The Customer Service Experience
The customer service experience should be positive and consistent across multiple channels. Many businesses are not able to provide a truly consistent experience across multiple channels during any given inquiry process.
Customers should be able to seamlessly transition between online (self-service) and offline (assisted service) channels.Organizations should provide consistent and integrated views of their companies and products across a variety of self-service and assisted channels.
Defining the key elements of an effective customer interaction ecosystem may help bring some clarity to the situation. Most customer interaction platforms require the capability to manage customer queries across two primary sub-categories: Assisted Service and Self-Service.
Assisted Service provides or enables human interaction with customers via phone or face-to-face interaction as well as the Internet through e-mail, chat, or click-to-call. This type of service is best suited to complex, multi-faceted interaction which requires a trained customer service agent.
Self-Service solutions offer support via electronic means and allow customers to access information quickly or to perform simple transactions, usually via the Internet. They include signing up for a variety of status quo offerings, searching for answers, gaining information, or perusing FAQs. They also include next generation solutions such as virtual assistants and instant answer agents.
Effective Self-Service transitions qualified sales and service leads to the most appropriate assisted-service channels. The Assisted Service agents must be able to access the same information the customer does and must be able to see the information entered by the customer.
A positive cross-channel experience increases the ability to achieve first contact resolution. Today’s businesses must deploy the software and train their agents in order to:
- identify the customer goal or need
- enable the customer to access consistent information quickly
- connect the customer to the best service channels for the identified need or goal
- provide clear, consistent answers
