Most companies realize that their success depends on building effective customer experiences across multiple touch points. Typically, it’s the customer support organization that is responsible for delivering support to maintain high-levels of customer satisfaction after a purchase. The question facing many companies is how to deliver exceptional support during lean times, when organizations face headcount and budget limitations. Now may be the time to take a look at recent innovations in customer response that automate service while also creating a positive customer experience. Unlike earlier automated services that helped a company, often at the customer’s expense, new real time solutions enable a company to proactively and cost effectively deliver an extraordinary customer experience.
Companies need to deliver services that reach customers where they are and across all modalities that customers prefer to use. It is also important to become more proactive and reach out to customers in a timely manner, when they need the information. Automated real time customer support includes:
- Contextual voice portals. Unlike menu driven voice response systems, adding contextual information regarding a customer’s status, account information, recent activities will personalize the interaction and engage customers in using the automated service.
- Proactive notification. No one likes spam or robo call but proactive notifications on matters of interest across the device of the customer’s choice alerts the customer to matters of interest without requiring a customer to make a call or look up information on the Web. Customers appreciate notifications when they offer relevant and opportune information.
- Social outreach. Social sites represent unprecedented activity and user adoption and provide a valuable way for a company to deliver its messages to large populations quickly. Unlike the one-to-one engagement of proactive notification, social outreach goes to the masses and information spreads quickly. It requires constant monitoring and attention to communities of interest to be effective and relevant.
- Text and video replies. With the use of smart devices, many customers prefer to see a text response or receive a short video clip compared to having to listen to the information from an agent or automatic voice response message. Text and video messages encourage customers to use automated services, as they receive information in a more convenient and practical manner and have a better experience.
- Mobile response management. Mobile applications need to provide a means to support customer requests on the application itself without requiring the mobile device user to make a call. Intuitive user interfaces attached to customer data or knowledge bases can provide customers with relevant guidance based on their profile and account information while on the mobile application.
Investments in automated services usually pay for themselves very quickly. Although there are situations when a live agent is the most appropriate response to a customer’s inquiry, reaching customers before they need to make a call or anticipating future inquiries creates an image of a company that goes the extra step to support customers wherever they are across multiple modalities.
