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Businesses realize that delivering a great customer service is not only a “right thing to do”, but it also has a great qualitative and quantitative impact on the business outcomes.

A research published in the Harvard Business Review showed that customers
who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared
to those who had the poorest past experience.⁵

To address the needs of today’s hyper-connected, well-informed, digital customer, companies have started investing in tools and technologies like customer service management, to help them gather customer data and leverage it to provide better customer service and enhance the overall customer experience.
Here is how customer service management can help companies in keeping their customers happy :

• It provides organizations in making sense out of the customer data. Only when the customer data is appropriately gathered, processed, and made available for analysis, it can help in offering good customer service. Good customer service management tools help companies in gathering the data and make it available at the right time, to the right people, on the right devices.
• When there is a common platform to maintain complete customer details, history of problems and resolutions, it helps in quicker resolution of issues as the customer service agents don’t need to waste their time in scouting for information from multiple sources.
• It helps companies in rightly knowing their customers, their preferences, purchase history, and other such details which help in not only quicker issue resolution but also allow companies to better target their campaigns. The targeted and more personalized campaigns help in predicting and solving the problems before they even arise.
• Customer service management tools offer a single platform for maintaining all the customer data which can be accessed by different departments such as sales, marketing, operations, and customer service who might be involved in resolving the customer issues. Since the data is maintained at a centralized location, there are no issues about data compatibility or duplicate efforts.
• Last but not the least, with centralized and timely access to data, customer service management tools help in increasing the efficiency of customer service teams and minimize the time required in resolving customer queries. As a result, organizations see a dramatic impact on their bottom line.

Biggest Customer Service Challenges Faced by Businesses
Traditionally, customer service was restricted to phone calls and emails. But today, there is a dramatic increase in the number of channels through which customers can connect with the brands.

In fact, phone / voice is considered to be the most frustrating
customer service channel⁶

To survive in this age, where customers can contact the brands through email, phone, social media, public forms, review sites, etc., only those companies which adapt and respond to this shift in business-consumer dynamics will thrive. The modern-day customer service is expected to take a more holistic approach.
Companies like Amazon and Zappos have really raised the bar when it comes to customer service. However, there are several companies which struggle to match up with customer expectations.
Here are some of the customer service challenges which companies face today:

• The vast varieties of channels through which customers can contact brands pose a serious problem to companies. Customer interactions, which used to be private and one-on-one, have now become public. Companies are under pressure to not only resolve issues but also be in the public eye line while doing so.
• Customers want information fast, and they need that in the format of their choice. So companies traditionally replying on FAQs on their websites now need to think about Live Chat, videos, tutorials, and self-help tools.
• Companies are struggling to collate and get a single view of the customer, because customers are interacting with companies through various ways; in-store, social media, phone, email, web, etc. A single conversation is happening across multiple channels and to serve the customer better, companies need to integrate all these conversations into one system and make it available to customer service representatives at the right time.
• Apart from the investment in technologies, companies now need to make customer service as a core function of their organization. Unless they ensure that it is imbibed in the culture of the organization and everybody is aligned with the company’s vision to provide a great customer service, it is hard to get success from their efforts. The customer service representatives need to be trained to be empathetic and be empowered to offer high-quality interaction. A winning strategy involves the right technology and the human-to-human touch.
• Consumers expect the content and assistance being delivered to them to be highly context sensitive. They need it to be useful in the moment when it matters to them. They don’t want to provide information about their issues separately across channels multiple times. Once captured, they expect brands to find and use that information.
• Customers are sensitive about their privacy more than ever. While they don’t mind sharing more information if it can help them get better service, they expect the brands to keep it private and secure. Companies need to continuously demonstrate transparency and security of the information.
• Customers expect the customer support representatives to not only have the right knowledge, know the resource availability but also expect them to have an ability to connect them with the right parts which can help in quicker problem resolution.

Traditionally, customer service was more reactive in nature and a delay of few days in issue resolution was accepted. Today’s digital customers expect a quick resolution to their problems in real-time. Companies which depended heavily on manual processes and had customer service departments working in silos are no longer able to cope up with the growing expectations of customers.
Companies wishing to create stellar customer experiences have started to move away from traditional CRM solutions and have started investing in new age customer service management solutions. To know more about how you can implement the modern customer service management solution at your organization, connect with us at information@alcortech.com