The current market is highly competitive. Customers not only value the quality of products and services, but their demands for customer service are also increasing. The reasons for complaints are endless. But as we enter the 21st century, is the responsibility of customer service just to handle customer inquiries and complaints? If not, how should companies improve the quality of their customer service teams?

Composition and Work of Traditional Customer Service Departments

Traditional customer service departments mainly handle customer email or phone inquiries and complaints. Therefore, the qualities of traditional customer managers hired by companies are typically high stress tolerance, quick adaptability, strong organizational skills, excellent communication skills, patience, and empathy.

Some customers are irritable, while others ask incessant questions. Customer managers must rely on their past experience in handling complaints to determine how to deal with each customer and provide the same level of service to everyone.

How to transform from customer service to customer success?

The title "Customer Success Manager" (CSM) was unheard of a decade ago.  But a 2019 study indicated that over 40% of 109 surveyed high-tech company employees had CSM roles.  Coincidentally, a LinkedIn survey showed that CSM was the second most promising sales job in 2019, second only to enterprise account executive.

Unlike traditional customer experiences, CSMs don\'t just handle complaints; they provide customers with information, transaction services, business processing, and advice. They also conduct market research and marketing. In fact, customer service acts as an engine, driving the production chain and intertwining with marketing, technical operations, and brand reputation.  Therefore, CSMs need a thorough understanding of company product features, usage processes, and manufacturing processes.

So, how can companies leverage technology to improve customer service quality today? Udesk summarizes four popular customer service techniques and demonstrates how to use software and tools to maximize marketing effectiveness:

1. Increase Social Media Interaction

E-commerce is no longer a new thing; social commerce is the future trend. With the increasing number of social media and communication software, many consumers or merchants are accustomed to using WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, WeChat, and Line as media for transaction services and goods.

Traditional e-commerce values the value of the goods themselves, while social e-commerce utilizes the characteristics of social media to increase consumer interaction and trust with the brand, and tries to get closer to the feelings of consumers, creating emotional connections and increasing the conversion rate of goods and services. Therefore, your marketing or customer service team should increase social media interaction, using word-of-mouth marketing and celebrity influence to achieve sales promotion through "Comment, Like, Share".

2. Strengthen Multi-channel Management

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, many companies have advocated for working from home (Work From Home). In fact, remote work, especially in e-commerce, requires good internal communication software. Sometimes customers, in urgent need of help, will leave the same question across different media.

To facilitate communication between SMEs and customers, Udesk allows employees from different departments to view activity records from various communication software on the same interface. By organizing this information uniformly, you can avoid multiple employees handling the same case repeatedly, and even integrate similar cases to strategically carry out work, enhancing the coordination and efficiency of the customer service team while maintaining consistency in customer experience.

At the same time, Udesk has added a covert messaging feature to help employees discuss specific customer situations on the platform, avoiding the confusion of forwarding messages and saving time. During the pandemic, Udesk successfully introduced social and conversational marketing (Social Commerce) into the luxury retail industry, such as watches and jewelry, through these internal communication features, resulting in a nearly fourfold increase in the company's business in the second quarter.

3. Provide personalized services

The rapid development of technology and networks has led to a proliferation of similar products and services. To stand out, you should elevate the level of communication between frontline sales and customers, enhance customer insights, enable more accurate targeting of potential customers, and provide a "unique" product or service experience tailored to individual customer characteristics. This fosters customer "reliance" on the brand, cultivating loyal customers.

Many software solutions in the market analyze customer habits. For example, Udesk can classify customers in real-time based on age, gender, needs, and past purchase history, sending them the most appropriate messages. Some merchants reported that during the pandemic, they consistently used Udesk to send personalized messages via WhatsApp, such as special birthday month offers and Valentine\'s Day limited-edition products. This resulted in a remarkable 24% increase in message response rates and sales performance.

4. Respond to customers quickly

Consumer expectations of businesses are constantly rising.  A study by HubSpot, a globally renowned marketing software, indicated that 82% of customers consider "immediate response" very important, and 60% consider a response within 10 minutes to be fast. Some e-commerce businesses report losing customers if they are left unattended for more than 10 minutes.

Therefore, you should try using online customer support, such as online chatbots, Udesk message "quick reply" functions, etc. Even after business hours, if there are customer inquiries, there will be an automatic "away message" reply to avoid customers leaving a bad impression on the company due to being neglected, and also to save employees time in manual replies.