Updated on July 13, 2023

Conversation between customer support professionals

This is an era of personalization. Since the advent of new-age technology and intelligent tools, businesses have shifted their strategy from mass appeal to granular.

Sales and marketing have been heavily influenced by personalization, catering to each customer personally. It is time for the customer support and service industry to tread the same path. In order to have the desirable profits, organizations have to empower customer support and service.

Businesses see a lot of churn and lower customer satisfaction due to poor customer service. And let me tell you, this is not a technical or resource problem. There is high-end tech available to help businesses. And there is no lack of resources to tackle any number of queries coming in.

What does it mean to empower customer service?

To empower customer service refers to providing the customer service team with the right tools and assistance that can help them further offer the best facilities to the customers. A company that has learned the right way to enhance customer service can do wonders in the market. On the other hand, if you are not able to improve your customer service the right way, you will have to face negative consequences for the same. There are a lot of benefits associated with customer service empowerment. Some of these benefits are-

  1. Improve the customer satisfaction rate

  2. Develops a sense of understanding between the organization and the customers

  3. It gives an insight into the psychology of the customer while making purchases

  4. Improves the work culture in the company

  5. Enhances problem-solving skills among employees due to the presence of the right tools and guidance

  6. Once employee satisfaction is high, it is bound to make all employees more efficient as they are satisfied with the work environment.

In short, it is beneficial to empower customer service not only for your customers but for your organization. Once you ensure your employees are well-equipped with the right tools and guidance, they will be able to deliver outstanding customer service. This eventually leads to better services for the customers. An organization must learn to empower employees before figuring out how to empower customer support. All these factors make it clear why you need to enable agents to achieve designated customer service and how it is multifunctional and beneficial.

Conversations, not tickets. People, not agents and visitors.

The root of the problem is more human rather than technical. In the customer support industry, agents, customers, and tickets are very familiar terms. We tend to overlook a very trivial thing in customer service: that, essentially, agents and customers/visitors are people, and a ticket is a conversation between them. We need to move over these age-old terms and move to honest discussions.

Tickets are a non-human way to cater customer needs

Tickets are about resolving a task. Conversations are for understanding people and helping them get a solution to their problem or achieve a certain goal. Rather than putting customers in a queue and giving them a support ticket to wait for their query to be resolved, companies can leverage a pro-active chat system to have conversations with the customers.

Agent dashboard for support chat — Kommunicate

Chat is a more affordable, fast, and reliable way to address customer conversations. With the arrival of AI, bots can assist humans in providing a pleasing customer support experience. Bots can handle generic queries and are available 24X7. At Kommunicate, we are helping businesses handle customer queries swiftly by creating an efficient amalgamation of Bots and Humans. Let us consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1

A customer comes to your website, takes a look, and immediately plans to try your product out. But he has specific queries beforehand. He raised a ticket from your Contact Us/Support section and is waiting for a reply. Your support team receives the questions and queues them based on other questions. In a matter of some hours/days, your team replied, and there is a strong chance that a customer has forgotten about you or has moved on to see other similar products. What a loss!

Scenario 2

A customer comes to your website, takes a look, and immediately plans to try your product out. He sees a chat widget on your site and submits a few queries. Your customer support bot can handle the generic questions and direct the customer to a resource that solves his problem. Further, your support agent can access the chat from any device and anywhere to respond to the queries proactively. The customer is happy and has more chances to try out and purchase your product after that.

Scenario 3

As mentioned earlier, conversations between people (customers and agents) are a more human way to help a customer. And this is not a mere hypothesis; according to reports by AMA and many other firms, chat has the highest customer satisfaction among all other support channels (such as phone and email). At times it might become confusing for you to understand how to empower customer service in the given resources. In situations like these, mindful thinking is very important. This is why you must empower your agents to become competent enough to give you the best outputs with whatever limited resources they have.

How can you empower customer support in your organization?

You can empower customer service in your organization in different ways. It is essential to consider all of these things if you want the process to be seamless and hassle-free.

1. Providing employees with tools that they need

It is essential to ensure that your employees have access to all the necessary resources and technology to carry out their daily tasks. This may involve phones, internet connection, laptops, and automation tools. Only through these resources will they be able to deliver favorable outcomes and empower customer service. Learn to empower agents of your organization first. 

2. Teaching them the necessary skills

In this fast-changing world, remaining updated with the latest trends is very important. You must ensure that all of the employees of your organization are updated on the ongoing changes in the market. This is yet again another situation in which deciding to empower agents can bring desirable outcomes for an organization. Taking the learned skills into acknowledgment, they can make the right decisions which can contribute to the empowerment of customer service in your organization. 

3. Take care of the mental health of your employees

The mental health of a human being is as essential as physical health. It is almost impossible to work correctly and give your hundred percent without a healthy mind. An organization must always strive to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life. Ensure that your employees are not overburdened with their work and are satisfied while working in the organization. 

4. Make your team more engaging

Make sure that all team employees are regularly engaging with each other. Sharing creative ideas related to work is always beneficial. Not only does it streamline the work, but it also keeps all the members of an organization motivated. This way, all the employees can always come up with innovative ideas and give their fullest in improving customer service enhancement. Creativity and brainstorming is the best way to empower customer support in your organization.

5. Listen to your employees

Listening to your employees is a must. It would help if you made your employees feel important and what they feel matters. This will increase the employee satisfaction rate in the company. Mindful listening is one of the ways to empower agents in your organization. Once the employees are satisfied, they can help the customers better solve their queries and problems. Only a happy associate can deal with an agitated customer properly.

From a different point of view: Agents based strategy is unscalable

Customer support is a highly invested side of a business. Tools, agents (many agents if you are a large enterprise), phone bills, et cetera, make the operational costs high. Most of the companies that provide customer support tools charge you based on the number of agents your workforce has. Understanding cost and pricing is another way of understanding how to empower customer support in your organization.

The pricing doesn’t make sense as it is highly cost-inefficient. The more agents you use, the more the pricing.

Per Agent → $ X

More Agents → $$$ XXX

Your business wants to get more customers and more revenue, and so are the ‘customer communication’ service companies. If pricing is based on agents, they will get more income when you have more agents.

It is true that more agents → more customers, and more conversations. But at the same time, more agents can amount to inefficient work, slow response time, and is effectively not scalable for high volume. Employees must always empower customer support in an organisation and not disrupt that process.In today’s world, where things are getting automated machine learning and advanced technologies, we should strive for the following:

  1. More Conversations
  2. Automated Replies
  3. Scalable solution with fewer agents
  4. Efficiency
  5. Self-help
  6. 24×7 Fast Response Time

The Final Word

All businesses must focus on empowering customer service and stimulating impactful conversations. All organizations must use a highly efficient support system that reduces the workload of agents through the help of AI and chat boards. At Kommunicate, you will be provided an intelligent support platform to help you have meaningful and seamless conversations with your customers. An organization’s main goal should be to bring customers and agents together to create an experience that is profitable and beneficial for both the customers and the agents.


At Kommunicate, we envision a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.

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Devashish Mamgain

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