How to Build a Customer Service Policy for Your Business

100% satisfied customers, no bad reviews, zero complaints – sounds dreamy, right? 

But does such an ideal situation exist? 

In reality, even if you give it your all, customers will still have complaints to raise, issues to be addressed, and questions to ask. 

While you cannot control the inflow of customer requests, you can take charge of how you handle your angry customers and deal with their complaints. 

What you need is a powerful customer service policy that works as a rulebook, showing you the dos and don’ts of customer service. It tells you what steps to take in specific scenarios and how to win customers even in the most horrifying situations. 

But here’s the question – how do you put your customer service guidelines into real action and let them work for you? 

This blog tells all that you need to know about implementing a customer service policy. But before we dive into deep waters, let’s look at the customer service policy definition and importance. 

Let’s begin. 

What are Customer Service Policies? 

A customer service policy is a documented rulebook comprising the guidelines to be followed every time a customer interacts with a business. Employees can refer to these guidelines to provide consistent customer service across different channels used by customers. 

The policy lays down certain standards that must be followed to deliver positive experiences and form strong relationships with customers.

Why are Customer Service Policies Vital for Your Growing Business? 

At a time when customers’ expectations are rising higher than skyscrapers, the importance of a customer service policy cannot be ignored. A robust policy helps you build a customer-centric culture where each employee, especially the customer-facing teams, are well-versed with the guidelines to follow during customer interactions. 

In addition to this, there are many other astounding benefits you can glean by implementing the best customer service policies. Let’s explore a few of them.

1. Brings Consistency in the Services You Provide

A stellar service today and a sub-standard service for the same issue 10 days later. Such inconsistencies break customers’ trust in a company. When your support team has a set of guidelines to follow, they are likely to deliver decent services in every single interaction. 

This also means every time customers contact you; they have the confidence that they will not be disappointed. 

2. Sets the Right Benchmarks 

A powerful customer service policy sets benchmarks that determine how quickly and efficiently your agents address customer concerns. For example, the benchmarks can be around the resolution time or minimum hold time. Benchmarks can also show the ideal way to handle customers in specific situations. 

These benchmarks can be used to assess agents’ performance and identify the areas where they need to buck up. 

3. Removes Guesswork From the Process 

When your service staff knows what actions to take in which situations, it removes guesswork and confusion from the picture. For example, agents don’t need to make baseless assumptions around when to follow up with a customer who contacted you via social media. Because that’s clearly mentioned in your customer service policy document. 

All of these benefits boil down to just one thing – exceptional customer experiences. 

At a time when there is not much difference between the products you and your competitors offer, how do you stand out and make your mark? 

By staying customer-centered – putting customers at the heart of everything you undertake. 

A customer service policy empowers your support team to focus on all the elements of customer experience, create moments that matter, and foster lasting customer relationships. This level of customer-centricity reflects in the revenue a company generates. 

According to research by Deloitte, customer-focused companies are 60% more profitable than their counterparts. 

What Should You Include in Your Customer Service Policy?

Now that you have a pretty good idea of what is a customer service policy and why it is important for your business, it’s time to explore the topic further. 

Let’s now look at the key details that your customer service policies must contain:

✅ Product and service details are important to mention. Add the necessary information along with images and videos and keep updating them. 

✅ Explain customer service processes in detail. Outline all the steps necessary for customer onboarding, refunds and returns, ticket escalations etc.

✅ Customer service benchmarks should also be added in the policy document. As mentioned above, benchmarks help agents keep the pace and quality of their work up to your company’s standards. 

✅ Define the process to gather feedback from customers. Also, explain why and in which situations, capturing customer feedback is important. 

✅ Mention the customer service metrics that will be tracked to measure agents’ performance. This will set clear expectations and help agents stay on the right track from the start. 

✅ Rules for internal team collaboration must also be mentioned in the policy. How should agents collaborate across departments to resolve customer issues? What is the collaboration process they need to follow? 

How to Create & Implement a Robust Customer Service Policy

The long-term goal of any organization is to achieve customer success. By creating certain guidelines, your team gets a solid foundation that helps them embark on the journey to achieve your top goal – customer delight.  

Here are some simple and practical ways to create a customer service policy and put it to action:

1. Identify Your Customers’ Needs & Expectations

Before you start working on your customer service policy, do your homework right. Since this policy is created with the sole aim to achieve customer success, identify what your customers need and expect from you by making a customer success strategy. 

Familiarity with customer demands will help you frame a policy that keeps customers front and center. 

But how do you identify what your customers really need? 

It’s simple. Ask them. 

Create surveys with the right questions, such as: 

• Which service channels do you prefer to contact us? 
• What kind of issues bother you the most? 
• What are the challenges you face while using our products and services?
• What are your expectations with respect to the response duration? 

Such questions will help you dig deeper into what customers really want and devise a structured policy for your customer support operations. 

Modern survey maker tools offer robust features and functionality to create, share, and analyze surveys. The best part is these tools let you share surveys across platforms such as email and social media, making it convenient for customers to take your surveys. 

2. Focus on Your Company’s Vision & Mission

The best customer service policies honestly reflect the values a company stands for and the goals it aspires to achieve. 

When framing the customer service policy, take into account your company’s vision and mission statements. While the mission mostly talks about the values your company adheres to, the vision shows the long-term goals you strive to achieve. 

The customer service policy should be in complete alignment with your mission and vision. This will help you build a solid foundation that guides every action or decision your customer support team takes.

For example, Amazon’s mission is to be “the Earth’s most customer-centric company, best employer, and safest place to work.” This mission reflects in the customer service principles it follows. 

The company’s history of impeccable customer service is known to all. From one-click ordering for recurring orders and an incredibly easy return policy to a highly personalized service at every touchpoint, Amazon leaves no stone unturned to keep its customers happy. 

Amazon’s mission is so deeply ingrained in its customer service operations that it is now widely popular as a Customer-First company. 

3. Identify the Strengths & Weaknesses of Your Current Customer Service

To create something new, you first need to look back and evaluate the current state of your customer service. 

Analyze how responsive your customer service team is and whether they are able to meet your customer service goals. Identify the bottlenecks they encounter during customer interactions and issue resolution. 

The best way to check the state of your customer service is by asking the right questions, such as: 

Are there any flaws in your customer service system? 

Are the benchmarks not being met? Or, have you set unreasonable expectations that are difficult for your team to fulfill? 

Is your team sufficiently skilled to meet the evolving needs of customers? 

Questions like these bring meaningful answers, giving you a transparent picture of the current customer service and also an idea of the road ahead. 

Read More: 10 Types of Customer Service You should know

4. Set Achievable Goals & Benchmarks

Once you are well-versed with customer needs and the flaws existing in your current process, you are better positioned to set goals and benchmarks for your customer-facing team. 

Defining customer service goals and standards will set a clear path for your team. When they have a good idea of their roles, responsibilities, and goals, they will be able to work with confidence and overcome challenges single-handedly. 

The goals and benchmarks you set should be quantifiable and achievable. There is no point setting unreasonable expectations that will bring nothing but disappointment and frustration. 

For example, while creating rules for resolution time, take into account different scenarios. Quality is bound to be compromised if you keep a single resolution time as a benchmark for all complex and simple customer queries. 

So, when creating customer service policies and procedures, define different scenarios and accordingly set an achievable resolution time for each of them. 

5. Prioritize Values & Relationships 

Setting the right benchmarks is crucial for your customer service squad to stay on track. 

But, what’s even more important is to not let these benchmarks come in the way of achieving optimum customer delight. 

For example, if a customer call is randomly cut without fully resolving the issue, the numbers might be in your favor, but in reality, you lost a valuable customer. Rather, the approach should be the other way round. Even if it takes longer than expected to tackle a problem, the end goal should be to ensure that customer leaves satisfied. 

Remember that benchmarks are not set in stone. You can be flexible with them. Find a middle ground where you can balance both – resolving issues on time while maintaining customer relationships. 

If at any moment, you’ve to make a choice – get rid of a problem as soon as possible or give it the time it requires to build a lasting relationship, always choose the latter. 

Your customer service policy should cover all these nitty-gritties and make it clear to agents that you value relationships more than anything else. 

6. Show the Best Route to Resolve Issues 

An impeccable customer service policy is the one that shows agents the right route to solve a specific issue. It lays down the best practices that agents can follow while interacting with customers across platforms such as live chat, social media, email, help desk, etc. 

For example, your policy should cover things like: 

• Share a self-help article while responding to a ticket on the help desk. This will help customers dig into the solution and solve the problem on their own next time. 
• Use canned responses for repetitive questions. These responses can also be altered to fit different scenarios. 
• Leverage a chatbot to provide real-time automated support to customers 
• Use pre-chat forms to gather visitor details and connect them to the right operators

Clarity around how to use different channels will help your customer service squad solve problems faster and delight your customers in every interaction. 

You can also mention the importance of a knowledge base and how agents can use it to provide quality customer service. Show them instances where they can use the internal knowledge base to their advantage to tackle customer concerns quickly. While this is a great way to boost agents’ efficiency, it will also help to keep the resolution time to a minimum. 

Here is a quick video that explains everything you need to know about an internal knowledge base. 

7. Keep Updating Your Customer Service Policy

Keeping up with the evolving customer expectations, industry standards, and internal company changes is crucial while creating your customer service policy. 

A static policy that doesn’t reflect the ongoing changes can prove to be catastrophic, as your agents will be sticking to the same old ways during customer interactions. 

What if customers have diverted to a different channel that agents don’t frequently use? What if you have adopted new customer service tools, but the policy doesn’t mention how and when to use them? What if the support process you followed before is no more liked by customers? 

It’s vital to incorporate such changes in your policy so that your customer service squad has the most updated and relevant information right up their sleeves. This enables them to follow the best approach while dealing with customers. 

8. Monitor the Success of Your Policy

Once your policy is live, monitor its success. 

As customer delight is the ultimate goal of any customer service policy, you can use metrics such as CSAT, NPS, and CLV to track its success. 

For example, the CSAT score shows how satisfied a customer is with your services. If the score is high, it means your policy is doing an amazing job. But, if you constantly receive low scores, it could mean, there are certain customer expectations and needs that your policy fails to fulfil. 

Similarly, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey helps you gauge customer loyalty. It is one of the best ways to analyze the success of your efforts from the eyes of your customers. The score gives you a clear picture of how many promoters, detractors, and passive customers you have. 

If detractors and passives outnumber the promoters, consider that there are serious flaws in your policy that need immediate attention. 

Get Inspired by These Customer Service Policy Examples 

Before you go ahead and take your customer service policy live, let’s look at a few practical examples. 

While standardizing the customer service guidelines, you are bound to face a dilemma around what to include and what to avoid. You may not want to add the very obvious details as that would do no good. Instead, your priority should be to include all necessary rules and processes for ultimate customer service success. 

A lot of your policy’s contents also depend on your company’s culture, values, mission, and vision.

Zappos provides, an excellent customer service policy example. Unwavering focus on customer happiness from the start and creative customer-centric strategies are the reasons that have turned Zappos into the popular brand it is today. 

One of the company’s key policies is its 365-day return policy that allows customers to return its products if they are not 100% satisfied. 

Isn’t that amazing?

Win Customers for Life With Thoughtful Customer Service Policies

Customer service policies reflect the kind of brand you are and the values you adhere to. 

Before framing these policies, try digging into what customers really expect from your brand. Identify their pain points and identify the flaws existing in your current customer service process. 

Once you have the necessary information, start standardizing customer service guidelines and set benchmarks for your team to follow. Tell them the dos and don’ts to follow in different scenarios. The policy should also show your support squad the best routes to handle customer complaints. 

After the policy is in action, start evaluating its performance. Also, keep updating the policy considering the latest industry trends, new technologies, and evolving customer needs. 

Create a thoughtful customer service policy that keeps customers delighted with your brand now and forever!