Want to know how well a company serves its customers?
Visit their website and you will immediately notice the infrastructure and resources they invest in addressing their buyers' needs.
Friendliness, patience, and soft skills have been superseded as the primary attributes of well-rated customer service since the advent of the internet and the ability to serve our audience directly from a company's website. Regardless of company size, industry, or target market, there are essential elements that must be in place when deploying digital customer service.
Essential Elements of Customer Service Tools
Communication channels.- Today, every segment of our market has different communication preferences based on their age and level of technological expertise. While individuals over 50 prefer speaking directly with a person to resolve issues during the sales process, a Millennial prefers using social media to contact a company. The key to satisfying most of your audience is omnichannel service: enabling different communication channels that can operate independently or complementarily to resolve an inquiry. The critical path depends on establishing standardized processes that meet milestones, clearly indicating where each request stands in the resolution journey. WhatsApp is one of the most popular trends as a customer service channel.
Knowledge base .- This is a digital repository of information housing solutions and answers to the most common inquiries regarding company operations. This base typically contains all static information within the service process (user manuals, operating hours, accepted payment methods, physical store locations, exchange policies, satisfaction guarantees). A properly configured knowledge base can significantly reduce the workload of your support representatives.
Support Ticket Creation.- Generating information records that contain the details of an inquiry and link them to a contact in your database brings structure, order, and certainty to your service process. A Ticket is created for every request received and moves through a workflow with milestones designed to resolve it. The Ticket serves as the work unit through which teams divide tasks to deliver the right solution, even across multiple departments.
SLA.- Service Level Agreement: the timeframe and conditions assigned to our teams to resolve a ticket properly and on time. An SLA should be shared with the customer to set expectations regarding resolution times, process stages, and potential outcomes of a request.
Frontline chatbot.- Chatbots are automated systems with varying levels of capability or intelligence designed to capture requests automatically, segment them, and route them to the appropriate support teams. A properly configured bot can collect the basic information needed to create a Ticket and route its contents to the responsible team based on the nature of the inquiry.
Surveys.- The only way to evaluate whether the implementation of these elements is delivering the required satisfaction is by asking users for their opinion and gathering their feedback to make adjustments.
Customer support technology solutions are a tool, a medium, and a vehicle that enables companies to optimize the resources invested in prospecting, acquiring, and retaining customers. It takes a significant investment to acquire a buyer, but it is remarkably easy to lose them without proper service.
