Making Customer Service Effective in the Digital Age
What is Customer Service?
Customer service is an elaborate and interactive process of understanding a customer and fulfilment of his needs as per the company’s resources, capacity and capability for the merchandise sold or service delivered. during this context, the customer’s expectation starts from the time he has purchased the merchandise or subscribed or hired the services. Therefore, customer service is an end-to-end process which begins from the time of sale till the top of the life cycle of a product or the service or its usability to the customer. Thus, this idea originates with the customer and ends with the customer.
Synonyms of customer service: customer support, helpdesk, service centre, customer care, troubleshooting team, client service, after-sales service, customer helpline.
Customer service may be a part and parcel of each organization. For any company to sustain and grow, their focus and efforts need to be channelized towards the creation of an excellent customer service team.
Good customer service should aim towards enabling the following:
- Long-time customer retention
- Loyalty towards the Company’s products and services
- This successively should build a customer’s trust toward the brand
- Enhancing product effectiveness and its value among the competitors
- Translating to higher sales thereby impacting overall revenues positively (due to the same customer buying products or services repeatedly or recommending them to his family and friends)
- leading to Company saving its cost of customer acquisition on account of customer churn (which is nearly 5 times more expensive)
- Strengthening a positive word of mouth and increasing the Company’s goodwill and equity
- resulting in less expenditure on advertising, promotion and marketing activities
So, of these efforts will ultimately cause the company’s prosperity and increased market share which is useful for its employees and vendors and its longevity.
Nevertheless, an unhappy customer is a chance and therefore the company should never lose out on insightful experience through the customer’s feedback to analyse the basis explanation for the matter that led to poor customer experience. Further, the corporate should invest time in reviewing their current working mechanism, stepping into process reorientation, improving their product or service, it’s features or offers, grooming and training the staff or bridging any gaps that exist as per the customer inputs.
Customer Service Representative, his qualities and therefore the different channels:
Customer service representatives (CSE) are the particular brand ambassador for any company since a customer interacts with them on phone, through on-line chat, on company’s website or portal, on e-mail, social media and online forums, face to face interaction at the service centre.
A CSE should, therefore:
- Speak to the customer politely
- hear him
- Give him respect
- Understand his need or concern
- Empathise
- Finally, most significantly, provide the solution or an alternate as per his problem or requirement.
Being polite and humble without resolving customer’s query won’t help. Similarly, giving solution but during a rude tone also will backfire. it is a vicious circle of expectations. The customer wants everything — politeness, empathy and solution. And he’s right as he has purchased the merchandise or the service. Customer is usually right and is that the king.
A Company has to:
- Keep their CSE motivated.
- they ought to be trained well in product and soft skills
- they ought to be ready to communicate well with the customer
- Have patience, take ownership and work towards providing resolution to the customer.
Every organization contributes to how or the opposite by working for its customers — it might be a B to B (Business) model or a B to C (Customer) model. within the end of the day, to accomplish its goals, every organization should align customer centricity to its vision and organizational strategy. this is often a facet no Company can afford to miss even a PSU or a Government organization.
Guide to great customer service is extremely simple:
- Remember, it’s important to create an honest rapport or connect with the customer
- Have qualitative interactions with him
- An intent to unravel his problem regardless of what.
- Smile while lecturing the customer.
- Acknowledge the very fact that the majority of the purchasers prefer human interaction quite communicating with machines. So, treat the customer the way you’d sort of a service provider to treat you.
Different industries could have different levels of customer engagement as per their business and will have alternative ways to assess or measure their customer satisfaction.
Customer needs might be different for the retail industry with regards to telecom, utilities, logistics, financial, outsourcing, government, healthcare, media, manufacturing, IT, land, the industry than on.
Background of Customer Service: The concept of customer service is as old as the early 1800s and it all started with the economic revolution where products were designed and made as per customer’s needs. However, since then, as we’ve noticed, customer’s behaviour has been dynamic, unpredictable and influenced by numerous factors, that’s why it’s never consistent and is changing even faster than a stock exchange. handling customers is challenging most of the time because it is like solving a jigsaw puzzle whenever.
Problems faced in Customer Service due to:
1. Limited authority with each service channel
2. Communication barrier between the customer and therefore the CSE
3. Resolution being awaited from the concerned person/ team
4. Every customer’s problem is exclusive and expectations could vary to a special degree
5. Less staff available to cater to customers (due to go away, absenteeism, attrition) resulting in high
6. Technical or unknown issue (with no timelines or alternative available)
7. Company policy that acts as a hindrance sometimes
8. Lack of data or skill
9. Customer reluctance to simply accept a resolution
10. Competition resulting in higher expectations
How can we gauge the effectiveness of customer service?
1. On-line surveys (as a part of the CSAT tool) as a neighbourhood of shopping for a product (mostly asking to rate customer’s experience on E-commerce websites). CSAT is Customer Satisfaction.
2. Surveys at IVR (Interactive Voice Response) as a part of CSAT tool
3. Mystery Shopping by posing as a customer
4. Live and remote monitoring of customer interactions (random sampling) and evaluating the standard of every interaction
5. Feedback calls, SMS, e-mails or IVR calls made to the purchasers to verify if their query/concern was resolved or not
6. Analysing and taking action basis customer feedback on Website, Social media, Customer Portal
7. Assessing customer’s behaviour towards the brand, its products and services by applying Business Intelligence, Data analytics, program Optimization and other techniques.
What is CSAT?
Customer Satisfaction Survey may be a powerful tool shared by the Service provider with the customer after he has had an interaction with the Customer service representative to rate his experience alongside rating on service-related parameters including resolution of his problem. This tool may be a Voice of Customer that gives an insight on customer’s experience, whether it had been as per his expectations and anything that was lacking or could are done better. for many of the businesses, CSAT is linked to the performance ratings of the workers and it impacts their annual bonus and increments. Why not CSAT rating impact everyone within the organization as every employee is predicted to try to his bit that contributes or adds value to the customer’s experience? Thought to ponder.
With digitization, things have completely changed and therefore the transition phase has emerged. because of the changing technology and other strong factors:
1. Customers became very demanding then have their expectations increased with simple technology. they need to regulate everything through the press of an app. they do not want to waste their valuable time visiting a Store or a Service Center expecting their turn unless it’s unavoidable. they do not want to call up the decision Center, wait within the queue then ask people that behave like robots reading a script and not as human interface.
2. there’s a batch of competition, which has given the world numerous options available online also as offline which too cost-effective ones. While there’s an enormous Basket for each Grover. there are OYO rooms for each Make My Trip and Yatra. there’s Amazon for each Flipkart and Snapdeal. there’s Ola for each Uber. there’s Zomato for each Swiggy and Food Panda and therefore the race is endless. there’s an enormous Bazaar for each Reliance Fresh. there’s a Chroma for each Reliance Digital, and there’s a Jio for each Vodafone, Idea and Airtel.
3. With VCs and new investors coming from the remainder of the planet, the business landscape has evolved and grown multiple folds adding to everyone’s benefit including income.
4. Next is clearly, people’s incomes (including disposal incomes) have increased alongside the life-style. Luxuries have becomes necessities in today’s universe.
5. Government policies inviting foreign funds, FDIs, are favourable for creating a business-friendly and investor-friendly climate.
6. Start-up Culture, Tech Parks are an enormous hit.
7. Mergers and acquisitions became the norm of the day.
Thus, technology has bombarded our day-to-day life. Daily Routine has been adapted as per the smartphone and what’s app demands. Social media has transformed our life completely. Posts on FB, Twitter, and Instagram are dearer than real-world friends.
So, if the private and business life has transitioned at such a rapid pace within the new millennium and within the last 10 years to be precise, the customer is justified in demanding excellent customer service with better reachability rates.
Sad but true, we are still missing out on several basic and important things that a customer in digital era will need albeit he could be the foremost tech-savvy person on this earth.
1. Most of the merchandise Companies and repair providers are lacking in providing personalized services to each customer customized especially keeping his needs in mind. this is often a challenge with many downloads happening a day for many of the businesses.
2. choosing the foremost suitable and preferred blend of touchpoints or channels of communications available to a customer 24 by 7. a corporation just cannot believe FAQs provided on its app for all its customers. Or running an analytics engine won’t be sufficient for analysing his behaviour. A mere e-mail survey won’t gather complete feedback about customer experience. All channels are equally important at different times and for various reasons and for various customers. A farmer using services might still like better to visit a Service Centre personally while an individual whose internet pack is over might just call up the decision Centre.
3. Even Robotics, Machine learning, AI and Chatbot has limitations and can’t answer everything or replace human interactions. Let’s keep that think about the mind. However, in most of the decision Centers, CSEs have a really limited role acting like robots following a script blindly.
4. A help menu inbuilt in an app may be a basic necessity but is that the organization smart and prompt enough to swiftly engage with the customer on any dissatisfaction or mishappening reported within the app?
5. Is every CSAT survey being looked carefully to reach some conclusion? Who takes ownership and why?
6. Are service commitments still being offered? How often does the corporate engage with its customers and to what extent?
7. How about customer education not only about new offers and schemes but also guiding a customer what plan should be appropriate as per his last one year’s expenses or usage?
8. Time to prevent and think. With Big Data analytics, internet of things, is that the company’s quality of interactions getting improved or deteriorated? How does the customer satisfaction graph look like? How about the turnaround for resolving a ticket on their Portal or app?
9. How about collaboration with the customer in making their app more useful and customer friendly? Inviting customer’s feedback and suggestions from improvement and not just triggering an invitation to the customer to follow on FB, Twitter? Ensuring speed, agility, updation of question bank, posting customer ratings + reviews, checking app and portal’s feedback and suggestions on regular basis?
10. How about ensuring adherence to code of conduct and ethical handling critical pointers being followed as a mandate: no data leakage, privacy breach, sharing of knowledge with the third party?
11. Keeping the Customer Service employees motivated as happy employees will keep customers happy.
12. Challenge of retaining the customer and building loyalty. With a far better offer, everyday customer switches to a special Service provider.
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