It’s estimated that up to 75% of customers have cancelled transactions or taken a stand not to return to a brand if they’ve experienced poor customer service. The figure’s high, but it makes sense, with so much choice available and businesses falling over themselves to win-over customers who’ve been let down elsewhere.
Gaining and retaining market share is a full-time job and the businesses that do it best are on the front foot when it comes to service and technology’s ability to help them stay ahead of the game.
Supermarkets are great examples of this. They were early adopters, using IT to drive customer reward and retention programmes that collected data on such a scale they could tell everything from when a household’s home insurance was up, to which brand of toilet paper they preferred, and used target marketing to tend to their every need.
They’ve taken it a step further in recent years, even piggybacking on competitors’ use of technology and customer relationship management programmes, accepting coupons and money-off vouchers distributed by (and at a cost to) other brands.
It’s a bold move, but it’s working in many cases and the customer feels like they’re in a win-win situation. Indeed, a few years ago, no one would have believed retail giant Tesco would be accepting vouchers for Lidl, but here we are, and IT is at the front line of the retail war.
Connection is key
Brands understand that to keep a customer happy, they must understand their needs and wants and how to encourage action.
Technology can help with every aspect of this engagement in any industry, if it’s tailored in the right way, and the best technology solution is used to address your audience and customer type.
Investment in technology is a smart move with the right strategy behind it. So, if you want to explore IT as a route to improve your offering or customer service experience, but you’re not quite sure where to start, talk to an IT service provider or IT consultant before you start spending. It’s only by spending on the right things, at the right time, for the right reason, that you’ll see real reward.
5 ways to use IT to enhance your customer service offering:
- Know your audience and communicate well
Brand communication is essential today, with global names living and dying based on what they say and where they say it.
Recently, we saw Clarks hit the headlines with claims of sexism and harmful categorisation of children, because of the shoe names they’d given to their back to school range.
‘Dolly Babe’ shoes for little girls and ‘Leader’ runners for little boys were available to buy online and it wasn’t long before disgruntled shoppers lit social media channels up with outrage, and Clarks had to respond on pretty much every channel available to apologise and try to claw back some brand integrity.
It seems they vastly underestimated their audience.
Crisis management aside, communication has lots of facets. It’s about:
- Knowing where to find your audience
- Which channels are best to reach them
- What kind of tone is appropriate and
- Where your most important conversations will take place
The answer to these questions will come down to the type of product or service you offer and your target audience. For example, a 24-hour phone line isn’t ideal for a product aimed at 16-24-year olds, who want to go online or use social media to find the answers to any questions they have.
Twitter, SMS and apps are proven to work well for the younger demographic while live chat as a communication tool tracks well across the board.
Using IT to encourage two-way conversations with customers allows you to test and learn what works best, whether that is detailed responses or clipped, factual replies. You can also measure who’s listening and commenting on the things you’re happy to openly discuss.
IT plays a crucial role in building customer relationships, meeting growing customer expectations and creating brand advocates, and not just promoting or distributing the products or services they sell. By revealing more of what sits behind the brand logo, customers can engage and get actively involved in ways they’ve never been able to before.
Businesses can share more on everything from the people who work there, their values and brand personality, to the social and political campaigns they get behind through sponsorship and endorsement.
Technology makes all this possible and the window of opportunity exists for every business. In many ways that’s the biggest change of all, it’s not just brand icons and multinationals that have voices anymore, and good IT that helps make this happen is affordable even to SMEs on a budget. A story about a customer service hero from CoCos Ice Cream Shop can go viral, just as quickly as one from Coca-Cola.
There’s something exceptional about that for businesses who are smart enough to use it.
- Be available
‘Always on’ is a phrase we hear in business all the time now. You might say, by coining the phrase, we officially marked the end of traditional nine-to-five opening hours.
In truth, they were gone long ago, but the new reality is that customers want to be able to communicate with businesses 24/7.
It won’t be possible for every business to man channels round the clock, but a problem shared is a problem halved as they say, and even offering customers with questions or complaints somewhere to leave a message is a good first step.
With so many outlets available now including phone, email, SMS, social media, live chat, forums and forms, for some, outsourcing this part works best. This leaves employees with the time to do the job they were hired to do and funnels customer service to a team with the knowledge, skills and expertise to do it well.
- Share information
Some customers don’t like asking for help, while others can prove to be a font of knowledge, so it makes sense to bring the two together where you can.
For most people, the internet is the first port of call for any problem to be solved, making frequently asked question sections (FAQs) the norm on business websites. A well written, designed and managed website can:
- Optimise your website investment
- Boost your SEO
- Facilitate self-service
- Inform what’s working well and where gaps in information are on the site
- Highlight user issues/product weaknesses
- Reduce call and email volumes
- Cut wait and response times
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Improve website user experience
In addition to this, forums, chat rooms and social media accounts have proven to be hugely successful in terms of knowledge sharing. Experts (especially the self-taught) are often keen to share experiences, ‘best use’ ideas, short cuts, upgrade recommendations, even answer other customer’s questions. And sometimes, it’s in the brand’s interest to let them.
Good brand managers know the importance of allowing conversations about their business to play out online and understand when the time is right to step in.
They’re silent voyeurs in many cases and for niche brands, that’s incredibly important. In gaming, for example, this kind of customer-to-customer communication gives the brand more credibility, with blog posts, chat room conversations, webinars, videos, Snapchat stories and YouTube videos tools of choice for consumers who’d rather talk to someone like them, than the brand itself.
Technology is at the heart of all if this, allowing businesses to open as many virtual doors to customers as they want.
- Stay connected
Like it or loathe it, social media is a game-changer. It’s one of the most influential inventions technology has delivered for the business-to-customer relationship and currently overtaking every other channel in terms of connectivity and engagement.
Brands who manage social media well ensure it’s always on, constantly updated and at the heart of everything the business is experiencing, as it happens. And, because the conversation is two-way, that means the agenda can be set by the brand or the buyers.
Fans and followers show their love and loyalty in spades, creating invaluable marketing content and metrics. And on the flip side, the disgruntled and disillusioned have the perfect platform to air their grievances.
There’s merit in both, it’s just a question of how you manage them.
- Be insight-driven
Using technology to deliver great customer service is just half the story, because it can do so much more. Having the IT infrastructure to collect, analyse and use data to understand customers better and execute strategic target marketing is one the most important and future-proofing things any business with IT capabilities can do.
Insight-driven marketing is at the heart of customer service, retention, loyalty and reward. So, setting your IT up to help you exceed service expectations now (with tools like net promoter score surveying), and informing everything you do in the future (with bigger picture insights), is important for justifying spend and ensuring ongoing return on your IT investment.
Find out how strong your IT set-up is and what you may need to put in place to offer a winning service to clients or customers by booking an audit with our team:
