Customer care shouldn’t be an afterthought but an integral part of your business.
Customer care is often seen as a secondary business function but it’s critical for your company. Do it well and you’ll have loyal customers for life. Do it poorly and you’ll get negative online reviews, a tarnished reputation, fewer customers, and reduced revenue.
There are many steps you can take to improve customer care and the overall customer experience (CX) your company delivers. Customer care representative training, efficient workflows, and software integration can help you go down the right path. The quality of each software component is also critical to your success.
Many off-the-shelf software applications can help you deliver excellent customer care. Custom packages are also an option, with many .NET development services and other types of development services available. The professionals who provide them can work with you to design not just a good solution but a perfect one for the unique way your company works.
Customer Care Challenges
Survey your customer care reps and they’ll likely tell you they regularly encounter one or more of the following challenges:
- I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what stage of the buying process the customer is in.
- I can’t find answers to customer queries. I have to sort through multiple screens or transfer the caller to another department.
- I’m expected to take too many calls. I’m unable to serve customers effectively and still meet my quota.
- Customers have to tell me about their past calls, texts, chats, and social media outreach. I don’t have that information available to look through on my own.
- I’m not an expert in the area that customers are asking about. I’m great with some topics, but not with others yet I keep getting those calls.
How Software Can Help
Customer care software offers support for all your customer interactions, including questions about your products, refund requests, and shipping status. The software includes detailed information about each customer as well as ways to get answers to common customer queries. Ideally, the application integrates a variety of channels, such as phone conversations, online chats, and social media requests. When you go into a customer’s account, all that information is available.
Some software can even anticipate what the customer might want next. For example, if they’ve recently placed an order, it’s likely they now want to know when it will arrive. If they’ve recently received an order, it’s likely they want to return something or ask a product question.
The better your software is at collecting and integrating this information, and providing predictive responses, the better your customer care can be. When your customer care reps must switch between screens to hunt for information while the customer waits on the line, the quality of customer care declines.
In addition to serving customers, the best customer care applications also serve your business. You can use them to analyze patterns such as consistent issues with delivery to a certain zip code or many customers calling with the same question about a product. Solving these issues (such as changing to a new delivery service or offering more information about a product upfront) can cut your customer care costs considerably.
These solutions can even help you manage your workforce by analyzing which reps are best at handling which types of calls. When you increase your team’s efficiency, the quality of your customer care increases even more.
The Value of Custom Software
Custom software developers, including .NET developers, have IT experience as well as the business expertise to be able to really understand your company and your needs. They start by gathering your ideas about what’s working and what’s not with your current solution and discovering your high-level goals and desires for usability and functionality.
In these initial stages, developers also look at your existing systems to ensure a good fit between various software solutions. They may sit with your customer care reps to understand the current workflow and how it can be improved.
During the development stage, they create prototypes to help you envision what the finished product will look like. You can make adjustments and then production gets underway. When the design is complete, you can test your new solution and offer further suggestions for change. Robust quality assurance takes place throughout these steps.
Even after the application is deployed, the developers are ready to help you manage problems or fix issues that arise. The result is software that works for your business, keeping essential functionality that you need over time yet remaining flexible enough to change as you grow. You may even be able to cut costs, given that generic solutions typically charge an annual fee while a custom solution is once-and-done.
In Summary
Customer care shouldn’t be an afterthought but an integral part of your business. In fact, the best way to approach customer care is as the foundation of your company, on which everything else is built. Win customer care and you win against the competition.
That’s why it’s key to give yourself as much support as possible, including the best software you can afford. Doing so will ensure your reps can effectively help every customer every time and ensure you can make the best decisions for your business.
Source: https://dev.to/khoiphan/the-right-software-can-improve-your-customer-care-53da
