Customer service is the support you provide your customers before and after they purchase your product or service. Offering timely service that consistently meets customer expectations leads to a positive experience of your brand. It helps you build trust and foster long-term relationships with customers to help grow your business.
The pandemic has significantly shifted customer engagement to digital channels. But even as lockdowns and social restrictions continue to ease, this digital shift will continue to evolve. According to McKinsey, 75% of first time digital channel users will keep using these channels. This has also significantly shifted the service standards expected by customers. 76% of customers now expect consistent interactions across different departments and touchpoints.
While customer service agents play a crucial role in delivering quality customer service, the systems and processes that support them are as important. Here are a few tips to help your business bring people and systems together to provide excellent customer service:
1. Invest in customer service training
Businesses with high-performing customer service teams invest in their agents. By providing training to improve product knowledge, troubleshooting, empathy, and customer management skills, businesses can empower agents to build trust with customers.
As newer contact centre systems and processes are implemented, agents need to be continually trained. This helps them take advantage of the improved tools at their disposal to deliver unparalleled customer experience.
2. Deliver personalised customer experience
To deliver great customer service, agents need to understand the changing needs of customers. When they have a 360 degree view of customer data across channels, they can gain insights into customer behaviour. This helps them meet expectations at every stage of the customer journey.
A cloud-based CRM can help your customer service teams stay connected to every customer interaction. They can deliver connected experiences with unique and personalised service, thereby increasing affinity for your brand.
3. Embrace analytics and automation
Identify and automate the most repetitive customer service tasks to free up agents’ time to focus on more complex, rewarding work. Some businesses build AI chatbots to help answer basic customer questions. Others use tools to automate the collection of basic information and logging of service requests.
A CRM analytics platform can empower service agents with just the right data and insights they need to make quick, informed decisions. By enabling them to solve challenging customer problems, it can help improve agent satisfaction levels.
4. Never lose customer focus
Create a customer journey map to help you see things from your customer’s perspective. Focus on what matters to customers by analysing the journey data continuously. This helps you craft a seamless, connected experience across customer channels and keep up with customer demands to stay ahead of competitors. When channels are connected, senior executives also get an overview of service standards to make the right operational decisions.
Staying customer-focused helps your teams come together, serve customers better, and grow your business.
Boost customer loyalty and deliver connected, personalised customer services across every touch point with Salesforce Service Cloud.
