Is Outdated Technology Ruining Your Customer Service?

Technology seems to change in the blink of an eye these days, and some businesses aren’t keeping pace. The longer digital transformation takes the greater the gap between you and your competitors. Often, old legacy systems operate in silos and trying to link them manually fails to be an effective solution.  

Outdated and patchy technology can reduce workplace productivity and create inefficiencies that negatively impact customer service. 

Here are five areas of your business where old technology may impede your ability to provide excellent customer service. 

1. Brick-and-Mortar Stores

Many people still enjoy visiting a physical store to see, touch and try out products before buying, something you can’t do online. 

Your point-of-sale (POS) system is an essential piece of in-store technology. Older POS and inventory systems that require manual updating can result in item prices differing from the price at checkout or not reflecting out-of-stock items. 

The latest POS technology is cloud-based, allowing retail staff to accept payments and update data, like pricing and inventory, from anywhere in the store. Many are also mobile-optimized, so they can be used at events or pop-up stores. 

2. Online Shopping

Customers want a sleek online experience. They want a user-friendly interface, responsive mobile-optimized websites, and the ability to engage with your company from whatever platform they use.  

If customers find it difficult to navigate your e-commerce store, view product information, compare pricing, place orders or process payments, they may not return. 

For a smooth online shopping experience, you need to ensure:

• Your website’s backend is stable, secure, and scalable. Have you ever headed over to an online Black Friday sale only to find the website down because it couldn’t handle the sudden influx of traffic and crashed? Frustrating, right? Test your website regularly to make sure it’s operating at optimal efficiency and can scale to meet increased traffic during a sale or as your business grows.  
• Your website offers multiple payment options. Some customers want to pay with a debit card, and others prefer payment platforms like PayPal or digital wallets like Apple Pay. Some retailers are even accepting cryptocurrency. 
• Your fulfillment service is efficient. There’s nothing more annoying to customers than receiving late or incorrect orders. If you use an external fulfillment company, make sure your e-commerce platform fully integrates with their fulfillment software for a streamlined execution of orders. 

3. Accounting

Older accounting systems tend to operate in a vacuum. Many cannot integrate with other business systems and rely on manual input. The problem with this is two-fold: 

1. Manual input is time-consuming. Remember, we mentioned earlier that old technology reduces productivity. If your accounting staff has to update customer accounts and manually generate invoices, the process takes longer to complete.  
2. Manual input can result in accounting errors and incorrect invoicing. When errors occur on customers’ accounts, they have to contact the billing department to have them corrected, which most customers find aggravating. 

Modern accounting systems can integrate with other business systems, like e-commerce platforms, order management software, banks and online payment gateways, and customer relationship management (CRM) software. 

This allows you to automate many functions. For instance, orders and payments can automatically feed through to the accounting system and update invoices in real-time. This reduces the chance of errors, and your customer accounts are always up to date.  

4. Customer Support

Inefficient help desk and customer support software can hinder customer service agents’ ability to provide exceptional customer support, which can lead to lower customer retention and loyalty rates. 

A Customer Experience Trends survey by Forbes Advisor revealed the following: 

• 53% of respondents said the experience a company offers matters as much as the products or services it provides.
• 74% indicated that good customer service is the top reason they remain loyal to a brand. 

And here’s an important statistics related to technology: 

• 86% of consumers approve of brands using artificial intelligence. 

Companies using AI-supported customer service apps tend to be strides ahead of those that don’t. Here are a few examples of AI technology that can improve the customer experience. 

• Chatbots. Chatbots can provide automated responses to customer queries 24 hours a day whenever the customer needs assistance. 
• Help desk ticketing system. The best customer service software features a robust ticketing system that can automatically identify, tag, prioritize and route incoming queries to the relevant individual or department. The system will also prompt agents to follow up on unresolved tickets so no customer queries go unanswered.
• Multichannel communication. Customers want to reach out to your company from whatever platform is convenient or available to them at the time. That may be an email initially, but later, it may be through social media. Can your customer service software keep track of a customer’s communication from multiple channels? Most AI-support CRM systems can. 

Set your customer service team up for success with the best tools. Even remote customer service teams can work efficiently with the right technology. 

5. Cyber Security

One of the biggest threats to your business and brand reputation is weak cyber security. Outdated systems that don’t feature the latest security enhancements and patches against cyber attacks leave your customer data and trade secrets vulnerable to hackers. 

It can result in scammers sending fake emails or text messages to customers under your company name. Should any of your customers fall for the scam and lose money, the reputational damage to your brand could be hard to recover from. 

Agile Technology Can Give You a Competitive Edge

Making the transition to new technology can seem daunting. It requires a capital outlay, and your employees will have to learn how to use new systems. But the investment will be worth it when you see measurable gains in employee productivity and customer satisfaction that help you gain a competitive lead.