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What is the True Value of Delivering Great Customer Service?

What is the True Value of Delivering Great Customer Service?

When it comes to customer service, it does not matter what country or region your organisation operates from or in, it is crucial to get it right! Adapting to changing trends from the USA, Australia, United Kingdom (UK), Europe and beyond is just one part of a complex set of issues that influences other vital components of an organisation.

While most companies have goals and tactics in place to improve their performance in customer service, their strategies are not keeping pace with the increasing expectations of customers around the globe.   

How Important is Customer Service?

According to Genesys’ 2019 Asia Pacific Consumer Research (APCR), 54% of buying decisions are influenced by the “reputation for customer service”.

CEOs and managers don’t need to read the whole report to learn that 53% of the respondents “will pay more for superior customer service.What they should do is lead their organisation back to basics by remembering that customers and prospects have one simple need when they reach out to your organisation: 

Resolve my issue.”

Easier said than done, so what is the solution?

Below are a couple of steps to start you off in the right direction:

  1. Pick the right Knowledge Management System and then setup your controlled-knowledge base so that it will function as a single source of truth for your organisational products, processes and policies
  2. Populate your single source of truth with answers, clear process guides and keywords to reach them rather than information or articles they need to read and interpret
  3. Make your single source of truth accessible via any communication channel through which your customers or prospects want to connect with you (live chat support, website forms, apps, social media, phone etc.)

It isn’t rocket science, but it requires the right software and people in the organisation to ensure the knowledge is clear, accurate and accessible. Remember that when someone calls a support line, interacts online, or visits your enquiries desk with a question, they want a quick answer. And be mindful that your brand is on the line every time.

Using the Right Tools to Satisfy Customers

Organisational silos and various platforms serving segregated touchpoints are major challenges to delivering a consistent and smooth customer experience. A 2019 global study of senior customer service and tech professionals by Ecosystm called out the increasing demand by consumers to self-serve, and the growing number of touchpoints through which they expect to do it.

In the study, 86% of respondents interacted with customers across at least three channels or touchpoints. You can imagine or maybe you have experienced the difficulty in managing at least three different knowledge systems and a customer who has received at least three different answers.

This is where a purpose-built Customer Service Knowledge Management System excels, providing one system that feeds all channels and departments, delivering answers quickly and correctly to agents.

To make a quick comparison, let’s look at a popular alternative, the Document or File Management System. It will direct staff or customers to a document where they must sift through a wall of text to find the answer they need.

What does that look like in practice? Here are some examples:

  • A customer has called your contact centre and is put on hold while the rep is searching for the answer they need: their patience levels are on borrowed time. The APCR study showed that 46% of consumers say that being put on hold for 5 minutes or longer is their biggest annoyance.
  • A customer is searching your site or app for product/service details. If they are confronted with PDFs to download and multiple screens to scroll through they will become frustrated and may begin a new search – a search for a competitor who has taken the friction away by integrating their knowledge base into a self-serve application on the website where customers can access these details easily. 

Customer Service Knowledge Management solutions are also developed with smart search features that take staff and customers directly to the answer. There’s no need to put customers on hold or transfer the call and the average call handling times can be reduced by as much as 30%.

When dealing with complex policies, refunds and product models, the functionality of a KMS like livepro breaks it down into step by step tree maps, offering different paths of knowledge answers based on the customers responses. This speeds up a usually lengthy process and helps remove any margin of error when it comes to these complex calls or interactions. Over time you will notice a significant improvement in customer satisfaction, accuracy and compliance.

If you are interested in learning more about livepro Customer Service Knowledge Management Systems, contact us today for a live demo or free trial showing you the various features and capabilities of livepro.

We also have a range of case studies and a whitepaper to demonstrate how livepro Knowledge Management has helped improve customer service and CX satisfaction scores for a range of organisations, councils and corporations across the United Kingdom (UK), United States of America (USA), Australia and APAC.

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Shannon Turner
Shannon Turner

Author

Published
Mon, Nov 16 2020

5:37 PM
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