Tech never sits still, and as it evolves it changes every single facet of how businesses are run. The most innovative and proactive companies see technological advances coming a mile off, and integrate them smoothly with their existing infrastructure. Those who lag behind become sluggish, inept, and invariably fail. One of the many areas where we’ve seen a lot of change in recent years is customer service. Here’s how tech has changed customer care standards, and how you should be adapting.
Greater Insight into Customer Problems
Delivering great customer care is invariably a lot easier when the agents responsible for it have visual insight into the problems that customers are facing, are able to make little adjustments and get immediate, visual feedback. At one time, this was only really possible when the agent, customer and problem were all in the same room together. Now, customer service agents have had to step their game up. Thanks to everyone having smartphones these days, the modern prevalence of social media, and features like screen-sharing, it’s much easier for customer service agents to understand problems and receive visual feedback. If you sell a physical product, make sure you’re encouraging your customers to send in pictures or videos whenever they have a complaint or question.
Image source: Pixabay
Robo-care
Artificial intelligence is so sophisticated these days that we’re pretty close to living in a sci-fi! When combined with interactive voice response and other modern tech, it can be a convenient and cost-effective way to provide great customer care and save time on your end. Of course, automated customer care still has kinks to be ironed out, and it can hit quite a few stumbling blocks in more complex business niches, such as healthcare. If you’re running a private medical practice, and you’re finding it hard to keep on top of all your customer care duties with existing staff and resources, then you’ll probably be better off with an outsourced solution like a HIPAA-compliant answering service. This US based 24/7 answering service, for example, can ensure that your patients always have someone to talk to, improving overall satisfaction and allowing your in-house staff to focus on more critical tasks. However, provided you combine it with some kind of human, live support, automated customer care can still be a great way to bring your customer service up to speed with modern standards.
Image source: Pixabay
Diversity of Agent Training
The level of skill you need for good customer service is higher than ever. Agents are now expected to handle each customer’s needs individually, all the while delivering responses which are properly aligned with the company’s brand identity, and suitable for the communication platform they’re using at the time. While you’re scrambling to modernize your business’s tech and digital communication channels, it’s important that you don’t neglect to train your agents in all the skills that they’re going to need. Handling complaints and communication in social media properly is extremely important. The way your agent responds to a complaint or query through Twitter is going to be very different to the way they do so on live chat, and the way they respond on live chat is going to be very different to the way they do through email. Make sure your agents are thoroughly trained for all situations and communication channels.
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