Today’s Customer: Listen to Me or I Walk
Today, customer service is a critical means to differentiate you from your competitors. Yet delivering memorable customer service continues to get harder and harder to do. That’s because customers have more power than ever. They demand to be able to communicate with you on their terms and their channel preference. They crowdsource for opinions, and they self-publish to their social networks the good, the bad and the ugly customer service experiences they have with your company. Today you need to better align with your customers to vastly improve the customer experience and to set your company apart or they may no longer be your customers.
The New Sales Frontier Is Service
It has long been our belief that service is the new sales. Today’s customers are more demanding than ever. So, you need to better align with your customers to improve the customer experience and to set your company apart. Reset your customer service mindset to one of being the “front and center” contact point of your company with the consumer. Ultimately, this shift will help you build brand and product loyalty with today’s modern customer.
Automation Is Not Enough: Think Customer Journey
Industry research confirms consumers are perfectly happy engaging through digital channels to look up information. But when they are looking for help on more complex issues they still seek out live help. Today we see the majority of businesses investing heavily in automation. The theory is by automating routine inquiries you will have the bandwidth to let your agents handle the more complex inquiries. However, for this to work, companies must understand their customer’s journey and what data points need to be passed on to an agent to effectively handle self-service to live-service inquiries. It is my contention companies that succeed with service automation will actually be those who also focus on arming their agents accordingly with pertinent customer inputs and data to handle the entire customer journey to achieve superior inquiry resolution. So, it becomes a technology balancing act and one you need to master to solve the frustration today’s consumers vent about – when they feel like they are penalized by not having information passed along to the agent and then must fundamentally start all over.
Smooth Their Journey, Earn Their Loyalty
To meet customers where and how they want may very well require a technology upgrade based on where you are at with your current offering’s lifecycle. If you’re already committed to raising your customer service to the next level, then considering a technology refresh is your logical next step. There are modern, cloud-based offerings that can help you take customer service automation and journey management to the promised land. And remember, just one negative customer service incident can badly affect your overall brand perception and customer loyalty.