Customer Care

It’s no secret that the quality of companies’ customer service can make or break them. A good customer experience can help your brand, but a bad one can really destroy it. Consider the last time you wrote a review on a company.

The world of customer care is constantly evolving, as consumer preferences shift and new technologies become available. What’s become apparent recently, however, is that consumers’ level of comfort with automated customer care systems is changing.

Customer care, although increasingly important, is constantly evolving. Businesses know they need to excel at customer care in order to remain competitive, but with the pace at which consumer preferences for channels continue to change, it’s difficult to develop a comprehensive and effective customer care strategy.

What is an ideal customer experience? For me, it is natural, frictionless and productive; regardless of the brand I’m dealing with, the time of the day, or the channel I use. Now think about the different channels you use to interact with a brand – it could be the website, the mobile application or the trusty phone call to customer service.

It’s that time of year again — when customers are rushing left and right to their favorite retailers (in-store and online) to start or finish up holiday shopping. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday season are officially here — and while that can mean great things for businesses, it’s often a stressful and frustrating time of year for consumers.

By making the right investments in your customer service, you can ensure your customers always have positive things to say about you.

It’s no surprise that your business or brand’s reputation is critical. For better or for worse, in person or online, customers talk. And no matter how fantastic your company, agency, or the experience is once a customer steps through the front door, in many cases your reputation could be all that a potential customer has to work with before they decide to do business with you.

Artificial intelligence has developed to a point where it is impacting our everyday lives — including how we interact with the companies we do business with. Hear Phil Gray, EVP of Business Development at Interactions, discuss how AI is impacting customer service at some of the world’s largest enterprises.

It is impossible to ignore chatbots if you are even remotely following the customer care industry. They seem to be everywhere. Some tech publications even called 2016 ‘the year of chatbots’ and 2017 ‘the year when chatbots will actually make customers more productive.

Most companies are aware that the importance of providing a good customer service experience cannot be understated. Increasingly, more and more consumers are making purchasing decisions based on a company’s reputation for providing good customer service.

Your customers are busy. So when they interact with your company, they want to do so quickly and effectively. But, too often, consumers are slowed down by the customer service tactics that companies actually put in place to help.

Customer effort — the amount of time or effort a customer has to put in to get an issue resolved — can be complicated. There are a lot of different obstacles that can drive up customer effort, and measuring it isn’t always very straightforward, either. But the benefits of reducing customer effort can be substantial.