A Customer-Driven Future For Business | The Future of Work on Customer Service (Part 4)

The employee experience is cemented in the business model already, and leaders are looking into creating a better experience for their clients and customers.

Businesses and companies are allowing their customers to take charge, which has raised the standard for services worldwide. 

The customer wants to feel as if they are preferred by every department in the company, whether they are speaking to sales or customer service. Being called by their first name and knowing their needs even before they say it is a boost for them.

 “Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps, Experience Architect, 9Inch 

Hence, all customer-facing departments are beginning to collaborate, if not merge, with one another. Marketing, sales, and service are innovating their departments to provide the best customer service for their clients.

Saying Goodbye to Email Chains

Email chains are fast becoming a thing of the past. All communications are now done on collaboration platforms such as Slack, which allows teams to create dedicated channels for departments and for specific needs.

Zoom has also revolutionized the way we meet. Video call meetings are faster, more efficient, and it gives everyone an opportunity to be heard. Zoom has taken over Skype, giving more companies the opportunity to maintain open lines of communication, whenever and wherever participants may be.

Aside from Slack, businesses and companies can also collaborate on apps like Notion and Asana for scheduling, taking minutes for meetings, and campaign planning.

With these apps, there’s no waiting time, since all communication is done in real time. Replies only take seconds compared to minutes and hours waiting for an email to be read and replied to. There’s no need to physically cross offices anymore. These collaborative platforms have eliminated company boundaries, so that there are no communication limits between team members and customers.

Since more companies are veering away from email and migrating towards more open communication, they have become faster and more efficient with regards to communication.

Moving to collaboration and meeting apps such as Slack, Zoom, Notion, and Asana can help your company grow internally and have better communication lines with your clients and customers.

Revolutionizing the Digital Environment

Customer-facing departments such as marketing teams, the sales department, and the customer service department have migrated online and has taken in more employees to cater to the needs of their clients and customers, no matter where they are in the world or what time zone they are in.

In an attempt to stay safe and avoid large crowds, customers are now turning to online shopping for everything they need. From groceries to clothes; from pet needs to plants, customers rely on online shops for all their needs.

There are almost no more customer offices, since all shopping transactions are done online. Customers require assistance online since they cannot, or choose not to visit physical stores anymore. Returns and refunds are also done online. 

Creating an Effective Digital Customer Journey

The next step for businesses and companies is to figure out how to provide excellent online consumer support and how to guide their clients through the digital shopping and consumption experience.

“The information that’s normally scattered across applications gets concentrated in the right place in Slack. The integrations become essential to how we work every day. By harnessing real-time insights from our staff on the ground for campaigns, then sharing that info on Slack, we now reach more than 1 million people each month through Instagram to promote our free service to users.” – James Coxon, Chief Product Officer, Stax 

Aside from digital customer support and providing an interface that is easy for the customer to navigate, all other shopping and consumption experiences are provided online. Sales deals, marketing campaigns, processing refunds and returns to online banks and e-wallets, and handling troubleshooting are all done via chat and email. Businesses and companies need to step up to provide a great digital environment for their clients and customers.

Integrating processes for better customer experience

Having more operations roles in marketing, service, and sales can decrease inefficiency. Having tech stacks can add value to customer service and to the company as well, and your company will have seamless service processing.

Productivity will increase and communication will be better if you integrate your communications platform with your operations apps. If you have Jira, Asana, PingDom, or any other app, connecting them with your Slack app can help your company move across departments easier.

Faster Response Times

Innovating the way, you listen to your customers can help your company provide personalized services to them. Integrating all channels possible into your company’s Slack can help all departments help your customer in the best way possible.

A collaboration hub can centralize all departmental communication so that anyone does not get lost in translation. Since the digital world is a highly volatile place, there are so many changes that occur daily. Customers adapt different behaviors each day and it becomes hard to plot and understand trends, especially if there are no clear communication lines to relay changes and growing trends.

 “A good design shows respect for your customer and you’re either respectful of their time or respectful of what it is that they desire, and so it makes it a very fundamental element to everything that you do.” – Penny Wilson, CEO, Getting On Board

Customers are relying on all available channels for support, including chat, SMS, service channels, and even community forums that are available in products, websites, and apps. This goes to show that even asking for help can be done online, and customers are settling for options where they can get service for free, as opposed to going to a physical store and asking someone to help them with their problem. Ever since the digital world came to light, more customers have opted to exist in that, which created the need for companies to innovate and revolutionize the way they provide service.

A 180° Turn for Customer Experience

In the new customer experience imperative, customer-facing departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service are merging to provide clients and customers with the best experience possible on all available platforms.

 “You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” – Annette Franz, Coach, CustomerThink

Data, insights, and apps are more integrated, which means that departments can easily access, monitor, and control information that goes across the company communications system. There are almost few to no barriers, allowing team members to communicate with leaders and vice versa. 

The company’s digital world has now transcended into a universe, and the information highway is now free of traffic. There are more people to answer customers in a live chat setting, and there are chatbots that provide comprehensive answers in lieu of live agents.

Collaboration among teams and departments, including the leaders, are now easier, since communication is centralized. More communication experts are also getting roles in companies and businesses, since migrating to the digital universe requires that all customers be provided service, regardless of where they are in the world and what time zone they are on.

Final word

Customers won’t have to wait for a day or two to have their inquiries answered. There are no office hours to speak of, since there are more specialists around the world to provide service. 

There are also no more interdepartmental email chains and data silos, which can be quite annoying and can decrease efficiency.

The new customer experience is now fully operational in the digital universe, and companies and businesses are taking advantage of it, so they can provide their own customers and clients with an experience like no other.

Up Next: The Future of Work on Automation

As technology is improving at rapid rate, we find ways to make our lives easier, both in work and in other aspects of our lives. Which is why there is a push for a lot of companies for automation, both to improve the quality of work, and make everything consistent.

Though there are still things that we can’t automate, and some that might best be left on human hands. We talk about this and more on the next installment of our Future of Work Blog series.

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