Long gone are the days when the only way to reach a company’s customer service center was by picking up the phone and waiting - sometimes for as long as an hour, or even longer - for a service representative to help you with your problem.
Now that we have so many digital tools for instant communication, today’s customers expect to have their issues handled promptly and thoroughly - preferably without having to pick up the phone at all.
What does this mean for the traditional contact center? Are the new ways we communicate making them obsolete?
Contact centers that remain stuck in the old methods of customer service will not be able to compete.
In many ways, customer service standards of the 1990s and even early 2000s are no longer applicable.
The basic principles, of course, never change: Be courteous and polite. Be friendly. Handle a customer’s problems as efficiently as possible.
Timelines for responding to a customer’s problems, however, have changed drastically. In the past, when phone was the main means of communication, taking a day or two to get back to a customer whose issue needed additional attention was acceptable.
Today, customers expect to have their problems resolved very quickly, and acknowledged instantly. This is true across nearly every communication channel.
So if your contact center isn’t responding quickly to every comment and question you receive, you’re running the risk of obsolescence - not to mention very unhappy customers.
To stay relevant, contact centers must fully adapt to the omnichannel world that we now live in. That means giving your customers as many ways to contact you as possible and monitoring all those channels continuously.
This is no simple task, which is why many contact centers software to help them gather feedback. Two examples of this are Voice of the Customer Analytics and Enterprise Feedback Management software.
And if you really want to make them happy, offer a self-service portal and allow them to resolve their own problems.
Despite the growth of self-service, contact centers have a huge opportunity to make themselves more important than ever.
There’s no doubt about it: self-service is the way that customer service is going, with more companies adding self-service options for their customers every year. In 2014, 76 percent of customers reported using self-service options, according to Forrester Research.
However, this doesn’t mean that there’s no need for live contact center agents anymore. In fact, quite the contrary is true. Well-trained, competent, and efficient contact center agents are more important to a company’s customer service success than ever before.
That’s because self-service has a limit.
While customers can solve minor or simple issues on their own using knowledge bases or interactive tools, complex issues will still require the help of a human support specialist. This means that the issues that these specialists have to deal with when customers do call will be more complex.
Contact centers that want to succeed in today’s market will have to do two things.
How do contact centers begin implementing these changes?
A great first step is to assess your knowledge base. Does it have the knowledge that your agents require in order to achieve first-call resolution on a regular basis? Is that information easy to find and access?
If your answer to both these questions is “yes,” then you may want to consider opening up at least part of that knowledge base to your customers.
As for the customer listening aspect, Enterprise Feedback Management software can help you make sense of all the information coming at you from all your different channels. To learn more about how you can better serve your customers in today’s service environment, read our post “Omnichannel Customer Service Should Span Both the Physical and Virtual Worlds.”
