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A customer promise is a simple reassurance that a brand will deliver on what a customer expects. It can be as simple as “We promise to deliver your pizza in less than 30-minutes or you get it free” to “We will provide you with the best after sales service”. But the thing about the customer promise is that brands need to mean it and deliver on it.
Because no matter if you’re engaging with a customer via phone, email, social media or AI Chatbot, today if you promise action in two hours and deliver it in three, a customer will be unsatisfied.
Here are three ways you can evolve to make sure that your employees are keeping customer promises, and therefore, keeping customers happy.
As a response to the world changing in the past year, customer service kicked into overdrive to deliver to on customer needs and meet an new level of engagement
The fourth edition of the State of Service report reveals that organisations have received a surge in demand for customer service, with 75% of service professionals saying managing case volume has become more challenging during the pandemic. And it’s not just the volume, it’s the complexity of cases.
The report reinforces the importance of agents’ soft skills when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experience. Of course, no surprise, that after the challenges of 2020 empathy is pivotal to this, with 71% of consumers saying that businesses that show empathy during the pandemic have earned their loyalty.
Investment in training is required not only for soft skills but also for working with new technologies like AI. Quality, ongoing training and the right technology can help service teams be more engaged and productive while also delivering outstanding customer experiences.
Field service workers are becoming pivotal to the front face of brands, so arming them with the same capabilities as their office-based colleagues should be viewed as key to the evolution of modern service. The State of Service report found that despite the public health crises 70% of consumers say they still prefer in-person service appointments over alternatives.
This not only shows the strategic importance of field service, but that customers also base their perception on a brand on their personal experience of interaction with the company. So a field worker can be a factor in driving new revenue streams and brand differentiation.
As the COVID-19 pandemic drove more people online, it also coincided with a rise in customers moving towards self-service options – a trend that has two-thirds of surveyed service professionals crediting as easing case volume.
Possibly the most interesting area is the impact of AI and chatbots on self-service and the customer service industry more broadly. Since 2018 there has been a 67% increase in organisation’s using chatbots.
Like all of these things, the true success of the implementation of AI will be determined by the customer. One of the critical areas of customer service is empathy and not only rectifying a problem or answering a query, but also ensuring that the customer leaves with a positive sentiment for the brand.
Customer service is all about making the customer feel good about the product, brand or company. While the automation of repetitive non-interactive tasks has very little downside, when it comes to personal interaction and relationship building, the less personally we deal with customers, the weaker the relationship becomes and disloyalty becomes easier for the customer to justify. We need to use technology, but in the right way: to deliver on our promises to our customers.
If you’re after more insights on customer service, download the latest State of Service report today.
