How Customer Service Strategy Can Boost Customer Engagement

Customer Service Strategy

If you have smart, hard-working and enthusiastic agents and lack a well-defined service strategy, but still hope to deliver pleasing customer experience then let me tell you, your business is heading nowhere. Because “Hope” is definitely not a strategy! Intelligence, hard work, energy, and creativity are just the ingredients to deliver a good customer experience, but a right customer service strategy is what binds together all these elements to ensure a perfect recipe for customer engagement at scale.
The aim should be to create extraordinary customer engagements, in which customers are free to choose any available channel at any point of time in their conversation. Organizations need a defined strategy to provide the same level of customer service across various channels. Brands have managed to provide an unprecedented experience in individual channels, but failed to replicate the experience when the transition happens from one channel to another. Thus, resulting in poor customer service and increased customer churn.
The right customer service strategy helps you find customer engagement gaps:

  • Based on the collected data, articulate different customer self service journeys to better understand the flow of conversations.
  • Consider your personal self service experience too, while deciding on customer service journeys.
  • Determine your channel support based on these customer service journeys.
  • Form appropriate decisions to better understand the occurrence of escalations when shifting from self-service to assisted channels.
  • Based on your research about the gaps faced in current technology, search for a fast and reliable solution to support your multi channel strategy.

How Customer Service Strategy Improves Engagement

A well designed customer service strategy connects all the dots to design a seamless customer experience that your customers expect from your brand. Key areas impacted by customer service strategy are:

Ensure Smooth Channel Transition

Journey mapping is one of the important aspect for creating great user experience. When a customer switches from one channel to another, the details of the previous conversation are not completely transferred to the other channel, this leads to poor user experience.
In today’s multi channel customer service environment, it becomes imperative for organizations to hold on for a strategy that allows smooth transition of customers to the channel of their preference. As organizations are now moving towards providing omnichannel experience, it is essential for them to opt for a platform that can help them create seamless experience across all channels. Apart from this, organizations need to personalize the customer journey by analyzing session data, and text from chat or social media interaction to drive predictive models that can be used to better understand customer intent for improving the next phase of their journey.

Embrace Customer Journey Analytics

Having deep knowledge of the process flow involved in customer journey is very important for organizations, as it helps in refining future and current interactions. Special analytics tools help organizations understand cross channel customer interactions.
Moreover, organizations need to embrace the concept of customer engagement hub, in order to have a better grip on channels and analytics obtained. The shift of customers from one channel to another can point out critical issues like non-availability of agents, technical error, or channel failure. Awareness on these issues will help companies to improve their services and at the same time will also provide an option to prioritize the need of a preferred channel.

Ensure Consistent Knowledge Management across Channels

Often the knowledge gathered by customers through different channels become contradictory, leading to confusion and frustration. In contemporary times, customers believe in being self sufficient and use multiple channels to derive a conclusion. However, there might be a scenario when knowledge does not turn out to be constructive. For instance, having information provided through self-service channel is of no use if the knowledge base to which the agent has access states something slightly different. Therefore, it is necessary for organizations to provide consistent knowledge through one central repository, whether it is for self service or assisted channels, in order to remove the communication disparity between customers and the agents.
Customer expectations are rising and changing rapidly in today’s hyper-connected world, and therefore, you  need to fine-tune your current service strategy to align your goal with their expectations from the word go.

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