Is your service process well structured? You can analyze and improve it with the help of a service flowchart.
Good customer service is also a way to add value to the product or service. Therefore, seeking to achieve excellence in service can be the great differential that your business needs. To offer good service, it is important that your team has well-structured processes. This way, you will be able to identify problems and improvements in customer support procedures.
A great way to structure your company’s service process is to create a service flowchart. The elaboration of a customer service flowchart is very useful, as it details the stages of your service and facilitates the automation of tasks in various channels, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook and online chat for website.
What is a service flowchart?
A customer service flowchart is a visual structure that organizes and details a company’s service process. It provides guidelines for your team to know how to proceed with requests from customers who reach it.
Through a service flow, you can:
- Understand how the processes are interconnected;
- Identify problems, such as bottlenecks, that generate waste of resources and rework of the team.
Another objective of the flowchart is to help automate the customer service process. Through it, you can identify steps that always happen in the same way, so they can be easily automated to save your attendants’ time and, thus, decongest your company’s service.
You can even rely on a ready-made flow, but it is very difficult to find one that fits your business perfectly and is able to be implemented without changes.
Common steps in a service flowchart
Most flowcharts have three basic steps: service request, level of specialized service with the department and satisfaction survey. We will detail each one better below.
Service request
The first stage of the process begins when the customer contacts the organization through a service channel. Currently, it is very common for customers to use messenger channels, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Therefore, it is important that you offer these service channels in order to facilitate contact.
Regardless of the channel, in this first stage the client provides some basic information such as CPF, e-mail and telephone. It is important that you do not ask too many questions, only the essential ones in order to be able to identify the customer, otherwise he may give up contact, thus increasing the rate of abandonment of your service.
If your company has several departments, in this step you can ask what the customer’s problem is and so you can direct him to the appropriate sector.
Level of specialized service with the department
In this stage, the service reaches the attendant. He must listen to everything the customer has to say and will analyze whether he can solve the particular problem.
If the solution is not available to the attendant, he must direct the attendance to the most appropriate sector for the demand.
Satisfaction survey
The satisfaction survey is a very important tool to measure the quality of the service provided by your organization. It can help your company avoid problems such as losing customers, as well as showing whether the results of investments in customer service are paying off.
The satisfaction survey should always take place after each service. You can define which type of survey is most interesting for your business model.
How to create a service flowchart
To create a service flow, basically, you must follow 3 steps:
1. Define the objectives of the process: The objective of the flowchart must be very clear so that it does not become another document without any functionality.
Example: Represent the current customer support process to identify points for improvement.
2. Determine the activities: In this step, you must determine which activities should be part of the flowchart, what is the relationship between them, in addition to the order in which they are to be performed.
Example: Your company has different levels of customer support and it is important that the service goes through basic support and, if necessary, is referred to a more advanced level of support. In cases like this, you should list these activities in order.
3. Graphical representation: You must choose a group of symbols to use in your flowchart. It is important that there is a pattern and that you create a legend for the symbols.
However, a flowchart with many symbols can be difficult to understand.
Example of automated service flowchart on WhatsApp
To exemplify the automation of a service flow, we created a fictitious clinic called DermoClinic and we also created a flow chart for it. The clinic attendance process is quite simple:
- The consumer contacts WhatsApp and is received with a welcome;
- Then, he is asked whether or not he is a client of the clinic;
- If you are a customer, you are asked for the CPF of the consumer and his data is searched for in the system;
- If the consumer data is found by the CPF, the service is forwarded to the support sector that deals only with those who already use the clinic’s services. If it is not found, the CPF is requested again;
- After the second attempt to request the CPF, the client is referred for assistance regardless of whether or not his data were found. This is because the customer may be typing the CPF in the wrong way and we also do not want to irritate him;
- If the consumer is not yet a customer, some data is requested, such as name, telephone and email, and then he is sent to a team that will present the clinic’s services and will be able to carry out the sales process.
Before redirecting to a human attendant, there is a waiting time that may or may not occur, depending on the availability of the attendants.
It is important to note that the same flow built into a service system can be used in several different channels, depending on which service system you use in your company.
