Why Voice is the Premium Customer Service Channel for Luxury Brands
As luxury customer experience expectations continue to rise, more and more global luxury brands are moving to a cloud communications system for their contact centers. Why, exactly?
Because higher luxury customer experience expectations mean business voice technology must adapt to provide it— and when 61% of consumers prefer speaking to customer service reps on the phone for assistance, there’s no denying the impact voice channels have on improving customer experience.
A voice channel offers customers a way to truly express their needs to customer service agents in full detail— whereas, with other communications channels, their needs may be lost in translation.
Read on to learn the importance of prioritizing voice channels for luxury customer service needs and how to achieve the best customer experience.
Prioritizing Voice for Luxury Customer Service
The simplicity of your customer journey can make or break customers’ experience with your luxury brand. If your global contact center call flow is too long or too complicated, expect your customers to become frustrated.
Set your customers and agents up for success with efficient call flow configurations. Not only will your customers experience a smoother customer journey, but your contact center agents will be empowered to:
- Offer a highly-personalized brand experience
- Provide fast resolutions to complex problems
- Relay accurate information
Let’s walk through the benefit of each of these luxury customer service actions below.
1. Offer a Highly-Personalized Brand Experience
Consider typical consumers of luxury brand experiences in the high fashion industry. These customers are often investing thousands and thousands of dollars in fine craftsmanship, status, and strong brand identity associated with their preferred goods.
When those same customers spending thousands of dollars need customer service intervention, you must be able to offer a distinguishable, boutique experience to keep them happy and keep their business.
Especially considering the fact 88% of consumers believe the experience they have with a company is just as important as the product or service offered.
By prioritizing voice channels for your luxury customer service operations, you’re creating an opportunity for customers to get that direct, premiere experience with your knowledgeable client advisors.
But sometimes, offering a highly-personalized experience can be tricky during higher call volume seasons. Your contact center may experience an influx of customer calls around holiday sales and invoice time that affects the availability of your agents. Even so, there are ways to maximize your customer service with the right cloud communications technologies in place.
2. Provide Fast Resolutions to Complex Problems
Through the advent of chat, email, social media, and other non-voice channels, many customers still crave speaking with a real-life human being.
In certain situations, automated customer service options don’t always capture exactly what a customer’s issue is or how to solve it. Non-voice channels may not offer a specific option they’re looking for, so they might feel the need to ask someone directly.
Luxury customer service issues falling into this category may include:
- Product Care
- Repair Services
- Account Information
- Premium Support
- Public Relations/Press
- Pre-Orders
- Appointment Bookings
Luxury brand customers expect a quick resolution no matter the issue's complexity. Here’s where a voice communication channel comes into play.
Getting on the phone with a customer service representative can ensure both parties are quickly aligned on the problem and best solution for the issue at hand. A phone call interaction leaves less information up for interpretation and leaves the floor open for specific follow-up questions.
Even further, using a cloud communications platform with extensive voice configurations gives you both flexibility and adaptability as your business needs change. Along with programmable voice, consider implementing web applications and SIP and business tool integrations to speed up your luxury customer service communications.
3. Relay Accurate Information
Luxury brand customers don’t just want perfect accuracy during interactions— they expect it. Because of this expectation, luxury customer service agents go through extensive training on all the precise details of their brand offerings.
But product knowledge isn’t all these customers expect.
Another critical part of luxury brand experiences is providing the most accurate customer data and account information on-demand. Customers want client advisors to access their information at the drop of a dime and without hesitation to solve their issues as quickly as possible.
So why not put all the data into one platform?
Having access to both CRM customer data and product information in one platform offers benefits such as:
- Quicker customer interactions
- Reduced operational expenses
- Improved luxury customer experiences
Ensure accurate messaging through voice channels
Along with product, service, and customer account knowledge, agents must also learn how to empathize with customers using emotional intelligence, which can often be difficult to discern in written communications like email or chat.
Voice channels can help luxury customer service agents to:
- Convey emotions: Customers can’t hear the empathy or kindness in the client advisor’s voice over a text or chat. These soft skills are often necessary to alleviate a possibly tense situation with a customer requiring assistance.
- Provide context clarity: Voice channels help eliminate context confusion by allowing agents an opportunity to convey the proper tone and intent much more clearly than other channels. In some cases, voice inflection is the only differentiator in the meaning of a phrase.
Sometimes, it’s simply more productive to relay accurate information with a voice conversation using VoIP channels.
Bring Luxury Customer Experience to Your Voice Service
As a luxury brand, your customers expect the best— the best products, the best services, and the best luxury customer experience. And they expect their voice to be heard.
Cue the VIP customer experience using digital voice service. Be sure your customers feel heard by offering highly-personalized, fast, and accurate resolutions to their issues with a VoIP communications platform for luxury brands.
As you research more ways to provide premium customer service, think about how you can leverage cloud communications trends to work for your brand. For more info, check out AVOXI’s 2023 Global Cloud Communications Outlook eBook.
