Popular fiction would have us believe that technology isn’t compatible with human values. The world of science fiction presents humanoid robots as distinctly cold and inhuman, which could lead us to the conclusion that robots and automation have no place in customer services. But that would be to misinterpret how technology works – and the jobs it can do to make your customers more satisfied, leading to retention and repeat custom. Here are just three ways in which you can fuse technology with customer service to make your customers happier.
Bots
The rise of bots in the past two years has been astonishing. From what first appeared a little gimmicky, bots are now performing vital rerouting and service automation where previously customers would have been bounced from department to department just to get in touch with the relevant representative. Bots can’t answer all queries by any means, but they help alleviate some of the pressure on your phone, email, and social media workers.
How do they do this? Well, when you set up a bot, you also set up a decision tree that will take every customer on a journey. Some decision trees simply reroute inbound calls to the right desk. Others, on social media, offer answers to frequently asked questions. But the best do more than that, and actually direct customers or consumers to the information they’re looking for in just a few simple prompts and clicks. These are a great addition to your customer services team.
Centralization
In the modern business era, it’s not unlikely that your staff will be picking up the phone one minute, typing out an email the next, and logging in to social media to respond to instant messages too. That’s great for your business because it means you’re able to correspond with customers over a variety of channels. What’s bad for your business is the data you lose when all these conversations aren’t centralized.
Without a centralized system to manage your customer services messaging, you’ll miss out on insights, planning, forecasts, and more. You’ll have higher operational costs, and you’ll get fewer people on the phone or primed to answer instant messages. That’s why communications centralization firms like Boomerang messaging exist – to make your communications well-planned and optimized across channels. It’s tech to make your life and the lives of your customers easier.
Task Handling
There are several businesses in which you’re asked by your customers for information. Often, that might mean your customer services personnel scrabbling for documents, log-in details, cancellation policies, and all kinds of different materials, all while an increasingly dismayed customer waits on the other end of the line.
Happily, technology has stepped in to solve this problem too. Ordering your files and giving your operatives the tools they need to handle each task as it hits their desk, such software is key for busy businesses with many business lines. It’s also perfect for swamped staff, freeing them up for more work down the line.