With the Weather Turning Colder, Isn’t It Time to Turn Up Your Customer Service?

The summer holiday break is almost over, with autumn looming in the air. Children will start their new school year soon and September marks the start of the end of the year’s last big marketing push for many organisations.

Re-focusing their efforts to improve their customer experience delivery – in the lead up to Christmas and the New Year – the majority of organisations will be putting strategies in motion to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty levels to increase revenue.

At the start of 2014, analyst firm Forrester predicted the top trends for customer service in 2014. With the weather turning fresher, just how much heat has been given to the key customer service development areas highlighted for organisations to focus on from the summary below?

• Provide a consistent omni-channel customer service – whilst voice is still the primary communications channel it is quickly followed by self-service channels, chat and e-mail.

• Align mobile strategies, technology investments and user experience across functional groups.


• Formalise agent actions through BPM tools – helping to streamline service delivery, minimise agent-training times, ensure regulatory and company compliance, and control costs.


• Explore the power of proactive pre-purchase and post-purchase engagements – i.e. invitation to live chat


• Complement the power of knowledge management solutions with generated content from; forums, virtual agents, analytics and social listening.


• Predictive analytics to be developed to recommend agent “next-best actions” – recommending the right content and agents to connect the customer to based on behaviour and data.


• Move towards more holistic measurement programs for communication channels and touch-points.


• Simplify the agent workspace – automating tasks to increase agent productivity and personalisation.


• Leverage SaaS customer service solutions – increasing business agility and speed of deployment.


• Improve data quality and data governance – a cornerstone of good customer service.

Although we are approaching the last quarter of 2014 – by focussing on consistent customer service, improved customer satisfaction through more personalised and pro-active engagement, and by having a solid multi-channel customer service strategy – organisations can still maximise their potential to deliver on Forrester’s top customer service trends.

But organisations need to understand their customers’ needs and invest in implementing the right customer service technology to meet these requirements consistently across all channels.

With online service playing such a crucial part in the successful delivery of customer service, one of the biggest challenges facing companies is figuring out which of the multitude of channels needed to service today’s customer they have to implement and how to manage these channels in an economically palatable way without any disruption to existing customer care practices.

For insight into the best practices to do so and further evolve customer service in the cloud, why not download our whitepaper.

With the Weather Turning Colder, Isn’t It Time to Turn Up Your Customer Service?