5 Ways to To Better Serve Your Customer (And Yourself)

A couple of team members played a game asking each other 5 times in a row why they’re working at Issuetrak (a technique derived from Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno). They ran the gamut of answers, starting with the obvious (“because it helps people perform better”) and digging down to the inevitable (“it gives me purpose”).

Overall, all answers came down to the same: we’re all here to make great impacts on people. Whether we hope to optimize our clients’ time or maximize our colleagues’ potential, people draw us to the inestimable power housed at Issuetrak.

For Customer Service Week 2022, Issuetrak wants to get down to the true grit behind offering the best support a company can provide. Customer service isn’t just about profits; true service drives deeper towards a grander purpose. Read on for 5 ways to guarantee your success in customer satisfaction.

5 Guarantees Towards Better Service

1. Are You Buried In Tasks? Or Serving A Purpose?

First things first: grab a pen and paper and answer this question: Why do you work?

Done? Great! Now ask yourself 4 more times. All 5 of your answers may surprise you.

For you to deliver above-and-beyond customer service, you must align with your “why” (your core purpose and reasons for working). Prioritize your customers' needs while staying aligned with your business values - you may even find common ground if both your values line up.

Giving full attention to your customer may be easier said than done, but the key to customer success starts with an obsession and full-on dedication to the service you offer. (We ourselves obsess over every detail of our service and software to ensure the best end-user experience. Our scores hit 100% last month!)

 If your whys aren't centered on the value of your service, ask yourself "why" one more time.

2. Internal Is External: Invest In Your People For A Better ROI

You've determined your why, but do you have the team to support that vision? We couldn’t deliver at even a fraction of our 100%, if not for an incredible team. We’ll tell you, it takes some trial and experimentation to make sure you have the right workers in the right seats, even if it means shifting the team's positions around for a bit until you get the perfect mix.

Yes, this means we dedicate time to shifting roles around so the right workers are in the right seats - but that time spent yields innumerable returns. 

It costs an employer an average of 33% of an employee’s yearly salary if that employee leaves their job. It's thus more profitable to invest in employees than suffer negative returns by under-stimulating and losing them - wouldn't you agree?

Since September 2021, there’s been a 94% increase in demand for Learning & Development. In other words, workers are opting for companies invested in their long-term growth (and abandoning companies that aren't). 

Education doesn’t stop at the job description! When you garner a professional team by providing an ongoing learning environment, you get the right skill sets in the right place - and skill-based placement matters. As a customer, you would only want to invest your hard-earned money into the expertise offered by field experts, right?

Nothing beats being backed by a team dedicated to learning every detail of their field. Issuetrak’s people are meticulously hand-picked for their devotion to lifelong learning. With powerful brains at work in the wheelhouse, the company is in constant self-discovery mode, applying improvements to its own performance and readdressing its own building blocks for structural soundness.

If you’re managing a team right now, ask yourself: what are you doing to maximize their potential and fit their daily duties into your company’s greater strategy? Value each team member’s unique genius because customers can see that what grows internally translates externally. It’s worked for us – and we have a feeling it will work for you, too.

(To see our improvements over time, read up on how our releases have kept up with our stakeholders' software needs.)

3. Use Active Listening With Your Customer’s Feedback

Customer service is about listening to the customer's problem, taking action, and setting clear expectations for a resolution.

If you’ve ever used surveys, you’ll recognize the high value it provides. Recently, one of our partners gave feedback, influencing an entire incoming email modification to better serve customers! (See our 15.6 release to find out what!)

The lesson in a word? LISTEN. Incredible intel will flood your way on exactly what you need to improve product and customer expectations.

4. Solutions Customers Really Want

Whether you write code or lead a workforce, the core of service comes down to owning your business at every operable level. Pair 100% accountability with the unquenchable desire to find solutions - and you’ll reap nothing less than the greatest customer success and service.

As claimed by author Brian Tracy, time is currency. Set goals for an excellent quality:cost ratio and for your team to be timely and dependable with customers. If you strike out the first time, come back to dissatisfied customers with a plan to serve their needs better, faster, and more astutely than before.

You’ll set yourself apart, build your customer relationship, and quickly get a reputation for dedicated, authentic, superior service.

5. Solution Hounds, Success Abound

As we said before, customers come to you, the expert, to remedy their greatest complaints, constraints, and fears. And as the expert, you are honor-bound to hound out solutions to your clients’ woes.

And that takes incredible determination and strength of character.

The greatest minds are decisive and action-oriented. Our Chief Operating Officer Taylor Ross, we’re happiest “on the brink of fulfillment” because we enjoy how strategizing and reevaluating both our product’s growth and people’s potential keeps us on our toes. Thomas Watson Jr. (formerly of IBM) stated, “If you want to be successful faster, you must double your rate of failure.” Success waits just on the other side. 

Keep honing your ability to self-correct and reroute. A true solution hound doesn’t consider the possibility of failure, but only envisions being one step closer to solutions–both of which are magnets for a business’s success.

Issuetrak Speaks Up About Customer Support

With these 5 community values, you can lead by example and get on the path to explosive growth in customer support. When in doubt about how to direct your customer service team, you can also ask (and listen to!) their input.

Here's what our support team had to say about what service means to them:

Empathy

Patrick Triscritti, Professional Services team member

Customer service comes down to the golden rule of providing the same service you would want in return – in other words, being a customer advocate and putting yourself in their situation.

Positivity

Danny Alvarado, Technical Support Analyst

Customers must be able to leave the interaction better than when they started it. We have to create space so they can be efficient with their time and make it clear that your goal is for them to be satisfied with the result(s).

Resolution

Noel Lucas, Director of Technology

Customer support has everything to do with positive interactions and working together towards resolution and understanding.

No matter what, success is an up-and-down cycle and it’s up to you to seek the peaks. Strive for a smile. You might just be surprised at how many smiles–and rewards–you get in return.