How to build a technology roadmap around your customers, from vision to integration to adoption.
Table of Contents
- What is customer service?
- Types of Customer Service?
- Customer Service Quotes From Leaders
- Delight Customers With Remarkable Service
- Establish 5 key criteria to evaluate existing and emerging technology
- Is your IT focused on products or customers?
- Building your technology roadmap — two paths to success?
- Conclusion
Without any doubt, the top priority of every business leader is to deliver value for its consumers. And now, this value needs to be delivered consistently fast.
This means making your consumers happy is everyone’s duty.
- A $1billion company can generate an average $823 million revenue increase in three years with only a moderate enhancement in customer experience. (Temkin)
- Worldwide, 67% of people believe that customer service as a whole is improving. (Microsoft)
- 52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers. (Microsoft)
- 48% of consumers expect a response to social media questions and complaints within 24 hours. (Statista)
Encouraging and boosting your teams to think, act, and operate with a customer-centric strategy needs alignment across your organization’s culture, processes, and mindsets, and of course, your technology.
Your employees need the right tools, powered by the right data to successfully do this. To ensure accountability across every touchpoint, you also need to confidently put your customers front and center with a scalable solution supported by an operating model.
What is Customer Service?
Before we start, let us clarify what we mean by customer service. The term may be defined as the ability of an organization or company to tend to their customer’s needs and wants and to meet and even exceed their customer’s expectations.
Customer service is a rapidly evolving discipline that plays a crucial role in the company’s long-term success. It is enabling customers to solve problems, teaching them how to use products, and answering questions.
5 Types of Customer Service?
The following are the five most effective and efficient ways companies can deliver customer service to customers.
Let’s dive into each :
- Phone Customer Service
- Text messages
- Email Customer Service
- Live Chat Customer Service
- Social Media Customer Service
1. Phone Customer Service
Phone Customer Service is the most popular choice among all of the different customer service types being used in the market today. It is the most basic and oldest form of customer service.
There is a sense of intimacy when you have a direct conversation with the customer via your voice. And that is the reason why this is the most popular choice in the market today.
Many organizations provide customer service mostly through phone interactions. Customers call a hotline, enter a queue, and a customer service representative picks up the phone.
2. Text messages
While 90% of respondents said they wanted to use messaging with companies via messaging apps or texting on their phones but via messaging, only 48% of businesses were equipped to reach customers.
Customers want to connect with businesses for things like order confirmations, reminders, status updates, surveys, and coupons — and that’s partly because they’re already using the platforms every day.
3. Email Customer Service
Email support makes use of one of the most popular, reliable communication platforms. According to DMR, every day people send 269 billion emails. Using email customer support, customers can ask questions about your product while they’re setting up meetings, coordinating projects, and browsing newsletters.
4. Live Chat
Live chat is another option for providing speedy customer service without forcing your customers to wait on the phone and it can be operated by humans or robots specifically, chatbots.
Live chat is the perfect tool for converting leads. You can add live chat to your online store by downloading plugins, such as Zendesk Chat, Pure Chat, and LiveChat.
Overall, live chat is the most popular customer support method: 73% of live chat customers report satisfaction, compared to 61% for email and 44% for phone, according to eDigital.
5. Social media Customer Service
Social media customer service is probably one of the most popular types of customer service. This service is provided by social media marketing channels on the internet like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, etc.
Consumers can get fast and easy responses to questions they have on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and social media permit businesses to be a little more fun too. Some brands even create specific accounts for customer support.
Customer service quotes from leaders?
Here are some of our favorite customer focus quotes to keep you motivated as you build out your customer focus strategy.
- “The reason for our success is no secret. It’s the Golden Rule–the simple idea that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated.” (Isadore Sharp, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts)
- “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” (Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos)
- “Our customers’ voices are vital when it comes to product innovation. Listening to and acting on customer feedback prevents myopic thinking and helps us constantly improve.” (Hetal Shah, CX, Product, and Operations leader at Postmates)
Read the rest of these customer service quotes to inspire yourself and your team to provide the best service possible, and to see the bigger picture for your business.
Delight Customers With Remarkable Service
Today, the customer has the power in the customer service landscape. So it’s up to customer service pros to help them succeed. Remember, you’ll allow your business to grow by positively impacting customers as well as your bottom line only when you help your customers succeed. PROS is one of the best digital marketing san diego company
Establish 5 key criteria to evaluate existing and emerging technology
The huge majority responded that they consider the following:
- Customer preferences
- Internal stakeholder feedback on technology’s performance
- Industry benchmarks on technology
- Cost-benefit analysis
- The ability of technology to integrate with legacy systems and support service objectives
Is your IT focused on products or customers?
To respond to customer needs and design connected experiences across touchpoints, your employees need the right information and tools at their fingertips. But the average enterprise uses about 900 different applications, and only 28% of those are connected. With CRM and other systems used tactically, many businesses still have a product-centric system architecture.
Fifty-seven percent of companies say CRM is fragmented across the organization, with a few, many, or all departments having their own CRM. (Salesforce)
Fifty-eight percent of companies say organizational silos negatively impact the quality of customer/prospect experiences. (Salesforce).
The technology can create more silos, or it can bridge them or it can either hold your organization back or propel the business forward. By connecting your organization’s silos, it can offer customers what they want: personalized, consistent experiences across all channels.
Building your technology roadmap — two paths to success?
As you begin to lay out a plan, you will need to decide how to approach an innovation roadmap based on considerations like timeline, budget, team experience, and any internal or external forces impelling action. All of these inputs will inform the way you approach a strategic plan.
Two common approaches are explained below to help guide your efforts.
Start small and power up
Your Approach
- Focus on simple wins as you build up to larger transformation efforts. This way, you commit to steady, continuous improvement to meet long-term goals.
How You Win
- Motivate your team with simple wins that give them the experience to take on larger projects.
- Prove it’s working with minimal impact on workflow before taking on more.
- You get to demonstrate value, which can help secure wider buy-in before tackling a larger-scale.
Issues to Keep in Mind:
Starting small and building momentum is a great strategy, but it comes with some considerations:
- Do you have plenty of time on your runway or do you need to make foundational change happen faster?
- Are you thinking as big and transformative as you need to be? Or is your roadmap focused primarily on quick wins and optimizing existing operations over creating customer value in new ways.
Start big and fill gaps later
Your approach
- Focus on large-scale efforts while supporting smaller initiatives on the edges. This is an all-in transformation.
How you win
- Focus resources on driving maximum impact and change as quickly as possible.
- Address foundational needs head-on, enabling any rapid transformation your company needs for success.
- Make clear to employees, customers, and other stakeholders that the company is committed to all-in transformation.
Issues to keep in mind:
It’s tempting to want to start big, but that can come with real challenges:
- Making major changes can put stress on other systems and that may impact workflow.
- Be sure to build in sufficient training time to limit the impact on your end customers and revenue-generating operations.
- Disruption can be challenging, threatening the entire roadmap and appetite for continuing on the journey. Keep focused on managing the impact of change and maintaining business continuity.
Conclusion
Customers feel happy when they receive exceptional customer service and remain loyal. In the business world, there is nothing as important as this achievement. So customers should always be at the heart of every successful company, and should always be treated with adequate respect.
