Great Customer Support is No Longer a Problem

You heard right, great customer support is no longer a problem. This is a ludicrous statement when you think about it, isn’t it? How long has effective customer support been something we have all wished worked in a realistic universe? With the constant and inherent problems with the backbone of this industry, the call center, it seemed like there just wasn’t anything that could be done to make it not a miserable and barely effective system.

So, when we say that great customer support is no longer a problem, we may as well be saying that fish swim in the skies. That is, until recent time.

There have been some vast innovations in the customer support industry that will alleviate a lot of these problems in the future as more and more companies adopt hybridization of support channels to make a more effective and dynamic model. While being rid of the call center is not likely possible, we can play to its weaknesses with new technologies and techniques that can make the whole ordeal much less of a horror story.

The first thing is obviously the innovations in social networking, especially Twitter. Twitter is a publicly visible medium, so there is little privacy. However, customers can tweet support agents about non-sensitive questions or complaints very easily. If the issue becomes private, PM is possible, or referral to a specific phone number for an agent. The twitter agent will have notified that agent ahead of time the call was incoming.

This eliminates a lot of phone tree use as well as reducing hold times in these scenarios when the call center must be deferred to.

Going a step further, email agents can also be employed to refer by email in the same way. A Skype staff through a web referral can also work well as a secondary call center system for convenience and parallelism. This allows customers to have the convenience of using Skype, and would free up those who would rather use the phones, thus cutting congestion by about forty five percent.

Finally, there’s the last step, which is to adopt some level of more involved self-service into your interface. This will allow customers to handle more of the routine administrative tasks with their accounts, without calling or emailing in to do it. It also reduces these tasks needing to be done by the support agents and administrators, thus allowing for the call service and administration service to be free to handle more pressing matters at any given time.

This is now possible due to the power of onboard systems. These programmable systems allow for a dynamic software-like experience with any given web interface. Being content aware, they can actually control the page themselves if programmed properly, adding automation and fool proofing to any self service model.

With this combination of software, independence and multi-channel contact branching, it is true that great customer support is no longer a problem. You just need to look at this three dimensionally, something we’ve all been guilty of not doing for far too long now.

 

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is Specialist in Customer Success and chief writer and editor of I Want It Now, a blog for Customer Service Experts. Follow her @StefWalkMe