Do you want to know how well a company serves its customers?
Visit its website, and you will immediately notice the infrastructure and resources it invests in addressing its buyers' requests.
Friendliness, patience, and soft skills have been replaced as the primary attributes of highly rated service since the advent of the internet and the ability to serve our audience from the company website. Regardless of the size of our company, the industry we operate in, or the type of market we serve, there are essential elements that must be in place when enabling digital customer service.
Core elements of customer service tools?
Communication channels.— Today, each market segment has different communication preferences based on their age and level of technological expertise. While individuals over 50 years old prefer speaking with a person to resolve inquiries during the commercial process, a Millennial prefers using social media to contact a company. The key to satisfying most of our audience is omnichannel support: enabling various communication channels that can operate independently or complement each other in resolving 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 .— It is a digital information repository where solutions or answers to the most frequent inquiries regarding company operations are centralized. This repository typically contains all information that does not vary within the service process (user manuals, hours of operation, accepted payment methods, physical store locations, exchange policies, satisfaction guarantees). A well-configured knowledge base can alleviate a significant workload for our support agents.
Support ticket creation.— Creating information units that contain the details of an inquiry and associate it with a contact in our database provides order and certainty to our customer service process. A ticket is created for each request received and moves through a structured workflow with all the milestones required for its resolution. The ticket is the working unit through which teams divide tasks to provide the appropriate solution, even when cross-departmental coordination is required.
SLA.— A Service Level Agreement is the timeframe and conditions assigned to our teams to resolve a ticket in a timely and proper manner. An SLA should be shared with the customer to set expectations regarding resolution time, process stages, and possible outcomes of a request.
Frontline chatbot.— Chatbots are software solutions 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 basic information to create a ticket and route its details to the responsible team based on the nature of the request.
Surveys.— The only way to evaluate whether implementing these elements is delivering the required satisfaction is by asking our 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 they invest in acquiring, winning, and retaining customers. Acquiring a buyer costs a significant amount of money, but losing one is very easy if we fail to serve them well.
