Why cloud is the key to revolutionising customer service

Providing a seamless customer experience is essential to improving your brand value and business growth. As we’ve explored before, giving customers what they want is key to success in the channel – and customer service has a big part to play in achieving this.

The key to revolutionising your customer service as a channel partner relies on a combination of factors that include focusing on relationships, listening to your customers, being accessible, and responding in a timely manner. All of which the cloud enables.

It’s high time that partners invest in their customer service models, which can be the very difference between securing business – and losing it. Lack of investment could have huge repercussions, especially as the cost of customer acquisition is much higher than customer retention. Choosing the right provider to enable this investment is key.

Keep up with customer demands

A lot can be learned from looking at the evolving work styles of your customers – the fact that they use the cloud as part of their IT infrastructure could point towards a preference for an agile system. It’s important to develop a customer service model that is seamless, responsive and fits in with their flexible way of working.

Just like the cloud, they want a customer experience that is on-demand and accessible from any device and any channel of communication. If there is an issue or a query, they want to be able to sort it out quickly, without wasting resources that should be focusing on the strategic growth of their own business. If your response rates are poor or you are hard to reach, you’re at risk of creating frustrations and even losing customers.

As a cloud reseller, you should mirror the same pace and dynamism of your customers’ businesses by having processes in place to be able to respond immediately and resolve their issues quickly. This means ensuring you have robust telecommunications support that can provide 24/7 support, 365 days a year. Which will also be a competitive differentiator for you as a partner.

Robust cloud support

A strong cloud offering means you can deliver fully managed customer service hosted on the most advanced and resilient platform, with around-the-clock, pro-active monitoring. Having the right systems in place to meet this demand will make delivering an excellent level of customer service much simpler. Using a cloud-based system means it can be scaled up or down easily to meet demand. It also means staying in line with the overall movement towards greater levels of cloud service selling.

The right cloud solution, from the right provider, will also allow your contact centres to integrate with your service systems, enabling you to access customer accounts much quicker, and therefore shortening the amount of time it takes to resolve issues. It will also reduce how much physical infrastructure you need to manage your customer service, which has the potential to create significant business savings.

The right support

As a channel partner, it’s also essential to have the back-up you need. If your customers are experiencing technical difficulties beyond your control, relying on your provider will mean downtime can be resolved more efficiently. It can also help you maintain any SLAs you might have in place.

Customer expectations are high and meeting them can be an overwhelming prospect. To sustain this level of customer service, it can be extremely beneficial to rely on your provider to supply you with the best tools and support to manage this.

 Find out if you have the right tools to meet your customers’ needs with our ultimate checklist