How to optimise your customer service for Black Friday

Figures from the Institute of Customer Service say that customers who are treated well and experience ‘excellent’ customer service spend up to £53 more than those who've had a less favourable experience. 

Taking the pressure off your customer service team, who’ll likely be dealing with a large volume of queries, and placing the emphasis on the quality of customer contact will pay dividends for consumer sentiment. But how do you ensure you’re answering your customers’ questions while still creating opportunities for quality customer interactions?

Automate your Black Friday customer service

The simple answer is to automate the more generic customer contacts your team is likely to encounter. Chatbots can easily handle the sorts of informational queries you might be asked over the Black Friday period (and at other times, of course). Customers may be asking about shipping rates, or delivery times, or stock levels. These kinds of binary, repetitive questions can be automated, leaving your team free to ensure customer complaints and more detailed queries are dealt with quickly and efficiently. Why is that important? Well, because according to the Institute of Customer Service’s UK Customer Satisfaction Index, 61% of customers view an organisation more favourably as a result of improvements in customer service. 

Equally, knowing more about your customers without having to quiz them on their personal details each time they make contact makes the process quicker for both customer and agent. A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, part of Mobile Service Cloud, allows you to aggregate customer data from across your organisation’s contact channels and build a detailed customer profile to use for every contact. 

Mobile Service Cloud also offers an omnichannel inbox that allows you to quickly and simply reply to questions, regardless of the platform used to ask them. Rather than trawling through separate channels’ native interfaces and managing multiple login details, you can instantly read and respond to customer queries from one central dashboard. 

In addition, Mobile Service Cloud allows you to manage inter-departmental messaging within your organisation, making it quicker and easier to resolve customer issues with fast internal communication. One of the bonuses of this single platform approach is that everyone has access to customer data, making it easier to deal with customers’ issues without them going through the tedious task of detailing their problem numerous times to different departments. 

The wealth of data that Mobile Service Cloud collects can also be used to examine your own team’s performance, too, allowing you to plan for extra resource in areas where your team is under-performing. In many cases, it’s simply a case of automating an element of your customer service to relieve the pressure on your team elsewhere. Mobile Service Cloud is uniquely placed to help you do that.

Ensuring your customer service team can do their jobs effectively through busy calendar periods will allow them to cope with the ebb and flow of retail customer service demand more efficiently. Automation is the key to ensure your team can cope in the busy times and build quality customer contacts throughout the year. In this way, you can ensure customer satisfaction at all times, not just on Black Friday, which ultimately benefits the bottom line.

Find out more about improving customer service experience with Mobile Service Cloud and if you’d like to discuss your needs and how CM.com can help you manage your customer service requirements, get in touch today.