The Art of Customer Service

Since its inception, Customer Success has been one of the integral pillars of how things are done at Kissflow. From growing a team of dedicated folks ensuring the best is offered to our customers to constantly innovating how we deliver this service, customer service has been more of an art form than a mere operation or function for us at Kissflow. We believe that great customer service will speak for itself and become an ambassador for the Kissflow brand.

In order to recognize, appreciate and celebrate all that we do and achieve through our great customer success practices, we are celebrating Customer Service Week at Kissflow. And so, as a part of toasting to our team and their efforts, we spoke to some of our folks about what goes on behind the scenes of delivering consistent and innovative customer service.

Here are snapshots of our conversations with a few champions of impeccable Customer Service:

Customer service is not without its challenges. What are some of the challenges you face in delivering seamless service to your customers?

“Dealing with different people and trying to meet their expectations is not an easy task. It takes patience, sharp intellect and I would even say wisdom to navigate through the various customer moods and still provide a professional service. Some of the common challenging scenarios faced by the customer support team are handling angry customers, dealing with a service outage or a crisis situation, admitting the lack of features in the product, not having a solution to the customer’s problem and having to serve multiple customers at the same time”, says Balaji Venugopal, Solutions Manager with the Kissflow Procurement Cloud (KPC) squad.

Poornamrutha S, Senior Technical Solutions Specialist, adds that “the major challenge in facing customers is being the face of the product. In a lot of cases, we might be able to relate to their issues, but it is important to balance it out and stay on the product’s side and explain why some things are the way they are. Patience and listening skills are the keys to doing well with customers. Helping them visualise the solutions we come up with is another huge challenge”.

Overcoming these challenges requires practice and innovation. How do you innovate to deliver great customer service?

Innovation need not always be about a process. Sometimes a different approach to doing something can prove more fruitful as Sanjanaa Shanmugam, Senior Business Analyst, points out. “Customers believe that they know what’s best. While this is often true in regard to their domain expertise, it is not so much when it comes to our products.

As product experts, it is our responsibility to ask the right questions and make them understand why certain direct implementations are to be innovated.

Helping them with all the right answers alone will not help, posing questions innovatively which make the customer understand why certain routes do not work is also necessary; this way we help them see how our expertise can help integrate with theirs to provide the best solutions.”

Balaji, on the other hand, talks about the process innovations they have implemented for KPC — “For KPC deployments, we have introduced a 4 phased deployment methodology called ‘KPC Rapid’ — Vision, Design, Test & Deploy.

It involved publishing the SoP and Implementation guidelines needed in these 4 phases and adjusting the set of 20+ documents and templates as per business feedback. The results have been more than satisfactory. The biggest outcome has been achieving less-than-6 weeks go-live time; our ambitious ‘Time to value’ promise which became a reality for more than 8+ customers.”

How do you improve customer engagement?

Poornamrutha states that the release of new features is a super-easy way to initiate a conversation with customers. “I personally encourage them to use our Case module to post any questions or issues they might have. This gives them an introduction to a new module and a potential that they might even start using it for their internal requirements”. She also points out that we need to take an extra step to help customers achieve the milestones set. “Making sure we keep them posted subtly about the effort and time spent in doing this is just enough. This already greatly impresses them. The rapport created through ‘I can relate to you’ is much better than ‘I really appreciate you helping me’. The effort from the customer’s end is huge as well.”

Sanjanaa also emphasizes quick response time. “Always respond to the customer immediately. We may not know the answers to all their questions but ensuring that we are around, working to have their problems solved, adds to our credibility. Maintaining a good rapport by being honest about the product capabilities, timelines and value we add allows the customer also be honest and loyal towards the product.”

Customer feedback is pivotal to how we maintain, innovate and/or refurbish our service strategies. How do you use feedback from customers?

As Balaji very eloquently puts it,

“It helps us see how we can improve. More often than not, our loyal customers would have developed an expertise of our product features; from their insights, we always get some exciting ideas that we did not think of.

If we are able to incorporate customer feedback into the product roadmap successfully, we have certainly come very close to the ideal market fit. Paying attention to customer feedback has also helped prevent customer churn. Showing that our care goes a long way in building a healthy business relationship and ensuring customer retention”.

“A very simple tip I’ve learnt is to document whatever is discussed. This works in most cases and helps avoid bad feedback in the future”, notes Poornamrutha giving an expert tip on handling customer feedback.

Sanjanaa provides insight into how feedback could usually also be a measure of general view on the product or service. “More often than not what one customer offers as feedback could reflect the minds of other customers too. Empathizing with all customers based on the feedback received helps in making things better for everyone. Making the customer feel heard is the topmost priority for any customer-facing role”.

And those are a few insights from some of the artisans who craft memorable experiences for our customers constantly. Here’s wishing them and everyone on the team a delightful Customer Service Week celebration!