Customer Service in 2023: The Roadblocks You'll Face and the Solutions You Need

It is surprising that 89% of companies now compete primarily based on customer experience. Amidst fierce competition, especially when faced with managing customer expectations and high volumes of inquiries, differentiating yourself through exceptional service is hard.

However, it's important to maintain a positive outlook and focus on your opportunities and not just hindrances, let’s just say, THE GLASS IS ALWAYS HALF FULL!  

There are plenty of companies that excel in customer service, for example, Silva Homes, a Housing Association in Southeast England, has taken an inspiring step to combat loneliness during the pandemic. With over 2000 customers above 65 years of age, who are more susceptible to loneliness, the company created a 'Phone Pals' program where over twenty employees made weekly calls to customers who were self-isolating. The initiative has been praised by customers, with one elderly woman commenting on how much she appreciated the calls. Silva Homes' program is a testament to the power of reaching out to customers when they need it the most and making a positive difference in their lives.

Amazon is another brand that's excelling in customer service by proactively addressing customers' concerns about delivery, returns, and safety during the pandemic. By prioritising customer needs, Amazon has been able to minimise support requests and deliver an exceptional experience to customers worldwide.  

A brand's outstanding customer service helps generate repeat business, turn customers into brand advocates, and boost employee morale, highlighting the importance of investing in customer service. As we move into 2023, businesses will face even more challenges like managing multi-channel communication, delivering first-time resolution, over-explosion of technology and difficulty to decide which is best for your business. However, all these shouldn't deter you from providing exceptional service to your customers. Let us explore the top customer service challenges you're likely to face and provide solutions to overcome them. So, buckle up and dream to create inspiring “WOW” acts of service, while we address your challenges!

Challenge #1: Poor Customer Data Quality

Incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated customer data can be the root cause of many usual challenges like the inability to first-time problem resolution, dissatisfied customers, ineffective marketing campaigns, irrelevant product recommendations, and inadequate customer support. For example, if a customer's preferences or purchase history are not properly recorded, it is difficult to provide personalised service and recommendations.

Knowing that their data is being tracked and evaluated at every step of their online journey, customers expect brands to use this wisely to provide them instant gratification. They want their issues resolved immediately, regardless of the time of day or day of the week. Businesses must find ways to meet these expectations.

Solution:

Prioritise data quality by investing in tools and processes that ensure accurate and up-to-date customer data. It is important to provide agents with a centralised knowledge base for a comprehensive view of the customer's interaction history with previous agents and real-time data, like their location, devices and channels used to contact, preferences, browsing history, and other relevant information. By implementing a lightweight CRM, your team can have a comprehensive view of incoming customer inquiries, allowing them to maintain consistent and meaningful dialogue by easily picking up where the customer left off in their journey.  

Advanced data management and analytics tools enable agents to gain deeper insights into their customer data making them even more powerful to understand needs, anticipate issues, provide solutions more effectively, and proactively recommend the best. This leads to faster first-time resolution of problems, better customer experience, increased customer satisfaction and ultimately, loyal customers.  

Challenge #2: Accumulating Data Silos Across Departments and Channels

Do you know if your different departments are working together or against each other? Organisational silos are barriers between your departments that affect efficient information sharing, collaboration, and communication between teams due to scattered customer data across departments. This works against your goal of providing a great CX if different members prioritise individual objectives more than the overall goal of your company, and can result in disconnected, disjointed, and inconsistent experiences for both customers and employees.  

Additionally, due to the multichannel presence, there are siloed communication channels between customers and agents, and as high as 50% of large organisations have failed to unify engagement channels in 2022.  

Consequently, customers may become frustrated when they must repeat issues to different agents, leading to unnecessary hurdles during their interactions with the company. This not only hurts customer satisfaction but also increases the resources needed to win back unhappy customers.

Solution:  

An effective omnichannel CX platform like CINNOX addresses both organisational siloes and multichannel siloes to provide the following benefits:

• Help maintain your agents’ sanity through a converging omni-channel capability where all interaction channels are brought together in a single chat room to enable a holistic 360-degree view of customers for agents to provide a hyper-personalised experience resonating with their buyer stage.  
• Silos happen when your departments sit on information without allowing the valuable data to do the work for them and others in the organisation. CINNOX’s unified dashboard not only helps converge every customer touchpoint but also lets the agent see all their data and history in real-time, in one place, bring in subject matter experts into an ongoing conversation, transfer the inquiries with full context to other subject matter experts to solve complex problems quickly and efficiently, and see reports and insights of the interactions and agent’s performance.

• Let agents help themselves by labelling all incoming customer inquiries enabling them to create powerful knowledge bases of their historical wins in challenging circumstances. Labelling also helps trigger workflow automation, allowing the collected and labelled data to be synced across the Office Automation systems through APIs. This, in turn, moves the events to the next business process, following the established business flow. Such automation not only saves time on duplicate efforts and repetitive tasks, but also ensures complete visibility of the customer's information when they approach next time.  
• Collaboration among team members is crucial for not just teamwork, productivity, and efficiency, but also for creating a joint effort or synergy to empower frontline services. By equipping your teams with the right collaboration tools, you can facilitate the sharing of information, decrease friction, and promote mutual work towards your common goal. This, in turn, can help your teams achieve first-time resolution, create delighted customers, and guide visitors towards sales, resulting in a successful and thriving business.

Challenge #3: The Lack of the Right Technology and Tools

Picture this: you have a team of super-talented and dedicated customer service agents and top managers, but they're still struggling to collectively provide great customer experiences for your business. What's missing? The right tools and technology! Without them, your agents can only do so much. The right technology enables your business to collect, converge, analyse, and act on customer data, to deliver a top-notch experience that keeps your customers happy and coming back for more. However, deciding and adopting modern technologies can be time-consuming and expensive.

Solution:

To overcome this challenge, stay up-to-date with technological advancements by attending industry conferences, webinars, and training programs. Identify the required tools, such as CRM software, customer service software, employee experience tools, or a Total Experience Platform that combines the fruit of all these tools while also supporting integration with other tools and platforms. Work with IT departments or external vendors to implement them efficiently to provide a seamless experience for your agents and customers alike.  

For instance, you can opt for cloud-based, open-source solution like CINNOX, an all-encompassing platform fostering a customer-focused digital ecosystem that meets all your requirements and fits your budget. Investing in the right CX tools and technology can automate processes, break down silos, and relieve your team of the burden of manual tasks, allowing them to focus on perfecting the finer details of the customer experience.

Challenge #4: Aligning CX Strategy with Business Objectives

Businesses face a significant challenge in aligning their customer experience strategy with their overall business objectives. Misalignment can lead to poor customer experience and wasted investments. For instance, if your company's goal is to increase sales, but its CX strategy only focuses on improving customer service, the efforts may not translate into higher revenue.  

Solution:  

To address this challenge, businesses can use tools like CINNOX to gain better visibility into customer data and align CX initiatives with their broader business objectives. With a centralised platform that allows companies to track customer interactions and measure the impact of CX initiatives on their bottom line, businesses can ensure that they are investing in CX strategies that deliver the desired results.

Challenge #5: Difficulty in Demonstrating CX Investments ROI and Ensuring Stakeholder Awareness

Investing in a great customer experience can be a tricky business. While it's crucial to ensure that CX initiatives align with business objectives, it's equally important to demonstrate their impact on the bottom line. But how do you measure something that's often intangible? For example, how do you put a price on a customer's loyalty or willingness to recommend your brand to others? This makes it challenging to secure funding for future CX initiatives or convince key stakeholders of their importance. The second challenge is ensuring that all stakeholders are aware of CX initiatives and objectives that usually involve multiple touchpoints across different channels.  

Solution:  

To overcome this challenge, companies need to develop metrics that capture the impact of CX initiatives on the business. For example, tracking customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value can help demonstrate the ROI of CX investments. Additionally, creating a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making can ensure that CX initiatives are optimised over time. By leveraging data analytics tools and regularly reviewing KPIs, companies can identify areas for improvement and make data-backed decisions to optimise customer experiences.  

Also, use digital tools to improve awareness regarding CX initiatives by using digital collaboration platforms or an intranet. By creating a centralised hub, stakeholders can access information regarding CX initiatives, and share updates, performance metrics, and success stories regarding the CX program.

At CINNOX, we help businesses tackle these challenges by providing a unified customer experience solution that aligns with your business objectives. Our technology helps businesses collect, analyse, and act on customer data to deliver a great customer experience as well as employee experience. The powerful collaboration ensures broken silos and real-time visibility into data and processes to dive in and offer support anytime if the situation demands it. The digital collaboration capabilities can be used to improve awareness of CX initiatives and ensure that all stakeholders are on board. With our help, businesses can optimise their CX initiatives and demonstrate ROI, resulting in better customer experiences and a positive impact on their business.

Challenge #6: Resistance to Transformations

CX transformations can be challenging as they require changes to the way a company operates. Employees may resist these changes due to the fear of disrupting their work or the lack of skills and resources to adapt. Customers may also resist change, making it difficult for customer experience managers to drive transformation.

Solution:

To overcome resistance, CX managers should engage stakeholders and create a shared vision for the future of the customer experience. Choose simpler, easy-to-use all-in-one CX transformation platforms like CINNOX that clearly make employees' lives easier by automating processes and providing them with the necessary tools and resources to succeed in the new ways of working, without much disruption and steep learning curves. Such platforms can also help gather and incorporate customer feedback, making sure the changes align with customer needs and preferences. Additionally, providing training and resources for employees to adapt to new ways of working can make the transformation process smoother and more effective.

To Bring it all Together

As you can see, the benefits of great customer service extend beyond just customer satisfaction. When customers have a positive experience with your business, they are more likely to become brand advocates and recommend your business to their friends and family members. According to a Deloitte study, on average, customers tell nine people about their positive experience with a brand, which means free marketing and more customers for your business.

In addition, providing great customer service can also boost employee morale. When employees see the efforts, your business is making for customers, they feel more connected to the values of your company. This helps to create a positive and encouraging work environment where employees are proud of what they do. For instance, the single experience of making a difference in a customer’s life can turn out to be all the motivation your team needs.

So, in conclusion, the key to overcoming customer service challenges in 2023 is to provide efficient, personalised, and omnichannel support while keeping up with the latest technological advancements and needs of your organisation. By investing in the right tools, training, and resources, businesses can provide exceptional customer service and thrive in the digital age.

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