Every company needs more “brown sauce moments”

Walmart’s founder Sam Walton famously said “the goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” As consumers, we need companies to make us feel valued and special, going the extra mile to answer a query or solve a problem.

Take last year, for example, when leading UK supermarket Waitrose made the headlines, re-designing its brown sauce label after a seven year old school boy wrote to them complaining the old image was “too boring.”

These feel-good “brown sauce moments” will be undermined, however, if we’re faced with unhelpful call centre staff, unable to connect us to the person that could answer our question, and irritating, tinny hold music.

Keeping modern, tech-savvy customers satisfied in a fast-moving, mobile world can be tricky, as these customers are empowered and expect instant communication. In order to keep up with their demands, businesses – large and small – need to look to a seamless, omni-channel approach to customer service, with mobile app support, contact via SMS and social media engagement in addition to traditional telephone contact.

Social media has emerged rapidly as a highly effective communication channel for businesses, as customers generally prefer to self-serve first, researching online or through their peers before re-engaging with a business. According to research by Nielsen, one in three users prefer to contact brands via social media rather than telephone.

Businesses need to leverage the power of these multiple channels, shaping a seamless end-user experience across all contact channels – the key to customer service is consistency – and consistently good service.

One trend that has emerged to meet this demand is the cloud-based hosted contact centre, a market that surpassed the on-premise product market in North America in 2013.  With a hosted contact centre solution, businesses can benefit from increased productivity and profitability by focusing on the core business. It’s also a much faster solution, with unlimited scalability, which can be rolled out in multiple locations.

To help businesses reach their customers cross-channel and cross-border, we have just announced a global expansion to our cloud-based contact centre offering. Named InstaCC Global, this development caters for global enterprises looking for a standardised and scalable solution to reach customers around the world, regardless of channel and geography.

We’ve designed this service to deliver highly personalised customer care, which means businesses can ensure that they deliver a consistent and genuinely positive customer experience, no matter when, where or how. With the basics taken care of, businesses can focus on adding sparkle and creating more of the special “brown sauce moments” that customers not only remember, but talk about.

At the heart of all this is the fact that the customer is king. Over 80% of customers retain their first impression of the company based on their interaction with a contact centre and whopping 65% would totally cut ties with a company after receiving poor customer service, according to research.

Take the advice of Bill Gates, and let your unhappy customers be a source of learning. Take that brown sauce label and add a schoolboy’s drawing – you never know, it might even boost sales!

Watch me introduce InstaCC Global below