How To Get Leadership Buy-In for Customer Service

C-suite level decision-makers are responsible for providing necessary support center resources and investing in their customer service center’s future. As a customer service manager, it’s your job to get leadership buy-in for the tools and technology your team needs to deliver the kinds of brand experiences you know will help push your brand to new heights.

Recently, there’s been a widespread shift across industries toward more customer experience (CX) investment. In Gartner’s 2023 CX trends report, they found that 58% of service leaders’ goals in 2023 are to grow business through CX, stating that they “face pressures to pivot their service function to contribute to topline revenue.” With a top-down recognition of the critical role customer service plays in the long-term success of a business, you can inspire your agents to feel like an integral part of that success.

GUIDE

A CX Leader's Guide to Getting Buy-In and Driving Change

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Making the Case for Leadership Buy-In for Customer Service

If you make a solid case for CX being a catalyst for growth, you’ll get full leadership buy-in for your customer service team. Building a convincing business case can be a straightforward process, but it’s essential to hit these notes to make a strong argument for the resources you need.

Identify an issue or gap

Your C-suite leaders are problem solvers by trade, so to get a sizable investment in your team, you need to demonstrate how the current CX approach is inadequate for the company’s goals. Getting leadership buy-in for customer service starts by making a clear pitch that identifies a fillable gap in your present-day processes. You can uncover these gaps using internal data, or by researching the systems and tools used by similar companies and comparing their performance.

Consider potential solutions

Before you can obtain leadership buy-in for CX investment, you should first flesh out various opportunities for improvement. Specifically, consider the ways your customer service center could be more effective at driving revenue, and what that investment could translate into. Common solutions include:

• Investing in hiring and training existing agents to provide more hands-on, personalized service
• Investing in automation technology to make customers feel more empowered in their own service outreach
• Investing in an all-inclusive customer service platform that doesn’t silo or exclude certain channels

By providing the chance to deepen customer connections and deliver better service options, CX can help drive brand loyalty, which, in turn, encourages more spending with your brand. In fact, in our Customer Expectations Report, we found that 72% of shoppers spend more on companies that provide a great customer experience.

Plan ahead for implementation

Even after you identify a problem and establish a solution, your C-suite pitch still needs to clearly lay out how to enact that plan successfully. Define exactly what you’re paying for — what each bit of technology costs — and what it will accomplish, and, most importantly, how it’ll fit into your existing infrastructure without disrupting your current business flow. Selecting a new CX platform that has a proven track record of successful implementations is crucial in ensuring a smooth transition.

When you’re able to demonstrate that great customer support tech has the power to actively drives new sales, your leadership team will be more easily convinced to provide buy-in to make the improvements you need possible.

How Gladly Helps Moves the Needle

Gladly provides the most holistic customer service center solution for a brand looking to drive even more revenue through CX. If you’re looking for the best solution to help move the needle with leadership and get the buy-in you need, our platform expands agent capabilities in profound ways — turning customer service agents into customer service heroes. Gladly helps:

• Empower individual agents to be catalysts for growth, using technology like customer details to proactively recommend additional purchases to customers based on their personal preferences
• Make purchasing even easier for customers by implementing payment options directly in the customer journey on the channels they love — like SMS and chat
• Give agents the means to be more efficient in their daily routines, making them happier by default

With the introduction of Gladly solutions into your CX process, your executives will be able to see the potential of your customer service team, and you’ll more easily secure future leadership buy-in for customer service. Even better, your team will thank you for the means to become better versions of themselves with technology that empowers them to build deeper customer connections and focus on the most important tasks in their daily work.

Make the Pitch for CX

Customer experience can be a proven revenue generator for savvy leaders — the only impediment is convincing your leadership team to provide you with the resources you need to expand. Gladly is the tipping point that inspires leaders to see the vast growth potential of investing in CX.

Brand Spotlight: Deckers

The proof of Gladly’s success lies within our customer stories. Shoe conglomerate Deckers started seeing CX issues begin to increase in frequency at the agent level. It wasn’t until that concern was pushed to the executive level and C-suite leaders invested in Gladly that things took a positive turn. Their disposal of a legacy ticketed system and investment in a solution that provides channel independence and lifelong customer conversations has helped the Deckers team vastly improve its customer satisfaction.

Wondering how Gladly stacks up against ticket-based CX platforms? Start here.

• Zendesk and Gladly Comparison
• Gorgias and Gladly Comparison
• Genesys and Gladly Comparison

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