Customer service is the foundation of a great reputation in any successful business; it underpins everything from how a service or product is marketed, right through to the after sales care. Essentially without customer service, a business will never flourish.
Aggressive competition and market instability have made times very hard for the average business owner. It’s not enough to offer good customer service, it has to be great – having the edge on competitors will put businesses in a great position to succeed and this book offers the tools to do just that. The book offers advice to businesses to help build a more profitable business and increase good sustainable customer service. It also suggests practical steps on how to inspire workers toward greater organizational performance and key skills to inspire today’s demanding customers.
Customer service is one of the biggest factors in a customer’s decision if they will become a repeat customer or not. In today’s industries, companies are failing to satisfactorily meet the needs of their customers. In chapter 7 of Nemec & Green’s book, “A Balancing Act: Technology vs. Personal Touch” they discuss that technology, such as automated answering systems can initially save a company money, but in the long run hurt the bottom line.
IBM’s Watson is a prime example. Why? “U.S. organizations spend $112 billion on call center labor and software, yet half of the 270 billion customer-service calls go unresolved each year.” Watson has been designed to help resolve this issue. “According to IBM, close to two-thirds of the 135 billion unresolved calls each year could have been resolved with better access to information, the search for which consumes six to eight minutes per call, on average. In IBM’s tests using its own call centers and proprietary data, Watson delivered a 40% reduction in search time for information,” according to Forbes.com.
This is a great advancement in the customer service world, but is still in infancy. Should it progress, companies may jump at the opportunity to utilize this new technology. However, not all companies will be able to implement it overnight. It will take money and time to load the company’s necessary data into the app’s database.
Perhaps it isn’t the technology itself that is the problem though but rather the way in which it is utilized. Let’s face it while human touch is certainly a competitive advantage, one emphasized time and again in this book, one cannot hide from advancing technology. The future may hold the ideal solution to the human vs. technology argument over which achieve better and more effective customer service. Meanwhile what can companies do right now? Purchase “Great Customer Service” by Jalane Nemec & Dr. Daryl Green and find out.
To purchase, visit the link below on Amazon.com:
Great Customer Service: The Definitive Handbook for Today’s Successful Businesses