Customer service is an important part of a business, which is sadly often ignored today. Greed and hunger for power have gripped our society. This poor treatment of customers is not only limited to small brands or corporates, but is something that was started by elite and high-profile organizations with consumer bases in millions, and many small organizations just followed suit.
The reason behind this is that good customer service requires effort and investment, something which companies are not willing to invest in. Many firms often just look at the amount of work that needs to be put into customer service, ignoring the many benefits they are going to get out of this investment. Customer service itself is a great tool that can improve a business in many ways. Here we are going to discuss how technology can help improve the customer service techniques currently prevalent in the market.
Consumers are getting smarter day by day and they are recognizing their rights. Good customer service is one of the top components in fulfilling consumer rights, especially in the current landscape of today, when there is a pandemic and economies are going through recessions. Decreasing the purchasing power of the consumer has made them even more vigilant to thoroughly investigate a business before spending their hard-earned money on it.
Surveys suggest that 74 percent of buyers in the US alone consider customer service as a major deciding factor while conducting any kind of transaction with a company. On the other hand, 88 percent of the consumers look for online reviews about a company or a product before purchasing anything. This clearly states that companies cannot do away with customer service for long, considering it as just an additional perk.
The Process of Customer Service
Customer service is a straightforward process in itself, which begins after the customer has bought a service or a product from a company. This is a long-term process that continues until the customer remains with the company. The customer service process only ends after the customer decides to end its business with that said company. Being a long-term process, customer service is the key component in customer satisfaction and customer retention, plus being the major driving force behind building a positive image for the company in the market that drives more customers and with that, increased revenue.
We have already established how crucial good customer service is in terms of sustaining and growing a business. It is not just words but we have seen recent examples of this as well. One such example is RCN, which has gained quite a fan following because of good quality customer care and exceptional RCN customer service. Customer service is already a big issue with internet service providers because of the outages, technical issues, and problems with the billing. Due to these reasons, the customer service teams of ISPs are always busy. RCN shines in this case that is why they have such a huge number of customers despite being a small provider in comparison to many other giants of the telecom industry.
Technology Trends for Better Customer Service
Customer service is essential for a business. This is something that we have already figured out, but the question arises as to how a business entity can improve its customer service practices. Well, a simple answer to this is through technology, as technological evolutions have been helping mankind through centuries in improving their old ways. So, this exact approach can be applied to the field of customer service to make it more robust, responsive, and efficient for customers. There are a lot of tools and approaches thanks to technological evolution that a business can use in order to improve their customer service practices and in this article we are going to explain a few of them.
Omnichannel Customer Support
The biggest perk of technology today is that it has given us numerous means of communication that we can easily use to get our word across long distances. We are living in the age of social media in which the words of a common person can reach the heights of global recognition. The current trend is that every major business entity has their official accounts on different social media platforms through which they can easily communicate with their customers and spread important updates and announcements quickly to several people including their customers.
Plus customers can also use these mediums to contact their brands and get resolutions of their queries quickly and effectively. This omnichannel communication model has allowed customers to skip long queues on calls to just get a simple issue fixed. More businesses can adopt this approach of using multiple communication mediums to interact with their customers effectively, thus improving the overall customer service experience.
ChatBots and Live Chats
Customer service is a department that involves a lot of workforce and manpower, and humans are limited in their working capacity. That is why sometimes the staff is preoccupied with such excruciating workload that most of the customers are ignored. However, technology and AI are not bound to these constraints. One such technology is the chatbot. Chatbots are AI-programmed chat assistants that are fed with the answers to the most common queries of the users. Businesses apply their chatbots on customer service pages so users can quickly get the answers to their problems without the need for any human involvement.
Usually, chatbots are used in combination with options of live chat, so at any point, if a consumer is not getting a proper reply from a chatbot, they can switch over to live chat to talk to an actual human being for a quick resolution.
Analysis of Consumer Patterns
Technological advancements have equipped us with sophisticated tools that allow us to study behavioral changes in humans using big data, machine learning, and certain algorithms of human analytics. These techniques can also be applied to a consumer base of an organization to predict general consumer behavior. This will allow businesses to better equip their customer service teams for future hurdles and customer problems in advance. Plus this data can also help in identifying key problems that customers face while using the products and equipment of a company, thus improving the overall service experience by making informed decisions.
Conclusion
Customer service is a very important aspect of a thriving business, and in some cases, it could be a difficult task as well. However, as technology has eased a lot of difficult things in the past, the same is the case with customer service. There are a lot of tools and technological trends, some of which are mentioned in this article, which if applied successfully cannot only sustain the customer service department of a business but can even excel for exceptional growth.