Making the Cut with Customer Service

Customer service – it means different things to different people. Areas where you believe you’re providing great care, your customers may find annoying. Have you really studied the customer base to understand what they want? There has to be a tie in to how you do business, but unless you develop a healthy balance between what you need and what your customers demand, you’re likely struggling to hit your targets.

This is one of the reasons why business VoIP provider Nextiva published a blog on the topic of customer service trends. The expectations of your customer base have become much more sophisticated. These individuals expect you to provide the same level of support and communication that they have become accustomed to in their increasingly mobile lives. In other words, satisfaction has to be immediate, mobile support must be there, cloud usage is a must and don’t forget self-service.

Mobility is an important customer service trend as users want to be able to complete all activities on a mobile device. This means they should be able to interact with customer service from their mobile device. As such, it’s critical that your website is responsive so you’re not simply presenting a smaller version of your site on your mobile device, but actually making it user friendly on the device itself. To that end, customer service should be intuitive, simple and interactive.

It’s easy to assume that the cloud is only a business focus and the average consumer isn’t paying attention. A closer look at technology trends, however, and it’s clear that the average consumer is actually much quicker at adopting technology and trends than the typical business. VoIP is readily found in households throughout the world, yet business VoIP is still not a dominant technology. When you rely on SaaS solutions, you’re better able to adapt to changes in customer service and maintain fluid databases with updated knowledge on how best to handle customer challenges.

Finally, self-service channels have to be in place. According to Forrester, 67 percent of consumers rely on web self-service knowledge to locate answers to their questions. Leading companies are identifying ways to supplement their own knowledge bases with content generated by users. This enables customer service employees and customers both to find the answers they need to a wide range of questions in much less time.

Today’s consumer is much savvier and has higher expectations than the consumer of even just a year ago. As technology advancements continue to evolve, these expectations continue to intensify. If you want to be at the forefront of your industry, you can’t afford to watch these opportunities slip away. It’s time to take a new approach to customer service and see the demands through the eyes of the customer.

Edited by Alisen Downey