Whenever your brand promise connects with a consumer’s intention, a customer experience takes place. That’s because in the above scenario, the customer has both an intention and expectation. The intention is to do something (usually to buy products), while the expectation is that brands will deliver high value and a good buying experience every time. With that said, businesses sometimes lack the strategy, solutions, and skills to deliver on their customers’ expectations. In those cases, the result is a negative customer experience.
The moment where consumer intentions and expectations meet, however, also reveal opportunities. We understand that it’s hard to imagine a negative experience creating opportunities, but it opens your business up to:
- Growing and protecting its revenues better
- Improving its customer retention and conversion rates
- Driving quality operations
All in all, these are opportunities that can maximize your customer lifetime value and they are all closely related to customer service.
Turning customer service challenges into opportunities
To excel in customer service is to excel in understanding your customer’s needs and delivering them the way customers want. Sounds simple enough but delivering experiences that clients expect requires a few things. Firstly, you need to analyse customer data that helps you understand what they want and what they like. Secondly, you need to create buying experiences that are simplified, enjoyable, and effective. On the other hand, there are a few challenges that can keep you from achieving quality customer service. Some common challenges include:
- Experiences that don’t connect
- Increasing complexity of processes
- Operational expectations and demand
Customer service challenges
No matter what customer service challenge you may be experiencing, there is always an opportunity that comes with it. For example:
- To create connected experiences, engage with customers at their point of need.
- For less complexities in your buying processes, connect and integrate them
To manage operational demands well, deliver better profitability by optimising your costs and using insights strategically
Engage with customers at their point of need
Convenience, simplicity, and effective speed are basically the basis of every positive customer service experience. By giving customers access to 24/7 customer service and conversational AI, like chatbots, you reduce their efforts in this process. This is how you deliver on convenience, which results in increasing customer loyalties. Simplicity of processes is also addressed above on the side of the customer, but experiences need to be simplified for agents as well. You can use solutions like SAP Service Cloud, for instance, with features like integrated agent dashboards and data-based recommendations to assist your agents. Finally, we cannot forget the importance of consistency. To position your brand as a top customer service provider, most, if not all your customer experiences need to be on point.
Connect and integrate them
Connecting your data, processes, and even internal departments actually decreases the time and effort it takes to complete any actions within your business. That’s because integration makes all data and processes more accessible by any authorized personnel. With customer service in particular, such integration allows you to solve customer issues better, faster, and more effectively as data is easier to extract live while agents are handling customers.
Deliver better profitability
Your brand’s profitability is largely attached to the brand perception that consumers share on your business. To protect your brand image and, thus your revenue streams, you need to exceed customer expectations and using more proactive customer service approaches. You can also increase your profitability by optimizing the cost of resolving customer issues. How do you do this? Well, there are several ways, including:
- Streamlining your service
- Using automation and machine learning to accelerate issue resolution
- Adopting a solution like SAP Service Cloud to save time to value
However out of all the ways to improve your profitability through customer service, the most obvious way is to improve your customer satisfaction. How? Like we have said before, understanding your customer brings you closer to satisfying their customers needs. Something else you need to understand is customer service trends. This helps you understand markets better, which allows you to deliver experiences that resonate to existing and potential customers.
Taking the first step
If you are interested in truly maximising your customer service experiences, our expert advise would be to strongly consider using SAP Service Cloud. SAP Service Cloud has the tools to deliver everything you need for incredible customer service, including everything discussed above.
Start your journey to improved experiences by booking a free, no-obligation demo with us today.
