When people think about brands, the first thing that comes to mind may be the brand’s products. However, due to the technological improvement in communication that might change in the future. According to a Forbes article, customer experience, especially customer service is becoming more and more important to the public and market. An example of this could be the United Airline crisis in 2017. Due to a negative public image, 1.4 billion in value of the company was wiped out overnight. Furthermore, a report from Gartner states that more than 89% of the companies in the US believe that Customer Service is actually the next battlefield, which is a big jump from 36% from four years ago. So it is clear that customer experience is crucial, but how do companies improve it?
Customer experience is comprised of many factors, such as quality, price, convenience, etc. These all seem to be very hard to reach. However, there is one factor that is easily manageable — customer service. Nowadays, there are a lot of ways a customer can reach a company, to list out some: telephone, internet support, social media, and fax. Having this much methods of reaching how can companies successfully manage to respond to customers’ complaints or questions in a reasonably fast time? First, to have all the customer service work in the same location or have an online platform to compile all the questions or complaints that were received. This makes the entire process easier since all the staff members will be able to access and respond to the complaints and questions. Second, create consistency in the entire response process. This ensures that customers are receiving a quality support experience, which can also improve customer experience. Last but not least is to create efficient communication methods within the entire companies. This can lead to faster response time since if there are technical questions that the customers need to know, there will be a quick way to access a team that knows the answer to the question.
Although customer services does improve overall customer experience, it isn’t the only thing that dictates customer experience. There are still a lot of other factors in determining overall customer experience!