If you think that customer service has to be ultra-complicated, then you’re mistaken. It turns out that modern technology is changing the game and making it easier than ever to communicate with customers reliably and effectively.
But how? Let’s take a look.
Multi-Channel Solutions
Today’s customers want to interact with you through a variety of channels, whether you’re a massive conglomerate, or a tiny startup operating out of a bedroom. Customers expect phone, text, website chat, social media chat and email to mention just a few.
Unfortunately, drawing all of those disparate channels together into a single solution isn’t always easy. Usually, it relies on a lot of notetaking.
Fortunately, you can now get contact centre solutions that work entirely in the cloud. All you do is integrate them with communication channels, and then do the rest for you. Some also combine with CRMs, allowing you to pass off customers from one rep to another.
Chat Bots
Chat bots are also helping customer service – but not in the way that you might expect. Traditionally, companies believed that chat bots would provide helpful answers to common customer questions. And to a degree, they are doing this. However, their real value is in filtering customers to relevant agents.
It turns out that most customers don’t actually know who they need to speak to to resolve their issues. Chatbots can help them with this, forwarding them to the right member of the team.
VoIP
There’s another technology that is also making a big difference and getting rid of the need to rely on traditional phone lines: VoIP.
VoIP is attractive because it offers customer service reps a whole new level of functionality. Customers call from their analog telephones and then software transforms their speech into a digital signal. It then transfers packets of information and records them as files that customer service reps can share.
For instance, suppose a customer calls up to talk about a particular product issue they have. Reps can store the recording of the conversation and then forward relevant bits to their colleagues for faster resolution.
VoIP is also super helpful for things like call queuing and playing courtesy music. Again, it automates the entire process, making it far more streamlined.
CRM Solutions
We already briefly mentioned CRM solutions, but it is worth talking about them in more detail because of the central role they play in customer service.
CRM solutions sit on the back end. They provide reps with all the information that they need about a particular customer, including data that could help with sales.
Many CRMs, for instance, offer reps prompts that tell them how likely it is that a lead might buy. The rep can then contact the lead to see whether they would be interested in making a purchase. Probabilistic models like this are superior to routine cold-calling because the rep can maximise the likelihood of a sale.
In short, customer service just got a whole lot easier. And that’s all thanks to advances in modern technology.
