The Future of Customer Service: Contemporary Care for a Modern World

Customer expectations are evolving, and centres that want to keep up had better make sure their service techniques evolve along with them.

Customer service used to be simple. You may remember an operator on the line, directing your call to the appropriate department, or a sales representative fumbling through manuals in front of you, trying to troubleshoot for you without having any idea how to solve the problem.

Businesses need to optimize their customer service experience to stay competitive in today’s market — people don’t have time to sit around and wait to receive help with their issues. The modern consumer needs quick and efficient help across multiple channels, so why do so many businesses still stick with outdated and ineffective customer care practices?

Read on for a few tips on how to modernize your customer service to better meet the needs of your customers.

The Shift to Customer Care

One mistake too many customer service centres make is becoming caught up in solving customer complaints.

Yes, you read that right. Quality customer care is about more than following a troubleshooting script that makes your agents seem like nothing more than human placeholders for a computerized system.

Solving problems is an essential step of the process, but modern customer service needs to go beyond this. Your goal isn’t just to fix their problem, it’s to create loyalty to your brand and deliver an exceptional overall experience. Customers respond best when they feel that their problems are important and that they are valued as consumers — goals that can’t be reached simply by fixing their issue and then rushing on to the next call.

Listen to your customers and make a connection with them. Sure, solve their problems as well, but building that connection first can help make sure that they’ll feel valued and want to come back again and again.

Balancing Costs

For a long time, customer service centres were seen as textbook examples of the standard business model. Productivity, efficiency and regulation were the name of the game. However, with the shifting values of customer care becoming more important than the bottom line, many centres have found that their standard business models are being uprooted in favour of something else.

This is part of why many businesses have been slow off the block when it comes to adapting. Changing established practices usually means more money out of the till. However, when you consider research done by Parature in 2013 that indicates that nearly 83 billion dollars a year are lost from poor customer service experiences, the cost doesn’t seem so high.

Multichannel Support and More

It’s no secret that customers nowadays expect support across multiple channels. Research done by E-consultancy indicates that customers still prefer to be helped first by phones, email, and then live chat, but a truly modernized support centre should go one step further.

More consumers today expect their issues to be handled across multiple platforms at the same time, and this is made easier than ever with the social media platform boom. They want to be able to post their issue to your Twitter feed, have the option of speaking with a live agent and then receive emails concerning the interaction all in one move.

This is a tall order for any business that hasn’t bothered to update their customer service practices to reflect the increasingly socialized nature of the online world. Make sure your agents are well versed in multiple forms of online and social media engagement to ensure that your customer’s needs can be met on whichever channel or channels they like.

Self-Service and the Web

Having effective customer service agents is great, but what if your customers could have the option of solving the problem without the need to contact you? Self-service troubleshooting has become more popular than ever, and you should do what you can to help facilitate this by making it easy for your customers to find the right materials.

People typically search for online help nowadays not by directing themselves directly to your website, but through search engines such as Google. Take advantage of this trend. Optimizing your online content by basing content around keywords boosts your page in online search rankings and allows your customers to find it easier. Some basic keyword research can give you insight as to what types of keywords and articles receive the most traffic from online searches.

Reap the Benefits Today

Modern customer service is truly a force to be reckoned with. By enhancing your customer’s experience along with the increased adaptability of problem solving that comes from multimedia and online support, your business can enjoy the increased revenue and customer loyalty that comes from an optimized customer service practice.

Want to learn more about modernizing your customer service centre? Check out our free white paper.