The New Customer Service

Customer service has stepped into the age of social media networking. With customers looking for a direct line to customer service through media, you need to have answers ready and at your fingertips. Customers want a no muss, no fuss, and completely satisfying customer experience: if you don’t give it to them, someone else will.

Combining Marketing With Customer Service

In the past, marketers relied on newspapers, flyers, and television advertising to tout the advantages of using their products. Now, with more advertising opportunities, as well as more ways for the customers to express dissatisfaction, customers may pay attention to marketing, but they may not believe what your company says about itself. They are more likely to believe what their friends, co-workers, family members and other consumers say about the product online. To influence customers in today's markets, great customer service is needed. By combining marketing with customer service, you can identify issues based on relevance or sentiment by the dissatisfied customer. By looking for keywords and indicators that are preset, you can learn the issue and what can be done o solve the problem quickly and efficiently.

What Customers Want

Expectations of customers have changed over the years with the rise of customer review pages, the easy access to social media, and the increased lack of interaction with traditional advertising. If a customer has dissatisfaction with a product, they can go online, tweet or go on their Facebook page and do some serious damage to your company’s creditability. They have their own ideas of how they want to interact with your company. It can be through social media, phone support, direct message, email, or even a web chat. According to Laura Bassett, director of marketing for customer experience and emerging technology at Avaya, managing customer service and expectations all comes down to having the right strategy in place. “Beyond just responding to a tweet, companies need to be able to truly understand their customers, their interactions and transaction history, and be able to immediately identify the right touch points inside of their organizations to make sure their issues are successfully resolved.”  In other words, you need to get back to what it takes to deliver exceptional customer service.

How to Improve Your Customer Service

Customers want a smooth, easy and stress free customer service experience. By finding the right staff with the right qualifications, using the correct strategies, and investing in the technologies for your company to monitor and respond to customers as soon as possible, you will keep customers happy. There are recommendations for not using time-to-resolution or call volume methods because it causes the customer service representatives to hurry customers off the phone without solving the issue so the service representative can meet their quotas.The way customer service is handled should be clearly defined to employees, reinforced with company policy, resources, and measured. 

Keeping up with what customers expect with customer service is important. Customer service will always be an important way to keep your company in business and growing.

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