The market is unpredictable at times. You have a lot of different entities, scenarios, and situations, where you can’t easily figure out what your customer wants. This “dilemma” often leads to failure to provide proper customer service to that particular group of customers. This article will highlight the key types of customer service for your business.
If you have been a part of the market for a while now, you will know that every customer is different. They have different needs, different requirements, different financial situations, and different visions of what they want. No two customers are the same.
Therefore, it is almost impossible to devise a strategy that will keep each customer happy. You need to learn and analyze the likes and dislikes of the customers related to your business and find out what their problems are and how can you gain access to them.
Once you have gained access to their problems, then and only then can you decide the appropriate type of customer service for your business to solve those problems.
In this article, we will talk about the 5 most efficient types of customer service that you can choose from, to make sure that you can solve the problems of the customers related to your business, almost every time.
But before we talk about the types of customer service, let’s take a look at the challenges that a customer service faces.
What are the Challenges faced by Different Customer Services Types?
The following are some of the most common challenges that your business’ customer service faces every day.
- How long do the customers have to wait before you help them with their queries?
- Do the customer service representatives provide the customers with the required resources so that they can resolve their problems themselves?
- Can the customer contact the company 24/7?
- Are the customers notified of every update that rolls out?
Now let’s take a look at the different types of customer service that you can adopt for your business.
5 Types of Customer Service
The following are the five most effective and efficient types of customer service. They are:
- Phone Customer Service
- Email Customer Service
- On-Site Customer Service
- Live Chat Customer Service
- Social Media Customer Service
1. Phone Customer Service
This is probably the most basic and oldest form of customer service which probably makes it the most popular choice among all of the different customer service types being used in the market today.
The reason why this is the most popular choice is that there is a sense of intimacy when you have a direct conversation with the customer via your voice. It makes a bond deeper and more meaningful then you make using a text chain or an email chain.
Also, we can see that people usually tend to talk faster with words rather than typing different pieces of text on a screen. This ability to make the transmission of communication faster is what makes this type of customer service very efficient and reliable.
Another thing that you might’ve noticed is that whenever people are distressed or worried about something, they want to talk to someone quickly via the phone so they can tell the other person about the problem and get a quick response. This is why this CS is a great channel for urgency.
Plus, who doesn’t know how to use the telephone? From little kids to the elderly, pretty much everyone can use the phone if they are not even remotely tech-savvy. That makes it a useful medium to cater to everyone.
If we look at the public sector, then phone customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Government
- Healthcare
- Legal
- Education
If we look at the private sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Banking
- Accommodation
- Courier and Delivery
- Legal
- Retail
- Healthcare
- Ecommerce
2. Email Customer Service
If we look at the numbers, then email is the king when it comes to channel popularity. How? Well, for one thing, there are about 270 billion emails sent around the world, every single day.
And we also see companies having an affection with email when we scroll down to the last section of every website where they have an online contact form just ready to be filled, almost every time.
One of the best things about using an email customer service is that you can send your queries at any point of the day or night. It doesn’t matter if you want help at 2 am or at 9 pm, email customer service is there for you, depending on how responsive the CSR is.
With emails, you can properly customize all of the different elements of the query that you can’t do in a phone call per se. Like customizing your query and go into detail instead of just blurting stuff out on a call.
You can also professionally sign your email so that you can get a properly professional response.
Also, if the company is not responding to your queries or is stalling your request for any reason, you can always use a chatbot that will automate your email sending process. This will help you send out emails to the company every day without you ever touching the keyboard even once.
If we look at the public sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- None
If we look at the private sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Retail
- Accommodation
- Ecommerce
3. On-Site Customer Service
This is another type of customer service that is provided to people’s workplaces or in their homes. Through on-site customer service you can have professionals:
- Repair your electrical and mechanical appliances
- Provide you with therapeutic services to maintain your physical and mental health
- Teach you different courses
- Consult you on different things regarding your personal or professional life
One of the best things about on-site customer service is that the customer doesn’t even have to leave their workplace or their home, and the customer service representative will come to them, which makes it a very convenient service.
When the CSR comes to the customer, they can properly communicate and the customer can properly describe the issue or the problem that they have been having. All of this results in a proper understanding of the problem and a rapid solution for it by the customer service representative.
Also, when a representative visits the customer and upon knowing the actual problem that the customer has been having, produces a rapid solution, it strengthens the brand quality of the company which makes the business stronger and more reliable.
If we look at the public sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Government
- Healthcare
- Legal
- Education
If we look at the private sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Consulting
- Beauty
- Telecom
- Marketing
- Education
- Healthcare
- Legal
- IT
4. Live Chat Customer Service
Live chat is an incredible asset that your online business can use. It is a feature that allows you to be in constant communication with all of your customers at the same time using chatbots that frees up your CSR’s to only respond to the most important queries while the others are taken care of by bots.
The live chat customer service mostly resembles the email service as it shares some very unique weaknesses and strengths of it. But since it has some huge leverage over email and phone channels, the customer satisfaction rate of this service is over 92%.
One of the best things about live chat customer service is the support agents of your company can take care of a lot of customers at the same time without any interruption. This enables you to have a much-increased customer satisfaction rate and no angry customers.
We all know how certain conversations can become repetitive for you if you have them with multiple people every single day. This can be very frustrating for anyone.
That’s why, to make life easier for the CSR, these live chats are automated with chatbots, so that they can have those repetitive conversations instead of the CSR.
One other thing that is useful about live chat customer service is that both of the parties involved in the conversation have a record of the whole encounter and if any party denies doing something wrong or if there is any complication whatsoever, the culprit can be unmasked very quickly.
If we look at the public sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Healthcare
- Legal
- Education
If we look at the private sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- SaaS/ IT
- Accommodation
- Retail
- Beauty
- Ecommerce
- Food
- Gaming
- Airlines
- Banking
- Legal
- Education
- Healthcare
5. Social Media Customer Service
Probably one of the most popular types of customer service on this list is social media customer service. This service is provided by social media channels on the internet like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, etc.
Well, how do you respond to the queries of the customers on social media platforms? Well, you can have a conversation with the customers on social media using many different ways. You can:
- Have a private conversation with them via “Direct Message”
- You can post comments on social media posts
- You can have group conversations with them if you think that many of the customers have the same problem
One of the best things about social media customer service is that the CSRs have a lot of different ways to connect with the customer and answer their queries.
But if the customer requires privacy and doesn’t want the world to know their problems, the representative can always shift the conversation to a private channel or a live chat with the client. This will help the customer relax and properly describe their issue.
We see every day that many of the people have the same problem regarding a specific product, service, or anything of that sort, and they all need the same solution but the CSRs don’t have the time to specifically message every person.
Instead what they can do is that they can post public replies to all of the posts that have been posted by the customers. This will drastically decrease the number of recurring queries.
When we use social media customer service, one other thing happens and it’s quite useful to the business who has thousands of queries in their mailbox every day.
When you are using social media customer service, people will post their problems, and instead of CSRs answering them, one of the other members of that platform can answer them properly.
You just need to check whether that answer is correct and if it is then you have a perfect system in place where your CSRs don’t have to answer everything and they can just focus on the most important queries.
If we look at the public sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- Education
- Government
If we look at the private sector, then this type of customer service can be used in the following industries:
- SaaS/ IT
- Retail
- Accommodation
- Beauty
- Food
- Gaming
- Education
- Entertainment
What Else Is There to Know about Types of Customer Service:
From an objective point of view, the details don’t do much justice to the various types of customer service-related factors. Of course, there is a lot more where that came from. We strongly suggest that before starting any online or real-life business venture, you should do your own research.
Doing so will harness your ability to know your customers and serve them accordingly. Other than that, consult with experts who have already been part of the market that you are looking to work in.
Regardless, we would love to know your thoughts on the types of customer service factors you had to deal with. Drop your comments in the comments section below to help fellow readers at nTask with your insightful feedback.
