No Matter What, You Still Need Customer Service Reps

Anyone can rhyme off a bad experience that soured them on the promise of customer service. This can range from being kept on hold indefinitely and having no one respond to a message or post on social media to an urgent email message that seems to disappear into the ether.

This is why, at first, the notion of a company that offers customer service without having to deal with reps sounds so appealing.

Think of all the technologies that are available today to automate the process of asking questions and having them answered, or self-service tools that let customers do their own troubleshooting. Don’t these tools handle a lot of things reps used to do?

For business owners, meanwhile, customer service applications may require investment, but not the same kind that goes into training a dedicated group of people.

Before we write off the idea of service reps completely, however, it may be prudent to look beyond efficiencies and think more carefully about the kind of customer experience you want to deliver as a brand.

A lot of companies do this with their marketing and sales processes, but service is equally important, given its impact on loyalty and repeat business. And people are a big element of that experience, especially in areas like these:

Anomalies and exceptions

Using the right tools, businesses can now establish rules and policies that can be executed through applications to handle a variety of service tasks. This includes product returns and exchanges, replacement parts or repairs or even just the delivery of educational content to deal with their questions.

Eventually, though, there might be extenuating circumstances or scenarios where it doesn’t make sense to apply those business rules and processes. A good example is when one of your largest or most frequent customers asks for a little leeway around the time they took to bring a product back, or if they wanted a small discount applied to an add-on to their latest purchase.

These are the kinds of things that sometimes require human beings with knowledge and experience to take a look and essentially make a judgement call. A good rep will not only meet the service need for an anomaly or exception. They can also give feedback to the business that ultimately helps shape or influence changes to automated business rules, or inspire new ones.

Best to not only have reps on hand for these situations, but to think about where you want an automated system to escalate and route a situation their way.

Training and coaching your customers

Even if you’re a good swimmer, there’s something comforting about seeing a life raft nearby when you’ve fallen overboard from a ship. If you’re moving customers to more self-service kinds of options, a human customer service rep can be a lot like one of those life rafts.

It’s not that you don’t have a great website with lots of DIY documentation or digital tools to help. You may target particularly savvy customers and have great explainer videos. Even then, there will be people who need a bit of help — or who don’t feel they have the time to learn the self-serve approach at that moment.

Well-trained customer service reps can be the go-to resource for such people, leaving them feeling more empowered and willing to solve their own challenges once they’ve been given a leg up, so to speak. In fact, a lot of what great reps do is make customers more aware of the self-service options they have the next time an issue arises.

This isn’t just about troubleshooting, though. It’s also about onboarding — the process whereby customers first start using your products and services. If they get confused or frustrated early on, it will only cause problems later. That’s why reps today are as focused on the idea of “customer success” as they are service and support.

Offering empathy and understanding

Do you stand behind your product? Okay, and who exactly does the standing when you’re not there?

Customers appreciate the speed and other benefits of technology, but they often want to feel as though the companies they buy from care about the experience they’re having. That happens best when they get feedback from other human beings —even if it’s just an email message or social media DM.

Keep in mind that in some cases, customers may never personally interact with your marketing team, and they may make their purchase digitally through e-commerce, with minimal to no connection with a sales person. That means a customer support rep may be the first human being to serve as an ambassador for your brand.

Empathy is a powerful force in building trust, goodwill and other elements of a strong relationship between a company and its customers. A service rep can make someone smile, laugh or at least feel like they’re being really heard and understood.

Those interactions may provide anecdotal but still relevant information that can complement what you see in the data, or offer ideas data alone might never have inspired.

By all means, organizations should make the most of the technologies that let them make customer service better. They should also, however, remember the value a great customer service rep can bring to that experience, and train and coach them to deliver that value.