Revolutionizing shopping with the launch of the eponymous department store in year 1909, Harry Selfridge coined the famous phrase “the customer is always right”. This catchphrase made perfect sense back then, and it still resonates immaculately with top-notch support leaders.
In truth, putting customer demands first and delivering an impactful, unmatched customer experience has always been the epicenter of growth and innovation.
Digital Customer Service: Lifeblood of Business
The importance of customer service in this digital era has risen exponentially as the demands and requirements of the user have evolved. While satisfied customers are comparable to walking billboards fora brand, disgruntled customers can cause major reputational damage and financial woes. So, companies, big or small, are adopting new, digitally-aligned ways to buttress their customer service and feedback policies.
There have been numerous instances where companies have analyzed their customer’s feedback and responded instantly, delivering a delightful customer experience. In a heart-warming story, Sainsbury’s renamed their tiger bread, “the giraffe bread” when a three-year-old wrote a letter to the supermarket chain about the product’s resemblance togiraffe’s spots.
This huge step has since been appreciated and applauded by many bigshot brands, but there are still some who fail to comply with new-age customer expectations. In truth, despite growing importance of digital customer service and rising pressures to boost digital experience, a multitude of customer service leaders showan alarmingly low level of preparation.
Enterprises on the line of mastering digital customer service in 2019 must keep these imperatives in mind:
- Companies today are adopting digital technologies to meet internal pressures created due to leadership. While this helps them scale resources and improve customer experience, many service leaders report difficulty in managing these new technology stacks.
- Given the sky-high expectations of consumers today, improving digital experience involves a trade-off between digital experiences and other initiatives, such as upgrading talent.
- Lack of access to modern technology and digital applications can plummet operational efficiency. Big data analytics and ecosystem integration platforms have become the priorities for the year. Service heads must collaborate with respective IT teams to improve operational efficiency via technology.
Companies aiming to strengthen their customer service support forsetting a good net promoter score (NPS) goal needto pay heed to these aspects of customer digital experience, gain insights, and then apply them to decision-making to make most of their digital investments.
Anatomy of Customer Service Strategy
Carving out a strategy for enhancing the quality of digital customer service and driving desired business outcome requiresmulti-disciplinary teams and intelligent technologies, as the foundation. With the following 4 steps, this foundation can be extended and transformed into a fully functional customer service strategy.
Assess
- Evaluate the overall business strategy, the “push” and “pull” factors, and brand promise prior to making a customer service strategy.
- Understand the demographic, psychographic, and technographic profiles of customers, including their channel preferences.
- Know the value and volume of customer journeys.
- Recognize and gauge the service and the capabilities offered by competitors.
Analyze
- Put the customer at the heart of the process and then design your roadmap.
- Lay importance on the touch points in the customer journey where digital effectiveness can improve.
- Track the customer journey, measure online performance indicators such as loyalty, and identify pain points regularly.
- Keep your customer needs, the primary stakeholders of the organization, above business priorities.
Encourage
- Establish a multi-disciplinary team of employees and inspire them to make customer service as their individual mission.
- Fuse a sense of accountability in the minds of employees to maintain effective channels for optimizing customer experiences.
Deploy
- Make efforts to integrate data-driven journeys and personas for creating memorable experiences.
- Prioritize flexibility using business integration platforms to quickly address inquiries and feedback from the respective stakeholders.
- Measure cross channel activity to ensure that the systems aren’t over-complicated and cause customer dissatisfaction.
Executing a customer-centric strategy not only helps enterprises exceed their needs and expectations but also creates a positive feedback loop. Once the customers are happy, you can continue on your road to success.