How to Improve Customer Service With Technology

Because of my experience working with a variety of companies, I often get some tough questions over email from prospective customers. With their permission (and without revealing any names), I decided it could be fun to craft some blog posts based on these questions so everybody can learn. Here are three questions I recently got asked related to improving customer service using technology.

What advice would you have for companies, specifically dealing with pain points such as personalization, speed, convenience and empathy? 

The biggest pain point for consumers is finding the right answer, and often they don’t want to do it themselves. Perhaps you heard of the site lmgtfy (let me Google that for you) It’s a satirical site that really just does a Google search, but it’s commonly spread around social sites when people ask questions they could’ve simply searched the internet for. It earns between $5 million and $10 million off over 500,000 monthly views, according to SimilarWeb.

Think about what that story tells us–despite having a search engine available that can provide an answer to any questions, we still prefer to ask real people on social media. Studies are consistently released showing the majority of people prefer to speak to a human being, however these humans must be given the proper scripts.

In a large-scale customer service environment, calls come in all day and must be handled in under five minutes. This means automation needs to quickly route the person to the proper department, and the representative needs to have access to both the customer’s account history and corporate policies and procedures.

Most problems are easy enough to resolve via both internal and external resources, but the human is simply there to act as a compassionate and empathetic listening ear while relaying the information. Although many automated options are already available and will continue to improve, nothing will ever beat the ability to speak to a human, and brands of all sizes (especially large enterprises) will do well to remember that.

How can a company improve the performance and responsiveness of its agents? 

The most important components will be access to information, ease of use, and, of course, human oversight. Think of delivery services like Doordash and Uber Eats, for example–whenever the customer does not get their order correctly, they can report the problem, take a picture, and obtain a refund with ease. 

Of course, some customers may choose to game such two-sided marketplaces for nefarious purposes, and both the driver’s and customer’s stories need to be weighed. This will require human oversight in customer service. Over time, patterns can largely be addressed in the system to determine if the driver or customer has a pattern of such behavior.

As I mentioned above–and will continue to–the human touch is what will make the difference at the end of the day for every business. While automated agents can resolve the most common claims, some will be complicated enough to require human understanding to resolve. 

Also, what advice would you have for customers who are trying to find better service?

From the customer perspective, it’s important to keep calm and describe the problem clearly. If you routinely are raging as you talk to customer service, you will inevitably be labeled as a problem in the system. Understand that the agents (whether automated or human) are trying to help you, and the angrier you get, the more you may dig your heels into the wrong response and make it take longer to do their job.

I also go out of my way as a customer to take customer surveys anytime I contact customer service at a business. This is because I’ve worked in the backend operations consulting companies for long enough to understand just how hard everyone works in these customer contact centers. It can often be grueling hours during the busy season, and there’s always a percentage of customers who don’t respect personal boundaries.

If you want the best service possible everywhere you go, just be polite at a minimum. The kinder you are, the more people will go out of their way to be kind to you. That’s how karma typically works.