3 Ways to Rescue Text-Based Customer Service

Susannah Richardson looks at why text-based customer service is failing and how it can be improved.

Delivering excellent customer experience is vital if you are going to win and retain customers and grow revenues, whatever industry sector you are in. But while customers are getting more demanding, recent research is suggesting that UK brands are failing to improve service levels.

According to research, one of the key areas UK brands are failing in is text-based customer service. Customers are complaining that channels such as email, social and webchat are still not delivering the speed quality they expect from customer service.

Supporting research has acknowledged the scale of the problem, with 60% of contact centres taking more than a day to answer a customer email, and a significant 8% not even responding to emails for more than a working week.

With channels such as webchat predicted to overtake traditional voice channels by 2020, and generation Y consumers poised to outspend baby boomers within the next two years, businesses need to find a way to successfully manage text-based channels in order to improve the overall level of customer service in the UK.

Here are three key areas that organisations need to consider when improving performance of text based channels for customer service.

1. Move from a multichannel strategy to omnichannel

Whilst many organisations are providing their customers with a choice of channels, not many are providing a consistent level of customer service across these channels.

Businesses need therefore to consider driving their multichannel strategy forward and becoming an omnichannel customer service centre. Omnichannel customer service provides a consistent level of customer service across all channels and allows a customer to start an enquiry on one channel and seamlessly transition to another.

From the agents’ perspective, they are equipped to handle all channels from a single system and can transition the customer between channels.

For example, if an agent is on webchat to a customer but the topic of conversation becomes too complex, the agent is able to escalate the webchat to a phone call and retain all customer information and data on the same system.

2. Use a blend of assisted and automated response

A key way to better manage this rapid increase in text-based customer service in the contact centre is to offer customer self-service by blending automated and assisted response.

The technology is able to identify the text-based customer enquiry using text analytics and ensure any simple requests are responded to immediately via automated response, whilst escalating more complex requests to live agents for rapid and high quality assisted service.

Agents are equipped to provide immediate and personalised response via their desktop, which will be populated with all customer history and related interactions whatever the channel.

It has been proven that this type of self-service solution can typically reduce by over 60% the volume of customer requests that require human intervention.

3. Understand and act on contact centre metrics

Contact centres are still struggling to really understand what metrics they should be using and how to create actionable insight to improve performance.

Organisations need to decide which metrics work together to provide a holistic view of the organisation, across multiple departments and channels.

While an individual metric does have a value, it is best not to focus on one. Instead, businesses should select a combination of task-related (e.g. AHT and Sales Volume) and performance-related metrics (e.g. NPS and Customer Effort) that support the overall business objectives.

With thanks to Susannah Richardson at mplsystems