Customer service is a crucial factor for any business that wants to be successful. It’s a direct contributor to growth and profits. Check out the following statistics to get an idea:
- Over 90% of consumers will likely buy from a business again if they have a positive experience. (Salesforce)
- Poor customer service causes almost 60% of consumers to switch brands. (Microsoft)
- About 52% of consumers can make additional efforts to purchase from their favourite brands. (Zendesk)
The stats show the importance of delivering a remarkable customer experience.
It contributes to customer retention, lowers acquisition costs, and even increases customers’ lifetime value, ultimately driving sustainable business growth.
The best part – there are tools and innovative solutions available to help businesses serve their customers better.
If you want your businesses to deliver exceptional customer experience, you are in the right place. This article explores technologies and strategies that can transform how you treat your customers.
Read to the end to see which ones you can implement to gain a competitive edge.
Let’s GO!
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning
AI and Machine Learning (AI & ML) have changed the game for customer services.
You can literally automate your customer’s experience and keep your business online 24/7, even without a human overlooking the interactions. Let’s see some of the ways AI & ML can help you in this area.
AI Chatbots:
For a long time, these customer queries were handled manually.
There’d be an actual person looking over the issues and providing relevant guidance. This came with limitations such as limited work hours, delayed responses, misunderstandings, etc.
With AI chatbots, your business is always online and available to answer the customers.
It can even take sensitive queries and report them to agents later, who can resolve the matters when they become available. For most common problems, these chatbots deliver automated standard responses to the customers so they can get the answers to their problems.
In fact, most chatbots can be trained to deliver human-like responses, and most people would never even know they have talked to a robot. You can install them on your website, customer portal, application, etc.
Predictive Analytics & AI Personalisations
Machine learning and AI are truly revolutionary in the way they handle data. You feed them a dataset, and they analyse the best possible outcomes that you can implement to service your customers.
Not only this but based on previous data, it can also highlight potential problems you can encounter in the future. Besides offering future forecasts, it can analyse customer behaviour and highlight potential improvements to offer a personalised customer experience.
For example, if 40% of your shoppers abandon their carts, AI & ML can analyse potential reasons for that and offer insights into how to resolve the issue.
Offering personalised experiences for all shoppers is also a possibility. You can even offer customised recommendations based on a customer’s activities. These steps can help you with retention, increased conversion rates, and even delivering satisfactory responses to stressed-out customers.
2. Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support means catering to your customers’ needs via multiple communication channels. This helps customers contact you in whichever way is feasible for them rather than limiting their options.
It can include calls, SMS, email, social media, or in-person interactions. Customers today expect businesses to be always available, and those who do win the game.
Incorporating omnichannel support can benefit your business a great deal. Here’s how:
Wider Customer Insights:
When you allow people to approach you at their convenience, you get a wider dataset of their activities.
This will allow you to closely monitor customer behavior and build strategies offering a personalised experience. Wider customer insights will also help you manage channels and make everything more effective.
Moreover, it helps you identify the most common communication channels, and you can deploy increased resources there to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Real-Time Channel Switching:
Omnichannel support doesn’t mean that the channels operate independently. With advanced systems, you can interlink them to operate efficiently in real time. This will greatly boost customer service by making things easy for your consumers.
People can start a conversation on one channel, and your system allows them to switch to another channel without any hassles. For example, someone may reach out to you over social media, and you can continue the conversations over WhatsApp or SMS, which is far more convenient.
Offering omnichannel support will help you stand out from your competitors. You can even grow them into channels of customer acquisition, which means even more business growth.
3. Cloud-Based Customer Service Platforms
There are now cloud-based solutions available that can blow magic to your customer service operations. They are powerful and help you deliver better customer interactions.
You can cater to a wider audience with the right tools, even with limited resources. Let’s see some of the benefits of cloud-based solutions and how they can assist you in customer service.
Scalability and Flexibility:
One of the best features cloud solutions offer is scalability and flexibility. For a few hundred dollars, you can get a tool and put it to work 24/7. These tools can handle more clients than a human team ever can.
It’s also a great way to control your budget – when the season is off, you can reduce your payment plans and save money. It’s definitely something worth exploring if you seriously want to make lives easier for your customers.
Bonus advantage – manual teams often have wait times for customers whereas cloud solutions respond in real time.
Remote Access and Collaboration:
Cloud solutions offer global access to teams. You can service customers in different parts of the world and even have your teams operate from various geographic locations.
You can even collaborate with customers and resolve their issues on the spot. In a service or project-based industry, you can use these tools to show your customers the progress made on the task.
This helps them track performance and be at ease.
You can also collaborate with the customers on different projects by integrating different tools. All this makes customer management so much easier for businesses.
Besides the customer-facing side of things, you can also create a centralised database of your customers on cloud platforms. Your team can then collaborate and work on the data to find ways of serving the customers better.
4. Self-Service Technologies
Many products and services are such that you can cut out the need for manual responses altogether. That’s basically the idea behind self-service technologies – helping customers navigate solutions on their own.
The 2 significant benefits of this:
- Customers can instantly find solutions to their troubles
- Reduced workload on service teams
See how it’s done below.
Knowledge Bases and FAQs:
Knowledge bases and FAQs are the easiest ways to help customers resolve their issues without stress. They are like the information manual you put up for your business’s common and known problems.
A lot of people try DIY solutions before bothering customer care. Stats show that 70% of customers want to solve issues independently. (Zendesk).
When your FAQs and knowledge bases are available, they can find the answers and eliminate the troubles.
The best part – they can find solutions even at odd times when a customer representative isn’t physically available. So, you have a satisfied customer just by putting up the relevant solutions online. Awesome, right?
Quick tip – ensure that your knowledge base is regularly updated otherwise, it’ll leave a bad impression on your customers.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems:
IVR systems are calls where people get their issues resolved via keypad inputs or voice commands. Many businesses, including banks & telecom providers, use them to assist customers with those issues.
They offer vast use cases, from scheduling appointments to resolving bank card issues. These systems will help you trim down the teams and only keep resources that can handle anomalies that the IVRs can’t.
Customer Portals:
Customer portals are a way to deliver personalised and priority support to customers. You can do many modifications to make things convenient for your customer base. Businesses can even offer tiered support from the portal and charge a premium for priority support.
Customer portals are always a way to connect closely with customers. You can use them to build loyalty programs and even offer exclusive deals to customers.
If you want to live in the hearts of customers, then these portals are something you must explore.
5. Data Analytics and Customer Insights
Another transformative strategy to ensure that your customers have a remarkable experience – personalise the experience based on data.
Unfortunately, many businesses still make assumptions and are in the dark about their customers’ preferences or how they behave. However, strategies are data-based, they can handle the customers more efficiently and grow the business.
Here’s how analytics and customer insights can be useful.
Customer Sentiment Analysis:
Knowing the customer pulse is important for any business that wants to play the long game.
With AI, you can analyse how customers perceive your business and make the necessary amendments. And if for some reason, people have a negative experience, you can use the data to take corrective measures and resolve issues.
Analysing customer sentiments can also highlight problems you should solve so that future customers don’t face those issues. You can track customer surveys, social media comments, social media engagements, and even customer calls to analyse how people perceive your business.
Customer Journey Mapping:
Businesses should understand customer journeys. Understanding the steps people take to become customers or leave your business is important. Means from the first touch point till the very end, everything must be thoroughly mapped.
You can then highlight problems and make changes to grow the business.
You can also know the pain points of your customers and take relevant steps to ensure that you address their problems.
Predictive Customer Support:
Predictive AI can help you anticipate your problems and prepare for them. This way, you’ll be less surprised when the issues show up. You could allocate the resources to mitigate the risks to a large extent.
Predictive customer support involves analysing previous data and anticipating customer needs that may arise in the future. This will allow you to be super efficient and even cost-effective because it will help you reduce error margins.
6. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPAs help you automate mundane tasks via software or tools. This frees up resources that you can dedicate to other important tasks. Let’s explore this deeper.
Automating Routine Tasks:
Customer service agents usually have to perform many additional tasks, such as maintaining sheets, registering responses, processing refunds, etc. All these tasks can now be delegated to RPAs, who will perform them more efficiently and in less time.
RPAs also bring the errors down to almost zero so you’ll have accurate data always.
Enhanced Interactions And Reduced Response Time
Your efficiency and customer dealing will improve once you put the right software into the picture.
The software offers many insights that you can use to deal with customers and satisfy their queries. In fact, RPAs can get customers to pre-fill forms before the interaction so the agent will know exactly what the customer wants.
Besides remarkable accuracy, RPAs help you do things really quickly as well. You can reduce the response times and resolve problems fast.
End result? Better customer satisfaction and business growth.
Conclusive Thoughts – Improve Your Customer Service With Us!
That’s pretty much it. By now, you understand the importance of customer service and the ways to improve it.
However, most SMBs are too busy with their daily tasks and tight on resources to pay attention to technological improvements. But not implementing them can result in losing customers and damaging the business.
If you want specialised IT solutions for your business, contact us. Our team of experts is ready to transform how you handle customer services on a budget. To learn more and get the gears moving with us, reach out today to schedule a chat.