Your customers are always switched on, which means you need to be too. This is across devices, touchpoints and across different times of day. Discover how remote access solutions can help you meet demand and acquire and retain more customers to build your bottom line.
Many customers dread the thought of contacting the customer service team. For your competitors, that’s a problem. For you, an opportunity.
Because in a world where innovation can be copied in moments and quality standards are uniformly high, your main competitive advantage is how quickly and securely you can deal with customer problems. For a customer-facing business, the obvious competence of the service and support you deliver may be your only differentiating factor.
Contrary to popular belief, customer relationships aren’t defined by the initial customer purchase. They’re defined by what happens the first time you talk.
The number one cause of service dissatisfaction is handoffs.
Which is why we have customer service teams. Sometimes staffed by IT professionals, using software to connect, conference, and collaborate with customers. And sometimes not. But today, support technicians of all kinds are using video conferencing, real-time chat, and even remote takeovers of the customer’s machine to diagnose and solve problems — making technical support a powerful business driver.
Not just for retention of the existing customer base, but for the acquisition of new ones.
That’s why more and more customer service professionals — right up to the C-Suite — are seeing the department as a profit center, rather than a cost driver. Customer goodwill translates to bottom line increases. But to build that customer goodwill, the service delivered has to be smooth, consistent, accurate, and useful. And the information exchanged, of course, has to be secure.
Let’s look at four ways remote access is helping customer service and support professionals to acquire customers by improving every customer service touch.
1. Provide a consistent customer experience
Customers interact with service teams in different ways; they’re used to being in touch with assorted people in different departments and levels of the company. To be worth singing the praises of — the sort of thing that brings new customers into the fold — that customer experience has to be consistent across every touchpoint.
Remote access applications — unlike the mass of phone numbers and contact emails traditionally associated with customer service — enable technical support to be seamless. With both user and device having an approved ID checked against both the blacklist and whitelist, the support professional knows precisely who they’re helping, and on what level they can use that service.
Fun fact: 76% of customers see service as the true test of whether a company values them.
2. Operate smoothly in diverse environments
Remote communication has broadened into a range of service options for today’s customer service team. When a new customer calls in for the first time, ease of connectivity matters hugely. They want to connect on their device, whether that’s a phone, tablet, or conference room workstation — rather than jump through hoops.
The right remote access options can solve it. Look for a solution that’s device- and OS-neutral — it works with the differences in form factor and software infrastructure between different devices, and connects them securely regardless.
Whether a customer uses their desktop to go through a training session, or their phone to connect to a server database, the solution — and the way he uses it — stay the same. TeamViewer is also free to try — making it easy to recommend to their colleagues.
Fun fact: Disjointed service costs U.S. companies over $40 billion a year.
3. Enable actions as well as advice
Sometimes hundreds of customers are communicating with just as many in the service center. One plus of remote access software is how it lets you deal with complex customer relationships.
If a service problem rears its ugly head, you don’t want thousands of users opening trouble tickets at once; you need to consolidate problems, communicate back, tell everyone you’re working on the problem and when it’ll be solved. That’s vital if the support you deliver is subject to service level agreements (SLAs).
Remote access, with its ability to take over a connected device to solve its problems, offers a huge opportunity to upscale your offer. To win customer praise, make sure you can scale to the challenge — fast.
Fun fact: Nearly a third of customers get frustrated by the service technician being unable to help.
4. Ensure security of customer data
Whether remote access support helps you win new customers ultimately comes down to how customers feel. Comfort. Reassurance. Trust. Whether their conversation is in confidence; whether their data will be safe.
All data exchanged between TeamViewer-connected devices is scrambled at 256-bit AES strength, with the keys encrypted even more strongly, at 2048-bits. That’s all devices — phones, tablets, point-of-sales systems, whatever. Over 20 million devices are connected via TeamViewer at any moment, and the network encryption has never been compromised. So you don’t need to email files or download documents during the service process; remote access lets you share and collaborate on data with a single source — keeping a single version of that data secure.
The channels available for you to connect with customers now go far beyond the phone. And for customers, that’s a good thing. But service professionals need to understand this profusion of devices for what it is — different connection points to the same customer.
Poor experience? Customer churn. Great experience? Customer for life
Offering a simple, seamless solution to any customer need means you’re driving loyalty at every service interaction — positivity that shows through in your customer acquisition and retention figures. So stop thinking of customer service as a cost. It’s a business driver.
Fun fact: 71% of organizations were compromised by a breach in the last year.
Takeaways
- Remote access solutions can help you to deliver excellent customer service
- Anytime, anywhere remote access
- Security of data is the primary concern for service professionals and their customers
- In a diverse world, remote access can provide a consistent customer service experience
- A service experience needs to be delivered across multiple devices, seamlessly
- Customer service is about conferencing, collaboration, and control as well as conversation