How Technology & Customer Service Go Hand in Hand

How Technology & Customer Service Go Hand in Hand

The jobs of tomorrow will focus on customer service and technology. A report to the World Economic Forum in Davos says in the next three years, 62 percent of new jobs will be in the care, sales, and people sectors. 28% will be in data and computing.

Technology and customer service can go hand in hand. You might be surprised by how true this is. Read on to learn about the many ways they go together.

Easy Payment

Paying for goods and services is essential to the customer service journey. By the nature of it, making a payment is fraught with challenges. The challenges are for both the seller and the buyer.

Imagine that you are booking a room for the night in a strange town. You find details of the room on a website, the pictures of the room look professional, and the room looks clean and attractive. The website says to send a payment through online banking, and the room is secured.

How do you know that the room will be there when you show up and what will happen to your money? Airbnb, Uber, and many others have used technology to enable secure online payment that protects the host, the guest, the seller, and the buyer.

These payment processes also make it possible for refunds to be paid securely. Working together, banks and sellers can make payment a safe and even positive customer experience.

Related: 7 Amazing Communication Tools You Can Use With Clients

Email Communication

Communication is an important element of customer service. Email still has a key role. It’s a quick way of responding to customers and a successful way of sending them information.

With the power of embedded links, emails can provide customers with the means to access both general and customized information. General information might be a website, product information or a link to an opportunity to make a purchase. Specific customer information could be an invoice, live delivery information, or a personalized product recommendation.

Tracking

Deliveries can be tracked by carriers to provide a blow-by-blow account of the progress of delivery from supplier to customer. This can give the customer confidence that their order is on its way and help their planning for receipt of delivery.

Knowing that your delivery has been delivered, especially if it’s to a drop location that is not in the hands of the customer, helps the security of the delivery. This transparency for both customers and sellers is important for customer service, dispute resolution, and confidence.

Social Media

Customer service is a social activity. It’s about relationships, and as such, it’s natural that it will feature as part of social media. Social media provides a place for customer service relationships to grow.

Social media allows brands to communicate about their products and services. It also allows for interaction between customers who can compare and contrast their experiences of these brands. This includes formal product reviews, blogs and microblogs of influencers, and informal chats between friends.

The exchange of information is part of the customer service journey. It can be supported and enabled by social media-savvy marketers.

Live Chat And Self Service

If you’ve ever tried to call a customer support phone line, you may have found yourself in a long queue. It’s also an expensive customer service option for businesses to offer.

A live chat facility that can be accessed from a website is an efficient way to provide fast, effective, and friendly service.

The live chat application can also automate the collection of essential information such as names, addresses, email addresses, order numbers, and the nature of the query. These things can take time on a phone call with an operator that is expensive and full of errors. The automatically-collected information can be quickly reviewed and responded to by a customer service associate.

Adding further layers of self-service can make the customer experience even quicker and easier. They present the customer with multiple-choice options, standardized responses to common questions like FAQs, and intelligent responses.

Bots might have a bad name in some circles, but when they work well, they make the customer experience better. You can’t always be there for your customer, but a bot can be. They can reduce the cost of customer service and that means greater profits for the seller but also better value for customers.

One strategy that has gained prominence is call center outsourcing. By leveraging the services of specialized providers like Hit Rate Solutions, businesses can tap into a pool of trained professionals and advanced communication tools. 

Customer Engagement

When technology is harnessed to engage customers, it makes the relationship so much more than a transaction. In an omnichannel world, communications are difficult without the power of technology.

Customers can choose how they want to be communicated with. Print may still have a place for many customers. If they prefer, there are a huge number of other communication channels, including messaging, email, in-app messages, and phone communication. When customers define how they want to be communicated with, they are more likely to be engaged. If they prefer, there are a huge number of other channels of customer contact, including messaging, email, in-app messages, and phone communication

Managing the customer journey can be impossible without some technology. Automating and personalizing the customer experience is how engaged customers become committed and loyal.

Insight-Driven Customer Service

Understanding customers is sometimes best achieved with data. Analysis of large volumes of data about customer behavior, markets, sales, and customer preferences takes huge processing power. Technology provides the tools to do this and provides really useful analytics.

These analytics can drive marketing effort, workforce planning, product selection and so much more. As the “internet of things” becomes a reality, more data will provide an opportunity to improve the customer experience.

Technology And Customer Service

There are many ways for technology to support customer service. Perhaps when your fridge orders you more supplies of Champagne, it will be an opportunity to celebrate this important relationship. Technology and customer service is a partnerships with huge potential.

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