NEW: New Year resolutions: Customer Service Incorporated

05 Jan, 2022 - 12:01 0 Views
NEW: New Year resolutions: Customer Service Incorporated

The Sunday Mail

Cresencia Marjorie Chiremba

“Although your customer won’t love you if you give a bad service, your competitor will” – Bob Hooey

Starting a new year can be a bit intimidating, especially in this time of the unpredictable Covid-19 pandemic.

Most companies that have high growth expectations need to focus on their customers, and having resolutions helps them in narrowing their focus on strategies, which they will use to better their customer experience.

As we enter a brand-new year, most people come up with ‘new year resolutions’ that they hope to achieve in that particular year. Churches also come up with themes that will guide them in that particular religious calendar.

On the business side, resolutions are also necessary since customers are now more concerned with the customer experience, and use it when making a buying decision. Thus, it is an important strategic decision for organisations to come up with resolutions that involve their customers.

Here are some resolutions that organisations can use in 2022:

1. Create Personalised Experiences through Data Usage – Customers are tired of the same old personalised service experience practiced by almost every company. Every company thinking of personalisation, addresses its customers with their personal names, or sending them diaries, whiskeys or any other corporate gift with their names inscribed on it. In 2022, customers are not going to be swept off their feet by this kind of personalisation, in fact they see it as standard, tired and a simplistic strategy.

What they should be doing in fact, is to capture their customers’ data at every customer touch point, and gather it throughout the entire customer journey. That information gathered will help them to know their customers better, hence, they can tailor-make, individualised customer service. When customers browse an organisation’s website, a chat-bot must be activated that asks for the customers’ demographic and personal information such as their name, email and phone/cell numbers. Equipped with this information companies are able to custom-make their customers shopping experience. Find out the reasons why the customer visited the site, what they are looking for and see if its products or services are a solution to the customers’ needs.

2. Improve Customer Experience through Artificial Intelligence – This new year, organisations can incorporate their customer experience through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). However, this is dependable on the quality of accessibility of the website, support buttons, add-ons and time taken by the organisation support team to attend to customer queries. Some of the AI methods that can be used to improve customer service include: unified communications and conversational AIs.

Unified communication is a unified platform, whereby if multiple calls are received, they are easily routed to the correct support team thereby reducing the waiting period. In instances when its offline, automated replies can be used so that customers can be helped with technical issues. For instance, a chat-bot can be activated to walk through customers step-by-step, and on each step will be triggered by a series of yes or no type of questions. This will help the human agent not to repeat the step-by-step when they go online, and helps issues to be resolved quickly.

Artificial intelligence (AI) messaging aligns chat-bots and human agents to help organisation ease pressure on their support teams. Conversational AI can also be used to triage issues, route customers and answer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and this allows the human support team to focus on more complicated issues that require human touch, human skill and a nuanced thinker at the helm. This is because a chat-bot can only solve very simple issues, while humans are there to solve more complex issues with high pressure situations that require personalised attention in real time.

3. Make It Personal and Real With Your Customers – Although we can use artificial intelligence to gather information about our customers, sometimes a face-to-face conversation with a customer can reveal more about the customers in more ways than just filling a table of questions and talking to a programmed machine. Body cues can tell a lot about an individual and this helps when dealing with consumer behaviour.

Organisations should find ways to have open and direct conversations, and these should be done regularly. Invite them for a chat or pay them a visit while making it personal and real. Customers tend to be loyal to organisations that engage them regularly. In turn the company is able to know what makes their customers happy and loyal, and will practice it.

4. Allow Employees and Customers Space for Feedback – Management information that is excellent, comes from experience. Customers and employees must be afforded a platform that allows them to freely give priceless information. This platform must be easy and quick, while management must show gratitude by acknowledging the feedback they are getting and use it in a transparent manner.

It motivates both employees and customers to freely give their feedback if they see that their management value information that they give them is weak, after all it is a well-known fact that feedback is priceless, and experience is the best teacher.

*Cresencia Marjorie Chiremba is a marketing enthusiast with a strong passion for customer service. For comments, suggestions and training, she can be reached on [email protected] or on 0712 979 461

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