Providing quality customer service is easier said than done, especially when competing with giants in your industry. If are planning to raise the bar high for your customer service, here are few challenges that you should be prepared for.
Too many redundant customer issues
About 80 percent of the calls that customer service representatives handle can be resolved with one answer. It’s those unique 20 percent that truly demand attention. For those common, easily resolved issues, no one should have to make a phone call. It wastes both your client’s and your customer service team’s time when there’s an easier and faster way that customers can self-serve.
The need for speed
Most customers have little patience for a long-winded customer service.Thus, providing rapid responses to their inquiries and rapid resolution to their issues is key to giving a positive customer experience.
Avoiding out-of-stock situations
Today’s shoppers desire instant gratification. The challenge for businesses such a retailers is ensuring that their customers can get what they want when they want it in whichever way they want. Again, that seamless, consistent experience means everything. Studies have shown that 57 percent of shoppers would go to a competitor to find what they want after having an out-of-stock experience.
Your business is growing faster than your support team can keep up
When your company expands rapidly into new markets or develop new product lines to grow, it can be challenging for you to keep up and quickly hire new support agents and train them to meet the increasing demands. This challenge can be tackled by adopting technologies that will assist support teams in improving their response by handling multiple issues in short amount of time, thus increasing operation efficiency without hiring new staffs.
Choosing the right tools to give better experiences
Finding a technology to complement customer service is not hard, yet choosing one the can significantly improve the existing service can be challenging in some cases. For instance, businesses that have been servicing customer in the traditional phone-based way may find it taught to fully shift to other new channels such as web-based chats. In such cases, a best approach would be to experiment with any of these channels and assess the experience it yields before making a decision to fully adapt it.
Providing an integrated end-to-end customer experience
It’s important for any customer service form an integrated end-to-end customer experience. Customers don’t like to repeat themselves. When an interaction starts with say a web chat or an email then transfers to a live agent, the process shouldn’t require the customer to start from scratch.
Unfortunately, my researches shows that about 80% of companies suffer from what is called “touchpoint amnesia” which is forgetting customer information during a multi-touch experience. The right technology can help, either by using a single platform or through a seamless integration of several platforms.
