Is Your User Experience the Best it can be?
Am I Keeping Up With New Innovations?
As a business owner you may ask yourself, “What is changing in customer service?” It’s a rhetorical question, but one that is always on your mind. What could you be doing that you’re not doing?
There are self-service solutions to answer your question that include robust frequently asked questions and video. There’s social media customer service with multiple channels like Facebook and Twitter.
And we’re all more than curious about the new best thing, AI or artificial intelligenceand how it will affect our business. Will AI change everything, and will it make things better?
Is Customer Service Really Changing?
It seems that a lot is changing about how we deliver customer service. But I’m about to make a bold statement. If you examine what customer service is, it is the same as it was fifty years ago. Customer service will be the same fifty years from now.
Customer service is really just a customer needing help, having a question answered or a problem resolved. In the end is the customer is happy? That’s what customer service is, meeting and hopefully exceeding your customer’s expectations.
Customer Service has Evolved, it hasn’t Changed
Nothing has Changed, but Everything has!
Maybe there’s a better way to say it. If we examine the desired outcome of a customer service experience, the customer’s expectations haven’t changed. They just want to be satisfied.
There are different ways to solve any problem and to reach the right outcome for each customer. What has evolved is how and when we deliver customer service.
We’ve learned how to do it faster, and possibly even better. Previous customer service solutions, just a few years ago, we typically had just two ways that customer service was provided.
Customer service was provided in person and over the phone. Businesses had office hours, many were just 8 am to 5 pm. A few had extended business hours, that might have meant 8 am to 9 pm.
Then technology exploded and it made customer service and support better, and more efficient. And then CS became a 24/7, 365 experience for all of us. It seems like no one sleeps at today.
We sleep, just not all at the same time since today technology has given even the smallest business a global customer base.
Technology Brought Choices
If you are focusing on the phone for support, there are now solutions to tell customers how long they have to wait on hold. Customers are given the option of being called back at a time that is more convenient if they don’t have time to wait.
We now have many options that customers can use to connect with us. Looking beyond the phone, we have email, chat, social media and many more ways to communicate with customers today.
What Will Your User Experience Look Like?
If you are thinking about a new customer service solution, adding AI to support your customers and agents, or deciding which tools you want to use, remember this.
Customer’s expectations haven’t changed. They just want to be taken care of, and how that is achieved doesn’t really matter to them.
Exceed Your Customers Expectations
Customer service begins when someone needs help dealing with a problem. They’re upset about something or just want to have a question answered. The experience ends when that person walks away knowing they made the right decision to do business with you.
How you reach the happy result is not as important as how they feel when they walk away, hang up the phone or turn off their computer. Customer Service is really the same as it’s always been.
