Customer service magic: How to make every encounter an opportunity
Retailers can perform service magic by turning every customer interaction – good or bad – into great experiences that fuel business growth.
It took the first 10 years of this century to master the essentials of customer experience. Now, 20 years in, the challenge is less about creating engagement than improving it. This is where leaders are focusing their efforts, specifically on adapting CX for their industry. Case in point: the tech industry.
Business leaders are effectively customizing customer experience and using customer service to do it. The high-tech industry, in particular, can use service to help mitigate problems within the sector, as well as take advantage of the singularly digital nature of its products.
Service: Tech industry’s big advantage
For instance, the supply chain strain caused by component shortages, shipping capacity and trade disputes has hit the tech industry hard and that affects CX. Service helps to resolve issues, keep the customer informed, and allows the company to stay in control of the narrative.
Trends like everything as a service provide an opportunity to embed customer service into the product. Adding a customer service layer connected to real-time monitoring changes the nature of service. Every service interaction, whether it’s proactive, reactive, from a human or a machine, can be managed in its entirety, from start to finish.
And as hardware becomes commoditized, tech brands need something other than products to make them stand out. Service gives customers the extra value they can’t get from buying a commoditized product, and allows companies to give it to them. That value can take many forms and it’s full of nuances that make a huge difference to the customer experience.
A simple fact such as where your support is located becomes a series of considerations that affect your service. Do you have global locations to offer 24-hour support – i.e. across time zones – so whenever a customer calls, they’ll get through?
Are the locations equally capable, so a customer isn’t left having to call at a certain time to make sure they get the better location (or at least, not the worst one)? Are you capable of switching support at the end of one location’s working day to another where they’re just starting work, so the problem is continually worked on?
Service is also a revenue generator. An SAP survey of business leaders in high tech and manufacturing found that aftermarket sales and service made up a high proportion of their total business: 32% of those surveyed said it accounts for 41-60%, and 15% said it makes up 60-80%.
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High-tech products need high-tech service
In Q3 2020, a quiet year by commercial tech sales standards, Dell sold 502,409 servers. That’s a lot of customers to take care of. They depend on those servers and can’t withstand downtime. If there’s a problem, the server needs to be fixed or replaced as quickly as possible — not next week or tomorrow, but right now.
This is a chance for the company to prove its worth to the customer and add value. It’s the start of an experience that, on the surface. appears to be a simple use-case scenario: customer calls, explains problem, agent sends out replacement server, problem solved.
But beneath this sequence is a series of actions that mean every time the customer needs something, it’s met by an action from the company. This works at all levels, even down to shipping the new unit in reusable packaging so the customer can easily return the old one.
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Make it quick, make it easy
Companies that make complex, expensive tech products need to provide customer service that’s simple, free (or at least good value) and quick. B2B buyers expect customer service to be like the service they receive in the consumer world, if not better.
The complexity of many B2B products and relationships, especially in high-tech industries, demands a service operation to accommodate them. And in turn, a system (or systems) then can achieve this.
The key word here is integration. Integration beats just about everything when it comes to running successful service systems; integration with other systems, across departments, and with customer data.
You can have the most beautiful interface and a perfectly harmonized appearance across every department, but if those departments don’t know what the others have been up to, it’s not going to be much use.
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Forging new frontiers
Conceptually this is straightforward: it doesn’t require a leap of faith to determine that integrated systems are going to work better than a bunch of unintegrated ones. Executing it is harder. Creating a solution that connects every part of your business, especially on a global scale, is a challenge.
Achieving this requires two qualities: a composable software architecture, which allows you to build and expand as you need, and a low-code/no-code means of developing apps within the solution. Both help create a solution that can be adapted quickly by the users, without the need to call in IT departments or buy more software.
And that gives you the ability to meet your customers’ needs when they need you to. Customer service is shaping up to be the new frontier of technological advancement.
