Let’s say you are a customer, and you just know, that you will never get everything you need all in one place. Departments, characteristically, exist onto themselves, right? Customer service reps are just putting in their time, right? No one entity speaks to another, right?
For once, the “customer isn’t always–right.” In fact, this customer is absolutely wrong.
Whether or not your customer is a walk-in, or you are a call in, or someone is making contact online, eventually everything ends up in the cloud. Without a customer expressing a desire to be in the cloud (or, asking questions like, what is a cloud?), the fact is that a combination of all of the above is the future as we see it now. It is the way of the technological world of today–the Internet of Things (IoT).
Yet, some things never change, and that is the need for top notch, state-of-the-art service. We need to envision on behalf of our customer what that means today. First of all, we need to be good listeners and observers, and we need to take seriously the input not just from our customers, but also from our frontline staff. If a so called tried and true practice is no longer working, or works well, they are most likely the people who will know.
What if a customer were to walk into a favorite box store and a well-trained associate greets the person, knows her or him, knows his or her preferences, and the customer wants to know, how do you do that? Your associate needs to be able to explain it. We cannot assume that the Internet of Things (IoT) or the Cloud are household words. People these days want to know how their data is used and why.
So, after all of that, what if the one thing the customer came in for that day is not in the store? No worries, because your well-trained associate can whip out an iPad (or similar) and place an order to have the item shipped out that very same day.
You may well just have a customer for life who not only knows that but tells others about the experience. Yes, word-of-mouth is still a key component to customer service.
This technology has come on fast and it is known as the “omni-channel,” which basically means that whether you are handling this technology in house or out of house, your “system” can move from any communications channel (call, email, web chat, etc.) to another. In short, this means your contact center, be it one person or 1,000 agents, can move to any channel, at any time, all from a single queue. Not only that, it means all your channels are connected to share information and work together, too, including with all aspects of social media.
If this is all a little much for your business to handle, at least right now, there are dozens of companies like PITON-Global in the Philippines that have cropped up to accommodate companies with world-class omni channel contact centre support. So, you can have the beauty of outsourcing unlimited customer data to get unlimited customer response in return.
If done well, that could also mean an unlimited supply of happy customers who advocate and sell your products or services for you!
