What is Customer Service?
Customer service is the support you offer your customers – before, during and after a purchase or use of your product or service. While customer service has been around forever, it has taken on increasing relevance in the “Experience Economy” where companies compete not just on the product or service they offer but the experiences they provide. Today, there is a premium placed on the speed, ease, convenience and satisfaction of interactions between customers and brands and research convincingly shows that customers will take their business elsewhere if a company’s customer service is not up to expectations.
To excel at delivering consistently exceptional customer experiences, companies need to do more than just offer a phone number that customers can call. Companies also need to:
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Listen to their customers-providing exceptional customer experiences starts with listening to your customers. If you don’t understand how your customers are responding to your service, you have no chance of exceeding their expectations. Customer journey mapping, customer surveys, advanced interaction analytics and more are all excellent ways to understand what your customers are thinking. And don’t forget to listen to your employees—especially your customer facing contact center agents.
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Streamline processes-with a solid understanding of customer expectations, concerns and frustrations, you can continually look at streamlining processes. Customers today expect smooth and seamless experiences. Process “breaks” disrupt this. Things change rapidly so you need to be continually innovating and streamlining customer service processes. Understanding your Customer Effort Score (CES) is also critical as it points you to weaknesses where customers are exerting too much effort in their interactions with your company.
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Offer omnichannel options-today’s consumer expects choices in how they interact with your company. Today there are many options including SMS, messaging, social media and modern digital channels to interact with friends and family and customers expect to be able to use these same methods when dealing with organizations. Digital-first omnichannel support options allow you to meet your customers where and how they want to interact with you, making it easier for them to quickly get the service they expect.
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Engage your workforce-a customer's experience comes from their interaction with your employees. Engaging and empowering your customer-facing employees with deep product knowledge, empowerment to act, internal collaboration tools, coaching, training and workforce optimization solutions are all essential to building and maintaining an engaged workforce which is tasked to deliver your brand promise.
Delivering consistent and exceptional customer service can have a profound Impact on your organization's financial bottom line while also impacting your reputation in the market.
How can NICE help with customer service?
NICE CXone is an integrated, intelligent cloud customer experience platform enabling companies across all industries to excel at customer service. It combines omnichannel routing, workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence capabilities to help companies consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences.
