Customer Service, Social Media, and Contact Centers

Success in business is generally determined by the value that is offered by a company’s product/service mix. Hence, companies are always looking for a potentially strong source of differentiation. In many cases, these entities attempt to set themselves at higher standards than their competitors by applying an above-the-curve angle towards conquering customer service.

Responding to phone calls, emails, social media, and all other forms of customer contact is essential to developing relationships that lead to new business and strong loyalty. The better your company is able to accomplish this, the more sustainable your business is likely to be in the long run. Thus, many businesses hire out customer service, social media, and other related operations to professional specialists.

Customer Service

Essential to the preservation of any business is the appropriate management of any and all customer inquiries. Providing high performance service to those people that have invested their money in your products/services is the best way to ensure they remain loyal to your company. Many large businesses can afford to have divisions that focus solely on this task; smaller businesses often struggle from a resource-allocation dilemma in this regard. Thus, in order to apply company resources for maximizing sales figures, utilizing a call center to facilitate these customer-client interactions is likely to be a favorable opportunity.

Social Media

Now an integral part of customer service, social media management continues to grow in importance with regards to customer retention. The current landscape of technology allows people to be “plugged-in” at all times. Consequently, social media is rising as a form of customer-client contact, as it provides an easy and acceptable interface for past and potential consumers to be heard. This opens up a unique opportunity for companies to interact with people that can both directly and indirectly be responsible for driving new business.

Therefore, it can be very detrimental for a company to inadequately respond to customer inquiries and feedback. Just as cultivating consumer engagement can drive exponential growth, ignoring it can cause an unstoppable downward spiral. Social media is an outlet by which customers share their most honest opinions and can voluntarily interact with your company, before and after making a purchase. It is necessary to acknowledge this interest and stimulate it further to spread awareness of your endeavor. Monitoring each instance in which your brand in mentioned in social media, stimulating the exchange of valuable consumer insights, and maintaining the reputation of your company and its brand are three of the many ways in which proper social media management can benefit your business.

Contact Centers

Customer service, social media, and other forms of contact are necessary for gaining new customers and establishing loyalty in your existing ones. Unfortunately, many business owners mistakenly consider the term “contact center” to be synonymous with “call center” and, thus, miss out on this opportunity. Nowadays, contact centers are geared towards providing an all-encompassing system by which companies can control their entire system of communication with their customers. Having a field expert dedicated to managing your contacts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year can maintain and increase the value of the future business that you can reasonably expect from each of your customers. This well help your business increase the rate at which it converts contacts into leads, leads into qualified leads, and qualified leads into paying customers.