How quickly is your team able to respond to customer service requests? Is your customer service team overloaded with common questions?
Customers today demand more timely service than ever before — smartphones have entirely changed the game when it comes to responding to customer inquiries. With people spending more of their time online, businesses need to adapt to the digital world.
Cost-effective and easy-to-implement technologies can help you respond with better answers, faster.
Depending on how your customers interact with your business, even 1 minute can make all the difference. Responding to and following up on every customer interaction can make or break a sale.
Are you currently capitalizing on new technologies to ensure your customers are being taken care of?
If you’re not implementing these strategies right now — don’t stress. Many of these technologies (like live chat, self-serve, blog posts, and email lists) are inexpensive, easy to implement, and most importantly, profitable.
The term “new customer service technologies” sounds much more daunting than it actually is. With the support of Omnie, you can significantly increase customer satisfaction at a reasonable price point — and ultimately raise your bottom line.
Cutting edge businesses make every effort to support their customers after a sale. The majority of any business’ sales (approximately 80%) come from a small number of loyal customers so it’s absolutely vital to keep those loyal customers happy.
The reason being, loyal customers offer long term repeat business, and speak positively about your business to friends and family — leading to new leads and more sales.
Leveraging new and developing customer service technologies is incredibly important considering the rapidly changing age of smartphones. You’ll gain valuable advantages and insights over your competition which directly translates into growth.
Customer Service Technology
By implementing the following customer service technologies, you can provide new and loyal customers with a superior experience than your competitors. In a perfect world, your business should offer customers multiple ways to interact with your customer service team.
Let’s examine a few customer service technologies and how they can vastly improve your customer service experience.
Email is the bare minimum — if you’re not currently using emails to communicate with your customers, that needs to change today. It is inexpensive, convenient, and simple to set up.
More importantly, customers demand the ability to interact with businesses via email.
Email is an excellent tool because it gives you some time to respond to customer requests and ensure you find the right response to their question. With that being said the best practice is to reply to emails within 3 hours of receiving them. The faster your reply, the more likely you are to convert that customer.
It’s also important to keep your emails concise — hopefully you can answer the customer’s question within 2-3 paragraphs. Anything longer and it may warrant a phone call.
If you can, add a personalized touch to your emails to better show the customer you genuinely heard their concern. It can be as simple as mentioning their name or briefly reiterating their concern.
Emails are an excellent starting place if you’re currently developing your customer service channels. Another great addition to your website is live chat.
Live Chat
Have you ever visited a website and had a live support window pop up?
These windows connect you directly to an agent who may be able to answer your questions within minutes. Live chat is a perfect solution for frequent questions that your team can respond to easily.
Live chat is a superior messaging tool when compared to email — which can take several hours to receive a response, even for simple questions.
It is a powerful tool to increase your customer service satisfaction score — according to Zendesk, customers leave happy approximately 85% of the time when using live chat.
Live chat also offers your team the opportunity to engage directly with customers in real-time. Although many people are looking for easy answers, some customers may require more thorough support — a conversation that may have taken days via email can be compressed down into minutes if live chat is an option.
A customer who knows they can receive instant and quality support is much more likely to make a purchase and recommend your business to their social circle. Live-chat can also be partially automated, freeing up even more valuable resources.
Automated Bots
For your most frequent and commonly asked questions, it’s possible to get a bot to respond and interact with your customers. As long as these bots provide the right answers to common questions, they can leave customers equally satisfied as talking to a live agent.
Many bots review the customer’s inquiry and deliver a preprogrammed answer while more complex ones may actually learn to create sophisticated responses.
These bots take some of the weight off of your customer service team by responding to the most frequent, simple requests. Bots also don’t need to sleep or vacation so they’re available to your customers 24/7.
Bots vastly improve the customer experience by reducing response time — they’re an excellent way to start helping your customers help themselves.
Self-Service
Lastly, creating ways that your customer can solve their problems without the support of an agent can lift a significant burden off of your business. Some examples include chatbots, blog posts, customer forums, and FAQ pages.
Although self service channels require time up front, they pay significant dividends by allowing the customer to do the work themselves. The good news is that many customers prefer to use self-service support channels — rather than sitting on the phone or waiting for a reply to an email, the customer can seek out the answer on their own.
Additionally, customers are often hesitant to reach out, for a variety of reasons, but happy to conduct a quick search of a business’ website. If they can’t find the answer they’re looking for, they may not submit a request at all and you’ve just lost potential revenue.
Self-service options generate more conversions, customer inquiries, and referrals. Let your customers help themselves and you may be surprised at the results!
Omnie Integrated Services
You may have already seen some of these technologies in action here on our website.
This article is just starting to scratch the surface about customer service technologies with the four channels listed above. The key learning for today is that technology can greatly improve your customer service experience and ensure you never miss an opportunity.
Implementing new technologies can seem daunting with all the other tasks running a business demands — Omnie can guide you through the process. Get in touch with our team via live chat in the bottom right, or contact us directly to learn more about customer service technology.