As it turns out, you can do both. And, in fact, there is a lot of evidence that executives who do both guide their organisations to better serve their customers.

As the seminal Harvard Business Review article ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’ showed, while people buy from you because of your product or brand, people most often leave because of poor customer service.

This is why conflict resolution skills are some of the most fundamental skills for every customer service team.

At the Internet Retailing Expo 2019 (IRX), ROBIN’s Brand Chief, Michiel Gaasterland was interviewed on camera by IRX’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Ian Jindal.

Tech tools alone will not keep customers happy. 

A customer is on the phone with a Customer Service Rep, frustrated about a clothing item that was supposed to arrive but hasn’t yet.

The Rep refers to her ROBIN dashboard, and sees it’s not the first time this customer has called in anger. But this is also not the first product he has purchased from the company.

Integrating your VoIP, or phone system, into your customer service tooling landscape can prove challenging. You want one user experience for agents that contains all relevant customer data - from every channel – available at a glance.

“They’re coming in too fast!” — Luke Skywalker, Star Wars (1977)

We seen it a million times. An eCommerce director sits down to talk with their customer service team lead about the pressure customer service is under and how to solve it, get it under control.

At some point, one of them says, “We really need to reduce the number of customer questions we’re getting in”. Both nod in agreement and walk away, happy they’re on the right track.

But are they?