Blog – Customer Experience in The Cloud

John M Perez voted 2014 top Expert to follow in Customer Service

John M Perez — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:57:14 +0000

Thanks to the folks over at GetApp.Com for including me in this years Top 2014 Customer Service Experts to follow on Twitter. Every month I visit contact centers and customers worldwide, and I am delighted to know it gets recognized by Industry folks. Looking forward to continuing to share. Thank you to the staff at GetApp.Com and the CEO Christophe Primault. Be sure to follow John M. Perez on Twitter.

50% of CX in The Cloud eBook Sales Will Help Teach Kids to Learn Computer Programming

John M Perez — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:50:50 +0000

As author of “Customer Experience In The Cloud”, I am proud to announce that 50% of the proceeds from this eBook will go to support training programs that teach kids Computer Programming in New York City and abroad. The programs are led by an organization I am a part of called StagingChanges.Org. As a Founder, we recently put our budget for 2014 together and we are in need of donations to fund an estimate of 8 Live Training Programs per year while also bringing them to a Virtual Classroom format. As a result, I am really proud to help raise money for the programs here through the sale of my eBook. 50% of all the eBooks purchased off this website and on Amazon will go towards funding Online & Live Training programs that teach kids how to program using the Scratch Programming platform, learn how to Build a Raspberry Pi Micro PC, and all the other programs offered by StagingChanges.Org.

Where can I buy the Book?

On this site in our Store Section.
On Amazon.Com for your Kindle.

About Staging Changes

StagingChanges.Org teaches kids and their families computer programming, and Digital Arts. It was started in April of 2013, after a visit to the Philippines where I witnessed some tough living conditions for kids in the local provinces like homelessness, and almost no technology existed for these families. After days of brainstorming with locals in the Philippines, I started Staging Changes to help “stage change” in these kinds of communities through the creation of programs that expose kids and their parents to Technology and The Arts. We are currently working to provide training and workshops to kids in both the local New York Community, and overseas and we have our very first training scheduled in August.

What will the proceeds go towards?

The proceeds of the book will help to fund the costs of operating ongoing classes throughout the year, virtual training, and developing online content for kids.

The 14 Most Important KPIs to Measure Web Self Service & Online Help

John M Perez — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:41:56 +0000

Companies often put a Help or Support site together with the goal of avoiding calls into their contact center, but quite often not truly assessing the impact or value of their web self service experience. This is often happening because the business of measuring, benchmarking, and base lining the performance of your Online Help pages is often a business challenge for an organization.

In many cases, organizations struggle with correlating the relationship between their web self service site or knowledge base and the reduction in calls. In addition, they solely look at call avoidance as a measure, but don’t evaluate other measure of success. The good news is that there are a bunch of data points you can evaluate and measure, and I took the time to outline some of the 14 Most Important KPIs & Measurements you can use to measure your Web Self Service performance.

This is a preview of a table from the book entitled “Customer Experience in The Cloud“. For a complete list of KPIs and benchmarks including other channels like Online Communities, Social Media, eMail, Live Chat, and other channels feel free to purchase the entire book with our current 20% off Summer Sale promotion.

#	Key Performance Indicator	Industry Average	Best In Class	Definition	Source
1	% of Returning Visitors to Support Page	> 40%	Not Available	This is the percentage of returning visitors to your online support page. This will measure the quality and effectiveness of your knowledge base with your existing customers. It is an indicator on whether your customers use the knowledge base as a credible source.	Google Analytics Benchmark Tool
2	% of Searches with Relevant Results	> 85%	99%	This is the percentage of searches invoked on your support page knowledge base that result in relevant results for the customer searching.	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook
3	% of Searches without Relevant Results	< 15%	Not Available	This is the percentage of searches invoked on your support page knowledge base that do not result in relevant results for the customer searching.	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook
4	% of Visits from Mobile Devices to Company Support Page	5%	Not Available	The percentage of visits to your support pages from Mobile Devices.	Google Analytics Benchmark Statistics
5	% of Visits from Search Engines to Company Knowledge Base	10.00%	> 30%	The percentage of visits from 3rd Party search engines like Google to your company support pages. This is usually invoked by a question on Google and land on your company knowledge base or answer.	2010 RightNow Oracle Customer Experience Benchmark Report
6	Average Pageviews Per Visit on Support Page	< 3	Not Available	The average pages a person goes through on your support pages before they leave the site.	Google Analytics Benchmark Tool
7	Average Time On Support Page	3 minutes	Not Available	The average time a person spends on a support page.	Google Analytics Benchmark Tool
8	Bounce Rate	< 50%	10%	This is the percentage of visits to your support page that enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.	Google Analytics Benchmark Tool
9	Average Cost of Live Chat with Agent Co Browse	$6	Not Available	The average cost of a Live Chat with Co Browse Interaction.	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook
10	Percentage of Online Visitors Rating Your Knowledge Base Answers	3%	5%	This is the percentage of online visitors that actually rate whether a knowledge base answer was helpful or not to them. This is the total amount of visitors to your support page divided by the number total ratings received in the same period.	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook
11	Self Service Deflection Rate	23%	50%	The Self Service Deflection Rate primarily has to do with how effective your online support web experience is with answering and addressing support questions from visitors. Often, this rate represents the number of visits to your support site or website that do not result in an email, chat, or any assisted online support channel into your contact center. You can often calculate this measure by dividing the number of Online Inquiries into support by the total amount of unique visitors to your web self-service support site.	ServiceXRG.Com
12	Self Service Success Rate	48%	70.0%	This measure is generally a measure of how well your online self-service capabilities are working for your company. This measure is usually a percentage, and it is a more complex way to measure the effectiveness of your overall web self-service capabilities. It involves tracking all the customers who logged into your website and determine whether they have made a call into the contact center, sent an email, or used any assisted channel to get support within the same day or within a 24 to 48 hour period.	ServiceXRG.Com
13	Negatively Rated Knowledge Base Answers	52%	30%	This is the percentage of negative feedback received on your knowledge base answers when you ask an online consumer “Was this answer helpful?” In this case, consumers answered “No”	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook
14	Positively Rated Knowledge Base Answers	33%	46%	This is the percentage of positive feedback received on your knowledge base answers when you ask an online consumer “Was this answer helpful?” In this case, consumers answered “Yes”	Customer Service in The Cloud eBook

How to Measure & Calculate Web Self Service Success Rates (Part 1)

John M Perez — Wed, 29 May 2013 20:04:28 +0000

This a preview from a chapter in my book entitled “Customer Experience in The Cloud”.

As I visit clients internationally, many organizations are consistently challenged with ways to measure self service success in their organization. Since the web is often visited by anonymous visitors, many clients find it a challenge to measure the effectiveness of their web self service. Particularly within the context of their knowledge base or help center where visitors do not always authenticate to get help or service from a company.

The good news is that there are several ways to accomplish this through identifying Key Performance Indicators for Web Self Service. In this series I will introduce one of the first KPIs to look at which is the overall Web Self Service Rate of your Online Support Page. Your online support page can be the page where you present help information, knowledge base answers, or video tutorials to your customers. In this article we will show you how to measure the pages overall effectiveness using Self Service Rate as a measure.

The Definition of Self Service Rate

The Self Service Rate represents the number of visits to your support site that do not result in an email, chat, or any assisted online support channel into your contact center. You can often calculate this measure by dividing the number of Online Inquiries into support by the total amount of unique visitors to your web self service support site. If your support is sprinkled throughout several areas of your .COM site, then use the Unique Visitors for your entire site as a baseline.

For example, Table 1 illustrates a 3 month Self Service Deflection Rate Trend for a company.

Table 1: Online Support Page Self Service Rate Calculation

	January	February	March
Monthly Unique Visitors to The Online Support Page	500	700	750
Incoming Live Chat Inquiries	100	90	70
Incoming Email Inquiries	100	80	60
Incoming Click To Call Inquiries	50	30	15
Total Inquiries to Support	250	200	145
Self Service Deflection Rate	50%	71%	81%

Online Self Service Rate Explained:

During the month of January, the company support site received 500 unique visitors to the support page.
During that same period, 100 emails, and 100 live chat inquiries occurred online with customer service. An additional 50 inquiries also came in that month using the click to call option on the website resulting in a total of 250 inquiries into customer service received online.
The Self Service Deflection Rate for the month of January would be 50% (100% – (# of Total Inquiries / # of Support Page Visits).
As you go into the months of February and March you will notice that the Self Service Deflection Rate improved as visitors to the support page increased, but there were less inquiries into customer service via the online channel.

Best in Class vs. Industry Average Self Service Rate

Many organizations are looking for specific benchmarks and comparisons for Self Service Rates. This will vary from industry to industry so benchmarking may be best suited within your industry. While there is currently no major performance survey on Web Self Service Rates, below and a bar graph that typically plots the self service rates of the laggard, industry average, and best in Class Companies.

Self Service Rate Considerations:

The one thing this calculation does not account for is determining whether a visitor to your support site is an existing customer or just a new visitor browsing.
Since this rate does not delineate between who is an existing customer of your business vs. the one who isn’t, consider adjusting the calculations for Monthly Unique Visitors based on your New vs. Returning visitor trends on your web analytics package.

20% off Customer Experience in The Cloud (Summer Sale)

John M Perez — Sat, 25 May 2013 14:45:48 +0000

For the month of June, the Customer Experience in the Cloud eBook is offering a 20% Discount to all our current members who have downloaded the Free Ebook. Upon Checkout type the coupon code of “SUMMERSALE” to get 20% off. That’s right, you can purchase the leading book on Online Customer Service Benchmarks, and Best Practices for less than $5.00. It’s just one of the many ways we want to thank you for your interest in the book, and help you to make a difference in your organization.

Preview Chapters

13 Best Practices in Providing a Mobile Experience with Service
Designing an Online Customer Service Strategy
T op 10 Online Customer Service KPIs and Benchmarks
Free Customer Experience In The Cloud eBook Sample

BUY NOW

13 Best Practices in Providing a Best in Class Mobile Customer Service Experience

John M Perez — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:09:13 +0000

From the eBook “Customer Experience in The Cloud”

By 2013, Mobile will surpass PCs as a primary Internet device according to Gartner, and as a result, companies will need to get ahead of the curve in terms of building superior Mobile Customer Service Experiences.

The following 13 approaches to developing and deploying a better mobile customer service experience will be essential to incorporate in your support experiences for mobile devices. While the technologies and strategies here can also be deployed via the web experience, I need to add that these experiences.

Many of these have been developed with today’s online support for some of the largest brands in the world, and others are forward thinking technologies that will enable better experiences for consumers in the near future, as companies look to improve the mobile customer experience. In a very competitive mobile app space, I firmly believe that these capabilities will differentiate apps and companies making them more attractive to consumers.

Mobile Web Self Service – The ability to render a support experience with keyword search, dynamic and most popular answers, answer feedback, and a knowledge base to your consumer in a mobile friendly format.
Mobile Reactive Chat – Providing Deploying live chat via a mobile device to support customers over the phone.
Mobile Proactive Chat – You may have been on a website and experienced a live chat window appear as you browse a site so that an organization makes a sale. This strategy in the context of sales, and support will be a key trend of mobile devices.
Mobile Guided Assistance – Deploying a logic tree and path of questions for the user to follow to help answer a support question.
Mobile Email or Ask a Question – The ability for a customer to send an email to support using a seamless form experience optimized for mobile devices and integrated with a knowledge base for case deflection.
Mobile Phone Support – Is the ability to call customer care from your mobile device. Companies may want to extend this functionality to include GPS aware capabilities to present a customer care number or local phone numbers that are contextually relevant to the mobile app user’s location.
Mobile Social Support – Is the ability for a mobile app or web experience to offer support over social networks right within the app so that consumers can get assisted support through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and the various other sites.
Mobile Support Videos – Videos are a great to present “How To” tutorials or demonstrations on your product or service. Why not integrate them into your mobile customer service experience.
Real-time Video Conferencing & Support – In specific industries like Retail, and Hotel/Restaurant there is a great use case for using mobile video conferencing for customer support.
Geo Location Support – Today consumers are using mobile GPS devices to find places and locations. We are not that far away from consumers finding local experts or support staff within a region or location to help support a question about a product or service.
Mobile Support Communities – Is the
ability to display your support or brand community on a mobile device.
Mobile Click To Call Back – Many consumers using mobile phones can be in various places where they may not have the time or patience to wait on hold for customer service. Why not offer a button on your mobile experience that ensures your support team calls back when they are available.
Mobile Texting Support – For companies that provide a mobile text gateway for its customers, this is an ideal to service customer interactions.
Typical use cases are ticket status, billing, invoicing, and payment functions.

Mobile Customer Service Illustrations

Designing an Online Customer Service Strategy – Free Chapter from CX in The Cloud

John M Perez — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:08:21 +0000

Map the Step By Step Customer Journey

Wikipedia defines Customer Experience as “the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.” One of the essential steps to evaluating how well your online customer experience truly is for your customer, you must first understand their journey as they interact with your business online. This step is actually creating visual maps of each step of that customer journey so that your organization not only understands it, but so that they also can align goals of the organization and of the customer within the journey map.

The Customer Experience Lifecycle

The illustration above highlights a typical customer journey lifecycle that a customer in your organization may have taken prior to selecting your product or service. As you think about an online Customer Service strategy, your going to be focused on the steps on the Support & Serve side of this lifecycle illustration.

Identify the Customer Touchpoints

As you dive into the Support and Serve portion of the customer lifecycle, document both current and future opportunities to providing a better experience. Let us take the time to identify the areas of focus that power the support and serve online experience today:

Web Self-Service – Electronic or online support allows customers and employees to access information and perform routine tasks over the internet to help them, without requiring any interaction with a representative of an enterprise. Today, your company knowledge base, your enterprise search, online troubleshooting wizards, or online self-service capabilities can power a web self-service experience.
Online Assisted Support – Using Live Chat, Virtual Agent, Email, or Co Browse Technology, this is the support that involves an online consumer needing help and your company’s support agent assisting the customer via an online browser in real-time, or in a follow up email.
Social Media Customer Service – The business process of your support staff engaging consumers in real-time via Social Media channels like Twitter or Facebook to support them.
Mobile Customer Service – Is the business process of supporting customers over mobile phones. This ultimately means providing them resources like a knowledge base, email, or phone support directly from a mobile phone.

Mapping the Touchpoints

The illustration above additionally highlights specific support channels a customer can interact with in the Support and Serve lifecycle. Notice how when once a customer begins to use your product, they can engage with the Contact Center, a Web Experience, an IVR, or a Mobile device to get additional support while using your company’s product or service. Consider also mapping the back end systems that power these channels. Whether they exist or not, you need to consider the platforms and systems your organization utilizes to power these touch point experiences.

Determine what your Customers Need

Simply put, this is the process of evaluating your consumers and identify what they need in order to effectively support themselves, or for your organization to support them. This can be the process in which a company implements a survey, a focus group of customers, or any method of collecting customer information to provide a better experience between the organization and its consumers.

A recent survey done by TSIA indicates that the Knowledge Base is the least utilized self-service resources on a Support Site. When companies are asked, “What web self-service resources are most frequently used by your customers?” the results reveal that Knowledge Bases rated last but resources for contacting a company, and support policies were first.

Source: TSIA Benchmarking Study – John Ragsdale Eye on Service.

Therefore, what does this mean and why? First off, let us define some of the areas in the chart. In speaking with John Ragsdale recently, here are the definitions of the Knowledge Base and Support Policies.

Knowledge Base – This refers to a customer either running a search for an answer to their Question or going to a Knowledge Base landing page on a company website where they can run a search for a question they have.
Support Policies – This section could include overviews of all support channels, entitlement, and for-pay options on the consumer side, SLAs, according to John.

Evaluate and survey your customers first to determine what is the best approach and focus for your organization. Many companies may be simply better off investing in a Content Management system and video tutorials for training before they make investments in a knowledge base technology. Again, these needs will vary from industry to industry and I encourage you to speak to your customers first before assuming any of the above is essential to your web self-service strategy.

Developing Online Personas for Your Customers

This practice is ideal in order to begin to develop online personas for your customers. A method in which your organization begins to assess, develops, and predicts the online behavior of your customers when they are on your support website. This will help you to design and implement strategies around tailoring your support experience for each customer. In certain organizations, you will have different customer segments that use specific products or services that will be the key differentiator in developing online personas. The following Illustration identifies some examples of Online Personas you can use for your Online Support Experiences.

The How To Consumer – How Do I Make the Most of Your Product?

The Troubleshooter – Quickly Resolve My Issue!

The Potential – Show Me You Have a Great Product

Applying this to your Customer Segments

I spent some years working with American Express and got to appreciate their business and culture. As a result, I will mention examples of how one would tailor the online experience for two types of cardholders. American Express has multiple consumer segments of cardholders and many card types targeted to those consumers. A consumer who has a Black Card may be more inclined to call customer support for many of his or her requests and expects calls within seconds. This is likely because the holder of a Black Card is extremely affluent, has a busy schedule, and may or may not want to choose the online experience to get support on their questions.

Meanwhile, a typical American Express Platinum or Gold cardholder is a middle class traveler, highly educated, and is more likely to investigate the answer online or on their mobile device before they contact the contact center. This person may also engage in Social Media to get the answers since they are typically traveling a lot and are on a mobile device. In both of these cases, the experience you develop online for each cardholder would be different. For the Platinum Card holder, you may likely spend more time creating a web self-service and support environment that has a knowledge base, online tools for finding answers, live chat, and both a Social and Mobile Experience in customer support.

For the Black Card member, your time spent designing an online experience may be limited to just displaying the contact center phone number and Frequently Asked Questions. For this consumer segment, Amex does not spend as much time creating online tools and knowledge base content for the Black Card cardholder who infrequently uses the online channels for support.

Evaluate What Your Competitors Are Doing

As a result of the shift from the “inside out” view of the customer to “outside in”, it is important that your organization audits its current customer experience capabilities, and compare it to your competitors. In doing this exercise, an organization may find some key opportunities to improve the overall experience and identify gaps that they need to address to stay competitive, while improving the overall experience.

	Home Phone VOIP Market
	Vonage	AT & T	Verizon	Comcast	Ooma
Traditional Channels
Phone Support					
Email Support					
Knowledge Base					
Page Layout/Design Attributes
Support Page					
Dedicated Billing Pages/Content					
Online Tools (Order Status, Repair, International Calling Guides, Troubleshooting Scripting, Call Plans, etc.)					
Alternative Web Channels
Live Chat Support				
Twitter Support/Presence					
Submit Ticket over Web/Ticket Status				
Forum Support					
Video Tutorials					
Blog for Support					
Facebook Support					
YouTube Tutorials					

Some things to evaluate in this comparison are what capabilities do your competitors offer for customer support? What online tools do they have for their customers, and even whether the competitor is investing in mobile customer service? The above is an example of comparing competitors in the Telecommunications industry for Home VOIP Phones. As you will see, this is a deep dive into how each company supports its customers online, and doing something similar to this may help define the needs and gaps you need to address in your Customer Experience Strategy.

Identify Problems & Opportunities

After evaluating all of the above, you should come away with an insight into existing issues, opportunities to solve for them, and future forward thinking experiences that will enable a better customer service experience. Like anything done in the business world, you will need to prioritize these opportunities.

As you read on in this book, you will learn how to evaluate and measure these opportunities as we begin to align the practices with providing online customer service to organizational key performance indicators and ongoing measurements.

Summary of Designing Experiences

In summary, the key to designing great customer experiences is to closely evaluate the steps as follows:

Map the Step By Step Customer Journey
Identify the Customer Touchpoints
Determine what your Customers Need
Developing Online Personas for Your Customers
Evaluate What Your Competitors Are Doing
Identify Problems & Opportunities

Help Online Customers Within 5 Minutes—or Lose Them Forever

John M Perez — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:44:27 +0000

I’m a major shopper, as all my friends know, but even I am shopping online more often these days. That puts me in line with the 60 percent of consumers in Deloitte’s 2013 LivePerson Connecting with Customers report who say they are shopping online more frequently than they used to.

When they hit your site, those online customers have high expectations for customer service. A whopping 83 percent report they consistently need some type of customer support when shopping online. How fast do they want to be helped? Hold your breath: 31 percent expect it immediately, and 40 percent expect help within five minutes. What’s worse, if they don’t get help when they want it, nearly half (48 percent) will leave your site.

These demands may seem hard to live up to, but consider that most customers shop online for convenience. If they have to wait and wait around for help online, they might as well go to a store and search for a salesperson, no?

Read more at Yahoo! Small Business Advisor.

6 Customer service apps that every online seller needs

John M Perez — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:37:31 +0000

It’s no surprise that at Appeagle we believe that the key to a more effective, profitable business is tools. eCommerce tools that help online sellers engage the marketplace, reprice their listings, analyze their competition and fulfill their orders. Many sellers know that these tools are crucial to maintaining a successful eCommerce business, especially when those sellers use Amazon, eBay or Rakuten Shopping to sell their items. What many sellers don’t know is that there are a wealth of fantastic customer service apps that can help you to manage customer interaction and feedback. These apps help online sellers keep their buyers happy and maintain a positive reputation in the marketplace. Because we think these apps are so important we put together a list of six of our favorite customer service apps.

Zendesk

This app allows customers to open help tickets whenever they have a problem. You can then respond and you can even enter predefined responses to cut down on time spent. You can then view all the activity on your tickets, conduct a search and it’s all in one handy app. The app costs $24/month and their mobile app is free.

OTRS

This is an iPhone app for the open-source OTRS Help Desk System. Now you can access your tickets and answer concerned customers via email. You can also close tickets remotely, which is handy when you need to do customer service on the run. The other great thing about this app is that it’s absolutely free.

Satisfaction Remote

If you use the customer service platform Get Satisfaction, you will love this iPhone app. The platform and app are perfect for getting connected with your customer base. You can offer feedback, provide support and communicate with customers anytime and anywhere. This app is also free.

Kayako

A help desk and support suite built-in-one, Kayako is perfect for keeping your customers satisfied no matter what problems they face. You get full-ticket management, the ability to make notes, time tracking, searching and support filters. Kayako the platform starts at $29/month, but the mobile app is completely free.

FAQ

This app is actually an email composer that delivers answers to questions that are most asked by your customers. You also get to choose from a variety of opening and closing phrases and there are also images, maps and diagram options to further get your point across. Talk about customer service. This app costs $2.99.

Freshdesk

This app converts your customers’ communications – emails, Twitter mentions, comments on your Facebook page – into support tickets. How handy is that? Your customers can also open tickets themselves. This app is a must-have for any seller that wants to keep on top of customer complaints. It also works on all mobile platforms.

10 Surprising Stats About Great Customer Experience

John M Perez — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:29:33 +0000

Whether you provide most of your customer service through email, social media, call centers, or your in-house call agents, your main goal is to provide customers with the best possible experience.

With customer experience gaining in importance each day, your company risks losing the most loyal of brand advocates if you don’t focus on what you can to improve their experience. Consider what your customers want, what your competitors are doing and how you can improve while you read these 10 surprising stats.

1. Despite the rapid growth of social media, online chat, and other online customer service technologies, 79% of consumers would prefer to contact a customer service center over the telephone.

2. Training is paramount for customer service representatives and anyone in your business who handles incoming client communications. Employees who are knowledgeable and engaged deliver a better customer service experience – which is reflected in the fact that these employees also close 33% more sales (Bluewolf).

3. Customer satisfaction is considered the most important call center metric by more than 60% of customer service managers. In addition, managers also track first call resolution, average handle time, and wait time in order to determine how successful their customer contact center is (2012 Ovum Logmein Customer Experience Report).

4. Small improvements in customer service can have enormous financial ramifications. For the average customer contact center, a 1% improvement in first call resolution would result in a $276,000 reduction in annual operational costs (Bluewolf).

5. Two-thirds of consumers would be willing to spend more with a company – 13% more, on average – following an excellent customer service experience. In comparison, 55% of customers would cease buying from a company that provides poor customer service (The 2012 American Express Global Customer Service Barometer).

6. Eservice – customer service provided over online means such as company websites, social media, and online chat – is expected to grow by 53% in 2013. Social media as a whole will grow 37% (Bluewolf).

7. Customers who interact with companies online do so for the following reasons: to pursue a customer service issue; to provide public praise for the company’s good customer service; to share their customer service experience with the company’s other customers; to complain about poor customer service; and to request assistance from other customers (The 2012 American Express Global Customer Service Barometer).

8. According to the Bain & Co. report “Putting Social Media to Work,” when companies engage with customers and provide responses to customer service requests over social media, those customers end up spending 20% to 40% more money with the company.

9. Customer service mobile apps – as opposed to websites, social media, or call centers – are considered by customers to be more convenient, more available, less time-consuming, more personal, and easier to access. Some customers don’t want to wait on hold for a call center agent, and others don’t want to have to talk to another person in order to resolve their issue. For that reason, 72% of consumers have a more favorable view of a company if they provide a customer service app (Nuance).

10. After going through a good customer service experience with a company’s mobile app, 81% of customers will use social media and word of mouth to tell others about their positive experience (Nuance).

What conclusion can you draw from these facts? It’s a good idea to expand your customer service into emerging platforms such as social media and mobile apps. Whether they’re answering the phone or sending a tweet, your customer service representatives should provide immediate, knowledgeable assistance from the first moment they come in contact with your customer.