Customer Service is all About R.A.C.E

Customer Service is all About R.A.C.E

Business and customer service are undergoing changes that make the ties between business profits and customer service stronger than ever. This has created a business climate where the cost of poor customer service can mean the end of a business. The answer to this broad challenge for all businesses is to leverage customer support solutions to impact R.A.C.E.

This acronym is a simple way to break down the four building blocks of excellent customer service: Resolution, Availability, Cost Reduction / Control, and Efficient Operations. To improve these aspects of a business, you must improve how technology impacts people and processes to better serve the customer through IT support solutions.

According to a recent PwC Future of Customer Experience Survey, 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. But by looking at each aspect of R.A.C.E, businesses can turn loss to gain. In fact, 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.

Resolution

By focusing on personalized service and fast resolution of customer fulfillment and queries, businesses can create a customer experience that drives loyalty and increased profits. Today’s customer services go beyond multichannel client communications to omnichannel via live chat, chatbots, SMS, email, social networks, and live video among others.

The goal is to move beyond multichannel communication approaches to omnichannel to eliminate silos that hamper fast customer resolutions. This requires customer service, communication, networking, and applications systems within call centers and network infrastructure enabling:

• First call resolution (FCR)
• Frictionless customer experiences
• Customer support and business process fulfillment 0% downtime.

That may require business technical support for contact center solutions and business systems that provide integration with IoT devices and technical products used by end-users as one example. Expert call center agent support is another way to drive fast resolution by augmenting internal services with third-party agent support services to meet growing customer service demands.

Cloud solutions can make employee access to data, applications, and customer service resolution through e-commerce and product services a frictionless experience. Customer support solutions should always pursue FCR of customer needs and queries via connected and integrated systems supporting people and processes.

Availability

Communication and customer service depend on availability in the digital age via internet access. That includes everything from data security in transit and at rest to having sufficient bandwidth, Quality of Service (QoS) and connectivity. These aspects of availability must be in place and go beyond the network to unify data and application access across business branches separated by distance.

Reliable, resilient, and secure connection options for your business from the business network to the edge is vital for availability. Availability hinges on connections that are stable, secure, and capable of meeting growing demand. This may include fiber, FTTN/DSL, ADSL or Ethernet over Copper. The right decision and implementation require IT support solutions tailored to specific business needs, regions and markets across Canada.

Cost Reduction and Control

Fulfilling the growing customer experience expectations puts the burden on business technology and infrastructure to improve access and control while reducing the costs to businesses. This can be done by providing solutions capable of meeting broad communication channel needs for the business workforce and customer interactions that:

• Lowers costs
• Meet scalability needs
• Provides optimum data security and compliance
• Contains cost of IT system and process growth to meet customer demand

Unified Communication Platforms are one example of ways to provide business with control over how they communicate internally along with customer-facing communication in an integrated way. Cloud services enable businesses to leverage broad omnichannel communications integration scalability to control costs by eliminating excess capacity through IT support solutions for:

• Cloud storage
• SaaS access
• Bandwidth QoS
• Integrated VoIP phone systems
• Video conferencing
• Remote application access for a mobile workforce

The proper planning and implementation of these solutions through business technical support can provide businesses with powerful collaboration and communication tools that deliver immediate ROI. They also contain costs and increase profitability by transforming systems and functions from cost centers to profit centers and Capex to Opex.

Efficient Operations

Although businesses run on IT and technology, those systems must work transparently and flawlessly for efficient operations. The best approach is to develop an IT system and infrastructure strategies that put resolution, availability, and cost reduction as uncompromising goals. This enables customer support solutions to deliver optimum efficiency and increase productivity in operations and strategic delivery of services. The payoff is a resilient business that increases customer satisfaction and loyalty along with business growth and the bottom line.