Customer Support

Are You Adapting Omni-Channel Customer Support?

Customer support was originally handled through three information channels: telephone, letter or in person. As technology advanced, however, the available communication tools evolved, moving toward digital and cloud services. Now, businesses must handle customer service communications through a multifaceted approach known as omnichannel. As defined, this new approach streamlines and unifies consumer information across all corporate and client touchpoints to provide seamless, universal and informed service, and it can be further defined through the four Ps: Pain-free The first P refers to the seamlessness of the customer experience during the point of contact and finding a solution. Is your business’ currently facilitating this process in the best way possible? Proactive Is your current service reactive or proactive? The second P is about being ahead of the curve when it comes to solutions. Therefore, provide answers to problems that customers haven’t asked yet. Personalized How attentive is the business to client needs? The third P requires a personalized approach, meaning that the old ways of one-size-fits-all don’t work in today’s customer service environment. Productive Lastly, the fourth P is focused on productivity. Are your service agents empowered to make unilateral decisions, or does everything have to go through upper management? Streamlining the decision process is the focus of omnichannel customer service. If your business is not yet in tangent with the four P’s, it is not too late to start. There are several steps your company can take to improve the consumer experience and better align itself with the principles of multichannel service. Understand Customer Behavior   The basis of business and customer support is to understand customer behavior, and in the current economic climate, it is more important than ever before. To understand consumers is to understand their behavior, and to acknowledge their actions. It is difficult to establish successful communication channels if you do not know where your client-base spends their time online. Knowing that the majority of your clients use platforms like Twitter and Facebook will allow you to divert budgetary dollars from other social platforms. Capitalize on Mobile Platforms   Also, while omnichannel efforts where once limited to desktop and laptop computers, there are now multiple ways for customers to use business platforms and to contact support. You will be hard-pressed to find consumers without mobile phones or tablets. Therefore, it is essential that companies design for mobile platforms. Allow for Self-service   Additionally, it is not always necessary to flood your patron’s inbox with personalized messages or to provide information only through a real person. Some people prefer a more introverted customer experience, meaning that they prefer self-service. Companies can accommodate these types of shoppers by providing thorough and robust FAQ pages. Integrate SMS   Omnichannel support often depends on a personal approach to consumer relations through the utilization of technology and its platforms. Therefore, to push your support features to the next level, offer SMS capabilities. The availability of text messaging and its nearly universal appeal make it a reliable way to provide service and support. Incorporate Live Chat   When discussing personalized service, you can’t get any better than offering live chats. While chatbots have their place in the streamlining process, a real person can provide empathy and relatability. A machine is not able to provide accurate as well as emotional support and understanding. Don’t Forget Email   Granted, it is easy to forget the old methods of letters and email, but each still holds value in the customer experience. By incorporating both personalization and technology, businesses are capable of crafting targeted email campaigns that can lead to satisfaction and further purchases. While technically optional, omnichannel customer service is an appreciated customer service approach that yields real results. However, for true effectiveness businesses must be capitalizing on this approach across every touchpoint. If you are interested in incorporating this multichannel strategy into your business, then contact Etech for a customized solution.

Organizing Customer Support on Social Media the Right Way

These days, social media and customer services are essentially one and the same. Companies are better able to take care of their customers, and customers are better able to connect with the companies they support. No matter how large or how small your company is, there are a few things you can do to better organize your online customer services. Respond in a Timely Manner Technology has accelerated our expectations, and that has never been truer than when it comes to social media. Take a lesson from airline companies dealing with customers with lost luggage and work on responding to social media questions and comments as quickly as possible, at least within 60 minutes. If not, you risk angering and potentially losing a customer. Use Tools to Better Manage Your Social Media While it’s good to have several different social media accounts, those multiple accounts can become a bit of a hassle when you have so many different lines of communication to keep up with. If you find that you’re constantly feeling overwhelmed, consider offering customers live chat and implementing social media tools like HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Klout to manage all of your platforms in a single place. Make Your Responses More Personal Instead of sounding like a robot in your responses, make them more personal and inject them with a bit of personality. A canned response can not only send the wrong message about your company, it can also anger the person and make it seem as if you don’t pay attention to what’s being said. A bit of humor can also help to lighten the mood while making sure the individual is still being taken care of. Train Your Customer Service Employees Utilizing the most effective and up-to-date online customer support strategies and technology won’t do your company or your employees much good if your customer services team doesn’t know how to use the technology or strategies the right way. Before you cut your team lose to dominate the world of customer service, train them properly and thoroughly. Not only that, but you should update and refresh their training as necessary. Just as businesses aren’t operated the same now as they were ten years ago, the same is true of customer service. Give your team the tools and education they need to stand the best chance of succeeding. Have a Backup Plan in Place Just as there are bound to be people complaining about your products or services no matter what you do, there are bound to be times where you experience a power loss or lose your network connections. Despite unfortunate circumstances, your customers still want answers to their questions and want to have their concerns addressed. Have a customer service backup plan in place to handle these situations and make sure your company’s reputation doesn’t take a hit during times of technological crisis. For instance, you might have to temporarily outsource your customer service department. If you do, you’ll want your outsourced team to be familiar with how you handle customers to keep things flowing as smoothly and as normally as possible. An organization is one of the essential cornerstones of operating a successful business. Keep your online customer service department well organized and informed and you’re sure to remain in your customers’ good graces. Original Source : LinkedIn

4 Top Tips To Boost Technical Customer Support

Technical customer support refers to a lot of services by which enterprises give help to users of a technology product, for example, cell phones, TVs, PCs, software product or other informatics, electronic or mechanical products. By and large, technical bolster services address particular issues with a product or services as opposed to the provision of training, customization, or other support services. Most organizations offer technical support for the product they offer, either openly accessible or for a fee. Handling the more technical side of customer services can be tricky now and again. At the point when clients require a more accurate solution to a tech test, there’s value in knowing how to resolve the issue in the speediest, best way. While a significant portion of similar core principles of customer service applies, help desk and tech to support regularly require a more specialized touch to ace. It’s significant that many companies roll the assistance desk and technical support roles together. In general, however, the help desk is most every now and again considered the first line of defense for handling initial customer contact and all the more easily corrected tech issues, while technical support is the more particular second level that harder problems get raised to for resolutions that require further expertise. A technical customer support ticket that comes in through telephone, email or any other channel your team uses will frequently hit the help desk, where agents will work to resolve the issue or gauge whether it should be raised higher up the knowledge stepping stool. If it’s a straightforward solution, for instance, if a customer obtained a product that is feeling the loss of a key component and they’d like a new part it’ll get resolved at the help desk level. If a customer is encountering more top to bottom issues with a product that the helps desk doesn’t have a useful answer for, notwithstanding, their inquiry would be knock up to technical support. For instance, if a gadget is acting bizarre and ordinary steps to reboot or reset the device aren’t working, an agent with more intimate technical ability on the product can help handle the issue. Depending on your call center technology organization, your products, and your team makeup, help desk, and tech support may be either united into one role or separated further into a bigger number of levels or department for every role or product line. Rather than the questionable catchphrases, how about, we discuss genuine, noteworthy technical customer service tips that you can use to do what makes a difference and develop your business. 1) Identify and assess the issue level Customer issues of a more technical nature can run the range as far as many-sided complexity and simplicity of resolution, which is the reason it’s vital to pinpoint the issue promptly and rapidly assess whether it’s something that can potentially be solved with a basic fix. Towards one side of the spectrum, a customer may require guidelines on the most proficient method to recoup a lost password or directions to restore a damaged product for substitution. On the upper end, they may need to troubleshoot a sudden device disappointment or report a software stopping glitch they’ve experienced that is never seen. Guiding customers to an important resource like video tutorials, well-ordered directions, and client gatherings that give quick responses to regular tech issues can be an incredible approach to speed things along. However, it’s additionally valuable to recognize more intricate problems early so they can be routed to colleagues with the proper skill to unravel them. 2) Gage the customer’s technical level Utilizing instinct and hints from the discussion or correspondence, it’s useful to attempt to distinguish the customer’s level of technical experience with a specific end goal to decide an ideal approach to help them. For a few customers, something that may appear like a simple fix could be significantly more complicated if they’re not technically inclined. Alternately, a customer with a more prominent level of technical ability may communicate all the more smoothly and get the solution they require from talking with an agent that has more specialized aptitude on the matter. For instance, cable and Wi-Fi connectivity issues are a typical illustration. An educated customer may make sense of a fix rapidly with access to your company’s learning base, while other casual users may be flustered over the thought of chasing around for the reset button. Making sense of a customer’s level of technical ability makes it less demanding to point your team’s response in the correct direction. 3) Check for previous support tickets It’s normal for some customers who encounter technical issues to experience a portion of similar issues or even related ones more than once. Looking into any earlier support tickets logged for a particular customer can give helpful pieces of information that may help speed the procedure along, which is a good thing for every person involved. Previous tickets may have notes that let you guide the customer to a better resolution or fast track them to the correct office to fathom their issues better. 4) Take detailed, useful ticket notes on each interaction Call center agents don’t need to compose a book on each customer, however keeping detailed, precise notes that help understand issues, their unique situation, the proposed solution, and the final result can be priceless both for following common problems and for helping customers who repeatedly reach out with similar problems. Technical custom service software solutions make the way toward tracking tickets and keeping exceptional customer information less tasking. In conclusion, while many individuals consider technical customer support as a cost of doing business, the numbers don’t lie: customer support pays off. It has been found that expanding customer degrees of consistency by 5% builds business gains by 25% to 95%. By utilizing the techniques above, you can be on the way to accomplishing profits like that for your call center technology organization.

5 Easy Steps to Build a Successful Customer Support Team

A functional customer support team is essential to the success of your business. Many customers view the support team as the face of the company, and an unpleasant customer service experience can leave them with a bad feeling about the company as a whole and create detractors you don’t need. To avoid this, you must have the right team and customer support services in place from the start. In today’s competitive environment this can and should be the differentiator, especially for a call center team. Here are a few steps that can be taken to build and maintain a successful team. Implement Effective Support Techniques Having the right support techniques in place can help to ensure that clients receive uniformed, quality care every time they contact or are contacted by the company. All techniques should promote treating the customer as the highest priority and must ensure that the interaction is as pleasant as possible. If it is feasible, it can be beneficial to implement outbound customer service practices where the representatives contact the customers on a regular basis to ensure that they are not having any issues. This proactive approach can set you apart and such actions go a long way in the customer’s mind. Utilize Data in Decision-Making You pay for data to be collected on calls and you should get your money’s worth. The collected data can be very helpful during the decision-making process. Things like rings before call is picked up, length of call, hold time, common complaints, FAQ can help you design and maintain the right type of techniques. You must review frequently as customer’s priorities can change, and you must be prepared to change with them. Knowing, tracking and comparing such data can help you to make proper decisions as far as what techniques may need to be deployed, improved, or in some cases removed. Encourage a Team Mindset Customer service practices are most effective when everyone is on-board with the process. No matter who the customer reaches everyone should and must be on the same page. Implement and encourage an “all-hands on deck” mindset. As all team members support everyone, not only will it help to boost customer satisfaction, but it can also create comradery within the group as they can all take pride in receiving positive reviews, high NPS, and in turn build confidence and boost moral within the group. Create a Reward System Everyone enjoys being rewarded and acknowledged for hard work. A reward system is not only a great way to show appreciation, but it also helps to make your customer support team feel valued. Studies show that employees who feel valued tend to be happier and loyal to their companies. You should always reward your team for great work! Set up weekly, monthly, and quarterly recognition that employees can look forward to and strive to achieve. Automate Wisely There are a number of customer support services available that your company can take advantage of. However, you must be mindful to only deploy automated services that make sense and provide the image you want to display. Many customers find too much automation to be impersonal which can leave them with a bad impression. It is important to find the right balance between automation and your customer support team. Research, do focus groups, and be prepared to change what must be changed as often as it needs to be changed as you go through the process of what works and what doesn’t. As you strive to implement or improve your customer service tactics, consider following these steps. Not only can they help you to enhance your customer satisfaction rating, but they may also lead to a more efficient and productive support team that will ultimately lead to more customers.

3 Tips To Help Create the Best Chat Experience

To stay on the cutting edge of customer service, you’ll want to offer your customers every available avenue to provide help and support. One of the newest, most innovative and customer-friendly methods is live chat support. Studies have shown that customers prefer this type of communication with companies over the phone or email. You might be surprised, in fact, to learn that customer satisfaction rates for live chat support are 73 percent. In comparison, email as a customer service route received 61 percent approval, while phone support only received 44 percent. Why wouldn’t customers pick online chatting over other avenues? For starters, with a live chat service, your customers are able to browse through your website at the same time they’re having their questions answered. This simplifies your ability to direct them through areas of the site where you’re helping them. Real-time chat sessions give your customers the best of all worlds here. How do you provide your clients the best possible live support experience? Take a look at the following three tips to keep your customer satisfaction rates at their peak. Train Your Team : “Chatting” with customers involves more than friendly banter. Your team will need to know how to understand the customer’s questions, accurately resolve problems and turn around dissatisfaction. Your chat team members will benefit by learning professional chat methodology principles and response tools, which will enable them to effectively communicate through a medium that might otherwise seem neutral or emotionless. Training courses are an invaluable element in keeping your chat team efficient, yet personable. Know Your Customer Demographic : With direct personal interactions, it is easy to adjust your style of speech and vernacular to match that of your customer, and therefore establish a rapport. However, you lack this type of face-to-face exchange in a chat session. It isn’t always possible to tell whether you’re chatting with a 20-something or a senior citizen. The issue goes beyond age – factors such as location, personality and background also apply. It can be challenging for chat personnel to discern these tidbits of information through a computer monitor. Even so, being able to identify with your customer by picking up on and matching his or her unique inflections is a valuable skill. Quantitative research studies can be vital in providing insight into your company’s particular demographic and average customer base. Understand Your Customers’ Needs : What exactly is it that your company provides, and what might they have issues with that prompt them to seek your help in a chat session? Being able to fully understand the help a customer may need, your particular services and your products is the golden ticket to providing stellar online chat support. You and your team might understand every aspect of your business inside and out, and that in itself makes a huge difference. However, you will get more in-depth, intuitive results by investing in objective research based on third-party interviews. In this way, you stand a much better chance of seeing your customers’ concerns through their eyes. Live chat support should be fun, engaging and thoroughly rewarding for your customers. These tips should help you elevate your team to chat superstars. This blog was first published on LinkedIN

5 Reasons why Customer Service is Incomplete without Live Chat

Exceptional customer service differentiates you from the other providers in the market. That differentiation is crucial because today’s customer is sophisticated and has more options than ever before. With the click of a button, they are out of your online shop and into the next. The secret is to offer them support and assistance that is relevant, timely and personal. One way to achieve this is through Live Chat Support. Live support is a web service that allows you to communicate with your customers in real time. Many companies have embraced the use of live chat software as more customer service channels arise in the market. Customers really appreciate it when you listen to them and meet them where and when they want. When you are able to do that, you guarantee increased satisfaction levels. Here are five critical reasons to invest in effective chat software for your customers. Live Chat Taps Into Customer Pain Points : Pain points are customer needs that have not yet been met. For example, a client will reach out to your company because he or she wants to ask a question pertaining to the performance of the product or just some clarifications. However, when the agent is alert, he or she will detect the customer’s mood and attitude, if there is something bothering them, the agent can inquire about underlying issues. These pain points, when effectively addressed, are great opportunities for brand positioning in the mind of the customer. You can leverage the interactions with the customer to discover which improvements are needed in your products or services. The essence of tapping into these pain points is to uncover critical areas of improvement, meeting the customers’ needs in the most direct way. The result will be higher customer satisfaction levels and incremental business growth. Live Chat is Convenient : Receiving support through live chat is very convenient. It provides your customer with immediate access to information. For example, when a customer is shopping online and he or she is having trouble with the purchase, while still on the page, they can chat with an agent who will resolve their issue on the spot. It is convenient also because you can speak with a customer service representative anytime and anywhere. If the customer is in traffic and there is a lot of noise, the live chat continues without any interruptions. How wonderful is that? Even when the customer has to wait in line for the next available agent to become available, the wait is not that long compared to waiting for a call to go through, because an agent can chat with more than one customer at any given time. Convenience is a win-win situation for the agents and customers. Live Chat Removes Language Barriers : Most companies reach, especially with online retail operations, extends beyond their borders and their customers are spread all over the globe. This can lead to communication challenges. Imagine having a phone conversation with an agent for whom English is their second language; you will run into language barriers because of the diverse accents and idioms. However, with live chat you will understand each other easily. As you type, words and sentences will be autocorrected, minimizing margins of error. A conversation that goes well, not only leads to customer satisfaction but also leads to employee satisfaction. Language can be vetted beforehand to present the most easily understood word choices. Live Chat is Versatile : Live chat is a great platform to attend to customers no matter the complexity of the issue presented. From a simple product question to a technical one, the tools and resources available through live chat can address a wide gamut of issues. Another critical quality component of the chat process is that, because all of the conversations are written, they are readily accessible by the performance management teams to review for quality assurance. The customer can also refer to it for directions in case they forget what you told them and an agent can evaluate their own performance on how well the conversation evolved. Live Chat Builds Strong Relationships : Strong and long-lasting relationships are worth building and fighting for, in order to grow your business. With live chat, you can introduce a human element into the online conversations with customers. Even though most companies have prepared their Frequently Asked Questions for access by website visitors, the FAQ’s are never enough to satisfy all of the questions asked by all of the customers. When customers are happy and satisfied, they will not only purchase more but also advocate for your brand to others, leading to higher conversion rates. Making yourself easily available to your customers when and where they want to have the conversation is powerful for your business. Live chat is critical to success platform in providing the unique opportunity to complete your customer service processes. Train and coach your agents in the best practices for live chat and you will see the improvement in customer satisfaction levels and healthy business growth.

Why Companies Still Need Chat?

If you know me, I consider myself a nice person. However when I receive terrible service, I try not to complain. I don’t kick and scream, I try to not call the company and complain, I do not try and make a scene. I’m one of those “nice” clients we hear so much about. All I will tell you is this; I am also the customer who never comes back. Sure, I could tell you off and feel better, but in the long run, I prefer to leave quietly and tell everyone else I know about my experience. You see, we talk about those nice customers who never complain and we all think they are great. But the sad part is most companies don’t understand there are plenty of people just as “nice” as me. When a “nice” person like me gets fed up, we go to your competitors. I tell you this because as I was trying to purchase products this week on a company’s websites and could not get any live help. Imagine that? I was trying to buy on an E-Commerce site and could not get help. Well my E-Commerce company – you have lost a great consumer this week and you have no idea how much revenue you lost because you chose not to have chat as an option to help me when I needed it most. Stats: Last year in the US alone more than 155 million consumers spent more than $165 billion – Yet, the shopping cart abandonment rate averages 70%. I was one of those people. Why? Because I could not get any help… Wouldn’t it make sense to assist these consumers before they leave without purchasing? You know the deal, have you ever gone online, found the product you’ve been looking for at what you thought was a great price, but you felt you did not have 100% of the information you needed to put it in your shopping cart? You look for a way to self-serve, ask questions and to your surprise no one is online helping you because the store is not open when you are ready to buy. I know what you are saying Mr. Webmaster. 95% of the information that consumers are looking for is already on your website. But let me ask you this – is it easy to find? Consumers like me want the information NOW. It’s fast food for the internet – I do not want to look around to get my answer, click 100 times to find the answer- I want someone to help me in real time. Nearly one half of shopping cart abandoners say that they plan to conduct more online research before purchasing in order to get the best price. As people abandon the shopping cart like I did, they are going to competitors who may have chat and will capture their sales. That’s what I did. People appreciate live chat for a number of reasons, and time is a key factor. Of those who prefer live chat, 79% said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly and 46% agreed it was the most efficient communication method. https://econsultancy.com/blog/63867-consumers-prefer-live-chat-for-customer-service-stats#i.1kthq2g12uce8n As more website visitors become more experienced online, even more visitors will abandon their shopping carts, and online comparison shopping will become ever more commonplace. Highly educated, experienced shoppers are more likely to use voucher codes or look for them online. Chat agents can offer the codes for them so there is no more searching and time spent not making the sale and increase AOV. Forrester found that web buyers that abandon shopping carts spend more time online than those that don’t. More than two thirds of shopping cart abandoners say they like to shop around before making a purchase. Reiterates how valuable it is to keep customers on your website. Look, if you can answer the shoppers questions in real time, do their comparisons for them in real time, keep them on my site and satisfied, they are more likely to make the purchase from me? Would you leave your brick and mortar store open without a sales clerk there? Of course not, but you do it every day on your website. If you do not have Chat or Social media as your solution you can start now it’s never too late. This Blog was first published on LinkedIn

Providing Superior Online Customer Support

These days, customers no longer shop exclusively through brick-and-mortar stores; online retailers have changed the game, permanently. Likewise, customers no longer expect product support to be delivered exclusively at a store counter or over the phone. Online customer services provide more flexible solutions for assisting clients remotely. As with more traditional methods, however, there are definite dos and don’ts for providing exceptional online customer support. Consistency is Key Similar to marketing, consistency is vital when it comes to a company’s online customer support presence. The tone and information being conveyed to customers should be cohesive across the board, paralleling the experience they would receive via phone or in person. This not only ensures an ideal interaction, but also greater confidence in your brand. Online and On Time Imagine visiting a major retail store and finding its doors locked midday on a Tuesday; you might feel bewildered and think twice about returning in the future. Your online customer support channel must take the same mentality, posting set operating hours to avoid confusion and frustration. Larger companies providing round-the-clock support still must be prepared for hang-ups. Much like a phone recording reassures callers that they are still in the queue awaiting service, your chat service should be provide an automatic response after a predetermined duration. Keep customers in the loop to keep agitation to a minimum. Security Sensitivity Despite the parallels, online customer services vary from other support methods in several ways. Transmitting unsecured data over the Internet is risky, and it’s important that your website makes customers aware of this. Provide them with the ability to send such information via secured web forms or telephone and ensure that your staff is trained to discourage sensitive details from being sent via chat. This includes passwords, personal info, and credit card numbers. Coming on Too Strong It’s helpful if your online customer support is readily available via call-to-action buttons or preset triggers. Trust your client to take the next step, however—trying too hard to initiate dialogue is tantamount to a pushy clerk. In many cases, it discourages interaction rather than encouraging it. If your chat numbers aren’t what you envisioned, consider displaying support agents’ names and/or photos to add a human touch, or decrease the amount of information required upfront to initiate the session. Train for Success Online customer support is all about communication, so make sure your staff is trained accordingly. The technical-minded people who make up your support team might think differently than your average customer, so it’s important that your reps stick with simple, straightforward language. Overly-technical descriptions may further cloud customer issues, exacerbating problems instead of working to resolve them. There are several other ways to promote an ideal customer experience. Make sure to emphasize for your team the importance of conveying a friendly, helpful disposition, which is often more difficult in text. Going beyond agent names and photos, you might implement the use of emoticons to keep the mood upbeat. Last and certainly not least, ensure that your team has the tools to succeed. High-volume support channels should be equipped with ticketing systems to keep responses organized and prioritized. Call scripts, data sheets, and other literature should be readily available so that customers are efficiently provided with clear, consistent information. Conclusion Many contrasts and similarities exist between online customer service and more traditional channels. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your goal is the same, regardless of the platform: staff good people that will deliver a consistent experience for your customers in a timely fashion. By respecting these basic tenants of customer service, your chat—and your brand by extension—are sure to enjoy success. This post was first published on LinkedIn

Affordable Strategy and Techniques to Improve Customer Service

Offering excellent customer service has tremendous benefit to any organization, and it is one of the top priorities for every employee. The top management assigns a team to develop strategies and then train the employees for a seamless implementation. Poor customer service hurts your business by driving away customers, who spread the bad news to others, thereby, killing your business. However, when you provide superior customer service the payoffs are enormous, from high sales, satisfied clients who become your brand advocates, increased profitability to happy employees. For your business to grow steadily, you need to increase cash flow as you lower operating expenses. Therefore, you cannot afford to have none or a poor strategy to improve your customer service. Have the following tips in mind when you are formulating the strategies and techniques to improve customer service, they are affordable too. Carry out a situation analysis The step is to understand where you are now. Approach it from the customers and employees point of view. Carry out a customer survey to get satisfaction scores. Compile the data and work with an average of the total. For the employees, use data from quality metrics like First Contact Resolution and service metrics like average speed of answer. It will help you understand internal problems that may be hindering superior service delivery. You also need to know how your employees define their roles at the contact center. Does an agent say, “I answer calls and respond to live chat inquiries?” or does he or she say, “I resolve customers issues the best way possible?” How an agent understand their role influence how they perform. Put all the above information together to get a clear picture of where you are. These will be your objectives as your progress with the strategy formulation. Scrutinize your Procedures and Processes Employees are not the only factor that can affect customer service; the contact center systems and processes can. What is the procedure for agents to resolve issues? Do they have to escalate all issues to the manager or are they empowered to handle the issues? Are your systems user-friendly? For example, when a customer logs into your website and wants to interact with an agent online, do they have to spend several minutes locating the live chat icon. You need to make your services accessible and available. Today’s customer expects instant gratification, or else they shop elsewhere. The procedures and processes should make it easy for the employees to meet customers’ needs. Work on the Improvement Areas You now have data on customers, employees, procedures, and processes. Now, look into the areas that need immediate action and start with them, and roll out the rest with time. With improvement, the focus on the employees and processes, and the changes will affect the customer. Take your employees through thorough refresher training, and focus on the weak areas. For example, if you found out that the call transfer rate was high, the training should emphasize on product knowledge. Loop in the line managers The best people to oversee the implementation of the strategy are the line managers because they spend most of their time on the floor with agents. Ensure they know and understand the strategy and the value it brings to the contact center. You can train them on a separate day, to empower them further and thus give them the right tools and information to make the strategy work. Line managers go beyond overseeing the implementation. For example, after the training, they can coach the employees to greater performance improvements. Effective line managers lead their teams to success. Monitor and Review After equipping everyone with the correct information and tools, you need to monitor their progress. How are the employees performing in light of the set objectives? For example, if they were to improve the FCR, has the rate increased or decreased? After gathering the data, conduct review meeting with line managers and selected employees. At the core of the monitoring and reviewing is to check whether the implemented strategies had financial implications to the contact center. They should not increase your operations cost but lower them. In summary, when you carry out a situation analysis, scrutinize your procedures and processes, work on the improvement areas, loop in the line managers, and monitor and review the strategies and techniques, you will improve your customer service. Be patient in the process as it takes some time to change from one policy to another.

4 Ways to Deliver better Customer Support utilizing Chat

If you look at monthly satisfaction rates for chats and tickets, satisfaction for a regular customer service chat is typically much higher than for a support ticket. This anomaly has a rather clear cause: When clients’ cases are pushed to support tickets, they are usually already dissatisfied with the service they have received. Why? Support ticket cases are the ones that can’t be handled easily, are hard to crack and require quite a bit more time to resolve. This longer wait time does little to calm upset clients. How do you take a disappointed client and, in the end, turn them into a satisfied customer? Although not every case can be expedited, there are certain shortcuts you can use to deliver better service to your ticket customers. Give Tickets to Those Who Can Resolve Them : Although this may seem like an obvious statement, it is a vital part of keeping customers happy that many companies might inadvertently ignore. If you know that the person who initially responds to a support ticket is going to pass it along to someone who actually possesses the knowledge and skills necessary to resolve it, there is a serious problem. The ticket should go directly to someone who can take care of it immediately to increase customer satisfaction. In some cases, there might be a difficult ticket that no one wants to pick up. Support teams should be encouraged in these situations to see finding a solution as a challenge that needs to be overcome. Utilize Tiered Support : Different cases require different levels of expert knowledge to handle. This makes a tiered support system crucial in efficiently handling cases after live chat fails. A basic tiered support setup involves two separate groups of agents: those who receive incoming cases from customers and the experts who actively deal with the cases. The receivers are the first to pick up the ticket, then they escalate it to the experts, who deal with it depending on the case type. One expert could deal with managing payments. Another could handle returns. This allows experts in certain areas to handle the cases that they have been so thoroughly trained on. It makes little sense to have experts in one area handling matters from other areas. This assures that the workers with the highest credentials are immediately assigned the cases that only they can handle. Keep Track of Tickets : One of the easiest ways to further anger an already bothered customer is to lose their ticket. Tickets are commonly lost when they are assigned to a person who is out of the office for more than a day or so. It is completely avoidable and should never happen. Only actively working individuals should receive new tickets. Provide the Details : If a ticket is passed to another worker, it is vital that all the ticket’s details are provided. Without that information, resolving the issue can be greatly prolonged. Any missing information will have to be filled in a second time by the requestor, which will lead to a longer case resolution and an overall poorer experience. For the cases that cannot be resolved via live chat support, tickets are unavoidable. However, the customer experience can be positively affected if support technicians simply follow these four steps.

How to Create An Exceptional Customer Service Experience

Offering exceptional customer service experience will win you some loyal customers. A string of loyal customers who rave about your brand is one of the key things you need to beat the competition. Exceptional customer service is making the customer feel they are the most important for the few minutes you are attending to them. You assure them that you will do that you can to make their day better. As a leader in charge of customer service, you want your team to deliver nothing short of exceptional customer service. However, as the days progress, you realize that new challenges arise. You have the perfect strategy and your customer service representatives are well trained and equipped but still you are not hitting the exceptional levels. Here are four steps that can help you craft a strategy always to offer exceptional customer service, Ask Ask your customers what they need. Asking is the fastest way of getting an answer. You may think that you know what customers need, but the answers they provide may surprise you. Most people ask through research when developing new products only. However, you will realize that customers will have feedback all the time. Ask your customers after a conversation for their honest feedback about your products and services. Do not forget to ask them how best they think you can serve them better. By asking your customers for feedback, they also feel you are you value their opinion, and that increases their satisfaction levels. Listen Asking without listening will be a waste of time. I advocate for active listening because after the conversation, you will remember all the points. Have you ever had a conversation with someone, and at the end you could tell they were not listening to you? Customers are like that too; they can tell when you are actively listening to them and when you are not. Another way of listening to your customers is through call monitoring. You can pick up information that will help you evaluate your current delivery and areas that need improvement. Develop policies You have asked your customers for feedback and actively listened to them. Now it’s time to develop procedures and policies in line with the information gathered. Your customers will respond warmly to you once they realize that you are implementing their suggestions. Policies and procedure help you to provide uniform services, and that consistency is important customers. Centre your procedures on what will drive the exceptional customer experience. Remain flexible As stated before, challenges arise when least expected. Do not be a stickler of policies and procedures. Some situations call for a different approach to resolving a customer’s problem. For instance, when an angry customer calls, the agent can figure out the best way to calm them down then resolve their issues Empower your agents to make decisions on the move. Evolve with your customers. In conclusion, asking customers what they need, actively listening to them, and developing procedures in line with the feedback gathered and remaining flexible will help you give exceptional experiences. Crafting is a continuous process, when you reach the third step, you are still working out the first two. You will provide exceptional customer service experiences by implementing these four tips.

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