Customer service has always been a critical part of delivering an excellent and exceptional customer experience. As today’s dynamic marketplace makes it difficult for enterprises to provide better customer service, taking a closer look at the future and anticipating what may help fulfill customer support needs can help drive better customer service.
Today, customers expect enterprises to address their issues even before they become aware of them. For this, enterprises must have predictive capabilities that help them to address these issues. Though predictive capabilities are commonplace in marketing and sales, they are less known in the customer service area.
Since most customer service teams frequently have to juggle with responding to the growing number of customers that come from various channels such as phone, email, text, and many more, it becomes difficult for enterprises to keep up with the current demand, let alone be proactive with customers.
Introducing predictive capabilities in customer service is fundamentally different from predictive marketing and sales. Maintaining brand loyalty in today’s constantly fluctuating marketplace has also become critical. And delivering better customer service after a sale is made can help boost the customer’s confidence in the brand.
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A few elements that customer service leaders must focus on:
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Data
Implementing the predictive customer service model begins by implementing data. But the real challenge emerges while unifying the data to identify the emerging trends, as most contact center metrics see operations as reactive instead of proactive.
Customer service leaders must acquire data from various sources and build appropriate models to better understand and manage them. Since today’s customers interact with companies across multiple touch points, they provide internal support teams, the insights they require to address customer problems as early as possible in an efficient manner.
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Tools
To make the best out of the predictive customer service efforts, companies must implement tools that help them to promote connectedness between a variety of channels.
The COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation journey of enterprises and the use of digital channels for the customer service department. Hence, enterprises must implement solutions that provide them omnichannel self-service and automated, AI-powered customer engagement.
Enterprises can leverage AI-enabled chatbots and conversational technology solutions that assist the customer representative agents when they are flooded with multiple requests and can route the request to the appropriate agent.
Another effective tool for delivering excellent customer service is speech analytics. It can help enterprises become more proactive and better understand customer sentiment and emotion in sync with customer feedback and other data.
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Capturing a customer’s most recent satisfaction information and storing it in a CRM system enables customer service teams to understand how individuals view the company based on their recent interactions.
Creating a compelling product and buying experience is important. It enables enterprises to grow the existing customer base. However, to strengthen customer retention, it is crucial to deliver exceptional customer service long after they have bought the product or subscribed to a service.
