Sales and support teams aren’t meant to be in silos—both have too much important information on the customer to keep them apart. Sales teams provide crucial context into who their customers are and what they want, and support has critical insights into how expectations are being met.
If long-term predictions about artificial intelligence bear out, the way we work will soon be upended in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution—but in the meantime, AI is already helping humans work better and smarter. And in customer service, AI stands to help support teams emphasize that most human of skills, empathy—a trait that no software program can match (well, at least until the singularity).
What do we call a “call center” today? Is it really a call center anymore or is it a vital part of the customer journey? Today, more than ever we have more ways to communicate with family, friends, and companies we do business with. Gone are the days of picking up the phone, waiting on hold listening to elevator music (some of it was okay), and being transferred 10 times to get something done. We demanded change as technology afforded us more options to get things done.
A common part of a growing company’s journey is beginning to build and sell multiple products, along with the original one you used to launch the business. As that happens, your relationship with customers will necessarily evolve and you may need to reconsider what customer-centricity looks like for your brand.
Your customer service team is made up of a variety of humans, each with different levels of knowledge. That comes with risk. Someone who is new or unfamiliar with a certain issue could say the wrong thing and fail to provide the solution a customer needs. For that reason, many organizations employ scripts within their call centers. Call center scripts clearly lay out what a customer service representative is supposed to say in response to a specific problem.
And by maps, I mean the blog post below...
With over seventy-two trillion messages sent in 2018 across messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, it’s no surprise that 68% of consumers choose messaging as their preferred way to communicate with businesses. Customers are growing more comfortable with sending a message to a business just like they would to their friends and families—it brings an extra degree of convenience and familiarity to the customer experience.
Have you ever overheard people having heated discussions about the differences between help desks, service desks, and IT service management (ITSM)? Surprisingly, we have. Some argue that help desk is an outdated term referring to an IT-centric support capability born in the late 1980s (think mainframes), with little attention to the end user. They may say service desk was coined to describe a new focus on serving end-users in a timely manner.
Keeping an eye on your day-to-day customer service operations means measuring the right metrics—that is, knowing which ones are setting your business up for both immediate and long-term success. Whether your company’s customer service is used as a means to drive overall revenue or is focused on helping customers fully understand your products or services, the tracked metrics should pertain to specific strategies designed to achieve your company’s overall goals.
Today’s companies understand how customer service plays a critical role in their efforts to be “customer-centric”—it’s why many of them invest heavily in the various functions of customer support. By adding an element of customer-centricity to different facets of a business, these companies are changing what a customer service job can be.
