How to Revive the ‘Service’ in Customer Service

As a customer yourself, you can probably relate to this: A Forrester survey found that customers’ biggest pain points in getting customer service was consistency and lack of agent knowledge. As consumers, we’re acutely aware of those pain points, but what are internal teams doing to solve the issue? 

A poor customer service experience can have severe consequences on a brand’s bottom line: U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service. Customer service needs to be reimagined for this new era as speed has become a higher priority.

Years ago, customers expected a long, drawn-out process with many line transfers to different departments and multiple points of contact to solve an issue. As technology advanced, customers often chose to forgo the often-unhelpful help desks and started to engage with brands on email, social media channels and even chat bots when available.  

Today, customer’s expect lightning fast service and immediate answers. As customer expectations for speed and quality of service increase, the resources needed for agents and reps to do their jobs should also keep pace. Insight Engines can help by powering all agents with readily available internal knowledge and insights and their fingertips so customer support teams can provide their customers with faster, more relevant results.

Relevant Information

Insight engines don’t give users an identical list of results every time they enter a similar query. Instead, they’re capable of giving users a more personalized experience. Some insight engines are able to make small tweaks to results based on the wording of a given query, and others rely on users’ personal histories to generate more custom-made results. As agents search for answers to common questions or very specific queries, an insight engine can evolve so that the answer presented is hyper-relevant to that customer’s given question.

Faster Answers

Depending on the design and coding used, insight engines have the potential to give users faster and more relevant results than their traditional search counterparts. That means users find what they’re looking for in less time, and are more likely to walk away satisfied.

Mining unstructured data not only unlocks data silos, but can also empower agents to deliver a consistent, expert customer experience across channels giving brands an easy, cost-effective way to increase the quality of customer service without having to rely on the institutional knowledge of more experienced reps.