Customer self-service continues to be on the list of top trends in customer service. According to Gartner Group, “By 2017, two-thirds of all customer service interactions will no longer require the support of a human intermediary.” Customer self-service is the capability for customers to complete transactions on their own. In the digital world, self-service transactions are becoming more widespread and provide significant opportunities for organizations.

In the past, sales nearly always hinged on the direct interaction between the customer and a representative of the company. Sales rep would call or visit you, and show you their line of products. They helped you understand their products and how to use them. The Sales rep explained why their products were of the best value, or the best solution to meet your particular needs.

Your company prides itself on its stellar customer service and support. But lately you’ve been having some problems. Customer satisfaction is down in certain areas. What’s the problem, and how can you fix it? It can be a difficult task, especially since customer support now occurs over so many different channels. So here are four steps to unraveling issues across those channels and getting customer satisfaction up to where it needs to be.

In any business, your customer is always your top priority. Providing quality customer service means catering to their needs as best you can. But before you can cater to those needs, first you have to understand them. What do your customers want? What matters most to them? These may seem like simple questions, but more often than not, companies get it wrong.

What experience do your customers have when they engage with your brand? On the surface, it may seem like a trick question. After all, every customer experience is different, right? Well, yes, to some extent. But even so, the experiences need to be consistent. They’re a reflection of your brand and what you stand for. Therefore, you need to do everything in your power to make sure every customer experience represents your brand in the best way possible. How can you do that? Use customer experience architecture to design exceptional customer experiences. Here are some tips:

“The customer is always right.” This old maxim is more than a little clichéd, but there’s still a fair amount of truth to it. If you want your company to succeed, you need to put the customer first. It has to be not just a maxim, but a way of life, throughout your organization. So how can you do it? What steps can you take and policies can you implement? Here are six traits your organization needs to excel at customer service.

What’s your company’s strategy for customer engagement? What procedures do you follow? What are your goals and priorities? How you engage your customers is one of the most important aspects of your company.

Contact center managers know that satisfied customers are among a company’s most valuable assets. Therefore, they know the importance of creating a helpful and rewarding experience, as well as providing a swift resolution to problems. In order their agents perform at the highest levels, most call center offer new tools to their agents, some having even invested in costly new applications.

An efficient, productive contact center reflects the focus on customer service. Managers, keenly aware of the needed efficiencies and essential customers’ good will, are providing more and more tools to their agents, from customer experience management, advanced helpdesk software, social media customer service tools and even individual agents metrics. Alas, these wonderful tools reside in disparate applications and do not communicate with one another. For agents, new challenges occur, the biggest obstacle being the need to handle multiple search fields.

For those of you still struggling to understand the computing "cloud", you will enjoy this video from Katie Couric. The cloud is changing the way that people and businesses manage computers, applications and data. The cloud creates unprecendented opportunies and new challenges as well. The explosion of new cloud applications, offers new productivity and entertainment tools. But these same applications also present new security and data risks.