It's always important to excel in customer services, but in a tight, competitive economy, it becomes even more critical. Now that customers have about five times as many ways to contact you than they did a few decades ago, high-quality, two-way customer service (also known as “customer engagement”) is even more critical. It won't do you any good to offer stellar customer service over the phone, only to fall down on another media – Web chat, e-mail or social media – with the same customer. All the hard work you put into the phone call is quickly erased if the customer experiences frustration during another, non-phone, contact. It is therefore critical to make sure you customer engagement is equally high across all customer touch points.
It's not easy, mind you, but it's still absolutely vital.
On-demand contact center solutions provider Contactual (News - Alert) (www.contactual.com) calls it the “customer touchpoint chain,” and it could be a wide collection of media: outbound calling, social media, trade shows, online marketing efforts, phone calls, e-mail, Web chat, Web callback, IVR or Web forms. Impossible to maintain quality across all these frontiers?
While customers are still mostly likely to communicate with you using traditional media such as Web chat, e-mail and inbound and outbound telephone calls, organizations shouldn’t limit themselves with leveraging traditional channels. Newer channels like web call back, social media, SMS (text messaging) go a long way in making it easy for customers to contact you, says Contactual. As a result, you need to be prepared.
Once the customer is in your “funnel,” it's important to measure which touch points work better for customers, says Contactual. Different forms of engagement work differently for different customers. Some customers prefer picking up the phone and calling you directly where as some customers prefer e-mail. It is important that you have multiple options available to make your customer engagement better.
But to ensure consistency across all these channels, it's important to make every interaction an extension of your previous interaction with a customer. In other words, never require a customer who called you three days ago repeat his or her entire issue to a Web-based agent handling chat, for instance. Avoiding contact center solutions that create communications “silos” is an important first step.
By leveraging a 360 degree view of a customer, you can better serve your customer by providing personalized, unified and consistent service, says Contactual.
For more information about standardizing your customer touch points, visit http://blog.contactual.com/Blog/bid/53648/How-to-manage-different-customer-interaction-points-to-enhance-customer-engagement.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Chris DiMarco