Let your customers help you scale customer service operations

Scale up your customer service operations leveraging on innovative technology

As your company grows, your customer service approach needs to adapt to meet the higher volume of tickets and customer service queries. The most effective way to do this is by integrating new technology to optimise service processes. Aside from being extremely effective, this will bring numerous benefits as you will have fewer cases, more satisfied employees, and an increasingly empowered customer base.

Customer service is about the customer

It’s vital to remember the experience a customer has with your company will be the deciding in factor in whether they choose to do business with you. At redk, we believe that once you understand who your customers are and what they’re looking for when they engage with customer service, you can start optimising and automating the way you interact. Your goal should be to cater to what customers want before they even know they need help.

This may seem simple in theory, but in order to act on it you have to first anticipate what exactly it is that your customers want.

Customers want control

Regardless of your market, all customers value control. In fact, according to Oracle’s Research paper “Redefining Customer Experience through Self-Service”, in certain situations customer control can even be more of a priority than speed. People often opt to solve their issues through their smartphone or similar channels instead of a lengthy conversation with a customer service agent.

This has lead to customers becoming increasingly empowered thanks to through new tools, mobile apps, and experiences from digital-first companies. A survey from Dimension Data-GCC Benchmarking shows that the current generation lists the phone as their 4th channel choice:

• Email/SMS – 42.3%
• Social Media – 36.4%
• Smartphone – 31.9%
• Phone – 29.4%

Provided you put the right tools in place, customers become more confident in their ability to find a solution themselves, which leads to smoother internal processes, and more time to concentrate on difficult cases.

How to leverage on technology to scale-up your customer service operations

Where should you begin when it comes to taking your customer service operations to the next level?

An interactive knowledge-base

Customers often look at the FAQ section of a company’s website to see if they can find the answer to their question. Take your standard static FAQ and add an interactive and customisable knowledge-base that helps customers find what they’re looking for quickly through dynamic search, create knowledge communities, open tickets from within the articles and establish a knowledge base content-curation-to-publish process. This also saves your customer agents time and optimises case escalation.

AI-powered software

AI-powered software such as chatbots and answer bots use your existing knowledge-base to find the answers to customer questions. They are powered by machine learning and will continue to improve over time. AI answer bots can also be used to send customers relevant articles and resources while they wait for an agent. This is also a great opportunity to direct your customers to points of interest on your website.

Customer self-service porta

Every company should create a customer service portal as a single point of contact for all customer queries. Also, when integrated using multifunctional software like Zendesk, a customer portal can empower customers and optimise internal processes to the benefit of employees. Not only can customers locate information, faster and independently, but it frees up your team to deal with more complex queries.

Staff training

Training your staff on every aspect of the customer service processes is of the utmost importance when striving for satisfied customers. This involves software and technology training sessions when implementing new processes. Usually, customers have already checked to see if they can solve their issue by themselves on your website before they call a customer service agent. If the customer service agent directs customers back to the website without helpful directions, customers will end up even more confused and frustrated than when they first called. This is why it’s important to train customer service agents on how to perform self-service options in case they need to assist customers on how to use online features.

In today’s fast-paced environment, scaling up your customer service operations is vital. To achieve the level of customer service that consumers expect, your company must fully leverage the power of technology. The benefits are endless: you’ll free up your sales agents, give customers more control, and increase overall satisfaction. More importantly, it will enable you to drive long-term, sustainable growth.