Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

When approaching customers, you want to become more than just another company. You want your customers to get to know your brand, find out what it represents, and discover the ways it can improve their lives. You want them to create a relationship with your brand, look for it when they need it, and help others connect with it. This process is called customer engagement. But why is customer engagement so important? And how can you engage your customers today?

Creating strong relationships with your customers isn’t something that happens overnight. And, every customer has a unique personality and perspective on business relationships. Ever been around a group of young pups? They may have the same parents and even look alike (i.e. adorable with tiny floppy ears) but talk about some unique personalities! It takes time and effort to understand individual pups and businesses alike, but once you do the end result is very rewarding.

Regardless of the type of business, every product and service needs to provide a great customer experience. That’s why the need for great customer experience specialists has been on the rise. The better the customer experience, the better your reputation, sales, and revenue will be. But what does a customer experience specialist do? And how can you hire the best ones?

Telecommuting or remote working is no longer only a strategy to scale up your customer service or globally distributing your support teams. It’s a growing necessity that is more about future-proofing your customer service against business-related uncertainties. Apart from being a developing global necessity, the need for telecommuting also entails the preferences of workers.

Did you miss Part 1 of this series? It was quite a show! Luckily, you can still go back and read it! We’re looking at different B2B customer support channels from two distinctly opposite perspectives: cost center (support is a necessary evil of business) and profit center (support can hold its own in the revenue generation conversation). In Part 2 we are looking at two of the most modern support channels, self-service and visual support. And we’ve got a bonus at the end!

Studies of customer feedback already tell us that the majority of customers prefer to solve their problems on their own over contacting a support agent. It makes sense—self-service puts the customer in the driver’s seat, empowering them to be autonomous and find the right answers with speed. But self-service is also better for businesses. It enables them to do more with less and frees their support teams’ time up for higher-stakes issues that require a human touch.

Smartphones have become a common part of everyday life. Pew research reports that 96% of people in the United States use cell phones. And with their ubiquity, text messaging has become one of the most common forms of communication in modern life. Recent research from Text Request found that 97% of smartphone users had texted in the past week. For businesses, that makes text messaging an important channel to include in your customer support strategy.