As the name implies, customer service is a provision of various services provided to the customers before purchasing, during purchase, or after the purchase of a product or an item. The customer service is dependent on employees because they are the ones who solve the queries of the customers and hence it is important for a company to provide proper training to their customer service employees as they bring value to the company. Customer service plays an important role in generating income and revenue for an organization. Customer service experience can help to change the perception of the customer towards the company, and it leads to trust between them.
What is customer service
Customer support is a collection of customer services helping a customer to use the product correctly. Customer support includes installation, training, troubleshooting, and supporting, and maintenance of the product. This type of customer support is done either on the customer’s site or the company’s site or sometimes in both places.
Customer service can be provided by a person or sometimes by automated means. The reason companies re choosing to give automated customer service are because it can work 24 hours and seven days and moreover they need not hire a customer service professional. Computers take care of everything at low cost and better efficiency. Automated customer service is increasing tremendously these days, and it is rare to find a person talking to the customer over the phone.
Automated customer service works as a touch-tone phone which means the customer should use his/her phone and press the buttons corresponding to the menu said by the customer service voice. As you press the button, you will be redirected to that particular terminal. One important thing to consider in automated service is maintaining and enhancing user/personal experience. Since everything is controlled by machines, people may doubt if it says the proper solution for their queries. But with the development of technology and internet, it has been proved that the automated service works better than human customer service operations. To measure the customer service results, various tools and metrics are used by companies. They are:
- First response time
- Average response time
- Instant feedback
- Total handling time
- Customer satisfaction score
These metrics are noted by the companies to check how effective their customer service performed in the real world and based on these measures they enhance or modify the working of the customer service operations.