“I feel the need, the need for speed!”
In Top Gun, the 1986 classic, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s famous phrase effectively summed up the future of customer service (CS). While it wasn’t intended to evoke the relationship between business and consumer, over 30 years later, it speaks directly to the state of CS today.
Speed is arguably the most significant benchmark for every single customer service interaction today. Businesses can never be too fast to reply, react, or resolve an issue. As channel choices continue to stack up, and consumers navigate through them with swift precision, the expectation to be ‘ready and waiting’ at all times of the day is now the gold standard in customer service.
Despite this, recent reports reveal that the average time to handle a customer service request is 15 hours and 17 minutes – a far cry from first-class service expectations. But of the 12 industries that improved customer satisfaction in 2016, nine of them had something in common: They each sped up First Response Time (FRT). When issues are resolved in the initial five minutes of first contact, the average customer satisfaction score is 90 (on a 100-point scale). If resolved in six to 10 minutes, the satisfaction rating drops seven points to 83, and continues dropping steadily as additional time passes. Therefore, responding quickly will help to stave off declining satisfaction.
The weight social media has on brand affinity and customer satisfaction is constantly growing. Today 
Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on how to handle customer service in a crisis. This expert panel discussed what brands can do to ensure that customer service is not compromised during times of stress in the contact center. They touched on social media for crisis management, reducing customer frustration, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.
One of our goals with the Fonolo blog is to help you stay current on the many aspects of the fast-moving contact center industry. To that end, we’re always on the look-out for new industry research, studies, surveys and whitepapers.
What a strange place Twitter is in. Consider the incredible influence it holds in the daily news cycle. Newscasts and white house press briefings talk about “tweets” with a seriousness that makes it easy to forget that no one outside the early-adopter circles had even heard that word before 2008. Or consider how iOS treats “tweeting” as a system-level communication option, on par with email and text messaging.
The burning questions for the customer service industry today are which channels of communication are currently most relevant, and which will be most relevant down the road. In recent months, the discussion has centered around Facebook Messenger and other messaging channels.Many people are debating whether any of these platforms (Messager, Snapchat, Kik, Line, etc) can “win” the B2C communication platform war. (See 
Good customer service doesn’t just happen. It comes from a number of places – namely a well performing contact center. This utopian call center we’re talking about operates smoothly with certain elements driving its stellar performance. But unfortunately, few contact centers are well oiled machines. With growing customer demands, we need to rethink what the ingredients are to provide successful customer service experiences. Think about the call center like baking a cake; if you miss just one ingredient the entire cake will suffer in quality and taste.
