4 Reasons Why You Need to Rethink Your Customer Service Strategy

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The digital transformation in the past few years has created an environment where consumers are tech savvy and are demanding more. Delivering great experience is now a must for companies, and marketers are prioritizing their services to take the level of engagement to the next level.

Customers expect to receive a response on the channel of their preference, which in turn has raised the need for a seamless and consistent brand experience regardless of the technology or method of interaction is used. What’s more critical is customer engagement and competitive success.

Many brands are now solely focusing on their customer service strategies as the customer’s perspective is really important for their brand journey. Research also shows that “consumers perceive brands to be putting more effort into creating a seamless and consistent customer experience for sales than they do for customer service.” Therefore, with the rise in demand, it has become increasingly important to keep up with customer’s expectations.

A recent report by Gartner – ‘Four Steps to Create Seamless Transition in Your Customer Service Channels’, states that the need for extraordinary customer service is gaining a lot of traction, as the new age customers want exemplary services, regardless of the medium being used. IT leaders need to revive their service strategies to power optimal customer journeys across all touch points. For this, they need a more consistent multichannel design like the customer engagement hub. Also, data transfer is one of the prevailing issues, that has occurred with the adoption of siloed technologies. Moreover, additional communication channels that support the phone is experiencing data transfer issues.

Few recommendations for IT leaders in the customer service domain are:

Design an Extraordinary Customer Service Strategy: The aim should be to create extraordinary customer engagements, in which customers are free to choose any available channel at any point of time in their conversation. Organizations need a defined strategy to provide the same level of customer service across various channels. Brands have managed to provide an unprecedented experience in individual channels but failed to replicate the experience when the transition happens from one channel to another. Thus, resulting in poor customer service and increased customer churn.

5 actions needed to justify the requirement behind changing your strategy:

  • Based on the collected data, articulate different customer self-service journeys to better understand the flow of conversations.
  • Consider your personal self-service experience too, while deciding on customer service journeys.
  • Determine your channel support based on these customer service journeys.
  • Form appropriate decisions to better understand the occurrence of escalations when shifting from self-service to assisted channels.
  • Based on your research about the gaps faced in current technology, search for a fast and reliable solution to support your multichannel strategy.

Ensure Smooth Channel Transition: Journey mapping is one of the important aspects of creating the great user experience. When a customer switches from one channel to another, the details of the previous conversation are not completely transferred to the other channel, this leads to poor user experience.

In today’s multichannel customer service environment, it becomes imperative for organizations to hold on for a strategy that allows a smooth transition of customers to the channel of their preference. As organizations are now moving towards providing an omnichannel experience, it is essential for them to opt for a platform that can help them create a seamless experience across all channels. Apart from this, organizations need to personalize the customer journey by analyzing session data, and text from chat or social media interaction to drive predictive models that can be used to better understand customer intent for improving the next phase of their journey.

Embrace Customer Journey Analytics: Having deep knowledge of the process flow involved in the customer journey is very important for organizations, as it helps in refining future and current interactions. Special analytics tools help organizations understand cross channel customer interactions.

Moreover, organizations need to embrace the concept of customer engagement hub, in order to have a better grip on channels and analytics obtained. The shift of customers from one channel to another can point out critical issues like non-availability of agents, technical error, or channel failure. Awareness on these issues will help companies to improve their services and at the same time will also provide an option to prioritize the need for a preferred channel.

Ensure Consistent Knowledge Management across Channels: Often the knowledge gathered by customers through different channels become contradictory, leading to confusion and frustration. In contemporary times, customers believe in being self-sufficient and use multiple channels to derive a conclusion. However, there might be a scenario when knowledge does not turn out to be constructive. For instance, having information provided through the self-service channel is of no use if the knowledge base to which the agent has access to states something slightly different. Therefore, it is necessary for organizations to provide consistent knowledge through one central repository, whether it is for self-service or assisted channels, in order to remove the communication disparity between customers and the agents.

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