Companies that make great products distinguish themselves from the competition through even great service.
What is Customer Service?
Service means the given product works most of the time and when there is an issue or question, they get solved quickly. Customers demand support on their terms – any time – any channel/mode of interaction – any type of issue. They want expert help and their perception of the product comes through how they receive the service. Better service they receive better their perception and they stick to the brand longer and buy more from the company.
Service Model Opportunities
Companies strive to offer support on multiple channels but the core of their support model is around some kind of a ticketing system that inherently translates in all their service delivery models – be it chat, email, portal, web, phone, mobile, SMS, and other media. The service model is built around more “chat” and less problem resolution. Customers are forced to provide a lot more information and are involved in a lot of back and forth before the issue becomes clearer to the support agent at the company. Even a 24-hour chat service that is available to the customers lacks actual troubleshooting and resolutions and is more fine-tuned for simple questions or just chat (pun intended).
For companies that extend customer service to include Field Engineers and/or Professional Services teams, the challenges are even higher. The troubleshooting and resolutions require one or more visits to the customer site in addition to spending time on live phone calls or conference calls. In today's world, customers are more interested in talking about their roadmap, value, and success instead of coordinating and spending time on investigation and troubleshooting.
It is not that companies are not interested or want to solve issues quickly. The opposite is true. They want to increase self-service resolutions, they want to know customer issues before even their customers become aware of them, they are keenly interested in knowing silent “brewing issues” before they become a fire drill, they want fewer escalations, they want to spend more time in their customer roadmap, their engineering team wants to collaborate with the support team so they can improve the product in a way that drives better customer experience when they need to hire new engineers don’t want to spend months training them, they want to teach and transfer the know-how built over time by a handful of experts to the rest of the members, prioritize to work on important things that matter to their customers, and avoid spending hours on phone and conference calls on customer escalations.
When their professional services and field engineers get involved, they want them armed with game plans and needed materials (in case a physical component is involved in the repair services) so they can avoid scheduling multiple visits to the customers to solve issues. Logistics and quality want to spend less time on RMAs and stocking parts and more time increasing the lifespan and optimizing their logistics operations.
Simply, companies want to do less chat during support and more conversations on customer experience and success!
Interestingly the goals of both the customers and companies are aligned – spend less time on unnecessary chat and more time on issue resolution and avoidance. Then why is this becoming a constant challenge and theme in customer service?
The reasons are:
Customer support and customers spend more time deciphering the symptoms to understand the root cause.
Finding the right solution to the given problem.
Finally, understanding and predicting proactively the potential issues that might come up so the companies can be better prepared with optimum solutions and materials, where they are applicable.
Ascendo has been built and continuously enhanced to solve this challenge. We are making the technology built with Artificial Intelligence and ML for this specific purpose and making it work for the demands of customers and objectives of companies when it comes to customer service. Ascendo helps companies to:
Do less “chat” and resolve fast.
Serve more, fast, accurate, and reduce escalation.
Replace less and repair quickly.
Stock less and avoid downtime.
Working with some of the wonderful brands in both Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C), we are elevating the experience in every interaction by the customer and agents.
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