7 Types of Customer Service Your Organization Should Provide

The best customer service strategies today require organizations to invest in multiple types of customer service. This way, organizations can ensure their customer base receives answers to their concerns in the format they want.

Customer service is an essential part of the customer experience. The omnichannel principle is increasingly taking hold, where all customers prefer to communicate through multiple channels. Therefore, to meet customer needs, organizations must support multiple ways for customers to receive responses to their issues based on their preferences. Resolving issues in your customers’ preferred channels can increase customer satisfaction, retention, and brand loyalty.

Read the blog: How generative AI is transforming customer service

What types of customer service should your organization prioritize?

By offering different types of customer service and multiple customer support channels, an organization shows that it is investing in customer care. It also shows that they understand the importance of customer engagement and will do what it takes to meet customer expectations. Here are some key customer service types to prioritize:

phone support

Many customers will still want to pick up the phone and talk to a live customer service agent, no matter how many new methods your organization offers. It can be expensive to maintain a call center or help desk with customer service representatives waiting on the phone. But ultimately, to deliver a great customer service experience, it’s important to provide a human touch to the customer who calls.

More and more organizations are looking to augment their customer service representatives with technology that can increase efficiency and reduce costs. One such method is using interactive voice response (IVR), which utilizes pre-recorded messages and text-to-speech solutions. IVR used at call origination can improve request routing, speed response times, and potentially resolve issues before a support agent is needed.

chatbot

A chatbot is a computer program that asks the user to choose from a list of pre-selected questions or to enter the question they want to answer into an open field. Here, the chatbot uses automation to scan a database of responses and provide the most relevant responses. In most scenarios, if the chatbot response fails to answer the customer’s question, the chatbot provides a live chat support option with your customer service team.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), such as generative AI, have enabled chatbots to answer more questions more accurately. Chatbots are therefore becoming an increasingly important customer service channel for both organizations and customers. Customers love them because they can provide more answers than human agents, and organizations love them because they save on staffing costs and reduce errors.

email support

Many customers prefer to have their needs addressed asynchronously by sending an email and waiting for a response. You can send an email to our general support email address which will then forward it to the most appropriate member of our customer support team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Also known as FAQs, many organizations use the same template for simply written questions and answers. These pages, which often appear on an organization’s website, typically list a series of questions and allow the user to click on the question that solves their problem, which will then display a detailed answer below.

knowledge base

Organizations are increasingly investing resources in databases where users can search for articles and forum posts. This form of self-service customer support is becoming increasingly popular with people who prefer to proactively solve problems themselves without having to talk to a representative or wait for an email response.

Organizations prefer knowledge bases because they minimize the use of staff and are a cost-effective way to solve customer problems. This is especially useful for complex problems that may have multiple causes, requiring customers to read and research multiple articles.

Social Media Support

With the increasing profile of companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., the need for social media customer service has arisen. Customers can now respond to brand posts on these channels or post directly to their followers. This requires organizations to use tools that monitor channels and generate notifications whenever their brand is mentioned.

Unlike other communication channels, social media posts are broadcast to the public. If not addressed immediately, individual issues can turn into much larger business reputation issues. For example, a customer may post on social media that a product is defective and puts users at risk of injury. This can prevent many potential customers from purchasing your product out of fear that they will run into the same problem.

Technical support and troubleshooting

Customers who are aware of their specific problem can contact the organization and request specific assistance. From here, members of the IT or DevOps team can walk through the issue with the individual and provide real-time guidance to help them resolve the issue themselves. If the problem affects a product that is connected to the Internet, such as a computer, a technical support representative may be able to remotely control the product and attempt to resolve the issue that way. If both methods fail, the customer may need to send the product in or visit a repair center to have a representative resolve the issue themselves.

Customer service continues to be a technology-driven field.

Providing excellent customer service increases customer loyalty and is increasingly a key competitive advantage for organizations that get it right. Studies show that poor customer service is the number one reason consumers stop buying from a company.

While customer service remains a human-centric process, advances in technology such as AI will continue to complement this workforce and begin to provide much better autonomous responses to customer inquiries.

Customer service has become a top priority for CEOs for generative AI investments, with a promise to help organizations address the dual challenges of increasing customer demand and operational costs.

IBM has been helping companies apply trustworthy AI in this space for over a decade. Now, generative AI has the added potential to significantly transform customer and field service through its ability to understand complex questions and generate more human-like conversational responses. IBM Consulting provides end-to-end consulting capabilities in experience design and services, data and AI transformation. Using watsonx™, IBM’s enterprise-grade AI and data platform, and watsonx™ Assistant, IBM’s market-leading conversational AI solution, we partner with customers through the AI ​​value creation process to advance conversational AI, improve agent experiences, and Optimize call center operations. And data.

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