Every business has to serve its customers – that is the basis on which a successful business runs. But it is also true that businesses have to serve their employees. If a company takes from their employees and gives nothing back, it’s going to leave behind a staff of embittered angry individuals with a sky-high turnover rate.
Customer service is constantly evolving, and the best customer service representatives (CSRs) are able to adjust their skillset to keep up. With these well-developed and specialized skill sets, these professionals are attractive to even the world’s largest tech companies. Here’s a look at the customer service representative skills you’ll need to get these companies’ attention.
The life of a support agent is no simple job. Each day they face a ton of queries varying from ‘how-to’ questions that only need a canned response, to complicated issues that require to be sorted out with the help of different teams. The complexity and volume of queries notwithstanding, customers are increasingly expecting immediate fixes to their problems, so much so that 53% of customers expect brands to reply to their queries within an hour of contact.
We’ve all been there – a recent purchase arrived late, you got something completely different than what you ordered, or it came damaged. You’re not happy, and rightly so – you just spent some hard-earned cash on that new product. Time to go to the computer, write a frustration-fueled email and give them a piece of your mind – you’ll never shop from them again!
It’s no secret that how well you serve customers will define your company’s long term success. In fact, great customer service leads to better customer loyalty, higher revenue, and lower costs. But if you have to focus on the customer and become a service-oriented organization, it’s not merely enough to attain a passable grade. You have to strive for service excellence to reap its benefits.
Automated phone technology, such as interactive voice response (IVR) menus, can save businesses time and money on customer support. These solutions route callers to the right people without the help of a human operator. Larger businesses should consider IVR menus to streamline the customer support experience. They should not replace account managers and instead are optimized for streamlining after hours and emergency support communication.
When two of the world’s most recognized fine watch brands, Citizen and Bulova, merged in 2018, they faced more than just the challenge of maintaining their distinctive identities, unique designs, and technologies. With one support organization having to serve customers for both brands, it became clear that streamlining the way the customer service team operated needed to be a priority—or else the customer experience would suffer. At issue?
Customers are engaging with more connected devices than ever before—they’re getting around on smart electric scooters, slyly reading text messages on Apple Watches during meetings, and telling Amazon Alexa which Cardi B song to play next—all of which is part of a phenomenon known as the Internet of Things (IoT). And, this is only the tip of the hyper-connected iceberg. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that there will be 41.6 billion connected devices in 2025.
