Customers today are driving the purchase process using social platforms, blogs, and websites. It doesn't stop here. Once the sale is complete, they also use the same venue to tag and share their experiences. In such a scenario, firms need to adopt new approaches and technologies to digitally transform customer services and channels to shape ongoing conversations with customers and stand out in the crowd. This viewpoint describes four innovative customer service strategies to help businesses better engage with customers in this digital era.
1. Enable seamless multi-channel customer experience
Mindtree surveyed 100 existing and prospective clients visiting our innovation hub, Digital Pumpkin, Bangalore, for over a year. In the survey, we realized that many organizations understand that the customer service environment is changing. Indeed, several are already reacting to this trend and have deployed social media service channels. However, their general response to digitization has been to deploy new technology-empowered interaction paths linked to existing operational models. This, I believe, is missing the point. Teams need to shift their focus from mere technology deployment to performance metrics such as Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value to provide innovative customer service.
Tomorrow's market leaders will not be decided by the number of new technologies they deploy but by how they evolve their entire service operation to respond to the changing customer behavior. They should review all parts of the operating model (information, people, processes, technology, and channels). Only such an approach will help businesses improve customer engagement and experience with innovative customer service, ultimately increasing revenues.
Multi-channel customer experience involves building an ecosystem that seamlessly handles customer expectations across channels. This involves a greater understanding of customer behavior and investments in systems and strategies designed to service the customer. This could be in terms of how customers communicate and transact across channels.
The premise behind multi-channel engagement is that the sum of the experience delivered is more than its parts. Thus, if your understanding of customers at a channel level (beyond transactions) is inadequate, you will find it challenging to roll out an omnichannel experience. This, in turn, places a significant premium on the back-end and front-end integration of systems and the ability to identify the customer regardless of the channel. The rules of engagement remain the same service―satisfy and retain. But succeeding in an omnichannel world also requires unified systems, data flows, analytics, cross-channel visibility, customer information, and knowledge management. In developing countries like India and many others in Asia, we also need to keep traditional customer service methods open alongside innovative customer services since digital adoption is not as widespread as in the West. For the next five years at least, we need to keep the traditional approaches running parallel to digital ones. The ability of the company to combine both approaches and keep them working seamlessly will be crucial for its success.
2. Build loyalty through customer service
The competition to acquire new customers is intense. Customers have more choices and greater access to information than ever before. They use social media, forums, and blogs to connect and share their experiences to aid one another in purchase decisions. Given the high cost of winning new customers, it becomes critical to ensure they remain loyal to you going forward as well. This necessitates innovative customer services that drive customer loyalty. Service teams must exploit their frequent contact points with customers to build customer loyalty. Customer service teams need to review their people and processes to prepare for this new role. The service staff needs to develop into relationship builders, consultative listeners, and good communicators.
For companies providing innovative customer services by utilizing digital support channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or web chat, it's apparent that queries on these channels have a different mix compared to traditional service channels. Customers not only request help on product issues but also seek buying advice and comparisons with competing products. The customer is not bothered whether the query relates to sales, service, or marketing. They want answers. A robust service strategy supported by trained employees and backed by technology can take your service standards to a whole new level even while helping customers along the buying path.
3. Redefine evaluation criteria for customer service
How you measure and reward these activities must change if you expect customer services to drive loyalty and manage end-to-end customer experiences. Customer service performance measurement is generally based on efficiency metrics (average handling time and call volume per agent). Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be appropriate to drive relationship-building in innovative customer service. Net Promoter Score and Customer Lifetime Value are two KPIs that are becoming increasingly popular for measuring the effectiveness of service teams. Minimizing costs will always be an important factor and cannot be dismissed. In addition, balanced scorecards need to be put in place to focus on efficiency and quality of customer experience. A few months down the line, the service strategy you define today will decide how your customers interact with your brand. With brands becoming more competitive, the need for customer service innovation is no longer a matter of choice. A streamlined and well-conceived customer experience strategy backed by technology, engaged employees, and customer inputs will allow your brand to grow from strength to strength. Service teams must also work closely with other teams to keep communications consistent and leverage the best channels to communicate with customers. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators should be implemented to push the community to a level of engagement where customers actively help others with service issues and create new ideas and use for products or services. Innovative Customer Service: Top 4 Strategies to win in this Digital Era | Mindtree Innovative Customer Service: Learn about innovative customer service strategies that can help businesses better engage with customers in this digital era & leverage digital technologies.
4. User Experience, the key to digital engagement
User Experience (UX) is defined as a customer's perception of human-computer interaction through a specific channel or device. It includes the customer's experience of using an instrument based on its' look and feel' and its practical aspects such as usability and efficiency. Nowadays, cutting-edge technology devised by UX leaders Apple and Google has led customers to expect a digital service experience that is clean, simple, and user-friendly, regardless of device, platform, or service provider. Customers today are discovering and engaging with a large section of services and products online. As a result, online channels play a critical role in providing insights into the overall brand experience. Service organizations embracing the digital age invest heavily in UX in response to such phenomena. They believe that putting UX capability high on the agenda for business and technical teams will help generate ideas that can subsequently be translated to business reality. They ensure creative input throughout the customer lifecycle, especially post-implementation when it's essential to respond quickly to feedback on customer behavior with release updates and tweaks. UX is a battlefield for service organizations trying to gain a competitive advantage within industries increasingly dedicated to digital customer services. Investing in user experience capability is crucial if they want to win this fight. They need to focus on fostering innovations that promote the best possible experience and testing those innovations frequently and at an early stage. Service teams, however, should not make the mistake of waiting for stability before adopting changes. Leaders must embrace continuous development and actively look forward to new opportunities to engage and service clients.
The way ahead
The service approach you outline today will decide how your customers interact with your brand a few months down the line. With brands becoming more competitive, the need for innovative customer services is no longer a matter of choice. To meet future challenges sustainably, customer service leaders must develop the ability to swiftly identify, evaluate, and capitalize on the right trends at the right time. For many organizations, this means acquiring or developing new talent that better understands digital technologies and how to apply them. Social media managers, data scientists, and growth hackers are some of the new job titles that can be seen these days. Service, sales, and marketing teams should work closely to leverage these roles across the entire customer journey. A new method is also required to make investment decisions and execute projects using new skills/capabilities. The speed and pace of innovation are such that looking beyond two years kills innovation. Instead, adopt an entrepreneurial spirit of experimentation and establish small innovation funds to test new approaches. This way, you can focus on bringing an idea to market quickly and continuously improving it through customer feedback. At this stage, it is essential to take a balanced view of successes and failures and accept that not everything you try will be a success.
Conclusion
Customer service is going through a stage of maturity where people are investing a lot in the workforce and technology. Innovative customer services are essential as demand has become more personal, requiring a quicker time-to-response, not to mention seamless interaction across channels. Different customers also have different communication preferences. As the number of channels increases, expect your customers to fragment across different age groups. You should also expect channel preferences to change depending on the context, process, location, and time. Leverage the customer segmentation work done by your marketing department to better direct your engagement and support efforts across appropriate channels and target audiences. In addition, make the following changes to how you handle customer service in the digital age:
Proactive assistance: Make your customer service agents more efficient in functioning. Ensure proactive customer communication within an omnichannel environment. Also, identify the top benefits of proactively communicating with customers―higher customer satisfaction, increased overall revenue, increased cost savings–and reward your agents accordingly.
Self-help/Service: Companies with a reputation for excellent customer service know that many customers prefer to bypass the call center and solve problems on their own. Investing in self-service options is crucial for every company today to reap the benefits of better customer satisfaction and increased revenue. Self-service could be via phone, web, or a mobile application. Establishing an effective self-help channel is a win-win for customers and companies. Customers save time, and companies save money by reducing traffic to call centers.
Automated Service: Incorporate an intelligent virtual agent that serves as an online customer service representative for the organization. This is because virtual agents have a human appearance and respond appropriately to customer questions. They lend automated interactions, a semblance of personal service.
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