Your customers are your business pillars to build on, if they are happy, your business revenue will reach the sky. Satisfied happy customers recommend businesses with which they encountered a really good service. And the more recommendations you business gets, the more sales your business will make. And it’s really important to retain your customers, make them loyal to your brand and products, so they’ll buy more and more products.
In this article, I am going to present you with the kind of problems customers face with any business with poor customer service and how customers have changed over the years, and how a cognitive assistant offers a better solution for a better customer care.
Common problems that customers face consistently while communicating with the care team:
It takes too long to reach a live agent.
Sometimes, you don’t have a large customer service team to handle all the incoming inquiries, complaints, and requests, so your customers might not reach a live agent so quickly because the agents are overwhelmed and busy answering too many calls and messages.
Customers have called the customer service multiple times for the same reason.
One of the things that really frustrates customers is calling over and over to solve a certain problem or to ask about something. Which makes them have to repeat things over and over again which in turn leads them to give up and decide not to buy and go to another place.
Customers have been put on hold for too long.
No one likes to be put on hold, customers want the customer service team to take care of their problem right away, they don’t like wasting their time waiting for someone to answer their questions.
Customers have been forced to repeat information to multiple agents.
When your customer service team doesn’t share information on each customer they interact with, they lose track or are unable to follow with a customer if that customer switches agents. The customer then has to repeat what they already said to the other agent, which will frustrate the customer and might make them give up buying and go somewhere else with a better service.
How customers have changed over the years?
#1 Customers have become more demanding than ever before
Over the years, customers have become more intelligent and have higher expectations than they used to in the past. They have more power now and are in control. They are also more knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest ways of best services thanks to the companies that already provide the best customer care so they are not going to accept less as they already experienced the best. Customers interact with the support team on their terms, they choose the channel they are most comfortable with using such as voice, web, chat, email, video and social media.
#2 Customers expect immediate personalized and convenient service.
Customers want and demand to be treated like a person, and not a number that adds to your sales rate. They want personalized interactions, and unified experiences across all channels and touchpoints. So when your customers receive tailored engagements based on their previous interactions with your business, that guarantees retaining your customers which in turn will grow your business revenue.
#3 Customers often defect because of bad service. Sometimes after one negative experience, and many will never come back.
Poor customer service experiences can easily make your customers turn away from your business and go somewhere else that offers decent services. It is called “customer service” or “customer care”, so you should serve and care for your customers so they don’t buy from another place that actually cares about them and their needs.
#4 Poor customer experiences are shared publicly twice as often as good service.
Well, they say that bad news travels fast, so no wonder if a customer received a bad service, it’ll spread like wildfire especially with all the social media channels customers are using these days. They will write posts and reviews about the experience they had and it will harm your business reputation if that experience or service is poor.
So how can a cognitive assistant help customer service teams
Let’s start by stating how a cognitive assistant actually works.
A cognitive assistant acts like a live agent by mining data, recognizing patterns, it’s able to simulate how the human brain works. It also learns from experience, it takes the data from previous interactions and it analyzes it by detecting emotions, sentiments, and tone of voice to determine the customers’ intents. It personalizes the conversation using natural language. It’s smart and trained to become expert at responding to customers’ conversations appropriately. It’s also fast and accurate providing customers with immediate and precise feedback.
A cognitive assistant can be easily integrated into any customer service channel and it can help the support teams answering customers messages. It interacts with customers directly and can tailor the conversations according to previous interactions, purchase history or any other data provided that can help it create a seamless experience for the customer.
A cognitive assistant doesn’t eliminate the need for live agents
One of the misconceptions about the cognitive assistant is the idea that it gets rid of the need for live agents. Live agents are always needed to answer and solve complex issues the customers are experiencing. A cognitive assistant is assigned for routine care to answer customer FAQs and help the care team by collecting customers’ info during the buying process. This is called automation, and cognitive assistants can automate customers’ routine care so the live agents can focus on much more complex customer’s issues like payment issues or insurance issues, etc. So a cognitive assistant doesn’t replace customer service agents, it only takes care of the most dull boring tedious tasks to free the care team’s brains for better use.
Whether you decide on using a cognitive assistant to help your care team provide a better seamless customer care experience or you prefer the old ways of hiring agents to respond to your customers, what matters is fulfilling the needs of your customers by offering them the best experience so they write better reviews about your business. Eventually, you want to retain your customers and gain new one to skyrocket your revenue growth.
