Defining good customer service can seem to be a bit of a moving target, especially in this era of ever-increasing customer expectations. But the forward-thinking companies leading the charge in this new reality—such as Zendesk strategic partners Guru, Lessonly, and Stella Connect—are keenly aware that it’s their customers who get to make that determination, not them.
If you’re reaching high growth levels, your business must be doing something right. You’re increasing profit, growing your customer base, and hiring new employees in a rush. But if you don’t scale your customer service to support all of those new customers, your competitors could catch up to you. If you want to make the success last and stay on the fast track to rapid growth, you’ll need to make sure that your support approach is innovative.
After switching to a different email address, I recently logged in to my client account to change the contact information my mobile company had. On seeing the email field greyed out and uneditable, I visited their Help and Support page for assistance. Live chat support was available. It was 9:31 in the morning. Someone was already waiting for me—Gie. This Facebook Messenger-based bot initiated the conversation with one of the more tedious stages of getting support: account verification.
The internet gives brands a unique customer service opportunity that didn’t exist even a few years ago. Now, brands can directly communicate with customers, and customers can share stories about brands with just a few clicks. This means that stories about your business can be sent out to thousands of people almost instantaneously, making them accessible to 3.39 billion internet users1. Sometimes these stories gain a huge amount of traction and can place your company in front of new prospects.
Customer service most often relies on a support team that works to help all levels of your organization. But those teams don’t just run on their own. They need someone to lead the team and make important decisions when the going gets tough. That’s where a customer service manager (CSM) steps in.
Customer service is a stressful job. People are constantly coming to you with issues that they feel should be your top priority, and they want quick fixes. After a while, the stress will begin to build up. If you don’t have a way to de-stress, you’re going to eventually burn out, and lash out at a customer or a colleague. So, it’s important to find ways to keep your stress levels under control. I want to share six great ways to do it.
As bonafide subject matter experts collaborating cross-functionally across the company, agents play an important part in knowledge management. Self-service content is increasingly being used beyond the help center, such as in 1:1 channels, as served up by AI, or for cross-functional collaboration between teams. As your content changes, the processes your team takes to maintain it need to change, too.
What a customer takes home from a brand is the experience it provides. Gartner proved that customer experience is a game-changer for brands. In fact, 81% of companies1 expect to compete on the basis of customer experience in 2019. This head-on competition is driving brands to strengthen their customer experience strategies.
