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‍What is customer service?‍

Today’s customer is highly opinionated, always connected, demands instant solutions, will compare your product to no end and if that isn’t enough, they expect the experience to be personalized; how’s that for a tall order?

Customer service can severely impact your business. When someone reaches out to customer support it is an indication that something is lacking in your product. From a User Experience standpoint it pays to take a long hard look at this gold nugget of information. Truly enabling customer service can help you build a loyal customer base through trust and increase business prospects in the long run.

Customer service is the quality of assistance a customer receives while interacting with your product. Ideally speaking, customer service shouldn’t exist at all but since that isn’t the case, making the shift from a good customer experience to a great one can be increase customer lifetime value and subsequently higher ROI.

Why it is important to change the perspective on customer service.‍

1. Customer service has often been given a bad rap. It should not exist in silos, instead must have representation on the product team. After all they are the ones who interact with customers the most over a period of time; their strategic input can inform product knowledge to deal with user issues.
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2. Empower your customer service team through:

-Ample training and information about your product

-Knowledge to understand your customers

-Insights to understand the problem

-Information and tools to offer personalized solutions

3. When customer satisfaction is high, customers become advocates of your product often revisiting and promoting your product through word of mouth. Customer service is seen to be a huge differentiator when it is at the core of business strategy.

4. Customer retention through good customer service is less expensive than customer acquisition which involves massive marketing budgets. It quite literally pays to delight your existing customers through personalized experiences, measuring their satisfaction and recording their demands.

How to improve customer service

1. Be proactive‍

The difference between meeting customer expectations and exceeding them is going the extra mile for the customer and not waiting for them to come to you. Proactive chats can inform them of new offers, quick feedback loops can put a them at ease and a well designed knowledge base like FAQs can aid those who are comfortable with self-service.

2. Understanding the customer and customer journey‍

Understanding your customers and their journeys across various channels will help you identify gaps in their experience. It provides your customer service team with deeper information. Since customers and their journeys are inter-dependant, understanding them can be leveraged for new business opportunities to build customer loyalty.‍

‍3. Omni channel support‍

Provide customers with options for omni channel support. Understand the most common complaints, identify the channels and design a system that can handle multiple channels. Customer personas and journeys can help you determine more relevant channels of communication.‍

4. Leveraging AI‍

Technology alone cannot replace customer service. People still value talking to someone over the phone to alleviate their problems, the human factor is vital to building trust and security. AI is not the solution for all companies, however it can help scale customer service functions when technology works in tandem with teams.‍

5. Be accessible‍

Customer support must be easily accessible at every step of the journey. When an organisation is unapproachable either because contact information is hard to find or non existent, customers get frustrated and eventually lose trust. Design for a customer friendly experience that is accessible and easy.‍

6. Invest in UX‍

The above points invariably lead to why investment in good User Experience can be a game changer for your product. Understanding your customer and their journey results in a reduced need for customer service. Investment in good UX can take the load off the customer service team while increasing user satisfaction, trust and eventually, loyalty.

Great customer support helps define your organization and impacts your bottom line. To be independent of the customer service is the end goal of any product and user because you want customers to be empowered to complete their tasks how they deem fit.

Looking for the right UX agency to design a great product? Look no further, contact us at contact@twistopen.in or visit us at www.twistopen.in to take a look at the diverse projects we have worked on.