Common myth | Rating |
What this means |
Social CRM is giving customers control of your brand. | Total nonsense | Take advantage of social channels to have an authentic conversation with customers and to reflect and reinforce your brand. |
Established best practices apply to my call center. | Half Truth | Best practices exist for a reason. But don't adopt them in a vacuum. Examine each one before adopting to ensure that it is in line with your customer service strategy and operations |
Discussion forums cut call volumes. | True | Discussion forums do answer common questions and deflect incoming calls. However, if done right, forums can help educate, engage, and support customers. This level of engagement helps drive customer satisfaction and can result in customers wanting to deepen relationships with your company and can result in contact with your customer service organization. |
Longer calls are not good web self-service candidates. | Half truth | Longer calls that follow reproducible processes are perfect candidates for web or mobile self service. Longer calls about exceptions or corner cases are not good self-service candidates. |
Front-line support agents don't know anything. | Total nonsense | Forrester data shows that self-service channels are the first point of contact for customers. This means that harder questions are being escalated to front-line support agents. Agents need to know something to be able to answer these questions! |
When you measure operational activities, you measure business indicators. | Half truth | Operational activities like handle time or speed of answer don't always map back to business indicators such as churn, customer lifetime value. or profitability. You need to define a clear mapping between business outcomes and the operation measures that support these outcomes. |
Customers can't create reliable knowledge. | Total nonsense | Customers can (and will) create reliable knowledge, with a depth and breadth that exceeds company-generated knowledge. The trick is to engage your customers to contribute to your knowledgebase. |
Email doesn’t work as a support medium. | Total nonsense | According to Forrester data, email remains the third most popular channel after web and mobile self-service and phone. B2C customer service organizations are moving away from this channel. Why? Email is a static channel that doesn't facilitate real-time conversations. Yet, email remains viable for outbound notifications, such as billing and shipping alerts or issuing a return merchandise authorization. For technical support, email allows effective sharing of files and data |
Chat won’t work for customer service. | Total nonsense | Chat is the fastest-growing digital channel across all generations. Why? It provides near-real-time service with minimal engagement friction. |
Better search helps me find what I am looking for. | Half truth | With better search, you will find content and data across a greater number of repositories. However, more information and data doesn't always surface the one right answer that you are looking for. |