Customer expectations may be constantly changing but a high-quality experience is a trend that isn’t going away. Your customers always want an excellent experience and customer service is part of that. Here are some common customer service demands and how you can solve them.
1. A unified experience across all channels and touchpoints
Customers want a seamless journey across your entire business. For example, if they’re speaking to your customer service team and they need to be transferred to different representatives, departments and channels (such as from social media to email to phone correspondence), they don’t want to keep repeating their story and details multiple times.
Your representatives should know it already. And there’s market research to support this - a Microsoft survey found 68% of UK consumers expected customer service reps to know their contact, product and service history.
This is where a CRM system can help. CRM systems pull information about customers from multiple sources, giving businesses one version of data truth. So, it’s much easier for customer service reps to pull up their customers’ details.
2. A unique, personal experience with your brand
According to a 2018 report, 72% of consumers will choose one brand over another if they receive special treatment. In other words, customers want to feel like they’re the only customers you care about and if you can provide them with that sort of personal attention, they’re more likely to choose you over a competitor.
Think personalised product recommendations, unique promotional codes and being greeted with their first name if they ever need to contact your customer service team. These are all ways you can make your customers feel special and noticed. However, to do this, you need to really know your customers and all their quirks and preferences.
CRM systems, again, can facilitate this, thanks to its ability to pull customer data from multiple sources. There are other features too - for example, automation functionality can present your customers with personalised recommendations based on their past searches and purchases.
You can also integrate a telephony system which load up customer dashboards before your customer service reps even answer the call.
3. Anticipation of customer wants and needs
Customers want brands to be one step ahead of their needs. How many times have you been impressed when a company has anticipated your need before you even realised you were thinking of it?
Let’s say you run a coffee shop. The company who supplied you with your coffee machine rings you and asks how your machine is working. They’d like to send over an engineer to double check its performance. When the engineer does come to inspect your machine, it turns out you needed a pretty vital part changing because it was about to break.
Now that’s an example of great, proactive customer service. How can you provide this level of service?
Introducing… a connected field service solution. A solution like this can help you benefit from predictive AI and IoT-enabled insights. These insights can help you predict instances when your customers’ equipment may fail or isn’t working as it should and you can automatically schedule field engineers in response.
Such insights can also allow you to identify patterns and root causes for corrective action. And of course, all of this information can feed into your CRM system, giving you a complete view of your individual customers. Ultimately, this helps to boost customer satisfaction.
4. Consistently delivering better service than everyone else
A unified, personalised experience that anticipates your customers’ needs is almost everything you need to truly satisfy your audience. What’s the final ingredient? To do all of this quicker than your competitors do.
Here are some tips:
- Always be available. For example, customers expect to be able to engage with your business at all hours - even out of working hours. You don’t need to have a customer service team that works 24/7; instead, have a chatbot or virtual assistant on your website whose responses are based on FAQs. If the bot isn’t able to solve the query, customers can enter their email address and a customer service rep can pick up the issue within a certain number of hours
- Use advanced route scheduling to optimise the routes of your mobile field service engineers and offer customers a more accurate estimated time of arrival. This means engineers can spend less time travelling and more time helping customers, and customers are more satisfied with the service
- Motivate your customer service team so their moods are lifted and they’re more enticed to offer excellent quality of service. You could offer awards such as Employee of the Month, along with prizes and other incentives, which keeps employees motivated to deliver their best performance
Want to read about these customer service demands in more depth?
We hope these demands we’ve just discussed were enlightening. However, they were just an overview - there’s a little more to them that what you just read. If you’d like to read about these demands in more depth, check out our customer service guide below.
Excellent customer service is just one thing customers are expecting…
As we mentioned earlier, customer expectations are always changing but they’re always expecting a great service and experience. Now, what exactly do we mean by ‘great service and experience’?
A welcoming experience, special treatment, helpful sales assistants…these are just a handful of things that make up ‘great customer service and experience’. We cover the rest in our visual graphic, along with intriguing stats from various reports. Click the button below to take a look and learn precisely what modern-day consumers are looking for.
