The first post on our blog. Let's talk about customer service in a web-studio / interactive agency

Hi, Habr! This is our first post on the corporate blog of the Ruward: All Runet Ratings project. The project was conceived as an aggregator of all existing niche tops on the agency digital market (we currently have 52 ratings and more than 1,000 participating companies) - to serve as a kind of map of the interactive market (and at the same time a cheat sheet to quickly see which positions have tops)

Since the rating topic is rather controversial and sometimes causes a negative reaction: “Yet another digital ratings!”, We decided to upload useful copyright (our) materials about the life of web studios and interactive agencies in our blog. I propose to begin our cycle with a conversation about customer service, since in the overwhelming majority of cases in our market it’s just a disaster. So:
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Customer service in the market of agent-based digital services

This is a brief overview material in which I want to tell you about the functions of the customer service service, to give a number of tips and discuss the fine points in building communication with the client. In the following material, we will certainly discuss the process of working with the client base, specific examples of its segmentation and other “hodovka”, allowing to increase the efficiency of work.

The main functions of the client service

There are three main areas of responsibility for customer service in a typical agency:

• Control and coordination . All work carried out on the client, services, projects. Terms, tasks, plans. The history of communication, complaints, appeals to the support. Money, contracts, documents, payments, debts. The main task in this area is to increase the quality of customer services and increase the efficiency of interaction with it. Also competent and error-free work on this unit significantly increases the level of customer loyalty.
  
  
• The development of relationships . Clarification of plans, tasks, needs of the client. Proposal of new projects and services. Suggestions for optimizing and improving already running projects / processes. Actually, the main unit is from a commercial point of view, the activity of which is aimed at increasing the CLTV (Client LifeTime Value) indicator - the total revenue that the client brings throughout its entire life cycle. It should be noted that the work in this area is almost impossible without organizing the right actions and business processes in the other two zones.
  
  
• Conflict resolution . A pool of works on anticipating the occurrence of problems as well as on effectively resolving existing ones (meaning problems in a broad sense, and not just the nature of the bugs solved by technical support). The purpose of the actions on this unit is to reduce the Churn Rate (outflow of customers from the database), as well as to increase the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI).

Today in our material we will talk more about communication conflict resolution.

Customer base - more than it seems

Speaking about working with a client base, in the agency market usually means a pool of your current, existing clients. In fact, your client base is significantly larger and consists of three large blocks, each of which should have its own work strategy.

• Current customers . Pool your current clients. As a rule, the main focus from the point of view of customer service is on this segment, which is not always the right decision.
  
  
• "Failure" . A large pool of customers who appealed to you but did not become your customers. As a rule, this is a rather large segment, significantly exceeding the volume of the first block. For this segment, a special communication strategy should be worked out - after all, it is also an important asset of your business.
  
  
• "Outflow" . Companies that were your customers, but for some reason left. Similar to the previous paragraph, it is important to set up separate business processes for working with this segment of the client base.

In the next cycle, we will talk about ways to segment the client base, how to work effectively with each of these three segments, and consider specific cases on how to use these mechanics in real life.

Work with complaints

Competent work with complaints and conflicts is the most important direction in customer service.
Often the client, whose problem was promptly and efficiently settled, becomes more loyal than the one who had no problems at all.

• Keep a complaint handling policy - who is responsible for what, what is the reaction time. Ideally, something like SLA (as in support). Again, there are many services that allow you to automate this process - for free or for ridiculous money.
  
  
• Monitor the situation in production and support all the time - take preventive measures even before a problem occurs. The simplest problem - which never arose. At regular meetings with account managers, always find out possible risks in communication for the upcoming period. For example, what are the risks of receiving a complaint from customer XXX during the next week on project YYY. Such a preventive practice instills the correct culture of communication with customers and develops the "sixth sense" among managers.
  
  
• Collect history on packs, highlight frequent, decide systemically. Use tools for automated collection and analysis of such data - there are quite a lot of them on the market now.
  
  
• Do not be afraid to involve guidance if necessary. Often, the mere presence of a director / top manager in a conversation reduces the level of a client’s “charge to conflict” several times - he sees that his problem (and himself) is important for the company.
  
  
• Do not make excuses, but offer a solution. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the client is not very interested in what “Vasya got sick” or “We have such an emergency, such an emergency” - he needs to know what and in what time you will undertake to solve his problem.
  
  
• Focus more on testing, QA. Then there will be less problems. It's pretty obvious =)

- Offtopic, about working with reclamations and "heaters" in SMM

How many times do I observe the same situation. Here you have a product / project / service. And it so happened that you had a personal hater on social networks. The reasons for his appearance can be different - whether he really was unhappy with the real jamb, but they did not help him in time, or simply did not like your pink blouse, or just a troll, and cannot ignore others. It's not about that.

He appeared - and now in your posts, any info-guides invariably appear and write. If he writes simply “XXX - sucks,” then damn him, everyone understands everything. But if he writes it is argued - the circus begins. You, of course, first tried to communicate, deal with the problem, discussed the arguments, and telephoned. Everything seemed to be expressed, answered, explained - and even, perhaps, they won a victory in the initial thread.

And he continues to write - with or without reason. Everywhere, where will reach. Well, this is not quite adequate. And here 99% of Internet directors and star PR-managers make the same mistake. For some reason they think that everyone around is aware of this sentimental drama, carefully read all the first posts and hundreds of comments when it first arose, and, of course, recognize your greatness and expert authority. And stop responding. Or they write something like “we have already discussed this,” “my time is too expensive,” “I already told you everything,” “I have nothing to prove to you,” well, or in a more rigid form, they are trying to troll back.

The same applies not only to haters, but simply to people who are not very fond of each other and have a long personal history of conflicts and media wars. Again, for some reason everyone thinks that everyone was obliged, with a sinking heart and barely contained delight, with all this dirty laundry that had accumulated over several years, to become familiar.

What the client sees. He sees that some person has written some reasoned comment / question / complaint about your post / infovod. He has no idea what your background is there, and what your real expert greatness is. He just sees - the person asked the question, and he was stupidly ignored. Or sent. And he thinks - some kind of this project, service, and even your blouse stops him right away too. So the reputation and user loyalty is lost. So they achieve their trolling.

A simple example: Post about the birthday of the company, the results there for a year, a party, photos from the corporate party. And in the comments there is a person who writes something like “ DR is, of course, wonderful, but what about my problem #XXX, and I also think that your service is bad because ... and your managers are incompetent and They sent me, and in an interview your CEO said about the YYY market trends, which I consider utter nonsense, because ... Dear customers, the project is going nowhere, do not use their services! ". Here it is. And a couple of influence agents and a pr-manager write something to him in this vein, “ Damn, well, you got it, the post is not about that, write to support ”, “ How much is possible, it’s already discussed 300 times, leave me alone ”, “ I’m tired of spamming , nothing more to do? ". And what do I think? Maybe the guy really got everyone - and just a troll. And maybe he has a real problem, and he says the right things. Will I go looking for initial threads with discussion, analyze market trends and read interviews? No, I'm too lazy. I want to see right here what the company will say to this claim. Though I understand that she is off topic.

For any reasoned question / claim (no matter from whom it comes) the client should receive a clear answer. Even if this question is asked completely off topic and for the five hundredth time. Do not think that everyone knows you and the story of the fiery SM-dramas of your project.

Customer Satisfaction, CSI

The level of customer satisfaction is the most important assessment of the quality of customer service work. It is necessary to measure and quickly monitor the dynamics. Without good indicators of “happiness” of our clients, it will be almost impossible to talk about any meaningful development of relations and expanding the pool of services / projects produced for the client. It may even be worthwhile to build a service motivation scheme based on these indicators:

• The number of incoming claims, the percentage and the period successfully resolved;
• CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) is a general indicator of customer satisfaction;
• Extended checklists for customer satisfaction (different services, different aspects of interaction, etc.) - for a deeper analysis of the situation;
• It is important to make cuts for specific client managers, and not just to watch the big picture.

As a general result, actions to improve these indicators will reduce churn rate and increase CLTV (total customer revenue throughout the entire life cycle).

CSI is the easiest way to calculate . Let's look at the easiest way to calculate customer satisfaction index.

• We take a relevant sample of the customer base;
• We call them around (or online, but the quality of communication is obviously worse) and ask one question: “Rate on a 10-point scale how ready you are to recommend our services to your friends”;
• According to the results of the number of assessments for each point. Select the category of "attraction" (the number of high marks in the range of 8-10) and "detract" (low marks of 1-3).
• We calculate the index CSI = attraction (8+) / detract (3-) ; Of course, it must be much higher than one, otherwise you have serious problems.
• We carry out evaluations quarterly, we look at the dynamics both for the company and for specific managers and clients.

A set of simple but useful rules for communication with the client.

• We had a meeting with a client - we sent a contact report on the same day. Often this rule is ignored, but a clear fixation of arrangements without delay is a very important part of communication. Unfortunately (I say this as a person who also works on the client side), most agencies simply ignore this practice.
  
  
• We heard, even verbally, some kind of complaint / dissatisfaction — we recorded it in some kind of repository / log. Be sure to inform the client about the status of the problem. Often, this simple approach has a magical effect - the customer just talked about a minor bug in the conversation (perhaps not even on his project), and after some time you notified him about the solution of the problem - this creates a significant amount of customer loyalty.
  
  
• Delay deadlines - notify the client BEFORE the deadline. Obviously, but ignored in 80% of cases. The reason for the failure to meet the deadline is not so important for the client - how much an early warning about this failure.
  
  
• Assign response time to different types of customer calls. Control them! Ideally, this is a kind of SLA, according to which, I hope, your support service is already working. Use a hard whip for managers who do not comply with them. It is important.
  
  
• Maximize all project discussions with the client; you are with him in a single conceptual field. Speak the same language, clarify professional terms. Remember that the verbal part may be lost when sending a document / sentence to another employee of the client.
  
  
• Keep a record of all incoming requests, all current customers, all those who left. Use statuses and filters. Automate support work — tickets, notifications, tracking. Jira, OS Ticket, etc.

Conclusion

Of course, within the framework of one small material it is impossible to tell about all aspects of the work of the client service. We will tell about some in the following publications + I propose to discuss the problematics in the comments to this post.

Perhaps you will also be interested in a couple of my latest materials about the business of web studios in Habré:

• Thin moments in the contract to create a site
• Typical errors on web-studio own sites

Andrey Terekhov