What’s the difference? “Context vs. Content”
According to Oxford Languages, Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. Content, on the other hand, is the things that are held or included in something.
On a different note, if we’re going to relate the terms to marketing, Context Marketing delivers the right content, to the right people, at the right time. While Content Marketing creates and distributes valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action.
Basically, if content is king, then context is queen.
Your content is the material or medium to connect with your customers, while context is the components or storyline that gives value to the content. Without context, connecting with your customers is meaningless.
What is Context in Customer Service?
In customer service, context is about capturing the idea, value, and meaning of the customer’s experience. This should involve all the relevant information that can help your customer service in interpreting the situation.
For example, context can include the following:
- Customer profile
- Customer’s preferences
- History of the customer or the concern
- Details of previous interactions with the customer
- Other aspects related to the customer journey
To make things simple—context is the framework describing the background and circumstances of a customer and the customer’s concern. As Hubspot puts it, context means never having to ask your customers to recap something they’ve already told you. But it also means not feeding them information that is no longer relevant to them.
Why is Context Important in Customer Service?
Customer experience is a priority strategy nowadays for businesses, so including context in your customer service is essential. Here are the reasons why:
Fluid Customer Experience
The more time passes, the more we involve technology and digitalization in our lives. For instance, we have accounts on different online platforms such as social media, e-mails, mobile apps, websites, and others.
However, when your customers use various channels to interact with your brand, they want those interactions to be connected. In simple terms, they must be in sync. Accordingly, 90% expect a consistent brand experience across all channels, and your job is to ensure that consistency.
Context’s role here is to maintain the continuity of customer interaction. The context will let you have access to insights about your customer’s behavior, preferences, and journey. Once you follow and apply the context, you can provide targeted and personalized content, and eventually, deliver a seamless experience to your customers.
Less Customer Effort
If you provide a seamless experience to your customers, then you make the interaction convenient for them. Who wouldn’t want an easy transaction, right? Even in the customer support offshoring sector, they measure the customer effort by letting them rank their experience with a product or service.
A seamless experience from a fluid customer experience also means less effort for customers. Once you have access to the context that we’re talking about, completing a transaction will be easy for them. Why? Because you already have the relevant data or information needed for the interaction.
Your data collection will result in your customers not having to repeat themselves or consume content they’re not interested in. Thus, that’s least effort on their part, and customers like it when they don’t have to perform much effort.
Fast Interaction
While customers don’t like to exert too much effort on a product or service, they can also be impatient. In this digital age, they expect more from brands because they’re too familiar with its convenience.
In fact, 40% of customers want companies to focus on taking care of their needs quickly. Without context prepared, your customers will have to go through giving their information that your representative should’ve already looked up to in the first place. This will add to customer’s frustrations because it’s time wasted to repeatedly give away their information that they’ve already done in previous interactions.
Essentially, when there’s a contextually intelligent system that can integrate contextual data for your customer service, then it’ll save you and your customer’s time. A fast resolution will lead to customer satisfaction.
Customer Retention
Speaking of satisfaction, customers today highly value a great customer experience, and 86% of them are willing to pay more for it. Hence, companies compete to provide an easy and seamless journey to their customers for every interaction.
Your context-driven customer service can help your business big time since it will cover a huge scope in your strategy. From keeping in touch with customer behavior, interpreting data, up to analyzing those contexts to develop strategic approaches, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your customers. When you understand your customers, you’ll know how to respond appropriately, which will lead to a successful interaction.
When you incorporate context in your customer service strategy, you’ll see an improvement in the quality of service you give your customers. Once you satisfy your customers, they will become loyal to you. When they’re loyal, this will boost customer retention, therefore, increasing your revenues.
Context for Meaningful Customer Interaction
Your customers take their precious time seriously. That’s why you should make every customer interaction count. While keeping customers engaged or solving concerns are the leading customer service goals, those won’t be enough if they don’t deliver value.
Ultimately, successful customer service and communication rely on strategic content. And for your content to be strategic, it must be surrounded by valuable and relevant context.
As they say, a king (content) is nothing without his queen (context).
Delivering a good customer experience must come from understanding your customers. It entails more than resolving a situation or a request. Otherwise, your customer’s experience will be of little value.
More than ever, excellent customer service will get you ahead of your competitors. Thus, you need to up your customer service game and get the assistance of an employer of record company in the Philippines that champions in providing companies with customer support solutions.
In One CoreDev IT (CORE), we can provide 24/7 employer of record solutions. We can also provide you with a team of experienced customer engagement specialists to respond to your client’s needs.
