What Is Inbound Customer Service?

You might already be familiar with theinbound methodology-- the business approach of turning strangers into visitors, leads, customers, and then promoters.

It's about meeting people where they already are -- by marketing with educational content instead of interruptive advertising, and by offering helpful solutions instead of using pushy sales tactics to close a deal.

但是，一旦潜在客户成为付费客户，入站方法就不会结束。您知道也有一个入站客户服务框架吗？

To help you balance the day-to-day demands of reactive customer support and the need to invest in your customers' success, we’ve developed a new, customer-first framework that provides the foundational strategy for excellent, customer-first support.

By helping your customers with fast customer support and helpful educational content, as well as consistentlycollecting customer feedback为了帮助您改进，您将帮助您的客户成功。成功的客户是快乐的客户，快乐的客户将帮助您发展业务 - 因此他们的成功也是您的成功。

入站客户服务框架

The inbound methodology we've created consists of three different stages of the flywheel: Attract, engage, and delight.

Attract

将入站方法应用于客户服务涉及将潜在的新客户根据资源和现有客户的积极反馈吸引您的业务。bob体育苹果系统下载安装您可以通过建立强大的良好知识库and educational blog and video content.

Engage

如果the self-service resources you create aren't enough, you need to engage with customers reaching out to you by quickly triaging and responding to incoming tickets, solving their issues as quickly as possible, and providing different channels through which they can reach out for help, such as phone, email, social media, and live chat.

Delight

By delighting your customers and retaining them for your business, you can activate them as loyal advocates who will leave you positive reviews, refer friends and colleagues, and provide helpful feedback. To identify these happy customers, you should regular deploy customer feedback surveys to gauge their satisfaction.

The Landscape of Customer Service Today

这是成为客户的好时机。他们在面前有很多选择，在互联网的帮助下，理解这些不同的选择比以往任何时候都容易。

What that means for businesses is that the competition is stiffer than ever. Because customers have so many options to purchase a product or service, the power is in their hands to decide where they do business. And with the help of greater online and social media discoverability thanks to inbound marketing, customers have the power and information to thoughtfully make buying decisions -- and plenty of other options to switch to if they need to.

The power dynamic has shifted -- away from businesses and toward customers.

The growth of social media has also played a role in this power shift. Now, because Facebook, Instagram, and messaging apps are ubiquitous to everything we do on our phones and on the internet, every customer has a megaphone with which they can amplify their voice. If a customer has a good experience, they can share it. If they have a bad experience, they can share that too. The ability of a customer to take their story and turn it into a story for other customers -- a good or a bad story -- is a uniquely 21st-century concept that we've seen go really well or really poorly for businesses.

Word-of-mouth is the most important channel for a business to tap into these days, and businesses and team members who view customers' success as a growth engine will treat it that way. They understand that businesses have an obligation to their customers -- not just to answer their questions, but to help them derive real value from their product or service.

Competition is growing, no matter what the industry, and as more competitors enter into already-crowded markets, customer service will quickly become a competitive differentiator and advantage for companies doing it well.

想一想：如果客户告诉朋友他们在企业上的伟大经历，他们可能更有可能在许多其他选择中选择它。客户服务可以使您的业务与众不同，而快乐的客户实际上可以成为您最好的营销人员。

客户服务与客户支持与客户成功：有什么区别？

These three terms are different -- but they live on the same spectrum.

1. Customer Support

Customer support is about reacting to your customers' needs. It's about being there for customers, whenever they need it, whatever they need help with. At its core, customer support is transactional, and the interaction is begun and ended by the customer. Customer support is a business reacting to a customer.

2. Customer Service

Customer service is more proactive. It's about saying to a customer "I have something for you" instead of a customer saying "I need something from you." Service is about a business guiding the customer.

如果businesses can provide both customer support and customer service by engaging reactively and guiding proactively, they're in great shape.

3.客户成功

Customer success is something that's initiated by the business, and it's doing something that a customer might not have even known they wanted or needed. It requires anticipation.

客户的成功是关于客户和业务的增值，同时又是为了扩大价值。它可能涉及通过为与他们已经购买的产品合作的其他产品或服务提出其他产品或服务来提高销售或交叉销售。但这是执行客户成功的关键：

一旦他们证明自己可以很好地支持并积极地指导，企业只有机会就可以做到这一点。如果您考虑一下，客户的成功就在面向客户的金字塔的顶点，这三个都聚集在一起：客户的成功是客户团队想要达到的重点，但是如果他们不接收，他们就无法到达那里客户打电话时电话。

Building a Customer-Focused Team

如果you don't have dedicated customer support or customer success teams yet, it's important to get started -- and soon.

The moment that you acquire your first customer, you're in the business of doing customer service -- it's an obligation you need to fulfill.

You might start with a small customer support or success team of just a few people -- or maybe even just one person. These small teams are often very in-tune with the voice of the customer and tend to provide exceptional service -- because it's what they do, all day every day.

The key to providing exceptional customer service -- and doing it well -- is twofold: You need technology, and you need amazing people. No matter what your role is in a business -- sales, marketing, or customer service --每个人should have a customer mindset and think about how to solve for them. When executed well,客户成功是真正的团队运动, and that stands whether you're a team of one or a team of 100. If you have a culture of customer centricity, you'll be able to grow faster than other businesses that don't put the customer first. (We've done the research on it.)

When it comes to hiring people for an exceptional, customer-focused team, we recommend hiring for character and values, and training for skill -- because it's much easier to teach someone how to use a software than it is to teach someone why it matters to always be focused on the customer first.

Here at HubSpot, we actually have a preference for hiring people that don't have as much experience in customer support and success because we want to be able to introduce them to these concepts from the start. We can start them off on the right foot and get them to a place where they see the customer as valuable as we do.

Which isn't to say that we don't hire people who've worked in customer service before. We have a bias for hiring people that we think have potential to grow really successful careers, that have good character, and can get on board with the customer-focused mindset.

Customer Experience Is Evolving

Inbound marketing has fundamentally changed the way the customer experience unfolds -- because it doesn't start at the point-of-transaction anymore. Instead, it starts far, far before that -- because it's a continuous experience across the entire lifecycle from someone's first interaction with your business to actually deciding to become a customer.

入站营销改变了客户体验，因为它改变了体验的开始 - 客户对企业的第一印象。无论他们是从Facebook，博客文章还是电子书从事企业，他们都会在与销售代表交谈之前对企业的印象。在整个培养和销售过程中，这会改变与客户的下游互动，因为客户更加参与和了解。然后，即使在交易结束并赢得了客户之后，体验也不会止于此 - 除了他们的客户服务代表或客户支持经理，客户可能仍然在社交媒体上关注您或阅读您的博客文章。如今，整个组织必须继续以无缝的体验给客户留下深刻的印象 - 并继续为他们带来更多价值。

Deciding how and when to engage customers with onboarding is an age-old customer service question, and it becomes a challenge when staff and resources to do so are limited.

organiz在HubSpot的,我们扩大我们的客户服务ation through two different pillars: self-service and onboarding.

Self-service is a key part of customer success -- because it lets customers get the help they need, the way they want to get it. It's about creating content that helps customers learn how to get starting using your product or service, or use a key feature, or fix a common software bug.

然后,新员工培训可以发挥巨大的作用得到customers up-and-running based on previous customer interactions and observations. You can even use marketing automation like workflows and emails to send new customers the resources they need when you know they'll need it to supplement onboarding phone calls.

How Customer Service Will Change

There will be a lot of incremental changes that transform the face of customer service in the next few years.

每个人都在谈论机器人和人工智能将如何影响每个行业，而客户服务领域也不例外。这些工具将带来更多的对话网站UIS，以帮助客户获得他们想要的更快的自助服务，并且他们将继续为客户提供指导。这些技术还将改变客户与企业交流的方式 - 远离电话和电子邮件，转向机器人和实时聊天。

Another change we'll see in the next few years will be a change in how businesses choose to invest their time, energy, and money -- and we think that, incrementally, more businesses will invest in customer service as a competitive differentiator -- otherwise they'll get knocked off the map by other businesses offering similar products with better customer experiences.

We conducted research that found that, while 80% of businesses think they deliver super customer service -- but only 8% of consumers actually think businesses do so. It will be critical for businesses to invest in hearing and analyzing the voice of the customer to close that keep and meet more customer expectations to kick the flywheel effect of engaging, guiding, and growing customers into high gear.

要了解更多信息，请了解good customer servicefrom real companies.