Customer service is the provision of service to customers
before, during and after a purchase. According to Turban et al. (2002),
"Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level
of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has
met the customer expectation."
Its importance varies by products, industry and customer;
defective or broken merchandise can be exchanged, often only with a receipt and
within a specified time frame. Retail stores often have a desk or counter
devoted to dealing with returns, exchanges and complaints, or will perform
related functions at the point of sale; the perceived success of such
interactions being dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to
the personality of the guest," according to Micah Solomon From the point
of view of an overall sales process engineering effort, customer service plays
an important role in an organization's ability to generate income and revenue.
From that perspective, customer service should be included as part of an
overall approach to systematic improvement. A customer service experience can
change the entire perception a customer has of the organization.
Some have argued that the
quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that
this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive
and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy.
To address this argument, many organizations have employed a variety of methods
to improve their customer satisfaction levels, and other KPIs.
Customer support
Customer support is a range of customer services to assist
customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes
assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance,
upgrading, and disposal of a product.
Regarding technology products such as mobile phones,
televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical
goods, it is termed technical support.
Automated customer
service
Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and
service representative), or by automated means. Examples of automated means are
Internet sites. An advantage with automated means is an increased ability to
provide service 24-hours a day, which can, at least, be a complement to
customer service by persons.
Another example of automated customer service is by touch-tone
phone, which usually involves a main menu, and the use of the keypad as options
(i.e. "Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish", etc.)
However, in the Internet era, a challenge has been to maintain
and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of
online commerce. Writing in Fast Company, entrepreneur and customer systems
innovator Micah Solomon has made the point that "Online customers are
literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it's easy to shortchange them
emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more
crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online
arena."
Automated means can be based entirely on self service, but may
also be based on service by more or less means of artificial intelligence.
Examples of customer service by artificial means are automated
online assistants that can be seen as avatars on websites. It can avail for
enterprises to reduce their operating and training cost. These are driven by
chatterbots, and a major underlying technology to such systems is natural
language processing.
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