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With more options than ever before for customers, switching brands is easy. Organizations need to take every advantage they can get, and providing excellent customer service has become one of these key differentiators. 99% of customers believe that companies need to improve their service and support and there’s plenty of scope to do so.
In this article, we’ll look at six game-changing customer service improvement strategies that businesses can introduce to enhance their customer service and gain a competitive edge.
Live chat lets organizations provide real-time customer service through text support, as well as voice and video too. Live chat software has become increasingly popular within customer service, and for good reason. With live chat, teams can improve customer satisfaction and increase conversions, while lowering costs associated with traditional phone support. Customers appreciate the convenience, speed, and personalization of live chat, which has led 71% of customers to expect customer service through digital messaging platforms.
To learn more about the benefits of live chat, read A Comprehensive Guide to Live Chat Software. This reveals how live chat platforms like Comm100 work, their key benefits, and the most popular use cases.
Excellent customer service requires happy agents, but customer service roles are notoriously challenging. The average turnover rate for call center employees is around 30-45% per year, which is higher than all other occupations. One of the ways that organizations are working to keep agents happier is by introducing better tools that help to reduce overly repetitive work.
Live chat achieves this by providing agents with features like canned messages and shortcuts that cut down manual tasks. Automation takes this up a level by letting chatbots answer the common and repetitive questions so agents have more time to focus on more interesting or complex queries.
For more on improving the agent experience, check out the expert commentary in The Best Customer Experience Needs the Best Agent Experience in which the 3 key tenets to positive agent experience are revealed.
Customers today stay connected across a variety of channels, and they are no longer content with customer service that limits how they get support. Today’s customers simply want to use the channel that suits them in that moment.
To meet this demand, organizations are introducing omnichannel customer service that connects every key channel into one platform. This lets customers reach out on their preferred channel – live chat, email, phone, SMS, or social media – while making it easy for teams of any size to manage every query. Companies employing omnichannel receive a customer satisfaction rating that is 23 times higher than other organizations.
For more on why companies are introducing omnichannel, see What are the Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Service? which looks at why omnichannel is the only way that organizations can provide the experience that today’s customers expect.
Many customers seek to solve their own issues before contacting customer support, which means that empowering customers with self-service can be crucial. A survey showed that more than 65% of US citizens interacting with federal agencies preferred self-serve options over speaking with someone. Self-service can also benefit the organizations because the more customers that help themselves, the less agent support is needed. Typically, the most common form of self-service takes the form of a knowledge base or FAQ section on your website.
To learn more about developing self-service options for your customers, read 4 Easy Steps for Building an Internal Knowledge Base. In the next of our customer service improvement strategies, we’ll look at how organizations can supercharge self-service with AI.
In the previous strategy, we saw that many customers want self-serve support so they can find the answer to their problem without interacting with an agent. Chatbots take this self-service to another level.
By integrating a chatbot into live chat software, chatbots can answer up to 80% of queries without any agent involvement. A bot can provide information as text, images, video, or links within the chat window, and it can do this 24/7 so customers can get support at any time of the day. On top of this, with customers helping themselves, agents have more time to tackle complex issues and ensure they are providing the very best support.
To learn what determines chatbot success, read The Essential Chatbot Success Metrics. In this blog, we break down the top performance metrics for chatbots that organizations should pay attention to.
The last customer service improvement strategy we’ll look at involves customer feedback. The best way for organizations to improve customer service over time is by seeking customer feedback through surveys and polls. Customer satisfaction surveys can provide valuable information on what customers like and dislike about your service, as well as identify areas for improvement. By making improvements based on feedback, you can show customers that you value their input and are committed to providing excellent customer service. You can easily input these surveys into your live chat software so when a chat closes, the customer can be prompted to leave their feedback.
To learn more about creating successful customer satisfaction surveys, see How To Create Successful Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions for IT Helpdesks. This article looks at defining survey objectives, writing the questions, and more.
These 6 customer service improvement strategies are just a handle of the many ways that teams can take their customer support up a level. To learn more about customer service improvement, see our complete guide here:
Explore customer service from top to bottom, from the state of customer service, best practices, and the best software.
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