Customer service is the provision of Service (economics), service to customers before, during, and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest". 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. Customer service also plays a crucial role in both increasing and maintaining Brand loyalty, customer loyalty, the tendency of a customer to do repeat business with a company in the future. One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization.

Customer support

Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost-effective and correct use of a product.businessdictionary.com > customer support
Retrieved March 2011 It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at the customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case, it is called "at home customer services" or "at home customer support."

Automated customer service

Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales representative, sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and Application software, apps. 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. An increasingly popular type of automated customer service is conducted through artificial intelligence ("AI"). The customer benefit of AI is the feel for chatting with a live agent through improved speech technologies while giving customers the self-service benefit. Another example of automated customer service is by push-button telephone, touch-tone phone, which usually involves IVR (Interactive Voice Response) a main menu and the use of the keypad as options (e.g., "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. "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."

Examples of customer service by artificial means are automated online assistants that can be seen as Avatar (computing)#Artificial intelligence, avatars on websites, which enterprises can use to reduce their operating and training costs. These are driven by chatterbots (also called "chatbots"), and a major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing.

Metrics

The two main ways of gathering feedback are customer surveys and Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score measurement, used for calculating the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer.

Instant feedback

Many organizations have implemented feedback loops that allow them to capture feedback at the point of experience. For example, National Express in the UK has invited passengers to send text messages while riding the bus. This has been shown to be useful, as it allows companies to improve their customer service before the customer defects, thus making it far more likely that the customer will return next time.

Criticism

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 othe
key performance indicators (KPIs)

References

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