Proven Strategies For Enhanced Customer Service Innovation

The present-day customers' buying decisions in this digitally-connected world are often influenced by the information they gain from various online media sources such as websites, blogs, videos, third-party discussion forums like Quora, and the social media accounts of enterprises.

When customers enter the buying funnel, they know what they want and the price they are willing to pay. However, this journey doesn't terminate here. Once customers buy a product or service, they use the above-mentioned digital channels to share their feedback and reviews by discussing the brands with whom they have had the best or worst experiences. Hence, it is very important of what they need to deliver to their customers and how to make them feel attached at all times. 

Common Customer Service Challenges

However, there are sometimes when enterprises might encounter some customer service challenges while providing effective customer experiences. So, what are these challenges? Let's see them below in detail-

• Manual & Time-Consuming Process: Customer-facing teams and their representatives constantly engage with tedious and manual-driven processes. In such a case, it becomes quite difficult for them to focus on their primary business goal of delivering great customer experiences. These manual processes are also vulnerable to errors since they have a human dependency and don't have the required transparency in processes to leverage customer trust and confidence.
  
  
• Asynchronized, Multiple Engagement Channels: The target customers for any business usually don't use a single channel for communicating with enterprises. Generally, customers tend to email. Suppose that goes unattended or there is dissatisfaction, or no relevant information has been provided. In that case, customers call the service center teams or chat with a virtual agent (Chatbots) on the company website. This directly results in service requests coming from different engagement channels, and if these channels are out-of-sync, the customer gets conflicting information, ultimately causing bad customer experiences.
  
  
• Disengaged Systematic Business:  In the present digital age, every enterprise uses several tools, technologies, and processes that might not be in the right sync with their digital transformation journey. As a result, it leads to data silos that negatively impact customer service efforts, and customers often fail to receive what they seek. Moreover, out-of-sync business processes often become challenging to find the root cause for a given issue. 

Enabling Customer Service Innovation – Why?

Digital transformation has significantly caused a disruption in redefining the expectations of customers and how businesses deliver customer service. Modern-day customers often encounter several unprecedented challenges owing to which there has been a notable increase in the number of expectations on service delivery. Enterprises have now realized that they can't sustain and grow without up-sleeving their customer service game backed with real-time connectivity and engagement techniques. Hence, there is a strong need to adopt new approaches and technologies to fuel customer service innovation. Customer-facing and customer support teams now rely more on information technology for streamlining and automating responses as per the customer's needs and offering them personalized services.

How to Enable Customer Service Innovation?

Earlier, we saw why businesses need to enable customer service innovation. Here, we'll read about some of the best-proven techniques enterprises need to adopt to enhance customer service innovation. Some of these strategies include the following

• Delivering Personalized, Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Implementation of the omnichannel customer service approach involves integration with the inbound and outbound communications along different customer engagement channels such as SMS, emails, and social media for delivering seamless customer experience journeys. This also helps enterprises offer personalized interactions and contextual engagement, thus providing a unified and uniform brand experience along the customer journey.

• Integration of Workflows Across Departments and Breaking Silos

Integrating workflows across several departments takes place using different tools, systems, and processes that ensure a smoother data flow within the organization. It also helps enterprises to analyze and learn about customer behavior across other engagement channels and offer customer experiences across all customer touchpoints in their buying journey.

• Boosting Customer Service Backed with Intelligent Process Automation

The customer-facing teams often deal with large data volumes. By leveraging intelligent automation in their key processes, these teams can easily and quickly sort the data, route the customer issue to the respective departments or subject-matter experts, and devise a corresponding solution. Intelligent automation helps customer-facing teams make informed decisions and resolve problems much faster.

• Enhancing Customer Support Operations Using Reliable Platforms

The accuracy of an enterprise's customer service is crucial for securing the enterprise's reputation. For customers who usually don't get the due support or information at the right time, there exists a high possibility that they'll drift and move to another brand/company with a similar set of services. Every enterprise today demands a reliable, securely-connected, and scalable customer service platform that runs customer operations efficiently, handling several customer requests that run smoothly and quickly.

• Adopting Data Analytics and AI Capabilities

Enterprises have been proactively adopting the strengths of data analytics and AI for assessing and predicting target customer behavior. The amount of data collected across all stages of the customer journey remains the core and DNA of any enterprise. With data analytics and AI, enterprises are using the collected customer data to analyze and determine customer behavior related to different products and services and accordingly provide them to the customers. Additionally, businesses are harnessing these technologies' capabilities to track the origin of issues, alert customers and advise resolutions before they loom.