In the world of Customer Service Excellence, the first point of contact with customers falls within the shoulders of your customer service ambassadors. Having a myriad of customer service strategies does not guarantee excellence – but the people behind customer service delivery does. Customer service employees play an integral role in keeping your customers happy; yet these teams' importance often comes as an afterthought instead of a focused attention.

We asked industry leaders on their opinions and thoughts on key issues revolving around priorities, implementation, and technological aids within Customer Service Excellence. Here is what they had to say!

Leader's Profile

Terence Yow, Managing Director, Enviably Me (Melissa Brand for Fashion Footwear)

Babul Balakrishnan, Head of Customer Care, Thunes

• What are your top priorities in evolving customer service strategy with the evolving customer sophistication?

Terence:

The thought process should flow from identifying to understanding and finally building an experential journey. First priority is always to understand WHO are our core Melissa shoes customers and then figure out what's important to them in their entire brand experience and shopping journey. Then zero in more specifically on what's important to them for their Melissa instore shopping experience.

Babul:

The first would be to drive service quality. It is important to continue to drive a continuous improvement program focusing on constantly optimising current processes and systems by working with cross-functional teams and catching the issues further upstream.

Next, would be to push for automation of redundant tasks: where possible, automate the day to day manual tasks so that the agent can focus on quality adding work and focus on providing the customer a better experience.

Finally, the Focus on customer self-service tools where our customers do prefer to reach out to our support teams for a resolution to their issues, but nevertheless, I believe there are still opportunities where we could possibly provide self-serving opportunities through more transparency which helps manage their and their customer's expectations. 

• How do you demonstrate customer service excellence in your business?

Terence: ​​

One of the things we are working on now is to meet the new needs of today's shopper with regards to frictionless shopping.  Specifically how do we enable a pleasant and smooth self-select self-checkout journey for those who prefer it. Ongoing, we have always maintained a good tempo and frequency on skills training.  We believe getting basics right in areas such as product knowledge, fashion styling knowledge and customer service goes a long way to make our shoppers happy.  

Babul:

We use KPIs to demonstrate how well we are meeting our operational goals of serving the customer but that does not present the full picture. We need a better measure. We have tried using NPS, but while the results have been favourable, it has not found favour with our customers in terms of quantity. We have tried to use CSAT from our support tool which again seems to be very lopsided, either they are very unhappy or extremely satisfied. In both cases, we don't have a sufficient quantity of responses to take these results seriously. So we are still on the hunt to find a measure that makes sense, and can measure ourselves against.

• In your opinion, what are the important pieces of technology in enhancing customer service experience?

Terence:

Technology can be a double edged sword.  It is easy to buy and implement  the latest tech gadgets but it has to be combined with the right enrolling, engagement and training activity systems for our frontline staff.  For us, we are focused on self-select, self-checkout and retail-entertainment technologies for our Clube Melissa shops.

Babul:

I see plenty of use-cases and tools in the B2C space, and this is completely the opposite in the B2B space. Customers in this space prefer to email to their account managers or support for all their issues; they are not very supportive of social media tools unless they are able to get instant responses; the nature of issues in the B2B space is such that several parties, internal and external, need to coordinate their efforts to resolve the issue, so a real-time solution is not feasible most times. What can help in this space is to understand trends of issues, the root cause analysis and then driving that to solution(s) which might remedy those issues; here data mapping and analysis tools along with real-time dashboards that visualise these to make the whole process more efficient and precise.