GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE FOLLOWS YOU EVERYWHERE; EVEN INTO THE BATHROOM

Today’s organizations might be perpetually connected to their customers, but a good business knows when to respect boundaries.  That interactions must add value to the customer’s experience, a good business knows that attempting to communicate with a guarded, disinterested customer is not only inappropriate but counterproductive.

Pivotal to recognizing such boundaries is understanding how—and why—they come to exist.  Standard business practice and societal conventions might provide good guidance, but they can never trump the will of the customer.  If a customer is particularly private and particularly disinterested in an open communication link, a customer-centric business recognizes, accepts and adheres to his stricter set of boundaries.

Similarly, if a customer demonstrates an unusual aversion to boundaries and conversational restrictions, the business should feel free to engage with a corresponding absence of inhibition.  In fact, its ability to call itself customer-centric might hinge on its ability to interact on the customer’s weird, unconventional terms. Even if those terms involve a bathroom encounter.

Other businesses must take note. Customers will use Twitter for urgent, conversational matters.  When doing so, they will expect the business to take urgent action.  To successfully satisfy today’s omni-channel customer, a business must be capable of meeting the demands of that urgency.

The customer needed action; he did not simply need to be heard.  If the business operated in accordance with standard boundaries – rather than the unique ones of a customer in a unique situation – it potentially would have shied away from the action that needed to be taken.

While few businesses will find themselves in this particular predicament, virtually all businesses will encounter scenarios in which standard norms, expectations and policies will prove insufficient.  The mark of a customer-centric business comes from its ability to adapt to the specific needs of its customers.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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DELIVERING A ROCK STAR CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE

Once considered a supporting aspect of the consumer transaction, behind ‘product’ and ‘price’, the customer experience is now a main-stage attraction when it comes to solidifying the relationship with customers. Increasingly, stats like this one from Bain and Company illustrate the impact that poor customer service can have on future revenues.

A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs. price or product related.

Today, the customer experience is a key strategic differentiator at many organizations. Consumers 2020 Report, customer experience is expected to become the number one key brand differentiator, overtaking both price and product by the year 2020. In today’s digital world, ‘rock star’ service means making answers and information available at your customers fingertips 24x7, every time they enter your digital channels. This report shows you how, with seven things you can do to make your digital self-service experience is more like the stairway to heaven and less like the highway to hell.

KEY 1: HELP CUSTOMERS BY LEAVING THEM ALONE (HINT: GET DIGITAL)

Just as the world of music has gone digital, so has the everyday life of your customers. We start the list with perhaps the most surprising piece of advice—that the secret to delivering exceptional customer service is to actually not get involved with customer requests. At least, not in person. Research into the preferences of consumers today indicates that when customers are looking for information or answers, they tend not to want to talk to people. As the results show, the customer experience of today is increasingly a digital one.

KEY 2: RESOLVE CUSTOMER QUESTIONS IN ONE ATTEMPT

With customers increasingly choosing to self-serve, it means your organization needs to deliver a satisfying self-service experience in your digital channels. This means bringing low-complexity issues to completion swiftly. Standard FAQ pages and site search won’t cut it today, because these solutions require cumbersome navigation and searching through multiple answers. For today’s customer who expects one single answer, your self-service has to deliver one right answer on the first attempt.

KEY 3: SERVE UP THE NEXT ANSWER BEFORE THEY EVEN HAVE TO ASK.

Intelligently serving customers means giving them the right answer when they ask a question and, knowing what questions they are likely to have next. When your digital self-service technology can provide the one right answer and intelligently anticipate the next question on the customer’s mind, you take the digital self-service experience to a whole new level.

KEY 4: MAKE ESCALATION OPTIONS EASY TO FIND

Knowing that there will be instances when your customers are wanting live support, it’s wise to make this live support easy to access. This means making escalation options easy to find, as part of your digital self-service experience. Doing so does a lot to inspire customer confidence in your organization because it shows that you place a high value on customer service—an increasingly important differentiating factor today.

KEY 5: TRANSFORM YOUR LIVE AGENTS INTO THE ULTIMATE ‘ROCK STAR’ SERVICE PROVIDERS

When customers are allowed to self-serve for answers to low complexity questions without having to contact live support, significantly fewer calls will enter your live channel. However, there are instances where customers have a more complex request that legitimately requires more personal, live support.

This is the best use of your live support channel – to provide that higher level of service when it’s really needed. When your live agents are no longer required to handle mass volumes of low complexity calls, they’re free to focus on delivering true ‘rock star’ service. This elevates the value of your contact center because your agents can use a higher level of skill to impress customers and solve true problems.

KEY 6: ENSURE THE MOBILE EXPERIENCE MATCHES THE WEB EXPERIENCE

The good news for organizations is that customers are very clear in their expectations of mobile customer service experience. Quite simply, they want exactly the same instant access to accurate answers when interacting with your company from a mobile device. Digital self-service is just as important in the mobile channel as anywhere else.

KEY 7: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BAD CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

Organizations that will survive in the digital economy are ones that accept the fact that customers today wield tremendous power: they have high service expectations, a wide range of choice on where and how to spend their money, and they can be fickle about staying loyal to one brand.

Often, this means an organization only gets one chance to make an impression. One study found that a staggering 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with the same company again. (Source: Lee Resources)

Delivering rock star customer experience means truly embracing your customer’s ‘rock diva’ personality, and investing in technologies that do a great job of catering to their service needs in the digital channels.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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CRM strategy to create a winning customer experience: A telco can gain real time feedback and deliver tailored offers to customers by empowering customers through self-help apps

Customer service is re-emerging as the core business strategy to create a winning customer experience. Great service needs to be consistent across all mobile devices, as well as social and digital media channels. It also needs to be personalized and consistent with marketing efforts by helping in retention and growth through enhanced customer experience and engagement. It also explains the current market scenarios and challenges that need to be addressed in order to place a successful strategy for customer relationship management (CRM) in place.

 Self Service applications allow customers to manage their mobile account transactions real time from their individual phones. Customers can even raise their own trouble ticket or request and provide MNOs with real time customer feedback. A study estimates that 80 percent of calls to call centers are related to simple queries.  By empowering customers through such self-help apps benefits the customers and helps the operator to reduce customer care cost. It also holds the potential for an augmented customer engagement, provided it is a personalized and secure interaction. By developing a rich interaction suite through the mobile self-service app, a telco can gain real time feedback and deliver tailored offers to customers. Talking about the customers, with a well integrated self service app they can resolve their issues within one session without having to wait for a 24 hour process time line.

Africa, Asia and Latin America emerged as the untapped markets for such apps. In such growing economies, MNOs can deepen relationship with customers by providing them a tool like self-service apps. In a fiercely competitive market, low engagement level contributes to high customer churn.

 Self-service apps provide MNOs a branded presence on the customer’s device, and a channel to have a continuous personalized dialog with customers. A positive customer experience via a self-service app generates repeat usage, loyalty and advocacy.

In terms of creating new application, the problem especially arises in mobile first economies where mobile device models are attached to pre- and postpaid contracts on 2G and 3G networks which make it difficult for developing and embedding self service apps on handsets. On the other hand, emerging economies which have poor literacy rates present a challenge in adoption of adoption of such apps. Here, it is important to create a simple intuitive user interface (UI) with one touch options and minimum number of menus and click through pages. MNOs will have to find ways to overcome such issues in order to create opportunities for advanced and rich interactions.

For more details, visit us @ www.urssystems.com

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