What Should You Put in a Customer Service Vision Statement?

A customer service vision statement provides meaning and direction for employees, and our panel of experts have put together a few suggestions on what you should include in yours.

Where Your Company Is Going

Your customer service statement should state where your company is going to be in the future. It is usually the guiding statement for your organization’s strategic plan. What big mountain is your company going to climb next?

A company’s vision statement tends to be quite idealistic and ‘big picture’ thinking. It needs to be clear and unambiguous. And it should be easily understood by both employees and customers alike.

Caroline Leonard

It’s best to avoid using any jargon terminology or superfluous words.

It’s important that your vision statement is communicated and regularly reinforced to all teams and individuals in your organization. Everyone in your organization should know the overarching vision of the company and what it is trying to achieve.

Thanks to Caroline Leonard at Spearline

Emphasize Collaboration

Your business is built on engagement and collaboration. Product use, consultation, application, and brand interaction are all integral to your communications and growth strategy. The key is focus. Start with some success stories.

Pick a few case studies and really dive deep into the customer, the journey, and the result. Now describe those interactions in a few action words like you would in a résumé. Create, help, provide, serve, deliver, and even collaborate are all great words to incorporate.

Stay Positive

Your customer service vision statement should also function as a happy path for the customer and your employees. Your statement should incorporate words and concepts that stress proactivity and positivity throughout the customer experience.

Best, finest, first-class, top, leadership, growth are all good places to start.

Expediency and Time

Kaye Rickards

A customer needs to know what to expect. SLAs and real time are now the standard and not the exception.

In 2022 most of our industry has implemented a revamped customer service strategy with an emphasis on streamlining resources in order to give your customers a faster version of what they were expecting.

While it’s a simple yet effective way to provide exceptional customer service, it’s difficult to maintain.

If your goal isn’t quantitative (think: delivery in 30 minutes or less) then utilize concepts in your customer service vision statement. Fulfil, accelerate, expedite, drive, satisfy, consistently are words to communicate urgency and delivery without a specific quantity attached.

Don’t Forget Your Employees

With all the emphasis on technology and AI, it’s important to remember where the call centre’s roots are. The level, quality, care, and attention to detail almost always changes once we incorporate the human element.

Keep this in mind with your customer service vision statement. Think about combining technology words and human interaction words in order to emphasize the many ways you can serve your customers and their needs.

Synthesis, combining, advancing, streamlining are great words to communicate the human element in our ever-changing digital world.

Thanks to Kaye Rickards at Alvaria

Customer Focus

Frank Sherlock

The best customer service vision statements are those that push aside traditional call centre metrics and KPIs, like average handle time or first call resolution, and focus squarely on doing what’s best for the customer, every time.

A big part of that is making sure agents always lead with empathy – focusing on the problem at hand for the customer, recognizing the hardship they might be facing, and committing to doing whatever is possible to fix it.

Oftentimes, when empathy is the most important contact centre directive, calls may end up being longer or the customer may have to be transferred to the right person, but at the end of the day, their experience is going to be superior than if empathy wasn’t a guiding light for customer service.

Thanks to Frank Sherlock at CallMiner

A Sense of Purpose

If your vision statement has strong agent buy-in, you know you’re on the right track.

Agents are the ultimate drivers of customer experiences, and every single interaction either helps or hurts your brand – there is no in between.

So, your statement should empower your agents to deliver amazing experiences while instilling passion in their careers.

Start creating your vision statement by asking for input from your frontline agents, and then make sure it showcases their brilliance. If it highlights not just your employees but also the incredible work they do for your customers? You’re bound to get the kind of buy-in that convinces them to turn that vision into reality.

A Common Vision

Laura Bassett

A great customer service vision statement should be clear and applicable to every member of your organization, from the CEO to the frontlines.

If you’re aligned on your common vision, the tone is set for how you plan to conduct day-to-day operations, treat each other with respect, and deliver amazing customer experiences.

When your vision applies to everybody, it also embodies natural accountability and training opportunities for every person. New hires automatically understand what’s expected of them, leadership is expected to practise what it preaches, and agents can be coached on their customer-facing interactions using your statement as an observable benchmark.

Being united on one vision isn’t just a reflection of who you are right now, it also reflects who you aspire to be – and the steps you’ll take to get there.

Clear Actions

Most contact centres aren’t run by magicians (but don’t tell my CEO that). In order to deliver exceptional customer experiences, they operate through clearly defined actions that reverberate from leadership to the customer and everyone in between.

An actionable customer service vision statement works in much the same way. Your action is to empower your workforce through innovation, passion, and a strong company culture. Their action is to deliver outstanding customer experiences.

Your vision should distil all that makes your company and people great into one statement that is actionable by all.

Oh, and as for your customers? It’s actionable for them too. Because they’ll keep giving you their business, knowing you practise what you preach.

Thanks to Laura Bassett at NICE CXone

Authenticity

Ben Booth

For your customer service vision statement to have the impact you’re looking for, there’s not one specific thing that I believe needs to be included. However, your vision must reflect your organization and its behaviours, culture, and leadership.

For the vision to be adopted by your organization, it needs to feel genuine and believable for your teams. So, if what you’re saying isn’t how you behave, doesn’t feel familiar, or your teams’ objectives conflict with the overall vision, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.

My recommendation is to base your vision on real customer insight and ensure that your operational leadership teams are behind and supportive of your customer service vision. This ensures that every layer within the organization talks consistently about your promise to your teams and customers.

Thanks to Ben Booth at MaxContact

A Reason ‘Why’

Alyssa Fishwick

Going back to basics, business is an interaction between two human beings – one a buyer and the other a seller.

The old adage ‘people buy from people’ underpins every good customer service strategy so bear this in mind when creating your own vision of what excellent service looks like.

Include in your statement why people buy from your organization and why the contact centre is integral to the customer service vision.

Each agent has a pivotal role to play in humanizing the customer experience by truly listening to customers to help anticipate their every need in the channel of their choice.

Thanks to Alyssa Fishwick at Calabrio

Empathy

Sabine Winterkamp

Empathy should always be at the heart of your customer service vision statement. As more experiences become digital, we can no longer rely on in-person, traditional methods to build stronger customer relationships.

According to our Global Customer Service Index Report, 50.7% of consumers surveyed prefer voice as their channel preference, followed by email (22.7%) and webchat (11.8%).

This reveals that consumers worldwide still prefer human customer service even with the abundance of digital channels available. This statistic rises to 65.2% when the issue is urgent or sensitive.

Therefore, it is essential to ensure that human customer service is still a priority for your business and agents.

Thanks to Sabine Winterkamp at Five9

Customer Experience Goals

Eric Leboeuf

We have well and truly entered the ‘customer experience age’, where knowing and understanding your customers’ preferences and habits will help you tailor the experience they want and need.

Today’s customer expects to be able to contact a business on a variety of new channels, in addition to the more traditional modes of communication like SMS and email.

Enabling personalized, proactive, and efficient interactions has never been more important and this should be included in your customer service vision statement.

Thanks to Eric Leboeuf at Infobip

Customer Service Expectations

Tony Lorentzen

An effective customer service vision statement should have creating personalized customer experiences at its heart. In our digitally powered landscape – with anything and everything available at the click of a button – it’s fair to say that consumer expectations have never been higher.

Brands that fail to offer a personalized, seamless experience will fall behind.

Combining human intelligence with modern technologies – such as conversational AI – has emerged as the key to customer service in this climate and beyond.

Agents equipped with the latest biometric technologies are able to connect with their customers and deliver a better, more personalized experience than ever before.

Thanks to Tony Lorentzen at Nuance

Company Values and Goals

Matthew Addison

In a customer service vision statement, organizations should highlight how they are going to put in place their values and reach their goals.

For example, if your company is focused on:

• building relationships that last, then you would want to include how you intend to deliver service that delights customers and ensures they receive ‘micro-moments’ of instant gratification.
• investing in innovation to improve CX and EX, then you should include how you intend to invest in intelligent digital self-service technologies that help customers find answers, reduce the stress on agents and make them feel empowered and engaged.

Thanks to Matthew Addison at NICE

How You Intend To Deliver

Claire Benbow

Your vision statement needs to reflect what you do, who you are, and what you want your service to achieve.

So take some time to really think about how you’d like people to perceive your business and go from there… while making sure that vision is achievable.

Involving employees in the process is a great idea because, after all, they are the people who you’ll be expecting to live out your service vision every day. You want it to inspire and motivate people to deliver great CX each and every day.

Vision statements are your opportunity to show what inspires you and what you believe to be your most important values as a business. And, if you can, try and sum up those feelings with keywords and short tag lines that are easy to remember. If your goal is to change the world, then tell customers exactly that!

Thanks to Claire Benbow at Sensée

Personalized Customer Experiences

Mayur Pitamber

Put simply, personalized customer experiences need to be at the centre of a customer service vision statement, and the first step to achieving this is with an omnichannel approach.

Customers are now dictating to brands how, where, and when they want to interact with them.

If organizations want to stay a step ahead of the competition then they need to listen not only to what a customer is telling them but how and where the information is coming from.

The customer service experience has never been more important, and you need to include this in your vision statement.

Thanks to Mayur Pitamber at 8×8

For more great information from our panel of experts, read these articles next:

• What Are the Main Call Centre Pain Points, and How Can They Be Solved?
• The 26 Principles of Good Customer Service
• 20 Smart Ideas to Improve Your Voice of the Customer Programme
• 18 Goodwill Gestures to Build Better Employee Relationships
• How to Deal With Demanding Customers

Author: Robyn Coppell