What will be great Customer Service and Customer Experience post COVID-19?
As vaccination efforts against COVID-19 progress, marketers all over the world are trying to understand what changed due to the pandemic, which of these changes will persist and how the “new normal” will evolve for them.
One of the areas that will never look the same as it did pre-COVID is Customer Service. Consumers state, according to a report by Salesforce [PDF], that COVID-19 raised their standards regarding customer service. Brands will have to adapt to the new demands, by taking advantage of technology (automation, artificial intelligence, chatbots, interactive voice response systems and more) to deliver meaningful experiences at scale and foster retention. Brian Solis describes in a very interesting post on ZDNet how customer service has become the face of the Brand and what Brands need to do to create a lasting relationship with their customers.
Optimizing the customer journey is crucial for the above to happen, and to do so Brands will need a combination of marketing technology and data, where machine learning plays a major role. Econsultancy’s editor Ben Davis discussed this topic with two experts in the field of customer journey optimization in a webinar that you can watch on demand (email registration needed). Some highlights of the webinar are listed in the post “Customer journey optimisation and smart martech: Where to start?”.
Speaking of customers expecting better experiences, Brands should be especially cautious to provide top digital customer experience to Gen Z consumers who state that post-COVID they are more willing to move on and try new Brands if they are not satisfied with the service they receive, than they were before the pandemic. Furthermore, 61% of them said (in a study by Sitecore) that they enjoy online shopping more than in-person shopping, so efficient shopping apps and optimized e-shops become more and more important for retailers.
