The central tenet of customer service is the same as it ever was: keep the customer happy! Which means: keep the customer coming back. ‘Tis the nature of business. But while the foundation of good customer service remains the same, the strategies and tactics you use to reach out to customers constantly shift and evolve. Staying engaged with and responsive to customers in 2018 requires a set of skills and technical interventions that would have been unimaginable thirty or twenty or even ten years ago.
Customers of decades past might have expected to walk around the corner to the general store to speak to a manager. Or to call a corporate office to speak to a representative. These are both still options, of course, but as the economy becomes increasingly digitized, customers have come to expect seamless and speedy digital engagement. They want to be able to reach out any time, anywhere. That’s the way the world works now that mobile devices define communication. Your company or organization should have strategies in place to meet this need.
The easiest way to achieve a responsive and reactive stance toward customers is to implement a cloud-based communication solution that allows users outside your organization to connect and communicate with you via chat and video without any hassle. Anyone who wants to connect should be able to--and the cloud makes that possible by eliminating the roadblock of traditional conferencing and collaboration infrastructure.
It should be noted that we are talking about “customers” here in the broadest sense, so this concept of engagement applies to doctor-patient and school-student and government-citizen relationships as well as company-customer dynamics. They are all informed by the same needs: providing a service to people who expect their demands to be met with 21st century solutions. So let’s take a quick look at how some of these other sectors can use cloud solutions to strengthen engagement with “customers.”
Direct communication with government officials has traditionally been possible only by traveling to city hall or other civic offices to attend town halls or city council meetings. With a cloud conferencing solution accessible by all citizens, a local government could open its proceedings up to anyone who wanted to attend, with no one denied access due to their inability or unwillingness to travel downtown to contend with traffic and parking and other logistical hurdles.
At this point, asking students to learn without digital technology is like expecting kids of previous generations to do math problems without a pencil and paper. It’s technically possible, but why not give students the tools they feel most comfortable? And for the vast majority of students, those tools include digital solutions that use video to redefine and expand the nature of the classroom space.
There is perhaps no greater need for cloud-based communication solutions than in the healthcare sector. It is more than a matter of convenience or reckoning with the bottom line, for a medical provider that extends video capabilities to its patients can improve lives on the most fundamental level.
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