By ASG Software

In today’s hyper-connected world, barriers to reselling products have fallen across industries, which makes how you sell just as important as what you sell. When your company delivers great customer service, from pre-sale to post-sale, customers remember the experience. Leveraging cloud-based services enables companies to align customer support with marketing and sales and deliver a key competitive advantage.

Zappos, for example, became the poster child for stellar online customer service. They never described themselves as an online shoe store – they are a “service company that happens to sell shoes.” The company’s tag line was “powered by service.” That tradition remains alive and well since Zappos’ acquisition by Amazon – another customer service star. GE, Toyota, and SouthWest Airlines also have long, illustrious histories of customer service that goes above and beyond. But how can your business benefit from what these companies have achieved?

William Band, of Forrester Research, documented thirteen customer management trends he expects companies to take note of for 2012. His advice is important – the increasingly interactive and user-driven web is changing how customers interact with companies, and companies must adapt to this new environment or risk losing significant business. So what’s the key? Availability and responsiveness. And how do you demonstrate that? By providing multiple touch points that allow customers to do business on their (the customers’) terms. Make no mistake, the customer is in the driving seat now.

Whatever stage customers are at in the online buying process, they expect their queries and concerns to be answered quickly and efficiently. By placing a toll-free phone number and an email link on every page, you’re going in the right direction. But the web and cloud services can significantly improve on the experience. Today, you can build direct prospect and customer interaction right into the web page with intelligent, personalized chat that will forever eliminate barriers between the business and the customer.

And after the sale, if your customer comes back with a question about specific functionality or to report undocumented behavior in a software app, those multiple integrated touch points are just as important. At this point, you can take the experience a stage further by embedding the actual assistance – like debugging a piece of software – directly into the online chat. In one seamless pass, the customer can go from describing their problem to having a technician hundreds or thousands of miles away work directly on their PC to fix the problem in their own language.

Get One Repeat Customer At A Time

Internally, outstanding service means rewarding your staff as much – or more – for how they sell as for how much they sell. We all know that it’s far more cost-effective to retain an existing client than to acquire a new one, which is exactly how Zappos built their business – one repeat customer at a time. This approach fosters team spirit and keeps everyone focused on the same goal.

There’s no longer any excuse for customer service to become less personal as the business grows, either; great customer service is scalable with the cloud. The cloud enables increased agility to be pushed out to both external and internal customers. Training your team, aligning metrics and integrating current channels to break down communication silos will help differentiate your customer support quickly and efficiently.

Pulling all of these actions together can dramatically boost your CSAT scores. And if you apply this experience to internal and external customers’ laptops, smart phones, tablets, kiosks and any other device that could lead to lost productivity for the user, you can truly say that your business provides customer service for the 21^st century.

Tim Hillison is the vice president of global marketing at NTRglobal, an ASG company that provides cloud-based remote desktop, chat and IT service management solutions for the enterprise market. The NTR Cloud safeguards every point in the remote support delivery chain, from login authentication to communication travel over 256-bit AES encryption. NTRglobal’s global network of relay servers supports the strictest international mandates.