What Customer Service Channel Should Your Business Go For?

“Just having a satisfied customer isn’t good enough anymore.  If you want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” –Ken Blanchard

It is also said that “Companies that deliver consistent, quality customer service across multiple channels retain 89% of their customer.” 

Customer service is a great asset to companies in the present time. It is not even up for debate anymore. It is now integral to the growth of businesses, thus conducive to growth. While in the past customer service was mainly through call centers and the medium was usually a cold call to customers with no work on the “relationship” aspect of the servicing. Servicing in terms is used interchangeably for both the sellers of products and services. It is thus important to understand how to satisfy the customer and beyond. It is intrinsic to company morale boosted through a happy clientele base. 

You can see this service quality in some great company names, like Nike, Zara, Nordstrom, Walmart, and many such brands with more under the luxurious wings. In the U.S. with companies based on services, many give customer service importance and work to improve services by keeping their customers first. One such example is of Optimum customer service pay bill option, allowing the customers the option to move to bill online, paperless, with lesser taxes, and never on due as convenience saves time. 

This shows how customer service should be a priority and satisfying customers is just the tip of the iceberg. It is about making relationships and keeping the customer happy in the long term. It is hence vital to adopt channels that will work and improves performance. 

The 6 Most Effective Type Of Customer Service Channels To Adopt:

ThisIt is no longer a time where one channel of customer service works like phone calls or the personal presence of a representative. With the advent of multiple online channel forms, there has to be a multi-level form of customer service to support business operations. There also has to be efficient and well-trained staff that knows how to transform customer service into a relationship-building approach toward the end goal of customer retention. 

Here are some of the channels you can use to manage all types of clientele bases:

Live Chat/Chatbots

Live chat support is the best when it comes to convenience and giving your customer a timely reply, generating higher levels of customer satisfaction. It has been studied that Live chat support provides the customer with the most satisfaction when they need instant help for something on the website or while product hunting. This is a high percentage of about 79% of customers with brands having extensive online services or products. 

Meanwhile, real-time interaction with humans or chatbots bridges the gap between a customer and seller’s relationship, making customer loyalty a plus through consistent efforts. Chatbots provide better and more prompt assistance to customers. With a knowledge system fed into the AI, people can quickly ask and resolve multiple queries ask and resolve multiple queries timely and through self-assistance without having to wait on calls or be put on even the slightest wait times. 

Email

This is the most used platform for reaching and digital marketing online. Email is a great way to allow for asynchronous communication,. wWhile one resource can work or have a handful of conversations under their wing. 

Email is a great formal and informal way to build a relationship with your customers and alsoand not intrude on their boundaries more than deemed comfortable by the customers. 

Video Chat

Visual engagement is a highly responsive way to resolve customer queries that require direct involvement. While, video chatting also allows personalizing and customizing solutions based on the type of customer and loyalty bases, because retention of customers matters highly to a business focused on luxury and niche product categories, while in fast consumption products, customers will always come and go for example customers of a specific tea brand. 

Video chat thus provides an overallThus, video chat provides  smoother and more personal communication to help the customer feel comfortable and build trust with the brand name.

Self Service

Self-service gives customers an understanding of the issues they face and a way to solve their problems or get answers to their queries on instant notice. This helps customers to find the best solution to their problems, with ease. 

Self-service is a channel that requires a one-time effort and finance to bring into place and only updating to maintain that. This also builds an evergreen resource that will be low on cost but provide immense benefit if used properly with the right resources. With this, support teams can work much more fluently on the more attention-demanding areas like personalized customer service responses.

Social Media

The best thing about social media is that people are mostly in on this and with customer service on this platform,platform; customers find it easy to communicate about all types of issues. With the right responses, customer reps can help boost sales, which allows people to have the right type of channel to make relations with a brand name. 

The benefit of this platform to brands is greater than having customer services channels that do not boost sales; neither do they help maintain a relationship with the customers, but only retainin maintaining a relationship with the customers, but only retaining them.

Social Groups/Communities

The use of communities and social groups for customer service was an idea of the past. However, with word of mouth being a common method of sales in the present times, so are the reviews and help for products or services. 

For example, someone buys a vacuum cleaner at Target or any brand, and after the usage for a certain period may post about it on social groups or communities within their circle or public forums. This can be in the social groups on Facebook or Instagram made specifically to share information and exchange knowledge about products or services to help the customers. Even many brands and companies encourage the practice. 

However, there is no control of negative opinions either, and higher chances of name slander occur but with other channels prospering and satisfied customers, you will not need much to help this one work out too.

Conclusive Note

With this informative article, we end here. Now you know which channels are effective means of forming a strong customer base. However, what sort ofHowever, customer service channels and customer channelwhich mix works for you cannot be established is established without trial and error, thus you should research well and use the means most effective and conducive to the type of service or product you are selling – all with the customer in mind and you will find success.

Read more: 8 Ways to Convert Web Traffic into Sales