
Know your Customers and Meet their Needs
Companies collect a lot of customer data. Still, customers often have to repeat everything over and over again. Instead, good customer support could sometimes even preempt issues if they would know the customer. Leveraging data stored in ERP systems and having the communication history at hand are key. For new customers social media mining or analyzing peer groups can make the customer known without bothering him with thousands of questions.
Deliver a Personal, Satisfying Self-service Experience
For most people being able to use their mother tongue is a prerequisite for a personal experience. Or simply the only way to communicate efficiently. This requires a localized UI, but also being able to access knowledge using the customers language. Ideally also answers are provided in the customers’ language, at least in a machine translated quality. FAQs should be translated in human quality.
Allow Customers to Share Ideas and Solve Issues
E-commerce wants to benefit from the sharing economy, too. And it should. Often the customers themselves are the best support agents. Companies therefore need to provide an Open Knowledge Base which can be expanded by customers. Giving kudos to contributors or implementing some sort of gamification is often incentive enough for the customer’s efforts. Most customers, though, will use their mother tongue for writing knowledge articles. Thus articles in many languages have to be revised for publication. They need to be retrievable by cross-language search through the Multilingual Knowledge System. Their content has to be machine translated into the customer’s language. Some companies want to translate every article in human revised quality into their corporate language. Articles need to be categorized. Text Analytics can extract invaluable insights.
Support your Agents Optimally
Customers can embarrass support agents, because by simple googling they often know more about the issue than the agents themselves. Therefore, the agents need the same cross-language access to the knowledge base as the customers. In addition they need to have access to the communication history and customer data from the ERP systems. A social media dashboard provides further information about the customer, about their colleagues, friends, or family members and their communication history. For known problems template answers, translated in all languages, should be available.
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Without the customers, no business can survive. You should make customers happy even when you can’t provide them everything they need, which is why we consider customer service outsourcing for any business.
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