There was a time when customer service consisted of a row of operators answering calls, using a bank of telephones. If the call center was understaffed, customers would wait for nearly an hour to talk to a representative.
But, if the call center was overstaffed, then the office was bleeding money in salaries. Luckily, cloud technology and integrated communication channels have changed this. Small businesses can compete with large corporations with scalable, multichannel cloud systems that give the impression of professionalism without the cost.
Omnichannel Love
Customer care is no longer a separate entity from the greater marketing platform. Omnichannel marketing focuses on creating a pleasurable experience for the customer from the advertising all the way through the loyalty-based repurchasing. As an example, the Just Cloud platform allows a business to give customers access to a huge amount of information.
And, since cloud technology is an offsite, secure file sharing platform, companies can give customers remote access to product specifications, consumer reports and complaint forms without needing a live customer rep. This decreases staffing without degrading the consumer’s experience.
Notifications in Bulk
With positive customer experience as a solid target for any business, cloud technology can turn stale emails into sales driving dialogues. Amazon offers a nice email system as a budget-smart advertising method for customer service email blasts. The platform is cloud based and only used for outgoing emails.
Large email databases and rapidly changing marketing messages can take up a lot of space, but can dwindle to nearly nothing as you purge old text. Additionally, the Amazon package is scalable, which allows you to pay for what you use and save money where you can.
Multichannel Customer Service
While email can be a great tool for outgoing communications and can deliver a lot of loyalty building information, it may not be the best option for customer service concerns. A large part of this problem with email has come about because of the variety of communication tools, especially social media.
Customer service representatives need to address incoming consumer messages across multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, text and old-school phone calls. The cloud-based software Deskero lets your customer service representative interact with consumers on all of these channels. They can even switch channels by dropping a client into a user-friendly chat to increase the customer’s experience.
Managing Everything
One of the new opportunities that cloud computing offers businesses is hierarchical workflow. The Swinburne Decentralised Workflow for Grid, or SwinDeW-G, is a peer-to-peer cloud network that lets a user tap into data at any point in the data stream.
So, when a consumer communicates with the business, hierarchical workflow sets a process into motion, monitoring the customer’s satisfaction, marketing outcome and research possibilities. This workflow is distributed over varying departments and each can grab the information that it needs to act upon the issue in an appropriate manner.
And, because it is cloud-based, the individual departments can approach the work order any time of the day and anywhere in the world.