There’s a whole new world out there when it comes to customer service. Social, mobile, connected, and cloud technologies have created unprecedented customer expectations.

Today’s customers want service on every channel and every device, anytime, anywhere. And they want their service experience with your company to be one thing: effortless.

Companies that fail to harness the power of today’s technologies to engage their customers in new ways will lose their customers to companies who will. The companies that make service easy for their customers will drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

Here are five ways to accomplish exactly that:

1. Create a single view of your customers

A major key to providing effortless experiences for customers is ensuring that all of your service agents have the same, single view of them. This enables the agents to deliver the consistent and contextual service that customers of today demand.

2. Deliver consistent customer engagement on every channel

Each time a customer contacts your company, they expect every employee to have visibility into all of their past interactions with you, regardless of channel. A standout feature of a customer engagement platform is its ability to keep context about customers as they are moved across channels.

3. Equip agents with a single source of knowledge

If you are going to provide the frictionless service experience customers expect, you must equip all of your agents, employees, and even customers with access to the right answers. Knowledge based solutions that are connected, mobile, and predictive ensure they can deliver on this.

4. Empower customers with self-service and mobile options

Instead of picking up the phone to dial a customer support number, today’s customer would sometimes rather do a quick Google search from their phone, ask their social network for advice, or get answers via your company’s website. Empower your customers by providing them with mobile self-service and communities that are available 24/7.

5. Embed service everywhere

You must be able to provide the next level of mobile service to customers of today by embedding service in every mobile app. They want immediate, personalized service in context, wherever they are, on any device. And where they are, more often than not, is on their mobile device, using an app.

For much more on how these five ways can help you and your business provide the effortless customer service consumers of today expect, download this new free e-book.