The customer service process, explained in 3 phases

Customer service is vital to the reputation, sales, customer experience, and long-term growth of any business. One of the major challenges of customer service, however, is how dynamic of a process it is. That process breaks into three phases, and each phase has its own steps, tools, and way to measure whether it's working.

Although most people think of customer service as simply taking in customer complaint calls or emails, there's a lot more going on behind the complaint box. Today's leaders in customer service recognize that connecting with customers is a process, and businesses that place their customers at the center of that process are the most likely to succeed.

This post covers all three phases, plus the steps to build your own customer service process, the metrics that tell you it's working, and where Gladly fits into each phase.

Pre-contact phase of customer service

This phase occurs before customers engage with the customer service team. It includes their discovery and exploration of your website, contact channels — such as social media and site chat — and first impression of your company's brand.

Customer service starts long before customers have made their purchase, asked a question, or called to complain about a service or product. It starts with your website and online availability, your social media presence and branding, and the avenues of communication you've provided to your customers.

Here are some ways you can bolster your pre-contact stages of customer relationships:

Train your team and AI: One of the most effective ways to prepare for interacting with customers is to provide training to your team and staff. This now extends to training your AI systems as well.

Get to know your customers: Especially as customer service strategies continue to move online and through social media, you need to know the people that your business serves if you’re going to connect with them. Identifying your customers can help you set guidelines for the kind of language, videos, and content you’ll be sharing with them.

Make customer service easy to find and use: Contacting your customer service team should be easy for customers. This means making it easy to find your customer service page, contact information, and FAQs. It also means being available and present on social media. AI-powered chatbots can provide instant responses 24/7, improving accessibility.

Contact phase of customer service

This phase occurs when customers make their first (or repeated) contact with a company, usually with customer service or support teams. This is the most critical customer service phase, as it heavily influences customer decisions on whether to buy from or interact with your company in the future.

Below are some tips to ensure your contact phase leaves a great impression on your customers:

Personalize the experience: Behind every sale and transaction is a customer, and behind that customer is a person with whom you can build a relationship.

Gladly's Customer Profile and Conversation Timeline give agents a customer's full history with the company in one place. This includes past purchases, interactions, preferences, and ongoing issues. With that context on hand, agents can provide:

• More personalized and empathetic service

• Addressing customers by name

• Referencing their individual history

• Tailoring solutions to their specific needs

That kind of personal service is what makes customers stick around even after something goes wrong once.

Empathize: Every step of the customer service process depends on empathy. AI can help by analyzing customer sentiment and providing agents with context, but human touch is still important for genuine empathy.

Communicate clearly and respectfully: Gladly's Answer Threads uses generative AI for chat and SMS responses, which means faster, more accurate responses to routine customer queries while maintaining a respectful tone.

Post-contact phase of customer service

This phase occurs after customers have contacted your customer service team. It can happen immediately, in the form of a response form or after some time has passed, in the form of a survey.

The post-contact phase is all about forming long-lasting relationships and building for the future. Here's how to excel in this phase:

Learn and improve continuously: Actively seek and analyze customer feedback to demonstrate sincerity and transparency in your customer service approach. Learning from past interactions is how you find out which customers you kept and which ones you lost, and why.

Tools like Insights show CX leaders where customer sentiment is dropping and which areas need attention. By analyzing customer interactions across all channels, Insights provides actionable insights that drive continuous learning and optimization of your customer service processes.

That gives you a specific reason to change something in the pre-contact phase before the same complaint shows up again next quarter.

How to build your customer service process, step by step

Map what already happens in each phase. Before you change anything, write down what customers experience today: how they find you, what happens when they reach out, and whether anyone follows up once the conversation ends. Most teams skip this step and end up redesigning a process nobody fully understands.

Assign ownership for each phase. Pre-contact usually sits with marketing or web teams, contact sits with your service team, and post-contact often falls through the cracks between support and product. Name who owns follow-up before you build anything else.

Match tools to what each phase needs. A chatbot that answers common questions at 2am and a tool that gives your team full customer history during a live conversation solve two completely different problems, even though a vendor might sell both to you as customer service software.

Set one target metric per phase. Pick the number each phase is accountable for, such as first response time for contact or survey completion rate for post-contact, before you roll anything out, so you can tell later whether the change helped.

Feed what you learn back into phase one. The post-contact phase should change what your pre-contact content says. If customers keep asking the same question after a purchase, that answer belongs on your website before they ever have to ask.

How to measure each phase of your customer service process

Pre-contact shows up in traffic and self-service numbers: how many people find an answer on your site or in a chatbot before they ever need a person, and how many give up and contact you instead. Contact is where most teams already track something, usually first response time, resolution time, and CSAT, but the number worth watching closest is first contact resolution, since it's the strongest predictor of whether someone comes back with the same problem. Post-contact is the phase most companies skip measuring entirely: survey completion rate, whether feedback changes anything downstream, and repeat contact rate, which tells you if the first two phases actually solved the problem or just closed the conversation.

MaryRuth's put this into practice: after launching Gladly's email AI, their email resolution rate jumped from 11% to 30% in the first week, a 173% improvement. 'The improvement was instant and dramatic,' said Jim Rodden, MaryRuth's CPO.

Leveling up your customer service systems and processes

Gladly can help you personalize, energize, and simplify your customer service teams' strategies and processes in the AI era. With Gladly's state-of-the-art customer service platform, you can:

• Personalize your customer experience

• Meet your customers on the channels of their choice

• Build lifelong relationships that keep them coming back

• Use AI to move faster without sacrificing accuracy

• Scale your AI and telephony use flexibly with Pay-As-You-Go pricing, allowing businesses to adapt their investments to their specific needs and growth

Gladly is built to support all three phases, from the pre-contact tools that answer questions before anyone has to ask, to the contact-phase context that makes every conversation personal, to the post-contact feedback loops that make the next cycle better than the last.