Developing a streamless interaction between all business operations requires several factors to be integrated well to succeed.
In short, you’ll need your sales, marketing, production, logistics, customer service, and administrative teams to be on the same page and working toward the same outcome objectives.
To better understand the seamlessness these departments need to operate under, think about your business operations like a bicycle chain. Each department is one link in the chain; when all work together, the bike can be pedaled and efficiently reach its destination.
However, if one or more links become chinked or broken, the entire chain falls apart, and the bike goes nowhere.
The problem most organizations experience is that one break in that chain can disrupt the whole process and, for the customer, lead to delayed or broken fulfillment, which can have lasting adverse effects on your business’s perception.
The Single-Most Important Department In Your Organization
To prevent any negative impacts and limit those that will come up, the customer service department in your organization is the single-most-important department. What a customer service department provides for your organization is more than just a repository for customer complaints.
A good customer service department provides your organization with the following;
- Interacts with potential customers
- Helps mitigate concerns
- Details recurring issues allowing you to iterate and improve your product
- Highlights the performance of your organization
- Converts potential customers into loyal fans
- Protect relationships with current customers to prevent loss
- Improves the likelihood of repeat business
- Provides omnichannel solutions for customers and within your organization
Providing in-person or on-the-phone customer service can boost the customer’s overall perception of your organization. Tone and inflection are a big part of communication.
Studies show that 20% of communication is verbal and in tone, making in-person customer service crucial as a vehicle for your business to represent itself well.
Getting Your Team On The Same Page
As an organization, you need to provide training materials and a clear org chart that describes what each individual in the organization should do to handle issues and concerns outside their expertise.
An occasional all-hands meeting should take place to get everyone on the same page. You can do it all at a physical location or remotely, whichever best suits your operations and organizational needs.
But to help every department see customer service’s value to the entire organization, you need to have an all-hands meeting to clearly outline objectives, philosophies, and goals and strengthen the company culture.
When deciding on your team meeting, to be efficient in achieving your outcome objectives, creating an all hands meeting agenda is the first step.
Your all-hands agenda should include guiding questions that help you perceive areas of concern and needs for improvement. Still, you should also have an open forum section to allow employees to bring up any related problems and suggestions.
In your agenda, you should prepare to ask the following;
- What is and isn’t working in a specific product, operations, and field
- What recent projects are you most satisfied with and why?
- What do the organization and team do well, and what are some suggestions for improvement?
Additionally, an all-hands meeting is a great time to roll out new strategies and troubleshoot new ideas before launch. It also helps promote the company culture and outlines your organization’s vision.
Not every meeting should focus on problem-solving, but also guided questions that empower your team members, such as asking about their vision and goals for the company, allowing them to highlight some plans and projects in the near future.
Create guidelines of how any new projects may come to fruition and outline how each department will interact with each other during development and launch.
Also, by giving voice to all team members, you’re creating better team cohesion and focus, allowing multiple departments to understand the importance of their roles in the project’s overall success.
For example, manufacturing and production can feel isolated from the sales and customer service departments. Likewise, the administration may seem like a detached-from-reality in their decision-making or removed from the “boots on the ground” reality that other team members experience.
By creating an all-hands meeting, you can strengthen the understanding of the various departments as a whole while showcasing how each department’s interactions strengthen or weaken customer service.
In other words, you’ll be able to detail how every department has some customer service impact, whether it’s billing, logistics, administration, or HR.
