ARTICLE SUMMARY
Have you ever heard about chatbots, co-browsing, live-chat or video-chat as technologies for successful customer experience? Learn more.
The digital corporate backdrop of today has ushered in a new age of customer service. It is no longer a domain that fetches you brownie points. Today, it has become an integral part of every customer retention strategy. Let’s dive deep into its importance and how new-age technologies are driving this vertical.
Customer service is key to extracting more value from your customers in the long run. Through top-notch customer service, businesses make up for their customer acquisition costs quicker and create a loyal customer base with a higher lifetime value. Here is why it pays to invest your resources to build a stronger customer support backbone:
- Customer Retention: It is much easier to retain customers than to acquire new ones. In fact, an increase in customer retention of as little as 5% can boost profits by at least 25%. Repeat customers are likely to spend up to 67% more with your brand.
- Brand Reflection: Customer service represents your brand image and is the best way of telling your customers about the values that you hold dear. Customers have a tendency to make assumptions about your brand based on the content you put in front of them. Customer service is one touchpoint where you can shatter negative assumptions or build upon positive ones.
- Happier Employees: In a culture that puts the customer first, a positive office environment is fostered. It becomes easier for employees to handle customers and cater to their queries. But it also goes the other way around. 87% of the employees who are happy with their jobs are willing to work harder for customers!
- Word of Mouth: Happy customers are much more likely to point your services to their friends and family. Research from Hubspot suggests that about 77% of the customers share positive brand experiences with others.
Customer service experiences that leave behind a lasting impact on your customers are bound to reduce your churn, improve customer satisfaction and boost your revenues. Here’s how you can strategize an impeccable customer success strategy in five steps to bring you up to your A-game.
- Foundation: Begin the journey at the foundational level by establishing the right customer experience culture. Nurture the hearts and minds of the stakeholders that are responsible for driving this. Have a cross-functional team leadership and establish a people-oriented attitude right from day one itself.
- Automation: Proactively address the issues that your customers face by reducing the reliance on manual processes and automating as many verticals as you can. Automation can churn the right data at the most opportune time to unearth insights about where processes are failing and how issues can be resolved even before they occur.
- Unification: Establish 360-degree customer experience touchpoints across multiple channels through omnichannel customer support. And while you do so, ensure that communication remains consistent throughout the customer journey.
- Customization: Instead of over-relying on self-service applications focus on adding a personal touch to your customer service efforts. Instead of installing the technology first and then working around your customer service operations, define the expectations of your customers (including the need to extend personal attention) and then pinpoint the relevant technology that will help you do so.
- Centralism: Once you have relevant customer CX strategies for various channels, impart consistency to the complete customer support value chain. This also acts as an active means of quality control that decreases errors.
As companies use emerging digital interfaces to increase engagement with their customers and build lasting relationships, the following channels have emerged as clear winners. Here are the trending tools in customer service today that help companies realize maximum customer engagement and minimum churn, making it impossible for them to execute their strategies without their intervention:
Use Case Strategies: Customer support, support scaling, faster query resolution, customer engagement.
The perfect way to scale your customer support activities, chatbots come packed with AI capabilities, integrated knowledge base, and an all-in-one communication platform. They can handle substantially higher volumes of interactions in a short span.
They act as perfect customer support solutions for Saas and product companies who often need to scale their support efforts in a short while. A well-designed chatbot can not only interact with customers to solve their queries, but it can also monitor consumer data and make it easy for businesses to obtain business intelligence. All this and more enables businesses to analyze data sets, gain valuable information, innovate new products and improve their service delivery during periods of high customer demand.
Use Case Strategies: Customer onboarding, customer support, live demos, query resolution.
A new-age tool that has revolutionized the way customers can connect with support agents to realize swift query resolution. Benefits of co-browsing for companies include:
- Increased Revenue: Agents can access the real-time view of customers and support them in the buying process. This functions as a visual walkthrough for customers and boosts the conversion rates and improve key KPIs such as higher revenue per call.
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: As many as 71% of the customers expect help to arrive within five minutes of encountering an issue. Co-browsing from platforms such as Acquire go a long way in successfully meeting the expectations of customers.
- Higher Agent Productivity: Co-browsing reduces the call-handling time of agents and provides a higher utilization rate and reduces the associated costs.
- Increased Repeat Business: Since queries can be solved more intuitively, the satisfaction level of customers high. This boosts the retention rate and keeps customers coming back.
Use Case Strategies: Query resolution, Customer Onboarding, customer support, live shopping assistance, live payment assistance.
Real-time chat is another technology that has become all the rage in customer support. Why? Simply because it offers blazing fast customer query resolution by instantly connecting them with support agents. Agents can also reach out to customers at the most opportune moment in their purchase journey to maximize their chances of conversions.
Customers are the obvious winners here since they can realize better convenience while shopping online. But this is an ideal side effect of the various benefits that users of the technology realize, such as higher customer service and loyalty, understanding the pain points of customers, quicker problem resolution, expanded market reach, competitive advantages and analytical reasoning capabilities.
Use Case Strategies: Customer support, customer interaction, customer engagement, customer outreach, lead nurturing.
Video chats have paved the way from casual to professional conversations by helping companies humanize their customer interactions. They can be used best when written chats become too comprehensive to extend quality support, helping both customers and agents save time.
There are times when customers can spend a significant amount of time sifting through the FAQ section of websites. This can leave them frustrated, proving to be detrimental to the health of the business. Customer success solutions such as video chat increase user engagement, revenue, conversion and ROI.
Using the right technologies will help customer success teams to constantly measure the impact of their activities and processes. With the requisite technology, businesses can predict customer behavior, manage their customer lifecycle and ultimately maximize customer lifetime value.