These days, people are demanding more efficiency when they rely on customer service. They want to get their problems solved as quickly as possible and are unlikely to wait for days or even hours on end to get resolutions. Efficient customer service also benefits businesses. First of all, it helps to enhance your reputation. Secondly, it allows your customer service team not to spend all of their time solving a single issue. Bearing this in mind, here are some ways to offer more efficient customer service.
Make Customer Service Proactive
Customer support has always traditionally been reactive. This means that a customer will be the one to contact your business seeking solutions, and you will be the one who offers them. At the other end of the spectrum, you have proactive customer support, which is offered based on the behavior of the visitor. For example, on a Windows live chat, this could be a chat message that automatically pops up on your website before an inquiry has been made. This can help to boost the efficiency of your customer service operation significantly.
With your proactive customer service, you should be seeking to target new and existing customers with different messages. Personalized messages can help to build up a rapport. Another time that proactivity can be used is when customers leave items in their basket. You could send an auto-generated message asking if they need support checking out. You could also use it to upsell – suggesting other items that could accompany the original intended purchase.
Automate Customer Service
If your customer service activities are automated, this allows them to continue round the clock. Generally, this will involve chatbots. Essentially, this can help to remove the pressure from your customer service, which can save the crucial resources of money and time. In our ever-advancing world, chatbots can help to solve four-fifths of customer inquiries. If you do not use them, each one will be taking up your customer service team’s time. Generally, these chatbots work best when dealing with the kind of questions found on your frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.
Proactive customer support and automated customer service can work hand-in-hand. For example, you can use template customer support messages that pop up at crucial times. call flow scripts is a great way for contact center agents to interact with customers.As well as saving time for your agents, this can also prove to be invaluable in keeping your language and tone consistent throughout all of your customer interactions, which can help you to establish a clear brand voice. For people who turn to customer service rather than looking through your website, you could create a specific chatbot specific to FAQs. They can also be used as an entry point to customer service. If the clients are still experiencing difficulties, they can then be connected to an agent.
Route Support to the Right Agent
If you have a more advanced customer service team operating across a range of different departments, you want the right team to be contacted as soon as possible. As well as being more efficient, this also gives the customer confidence in that they know that they are speaking to somebody who can solve their problem as quickly as possible. You can set this up based on a number of different factors, including skills or expertise, department or team, and location.
There are several ways that you can route your inquiries to the right team in an efficient manner. The first is to use a chatbot to find out what kind of support the customer is looking for by asking some targeted questions. They can then be transferred to the right team quickly and efficiently. If the team is regularly inundated with requests, you can then aim to create an overflow system. This way, chats are not going to go unanswered. If you work with an external customer service agency to handle other requests, you can route these automatically to the right place. This gives you the option of offering customer support outside of the usual office hours.
Work on Collecting More Customer Feedback
One of the best ways of improving your operation as a whole is to collect more customer feedback. This way, you can identify where the problems are quickly, as well as seeking to solve them with minimal fuss. Not only can this help you to improve your existing product and service offering, but you can also further develop your website and your online customer service experience as a whole. Also, you can get a general idea of how satisfied your customers are.
There are several different methods that you can use to collect more customer feedback online. The first is to do it after a live chat has ended. A feedback screen will pop up to ask how everything has gone. Another option is to use a targeted feedback form that appears on your website. If you can get your frequent customers to fill it in, this can be an invaluable fact-finding mission. The other main option available to you is to offer your customers incentives for filling in the form. You have a range of different options for what you could offer them including special offer codes and exclusive sales access. Sometimes, the rewards do not have to be monetary. Instead, you could offer access to exclusive content instead.
By putting into practice one or more of these techniques, you can help to create a more efficient customer service operation. Remember, this is not all about speed. It is about offering the best possible solution with the least possible fuss. The improvement of customer service is often about the small steps that you take, which can mean the most to customers, which is what encourages them to keep coming back. While the little improvements may exist under the radar, they can still add up to making a significant difference in our highly competitive world. So, make the changes one by one rather than all at once to measure how well each one does.
