• by Nate Skinner , Op-Ed Contributor, November 13, 2015

Every business touts customer service, but most don’t do it well. Too often, companies treat customer service as a cost-eating division that can be outsourced, as opposed to an opportunity for a team of ambassadors with the power to make a customer’s day. Companies like Atlassian, Squarespace and Gusto prove that positive customer experiences can lead to increased profits. They’ve invested in creating world-class customer success organizations, and as a result they’ve built loyal followings of customer-champions. 

How do you build a culture of customer success? Here are four principles that can guide your customer support and success teams:

Nobody puts customer data in the corner

The companies with the best customer experience not only improve their products based on extensive user testing, they also incorporate customer feedback. This requires internal processes and systems to filter that feedback to the right people. This could be as simple as inviting customer support representatives to your product meetings, or introducing platforms for information sharing. Chat applications built for internal business communication, like Hipchat, can facilitate support discussions in real-time. People from sales, product and compliance can pop into a conversation to ask questions and quickly get answers. 

Know your customer

You can’t develop great customer relationships without a thorough understanding of who your customers are. At most companies, the people who possess this knowledge work in customer support. Marketing teams who are developing campaigns and designing customer personas should always work closely with the customer support and success teams. At minimum, ensure there is transparency and consistency in the systems that log sales, customer support, customer success and customer marketing activity. Otherwise, this feedback will never make into marketing programs or company messaging.

Customer love should be a company value

Think about your mission and values. Is the customer mentioned? If so, how? A customer-focused company works every single day, makes every single decision, builds every single product with the customer front and center. Gusto, for example, onboards every new employee by coordinating an in-person meeting with one of their customers. Similarly, Squarespace mentions 24/7 customer support in all of its advertising. Atlassian grew its customers without a sales team, relying on customer word-of-mouth. 

Don’t think of customer service as a cost center

Too many businesses now rely on digital support tools to do the work, asking customers to find answers on their own rather than providing high-touch service. What if, instead of creating a customer support team of junior employees or outsourcing the job entirely, you hired seasoned professionals to champion customer success and support functions? Empower your customer support teams to be company ambassadors instead of a scripted answer engine. Rather than relocating your customer support team to a place with more cost-effective labor market, think about stationing support in the best possible places to serve your customers. For example, if your customers are spread across different time zones, hire local support people who can promptly respond when issues arise. 

Create goals and celebrate success

Design your metrics to align business goals with what’s right for the customer. A classic support organization metric is time to resolution: How fast did your support team resolve a customer issue? The faster the better. Although there’s sometimes value in speed, this metric places no value on customer satisfaction. Consider evaluating time to first response. The goal should be to create sense of urgency when a customer makes a request, then to devote the time needed to resolve the issue and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Prioritizing customer support and success can take many forms and start from many people within your company. At its core, a culture of customer service comes from the company’s DNA — and the desire to align your company’s success with that of your customers.