National Customer Service Week: How technology can enable a great customer experience

But keeping them satisfied isn’t “a one-time tick-box exercise, it’s an ongoing activity,” explains Richard Sampson, Chief Revenue Officer at Tax Systems. “If we want to support customers, we need to build relationships with them.”

Whilst this does take time and effort, the long-term benefits are significant. Sampson encourages business leaders to “take a step back and look at the bigger picture – the entire customer journey. By viewing it as a customer lifecycle, we can look at how we can add value to our customers, or prospective customers, at every touch point they have with us as a company. Customers that feel supported and valued are more loyal and will advocate on a business’s behalf, subsequently kickstarting the journeys of future customers, and so on.”

Luckily for businesses, as expectations have grown, so has the ability of technology to aid with providing great customer service and building long-term relationships with customers.

The power of technology

One of the most obvious and relatable use cases for technology in customer service is retailers. Everyone has experienced the frustration of being stuck in a busy shop, unable to find what you are looking for and with queues so long that you cannot ask a shop assistant for help. But, as Rob Shaw, SVP of Global Sales for Fluent Commerce, explains, technology has the potential to revolutionise the shopping experience “by providing all employees with the right data and authority to act on customer requests and complaints. An order management system (OMS) will enable customer service staff to easily find the details of an order, wherever it was placed, offering up-to-date information. Combined with a real time view of inventory, this will enable staff to better answer customer questions – such as if they can find an out-of-stock item online or in a different store location.”

But, even with technology at their fingertips and all the data necessary to answer questions, customer service assistants can still face challenging situations with customers. “For those in customer-facing roles, an encounter with a challenging customer is almost inevitable,” notes Koma Gandy, Vice President, Leadership and Business Segment at Skillsoft. “The key is to handle these situations with poise and empathy to transform a negative situation into a positive one.

“Employees need low-stakes ways to practise, build and retain those skills well before they need to apply them to real-world conversations. All too often, their practice ground is a real-life interaction with an unhappy customer, which is a high-stakes trial-and-error approach that also has a high probability of not delivering a successful outcome.”

Gandy advises that regular training should be provided for all customer service assistants to enhance their confidence when faced with these difficult scenarios. She recommends programmes such as Skillsoft’s “CAISY Conversation AI Simulator, which provides customer service staff with a safe space to practise important conversations they are likely to encounter in real-life, such as dealing with an irate customer or handling a refund request. CAISY plays the role of the customer in the conversation, providing employees the opportunity to practise difficult conversations and receive personalised feedback and guidance to help guide employees’ ongoing professional development. By helping employees navigate tough interactions, organisations can build stronger customer relationships that will reflect positively on their brands and their bottom line.”

Yet customer service is not just a priority for consumer-facing industries. Business-to-business (B2B) organisations also must prioritise customer service, as it can be a crucial differentiator, especially in competitive markets such as technology. Claire Rowland, Head of Client Experience at Node4, shares her insight into how managed service providers (MSPs) must prioritise customer service because “as MSPs manage their client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems, it is crucial that round-the-clock support is available. It is no help if a support team is only available from 9am-5pm on weekdays if a client’s IT system – which is a 24/7 system – crashes at 5:30pm on a Friday. They need help immediately.”

She continues: “An MSP shouldn’t just be a technology provider. It should be a trusted partner. That is how real value is added and a strong, long-term client relationship is forged. Because of this, at Node4 we focus on technology-enabled outcomes. We put our client’s problems first and find a solution that fixes them, rather than merely selling products and services.”

AI: the future of customer service?

One element of technology that has had an explosive impact on customer service over the past few months is artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically generative AI. Its ability to generate content and interact with humans gives it the ability to become a customer service assistant, and many organisations have been reaping the benefits by implementing the tech into chatbots, voice assistants, and self-service portals. This can speed up response times – no more waiting on hold for hours for the next assistant to be available! – which improves customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Simon Bull, Head of Sales at Aqilla, recognises the advantages of AI in “freeing up staff to do more high-value work and deliver personalised, crafted and thoughtful responses” but argues that “top-class customer service is still about person-to-person engagement.”

Dave Howard, Global Marketing Director, Retail at Intellias, echoes this, agreeing that, despite the boom of AI, "businesses must not forget the importance of allowing time for human-to-human interaction. After all, there is no personality without a person. Where the importance of customer services to a business is undeniable, organisations must remember to appreciate those that provide the human touch to customer relations.”

To conclude, Bull summarises: “No matter what job we do, most days, we’re customers who might need support and customer service providers who need to assist colleagues or clients. It might sound terribly old-fashioned to say, but good manners, patience and empathy will go a long way in making us better at providing support to those who need it and receiving it from those who are trying to assist us."