Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.
Being a small business does not mean one can afford to be less responsive to customers. Mobile and cloud technologies are enabling deeper interactions today.
Customer service and the cloud
It could be as simple as missing a call. Or getting back to a customer a few hours late. Perhaps the call center staff didn’t recognize her as a top-tier, returning customer of many years.
For whatever reason, when a customer gets upset today, the repercussions can go far and wide for the company serving her. With the widespread use of social media, a bad experience is just a tweet away from being shared with hundreds of other users.
One bad experience can ripple through the Internet, as companies big and small will testify. Indeed, the consequence of poor customer service, or the perception of it, is something all too familiar in today’s hyper-connected markets.
Miss a call and a potential business deal is gone. Reply to a customer late and he takes his business to another company that responds more readily. Fail to identify your biggest customers and they could turn into the biggest advocates for a rival.
In a consumer survey by research firm Harris Interactive in 2011, 79% of those who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored. In the United States, 89% of consumers took their business elsewhere due to a poor customer experience.
While fully understanding the issues, small and medium-size businesses often find it hard to offer a seamless customer experience. In particular, multichannel customer service is a tough task because of the limited resources at hand to monitor and respond to voice calls, e-mail messages and social media queries.
This problem might just get harder to solve. For younger Generation-Y consumers, electronic messaging, social media and smartphone applications are preferred over traditional voice calls when interacting with a company, according to a recent survey by Dimension Data.
Even older consumers from Generation X, the researchers added, are beginning to shift toward the newer, digital channels.
How should companies address these trends? For a start, create a single view for customer information, products and history so staff members can get both the big picture as well as drill down to micro segments of a customer’s engagement with the company.
Companies still have a way to go to address these issues. Only 47% of the 800 participants Dimension Data surveyed in 79 countries had a single-view system to track customer data. Fewer than 33% share the data they have throughout the organization, according to the survey.
Silos in a company’s various departments blunt the edge from any business intelligence that can be derived from a customer’s multichannel interaction. Without coherent, modern contact center capabilities, companies end up not knowing their customers as well as they should, losing them as a result.
The good news is technology is providing a way of overcoming limitations of the past. Cloud technology could prove to be the game changer in multichannel customer service in the years to come.
The researchers from Dimension Data said as much, after their extensive study. Among those it surveyed, 77.6% said cloud technology had helped cut costs to serve customers.
Another 65% already using hosted or cloud-based technology solutions agreed that it provided access to new and enhanced functionality. For 64.8% of the respondents, the technology improved flexibility.
Clearly, early adopters of cloud-based call center technologies are reaping the benefits of streamlining and unifying their multichannel touch points. It’s also important to emphasize the inherent flexibility that a cloud-based operation offers – mobile and wireless connections could be only a smartphone app away. The result is more responsiveness, and deeper, more meaningful customer interactions.
For many companies, the bottom line is clear. By turning to more agile cloud-based call center capabilities, they will be seizing more opportunities, generating revenue that could otherwise have been missed through inadequate customer service.
