ASSIGNMENT

Unit 2: Customer Accommodation

1 Find out the trends in Customer Accommodation.

2022 Customer Service Trends

1. Customer service is a significant pillar of business growth.

As a result, businesses overall are increasing their investments in all areas of customer
service to ensure customers are satisfied with their experience. Below we’ll discuss the
key areas of focus to look out for.

2. Customers Want a Personalized Experience.

When someone reaches out to your team, they want to be treated like a person, not a
number. They want to feel like their case is important and that your rep cares deeply
about solving their issue. It shouldn't feel like your team is applying a one-size-fits-all
approach to every customer interaction. Since every support case is a little different, each
one should be treated as such.

3. Businesses are prioritizing customer experiences.

With more businesses shifting their focus to customer experiences, customer expectations
are rising as well. This means that if your business isn't prioritizing customer experience,
you run the risk of failing to meet customer needs and potentially falling behind your
competitors.
4. Face-to-Face video support options are increasing.

Face-to-face video was once an internal tool that teams would use to conduct meetings
between offices or team members who worked in different departments. Since the
COVID-19 pandemic, video has grown tremendously in popularity as many businesses
were forced to adapt to a remote or semi-remote environment.

Now, tools like Zoom are becoming commonplace as organizations are starting to realize
how useful face-to-face video communication can be both internally and when working
with customers. Customers appreciate this as well, as preferences for using video calling
in customer service have increased to 70%. In addition, 94% of customers rate video
support as a positive experience.
5. Automation is being used for simple tasks.

In customer service, you can perform the same task multiple times within the same day.
Whether that's solving a common problem, transferring calls to a special department, or
 sending follow-up notes to customers, there are a few actions that can seem tedious or
menial throughout your workday.

This is where artificial intelligence has made great strides in reducing the workload for
customer service personnel. APIs and workflows automate routine functions like
assigning cases and chatbots can handle customer inquiries without the need for a human
rep. Customers also prefer automated interactions for simple tasks, as shown in the graph
below.

6. Self-Service is a standard form of customer service.

Google — and other search engines — have changed the way consumers access
information. Rather than calling your support line when they have a question, people will
Google their inquiry first to see if they can find a solution. This cuts the need to call your
support team and potentially get stuck on hold waiting for an answer.

7. Chatbots and other messaging tools will continue to be popular.

Chatbots and other messaging tools are great for customer service because they often
provide answers faster than waiting on the phone or for an email reply. 71% of customers
already expect brands to offer customer support over messaging channels, so it’s a trend
for 2022.

2 Find out the role and Importance of customer service?

Customer service is a process for providing significant value-added benefits to the supply
chain in a cost-effective way.

Importance of customer service

Increase sales.
Customer support isn’t just about retaining customers. It’s also an effective way to
increase sales. It’s not just your existing customers who have questions — your prospects
do too. It’s been reported that 52% of customers will abandon online purchases if they
can’t find the information they’re looking for. Provide online support or easy ways for
your reps to get the answers they are looking for. Save your sale by getting customers and
prospects the information they need, when they need it.
Retain customers.
It’s an oft-quoted statistic that acquiring customers costs 6–7x more than retaining your
existing ones. For small businesses, with limited time and resources, customer
satisfaction is even more important.
Find opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.
Your current customers can be one of your best sources of business. When you connect
all of your support channels and the apps you use to run your business, like a customer
relationship management (CRM) app, everyone at your company can be in the know
about customers. Support agents can see order histories, open opportunities, and shipping
status. Sales knows when a customer needs help. When you share customer information,
product insights, and support metrics across the company, not only can everyone be more
productive and do a better job of building relationships, but you can uncover
opportunities to cross-sell and upsell customers.
Improve the products and services you offer.
Whether you have three people or 30 on your support team, they’re a crucial link to the
outside world. Unlike product management or marketing teams — which only talk to
customers from time to time — your agents talk to real customers every single day. A
good customer service application coupled with a CRM system will gather information
from a huge variety of sources across your business and beyond. It can tell you how
customers are interacting with your product and if they’re having problems. We can’t
underscore the importance of your product decisions and how they impact customer
service. If you categorise your cases carefully, you can see what modifications and
features customers would like to see in your product or what the biggest pain points are.
These customer service insights are crucial in driving the most critically important
product decisions.
Make better business decisions.
Your customer service tools can help you do more than just support customers. They can
help you improve virtually every aspect of your business. Data from your help desk lets
you see how your agents are performing and provides indicators for optimising your
support team. Your help desk can also provide an overview of CSAT (customer
satisfaction) scores and customer health indicators. Or track the most requested customer
features. When you look at a help desk solution, make sure it’s easy to get the insights
you need to make faster, smarter decisions.
It is clear that excellent customer service performance seems to add value for all
members of the supply chain. Thus, a customer service program must identify and
prioritize all activities important to accomplish operating objectives. A customer service
program also needs to incorporate measures for evaluating performance. Performance
needs to be measured in terms of goal attainment and relevancy. The critical question in
planning a customer service strategy remains. Does the cost associated with achieving the
specified service goals represent a sound investment and, if so, for what customers?
Finally, it is possible to offer key customers something more than high-level basic
service. Extra service beyond the basics is typically referred to as value-added. Value-
 added services, by definition, are unique to specific customers and represent extensions
over and above a firm’s basic service program.

3 Explain the customer satisfactions and its importance in the service industry?

Customer satisfaction is a marketing term that measures how products or services supplied
by a company meet or surpass a customer's expectation. Customer
satisfaction is important because it provides marketers and business owners with a metric that
they can use to manage and improve their businesses.

Small businesses involved in the service industry need to develop a strong customer service
focus to attract and retain customers. The service industry is a rough and tumble place,
where only businesses with an aim to completely satisfy their customers survive. From the
first contact to the completion of service, embrace some basic customer satisfaction tips to
gain a competitive edge.

Companies involved in the service industry, such as hair salons and car repair shops, must
focus on providing top-notch customer service at each and every level. Whether interacting
with customers on the phone or in person, greet customers with an enthusiastic and joyful
tone. When setting up appointments, provide detailed information related to the procedures
and time-lines associated with your service. Employees should demonstrate a thorough and
accurate knowledge of all services offered. Promote prompt and courteous service. Provide
explanations for any delays. Thank customers for their business and welcome them back.
Strive to develop a positive and respectful relationship the first time to encourage repeat
business and customer loyalty.

Providing proper customer service throughout the customer experience will hopefully limit
the need to handle conflict. When conflict does arise, it's important to limit any damage and
seek to mend the relationship with your customer. Employees should demonstrate empathy
when handling angry or upset customers. Demonstrate empathy by allowing the customer
to vent and then respond with an affirmation of the problem and your desire to assist in
getting the problem resolved as soon as possible. Offer solutions to help remedy the
problem--this can include discounts or free services depending on the severity of the issue.
Track customer complaints to help identify possible problems within the company. Follow-
up on complaints to ensure customers received appropriate care and service after the
complaint.
 Customer satisfaction helps drive repeat business and should remain a top priority of a
service-oriented business. Go above and beyond to meet customer needs. Employees can
offer complementary services when appropriate. This provides an opportunity for
additional profit while driving a positive customer experience. Do your best to nurture
relationships with current customers, while working to attract new customers. This can
include providing current customers with discounts for referrals or sending them emails
linked to special promotions to celebrate their birthdays.

4 How can owners deal with challenges in customer service business?

Serving Multiple Customers at a Time

Whenever your business is growing your customers will increase automatically. If you
are managing customer service on your own, then you must have faced the challenge of
serving multiple customers at a time and you failed in offering the relevant solution.
However, there are customer service challenges that the customer support representatives
face every time because of a lack of time and infrastructure.
Putting customers on hold and after that not offering them relevant solutions is not a good
customer support practice. Outsourcing customer service to a reputed BPO service
provider is the best solution as they have experience in dealing with customer issues and
tough market conditions. Apart from that, they are known for using best-in-class
technology and infrastructure known for delighting customers.

Slow Response Time

More than 70% of the people claim that they are not satisfied with the customer service
which puts them on hold and has a very slow response time. Nowadays customers switch
to different brands if they face a single unpleasant experience from their preferred brand.
Most of the companies think that investing in customer service does not yield any profit
or even return on investment which is not true.

Resolving customer service challenges include multiple efforts such as adding live chat,
deploying AI chatbots, having skilled customer support representatives, etc. It can incur
huge costs to the company. Outsourcing customer support services to a renowned third-
party service provider is very much cost-effective while leaving your customers happy.

Lack of Customer Engagement

Whenever a customer faces a problem, then they try to reach out to customer care and
want to speak with a human customer care agent for troubleshooting. In many scenarios,
companies fail to meet the customer expectations of human interactions as the number of
agents is less than the number of calls they receive. Lack of customer engagement may
lead to a significant loss of customers and a decrease in sales. Outsourcing agencies
usually engage customers in real-time while using voice chat or video chat if required by
collaborating with a co-browsing facility for resolving the customer issues. It will not
only help in customer retention but also positive word of mouth that will lead to
enhanced sales and customer acquisition.

Transferring Calls Frequently

Sometimes customer care representatives transfer calls very frequently without listening
to the customer. Finally, it leads to more time to resolve the customer issue because the
customers have to reiterate the issue to every agent, and eventually it does not get
resolved in time that leads to huge customer dissatisfaction. These types of customer
service mistakes occur when business workflows are misaligned with all communication
channels. To mitigate these customer service challenges using intelligent routing and
effective department management are the most efficient solutions that will result in
excellent customer service.

Offering Wrong Solutions

Many times the customer care representatives offer wrong solutions or products to the
customers as they don’t understand what the customers are saying. The reason behind this
can be an unclear conversation with the customers, lack of listening, etc. These kinds of
customer service challenges can be solved through active listening, and calming down the
customer while asking them relevant questions for a better understanding of the problem.
The customer service agents of BPO agencies are trained enough in a way so that they
listen to the customers and ask relevant questions by gaining insights from the visitor
analytics. They also proactively guide customers as they use state-of-the-art technologies
that collect customer data which is essential for faster response time.

Poor After Sales Support

One of the most common customer service challenges is poor after-sales support. Many
companies only focus on the sales of their products and do not bother about after-sales
support. It is an example of poor customer service. The research report says that
customers leave brands because they don’t get proper responses if they face any issues
after they buy the product from that brand. These kinds of customer service issues can be
handled while making regular follow-ups or sending emails or a thank you note so that
the customers feel appreciated.

Fail to Meet Commitments

As a company, you should not make false commitments to your customers because false
commitments will ruin your brand reputation as well as you will lose customers. Many
service providers unknowingly make false commitments without realizing the fact that it
can create a negative impact on their brand. It will eventually affect customer loyalty and
brand reputation thus leading to negative words of promotion.

Disconnected Customer Journey

Measuring the customer journey for a brand is crucial for a company to grow in the
market while offering relevant product fit for their customers. It is very important that
customers fulfill their life journey with a brand so that they become loyal to the brand. If
 the stakeholders and the brand representatives are disconnected, then they will definitely
fail to align the customer service and customer journey.
To overcome these kinds of customer service challenges, companies need to focus on
their customer touchpoints, social channels, website, inbound and outbound marketing,
and last but not least the customer service department. Use different metrics to map the
customer journey and try to fulfill the customer expectations by knowing their needs. To
do that, always remember that as a brand you should be present with your customers
starting from the time of purchase to after-sales support and nurturing customer
relationships.

5. Explain why the education and background of a customer is important.

A customer who is a professional, like a chartered accountant, will be in a better position

to understand the savings account opening norms in a bank than an illiterate farmer. The
latter would most probably require detailed explanations, in his mother tongue, and
assistance in filling up all the forms. These would undoubtedly make the service
transaction more time consuming. In addition, the service delivery would suffer, if the
provider was not conversant with the language of the customer or was incapable of
coming down to the comprehension level of the customer.

Example: An educated housewife could be helpless inside an ATM kiosk, if there was a
“system fault” and would have to resort to ‘manned’ banking procedures.

The mood, attitude and personality of the customer might prevent a smooth service
transaction.

 In a popular restaurant positioned for the family, when some rowdy nonfamily
group disturbs the peaceful atmosphere, the service provider fails in delivering the
promise.
 The demeanour of the ill-mannered group is markedly different from the orderly
behaviour of the rest of the family-type customers, and although they are smaller
in number, they manage to ruin the experience of all other customers. This is also
an uncontrollable factor for the service marketer.

Service transactions and the quality of service delivery depend a lot on both the provider
and the customers carrying out their roles seamlessly as designed by the blueprints of
operations. While it can to a great extent be possible to manage the quality of the
performance of the internal customers, it becomes a challenge to extract compliant
behaviour from the customers.
The customers of the same service firm and offer are different from each other due to the
following:
 Differing backgrounds of education, family, occupation, income;
 Differing skills, attitude and aptitude;
 Differing moods, involvement, experience, awareness and perception.

If the service has to be delivered with consistent quality – and customers’ participation is
taken as mandatory for the service delivery – then the differences in the characteristics of
the customers have to be taken into account by the service marketer.