We’ve learned a fair amount about our strengths, weaknesses and what really matters to our clients since we first started webcasting. Perhaps paramount in that is customer service. When I use that expression I’m not talking about telling people ‘have a nice day’ or just being nice (although, obviously it’s very important to be nice). I mean making sure our clients get what they want when they want it and feel confident in using our services as a result.
Going live with a webcast can be a heart-in-mouth moment and ensuring everything goes smoothly requires technical skills delivered by sensible, understandable human beings who can listen. At Public-i we are proud that we get this right most of the time and that, time and again, customers tell us it’s this that makes the difference for them.
But how we deliver customer service is changing massively, as we grow and develop as an organisation. Here are just of a few of those things:-
Communication
How we communicate is changing. It used to be just simply about talking to clients, mostly face to face. But now much of that communication takes place online. While there’s the conversations we’ve always had on Messenger, increasingly we’re also using social media.
Being pro-active
We’re also becoming much more pro-active about what we do. Where once we saw customer service as simply responding to clients’ needs, we’re now much keener on trying to solve problems before they appear for clients. That means, for example, that we’re actively trying to hold back from simply solving problems in a reactive way by ensuring that we know already how to take care of them.
Process Process Process
It’s becoming more systematized – a much more process-driven approach as we continue to take on more customers.
Empower
We have an ethos where the all employees should be empowered to be able to give good customer service – not just frontline staff.
Transparency
And also we’re becoming more transparent about how we do things which means trying much harder to embrace that negative feedback.
What this all adds up to is that we are seeing this much more about being a conversation that’s ongoing with our clients – and prospective clients – than it once was. And the reason for talking about this now is that, in a sense, we feel we need to be more explicit about that conversation. That already happens with the Public-i usergroup (although that’s for technical issues as well) but this blog post marks the moment where we start to explore this more publicly.
I’m going to be thinking about various aspects of the customer experience that we should talk about here on the blog, but it’d be great if anyone wants to tell me what they’d like us to talk about first. You can leave a comment, or if it’s a little more sensitive, of course, please just email!
