For decades, many business owners have been trying to find ways to effectively enhance the customer experience. They know that when customers are happy, they’re more likely to make personal recommendations, and word-of-mouth is the most effective form of advertising around. However, creating satisfied customers can be a challenge.
It’s not enough to make an exceptional product or provide outstanding services. Today’s consumers derive the majority of their satisfaction from customer service interactions, making customer service a central player in the overall customer experience.
If your business isn’t focusing on improving customer service, your competitors probably are, which means you’re falling behind. However, it’s not too late – you just need the right tools.
Here’s how embracing technology can help you make a bigger difference.
Unify, centralize, and streamline customer service
The quality of customer service tends to drop when the tools your team uses are all over the place. For example, you might have a CRM, VoIP software that routes calls to each representative, and a separate task management program you’re using to schedule callbacks and responses.
Having a CRM and VoIP software is essential, but a task management program isn’t sufficient to manage customer service requests. However, Contact Center AI will provide your support team with everything they need to deliver excellent customer service.
When you use software to streamline and centralize your customer support, your support team will have all the tools they need to create an excellent customer experience. For instance, when someone requests help from your chatbot and your self-help options aren’t good enough, your agents will be right there to help the customer in real-time. Cloud-based solutions make it possible for anyone, anywhere to manage customer interactions, which means you can hire a fully remote customer service team and provide top-notch service.
Automation improves the customer experience
Automation isn’t just for manufacturing and robotics. Customer service software applications use automation to take care of the mundane, repetitive tasks service representatives have to go through. When these tasks are automated, it frees up the representative’s time and they can help new customers and/or resolve existing issues more thoroughly.
Cloud technology gives businesses first pick for talent
Good customer service representatives make customers feel taken care of and respected. They empathize with their situation and offer solutions that work. This keeps customers happy. However, when service reps make customers wrong or blame them for the issues they’re having – like when some reps play the ‘blame game’ – customers are left feeling bad.
How can you avoid this problem and build a great customer service team? You need cloud-based software. When companies try to maintain an in-house customer service team, they’re limited to local talent. This forces business owners to sometimes hire people who may not have the best customer service skills. The solution is to use cloud technology to manage customer service interactions so that you don’t need to hire an in-house team.
When your support team can manage support requests from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, you can keep searching for the right people and hire the best of the best, no matter where they live.
Technology makes sharing data easy
When data exists in a silo, teams without access will underperform. When you can share data across all your teams, everyone will work together more cohesively, which ultimately means better results. Whether you’re building software applications, making custom t-shirts, or selling socks, teams that work smoothly with each other directly impact your success. When it comes to providing an excellent customer experience, you need everyone on the same page.
All of your teams play a role in the customer experience. For example, your marketing team needs to work with sales and sometimes PR to create marketing campaigns and your web team needs to work with customer support and sales to ensure your website is functioning properly.
When your teams that need to work together don’t have the same data to reference, there will be a gap that affects the customer. For instance, if the web team doesn’t know customers are complaining about a confusing checkout process, they won’t know they need to fix anything. However, if they can access this data in a centralized location, they’ll start working on a solution before too many more customers are inconvenienced.
Technology is customer-positive
The point of using technology in your business is to make things easier. The easier it is for your teams to accomplish their goals, the better they’ll serve your customers. This is how technology supports a better customer experience.
