By: Ginamarie Austin
Factoring Industry Customer Service
Is Technology Destroying It?
As a blogger, I follow many other bloggers as well and in one of my emails a title to a blog post caught my eye, “How to Hire An Assistant and Get Time Back in Your Day – For Free” written by Cole Harmonson from FarWest Capital. As a Factoring Consultant, I’m always looking for ways to make a factoring operation more efficient without adding more dollars to the budget of managing one. In fact, the number one question I get, is how can we cut overhead in order to save more money? However, none of us want to destroy factoring industry customer service.
Is a robot the solution to save money and time?
Harom’s post is about a robot (web software) that scans your emails, corresponds to the recipient of those emails and review your calendar in order to schedule appointments on your behalf. According to his blog post, the average businesses spend about just about 5 hours a week scheduling meetings. Yes, this could be a cost-cutting tool, but while reading his blog, all I could think of was how frustrated I get when I try to call Customer Service and have to deal with the automated system before you can even get a “live” person on the call. Soon, we will not be interacting with a “live” person via email either.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a life without Internet, email, and mobile phone. We’re so plugged into technology that when it does fail, we can’t the customer support service needed to get it fixed quickly. Nowadays, customer service is being managed electronically and is rarely done person-to-person.
As communication becomes a thing of a past and respond time from customer service department generate no reply up to twenty-four hours or more. However, time is money! So, when the technology is hindering the factoring operation from being efficient, so we’re basically losing money.
How to find that balance between technology and factoring industry customer service?
When businesses try to be more cost-effective and productive with technology, sometimes factoring industry customer services takes a nosedive. Customers begin to feel like they’re just a number and become frustrated. Remember, technology today also means Social Media. Which makes it much easier and faster to bad mouth a company. Rarely will a customer takes the time to post something positive about a company but wouldn’t hesitate to post negative feedback in a heartbeat.
Therefore, businesses need to find a happy median between technology and human interaction based on their customer’s needs. Technology should be used to enhance customer service, rather than overwhelm or ignore them.
So how do you find that happy medium?
4 Tips to Amazing Factoring Industry Customer Service
- Be willing to try a new technology on a trial basis with the expectation that you may return it if it does not work out.
- When trying out a new technology, only do it with a select few trustworthy customers and get their honest feedback before doing a full launch of the product.
- Do a customer survey at least once a year with a strong emphasis on their experiences with all of the departments in the factoring business.
- Also, have your employees do a survey once a year as well to see where and how the factoring business can help them with their customer interaction.
The power in human touch!
Like Shep Hyken said, “The greatest technology in the world hasn’t replaced the ultimate relationship building tool between a customer and a business; the human touch.” So, take a moment to pick up the phone to call on a customer to see how they are doing and if there is anything you can do to improve the customer’s relationship with your business. You may be surprised that one small phone call may solidify the customer relationship with your factoring business.
Next Steps
We are factoring consultants and assist companies with their factoring needs to help them become more successful. If you have any questions or needs regarding factoring and how we can help, schedule your free consultation with one of our factoring consultants.
We promise a human will answer the phone. No robots here!