When it comes to providing excellent customer service, every expert has different advice on the topic. But all of them agree: Your organization has to be adaptable to change.
Every business has to deal with customer service to some extent. It doesn’t really matter whether your customers are big businesses, clients, or individual customers. Your priorities lie with anyone who is buying from your company or interacting with your employees. The good news is that document management systems (DMS) can free up your employees’ time and make it easier to provide great customer service.
Choosing the Right Technology
There are many different ways to interact with your customers in the digital age. It’s important to choose the right technology for your company. You don’t have to staff the phone lines if your customers prefer to email or chat with you. The easier you make it for your customers to contact you, the better.
Many customers also prefer to solve their problems themselves. So it might be a good idea to offer an extensive knowledge base for customers to search. Traditionally, this would be a FAQ page, but it can be more interactive, too.
Your employees need information, too. In order for them to better help your customers, teach them to use your DMS to their advantage. For example, they can use the DMS to do a full-text search when they’re researching a problem for a customer. That’s much more efficient than asking a colleague who may or may not know the answer or hunting through the archives for an hour.
Aim for Consistency
Customers expect to have the same type of interactions with different employees of your company. Whether they walk in to make a purchase, call to ask a question, or send an email about a return shipment, they expect consistency. In order to create the level of consistency your customers need, you need to have overarching goals for your employees.
Your DMS can help you provide consistency by outlining the steps for every employee in the form of workflows. Workflows also give your employees a purpose.
Give Employees a Purpose
It’s important to teach employees what they need to do and how they need to do it. But great customer service requires companies to go beyond the basics. In order to help your employees make your customers happy, employees need to have a purpose.
In order to give employees the direction they need, you can utilize workflows inside of your document management system. Workflows ensure that your employees don’t forget steps in any given process and make sure that the overall goal is met in each customer interaction.
Find What You’re Looking for Quickly
Have you ever been on the phone for more than 20 minutes with a customer service representative? Long phone calls usually make for a bad customer experience. In some cases, you can tell that the representative is new at his or her job and needs some assistance. Other times, the company has no recorded procedure for the employee to follow. Sometimes the employee just can’t find the information he or she is looking for.
When you use a document management system, which is much more than just a file manager, hunting for information is a thing of the past. It only takes a few mouse clicks to do a full-text search of your entire knowledge base. If this isn’t the first time the problem has come up, your employees should feel empowered to take action.
Even if it’s a small matter, your employees can manage customer requests quicker with the help of DMS. Getting things done in a matter of minutes will increase customer satisfaction.
Manage Projects Appropriately
When you’re using DMS, your employees won’t spend inordinate amounts of time on managing projects. That’s because it’s much quicker to find the documents they’re looking for when the documents are easily accessible. As a happy side-effect, your DMS will also increase workspace efficiency.
Provide Your Customers with Access to Information
Customers like to be kept informed of the progress you’re making with their project. If you can find a way to provide your customers with access to their documents, they’ll be happier than if they’re left in the dark. Fortunately, eFileCabinet makes file sharing with customers easy and secure via the Client Portal.
Why DMS Is a Necessity for Providing Great Customer Service
Customers want their needs met quickly and inexpensively. DMS provides your company with the tools for meeting those priorities. In order to respond quickly to customer questions or requests, your employees need to understand what they’re doing and have the technology to do things the right way. Whether it’s finding information, overseeing a project, or listening to your customers, your employees should have enough time to provide a better experience for your customers.
To learn more about how eFileCabinet works, take a minute to fill out the information on this page so you can start your free 15-minute demo. You can also call us or chat with us.