repeated deals and reduced churn. Businesses that constantly address customer issues quickly build a positive impression about their brand and see less churn. That's a fact. 

“ 69% of consumers tend to shop more frequently at companies with consistent customer service. 

⭐  Increases revenue

The more people tell others about their positive experience with your brand, the more new clients you have. On top of that are decreasing churn and growing repeated purchases. 

The result is increased sales and revenue growth. Discover more on how to Accelerate Sales and Revenue Growth.

For example, a customer service plan includes a consistent brand voice. Businesses that implement this rule on different channels enjoy a 33% increase in revenue.

Interested in how to achieve this? Continue reading 👇

How to Build a Customer Service Plan in 8 Steps

1. Analyze your current state of customer service

Here are some questions to route you: 

• What do customers say about the service you provide? Repeated praises or complaints?
• How well are your customer's needs listed in an ICP? 
• Do the scripts you use address customers' pain points?
• Does your customer service team have KPIs (key performance indicators)? What are they?
• Do your current performance metrics meet the market benchmarks?
• What channels do you use to communicate with customers? Does it meet their preferences? 
• Is it really easy for consumers to reach out to your team? 
• Does your tech stack help your team achieve KPIs? 
• Is there room for workflow automation without losing personalization?
  ‍

This will help you decide what to focus on when creating a customer service plan.

2. Understand customer requirements

So, what experience do your customers expect from your team? Are you sure you meet the benchmarks? 

Here is a list of common requirements to check during a customer survey:

• How do they prefer to communicate with customer service agents: via text, voice, or video?
• Do they need a self-service option? What type: chatbots, FAQs, knowledge base?
• What channels do they prefer: social media, live chat, phone calls, email?
• How fast do they want to get a reply?
• Ideal communication hours?
• What tone of voice they’d like your agents to use?
• What level of personalization in communication?
  ‍

Once you've gathered the key customer service requirements, it’s time to rate your company’s performance in each area. Ask key leaders and service team members to rank your company’s service performance according to each customer requirement.  

Determine areas of improvement. 

In addition, find out your front-line employees' biggest challenges and ideas. For example, they may mention the need for additional agents or tools. 

3. Create or update customer personas

An ideal customer service plan is only possible to build with an explicit knowledge of your target audience. The deeper your research, the happier your clients. 

The goal: Better understand the interests and pain points of your buyer personas. 

The result: Ideally, it should be a list of characteristics with a focus on goals, interests, and pain points, like these:

How to create it?

• First, we advise you to analyze your current customers data: with a focus on their feedback about your service, channels they use, website behavior, etc. 
• Then, talk to your agents and marketing.
• The last step is customer interviews and surveys. 
  ‍

Pro tip: If you wanna better understand your customer’s needs, collect opt-ins during interactions on your website, emails, or other channels. Gathering consent to reach out for feedback will help you deliver more personalized experiences.

4. Analyze your customer journey map

The key point here is to define every customer interaction (channel or resource, areas of interest, pain points, opportunities, and sentiment) with your brand in a visual infographic. Such an exercise will help you define communication bottlenecks to focus on when creating your customer service plan.

Depending on a chosen template, a customer journey map can include from five to ten or even more elements. Take this one for example:

1. Awareness is about how clients learn about your brand for the first time. 
2. Consideration — how they understand that your product can solve their needs.  
3. Conversion into a purchase. 
4. Retention is about customer communication after a purchase and repeated sales. 
5. Advocacy — customer service team activities to win customers’ loyalty and turn them into brand fans.

Additionally, from a customer's point of view visualize what happens when clients contact your company and how your managers reply to them. 

Ideally, you should work on CJM with marketing and sales so each of them enriches the document with relevant info. 

Eventually, you’ll form a list of things to improve in customer service. 

5. Set goals and KPIs

Turn your ideas into SMART goals. SMART stands for five characteristics of customer service goals:

Here are some examples of how it may sound:

• Increase live chat CSAT by 15% during 3 months by implementing FAQ chatbot.
• Reduce the number of customer requests to agents to 45% by implementing a chatbot and writing knowledge base articles to FAQs by the end of year.
• Achieve a 5-minute average handling time within 2 months with the help of an AI chatbot.

Don’t forget to review your team KPIs. Here are the most popular KPIs companies track in customer experience:

Choose metrics, set sights like “CSAT score between 90 and 95 percent” and track it in the service your team uses. 

6. Update your customer service tech stack 

The goals are set. How will you achieve them?

A vast part of customer experience team efficiency is in the tools they use. Let’s say it would be a real challenge to make customers happy if your customer service platform is outdated, or lacks integration with social media, or important tools like chatbot, or agent seats. It is  common for agents have to switch between different tools.

All this is about poor performance. 

So make sure your team has all the necessary solutions. 
‍

Top customer service tools businesses use

• Live chat
• Phone support, 
• Ticketing system,
• Social media and messenger channels (monitoring and responding)
• Self-service resources like chatbots, knowledge base, FAQs, 
• Community forums,
• AI and automation,
• Reporting and analytics,
• CRM,
• Customer feedback surveys and forms.
  ‍

7. Document new customer service workflows and processes

A customer service plan includes a list of repeatable workflow for each task and goal. You should have a documented version for each case. For instance, the situation when clients contact customer support with an issue in a live chat: 

1. Consumers reported an issue. 
2. They get a reply from a chatbot offering self-service options or an opportunity to talk to an agent. 
3. They choose an agent option.
4. The customer service system generates a ticket and routes it to the relevant agent. 
5. Before entering the chat, managers check the context of the bot conversation. 
6. Then, they resolve the problem and close the ticket.
7. Clients get an opportunity to share their feedback on this interaction in a (CSAT) survey.

Your customer service plan should have the same documented flow for each process within a team. It can be a knowledge base, FAQs, community forums, analytics reports processes, etc. 

Documenting everything will reduce the number of errors your team makes. The result: increased productivity and better customer experience.

8. Measure and analyze the impact and success of your customer service plan

So you have a list of KPIs set a few steps before. Time to define how to measure them. 

Here is a short guide for you:

• Prioritize them. For example, businesses prefer to choose CSAT as their main metric. 
• Create relevant reports in your service. 
• Define when you’ll track each of the metrics because some should be measured daily, others weekly, and even monthly.  

Top 3 Best Practices for Customer Service Planning

Creating a customer service plan is only a part of the process. Another important part is its implementation.  And this is where companies usually make mistakes.

The good thing is that the majority of them are repeatable, so we’ve collected a list of the best practices on how to avoid them: 

• When presenting your customer service plan to a team, use simple language. Changes are difficult. Don’t make this update more stressful with tech or business jargon.
• Reward customer service managers’ performance with an extra vacation day, gift, or money bonus. 
• Regularly check your customers' feedback. What do they write about on platforms like G2? On social media? In CSAT and other surveys? In addition, train your agents' active listening skills like encouraging customer feedback during a chat, make pauses to let customers ask questions, etc.

Wrap up

Now you know everything to build your customer service plan. Follow your customers' preferences, keep responsibility to their feedback, and never stop testing new strategies to serve them better.

It’s time to practice!