Customer service is as simple and complicated as answering the call when a customer contacts your business with a need, desire, question or problem.

That’s the hope, anyway—but it’s not always the reality. Customers look for you across all available communication channels and generally meet a variety of responses in return: having to identify and explain themselves more than once, waiting patiently for troubleshooting steps that don’t work, and sometimes, no response at all.

That’s probably not because the business wants it to be this way. More likely, you’re facing limitations in technology and manpower and are doing the best you can, especially given the multitude of systems you’re already using to serve customers. Even so, it’s not the best customer experience. As Sean Gerety, the user experience lead at The Home Depot, has been widely quoted as saying: “The technology you use impresses no one. The experience you create with it is everything.”

For everyone, the experience of being seen and heard goes a long way. And when it comes to customer service, companies have to heed that cry from the customer and respond.

Welcome to the Experience Economy

We’ve actually been here for quite some time. As the Harvard Business Review explained ten years ago, “From now on, leading-edge companies—whether they sell to consumers or businesses—will find that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences.”

Take a food delivery service: the speed, ease and overall convenience typically matters more than the food itself. It has to be good, of course, but when you’re hungry and short of time (or just unwilling to change into restaurant attire), you’re going to choose the service that delivers the food warm and fast—the one that gives you exactly the experience you desire. Positive experiences with your business may involve your product or service, but the product or service alone can’t compete against another brand’s experience-led offering.

Customers have shown that they like having options for contacting a business—sometimes to self-serve, other times to reach a live agent—but they don’t appreciate experiences that exist in a vacuum. Instead, they value being able to pick up where they left off with a business, and appreciate it when a business recognises that it’s dealt with them before.

Meet our bundle of joy

Zendesk is proud to announce our newest arrival—The Suite. The Suite combines Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat and Talk into a single omnichannel solution that’s easy to try, buy, and set up, all at a great price.

The elements of The Suite connect the dots so that you can choose to open and close channels as desired, but always recognise your customer. No contacts slip through the cracks and nothing is lost in one system while you’re working on tickets in another.

With The Suite, you can both save money and:

Give customers what they want, when they want it

Original research from Zendesk found that 64 per cent of customers expect real-time assistance, regardless of the channel they choose—a tough demand for lean and growing teams. As many as 87 per cent of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a seamless customer service experience. This includes meeting customers on their smartphones or embedding help directly in your app. With The Suite, you have the flexibility to extend Zendesk using the API, Mobile SDK, and Web Widget, and can tap into Zendesk’s ecosystem of apps and integrations to design exactly the service experience your customers expect.

Create insight-led experiences

The Suite gives your leadership team visibility into cross-channel trends, ticket volume and agent performance. With a single source of truth, admins can manage all channels from a single interface and make adjustments in real time, as needed. This can mean using Guide to update a help article from within Support, or spotting a trend and alerting your product team about an issue that’s generating tickets. It also means being able to easily shift agents between channels when there’s a surge in volume. When you can see what’s happening, you know how to act. 

Build a world-class support operation

Omnichannel customer support is important to small and large businesses alike, and size doesn’t have to matter when it comes to providing the channels your customers want. When every channel is integrated into one seamless agent and admin experience, that naturally transfers to the customer experience. The Suite allows you to track the history of each customer relationship and gives agents more context the next time the customer engages. This is the type of support offered by world-class support organisations and produces happy customers. It also plants the seed for growth: the infrastructure allows you to be agile, so that you can begin to transform your support organisation into a proactive and revenue-driving arm of your business.

The best part is that The Suite offers a low investment to get up and running. Turn it on right out of the box, and scale or extend and customise your experience as you grow.

We’ve got options: Learn more about The Suite, kick the tyres before hitting the road, or contact us to learn more about building your own omnichannel solution.