CUSTOMER SERVICE & THE POWER OF COMMUNICATION

The Grandma is waiting the express bus to Gavà

Today, The Grandma has returned to her day-by-day. To start with it, she has gone to Gavà to participate in a course of customer service, something very important for sellers and purchasers.

Visiting Gavà is always a great experience for The Grandma because she loves this city and she is very happy to visit old friends. Gavà is near Barcelona and the best ways to arrive are train or bus. Using public transport is a must to try to avoid pollution and traffic jams but this means that cities must have a good net of communications with a great offer and a short frequency between every bus or every train.

During the trip from Barcelona to Gavà by bus, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

 Chapter 16. Excel Tables (II) (Spanish Version)

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest. 

Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.

From the point of view of an overall sales process engineering effort, customer service plays an important role in an organization's ability to generate income and revenue.

From that perspective, customer service should be included as part of an overall approach to systematic improvement. One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization.

The Grandma often travels by public transport

A customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.

These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called at home customer services or at home customer support.

Regarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support.

Customer service may be provided by a person, or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps. An advantage with automated means is an increased ability to provide service 24-hours a day, which can, at least, be a complement to customer service by persons.

Download English for Customer Care-PDF & Audio

An increasingly popular type of automated customer service is conducted through artificial intelligence AI.

The customer benefit of AI is the feel for chatting with a live agent through improved speech technologies while giving customers the self-service benefit. Another example of automated customer service is by touch-tone phone, which usually involves IVR (Interactive Voice Response) a main menu and the use of the keypad as options.

However, in the Internet era, a challenge has been to maintain and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of online commerce. Online customers are literally invisible to you and you to them, so it's easy to shortchange them emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online arena.

The Grandma has arrived to Gavà, Baix Llobregat

Examples of customer service by artificial means are automated online assistants that can be seen as avatars on websites, which enterprises can use to reduce their operating and training costs. These are driven by chatterbots also called chatbots, and a major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing. The two main ways of gathering feedback are: customer surveys and Net Promoter Score measurement, used for calculating the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer.

Customer service metrics that are followed by companies depend on the tool used for customer service. Most popular metrics include:

-First response time,

-Average response time,

-Total handle time,

-Customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

More information: The Balance Small Business

Many organizations have implemented feedback loops that allow them to capture feedback at the point of experience. For example, National Express in the UK has invited passengers to send text messages while riding the bus. This has been shown to be useful, as it allows companies to improve their customer service before the customer defects, thus making it far more likely that the customer will return next time.

Technology has made it increasingly easier for companies to obtain feedback from their customers. Community blogs and forums give customers the ability to give detailed explanations of both negative as well as positive experiences with a company/organization. 

There are few standards on this topic. ISO and The International Customer Service Institute (TICSI) have published the following ones:

-ISO 9004:2000, on performance improvement

-ISO 10001:2007, on customer service conduct

-ISO 10002:2004, on quality management in handling customer complaints

-ISO 10003:2007, on dispute resolution

-ISO 10004:2012, on monitoring and measuring

-The International Customer Service Standard (TICSS)

-CCQA Customer Care Standard (Care Quality Alliance)

There is also an Information Technology service management standard: ISO/IEC 20000:2005. Its first part concerns specifications and its second part the code of practice.

Some have argued that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy. To address this argument, many organizations have employed a variety of methods to improve their customer satisfaction levels, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

More information: Oracle

It takes months to fins a customer...

seconds to lose one.

Vince Lombardi