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Luggage Free: Unpacking The New Customer Experience

Luggage Free ships your luggage worldwide giving customers the option to travel without the hassle of their bags. The company provides white glove service that is all about convenience, so naturally, they wanted to make the ability for customers to contact them simple and straightforward.

Over the last ten years, the Luggage Free team has seen mobile searches steadily climb. As searches on mobile and tablet eclipsed their desktop searches, the team looked at their engagement from a user experience point of view. They wanted to make communication easy and decided to deploy Quiq’s chat and messaging channels.

“Text transcends a customer’s whole life. They no longer need to be at their desktop to engage with us. They can send us a chat or a text and go on about their lives. Then, instead of getting an email, they receive a real-time alert when their bags are delivered.”

Jeff Boyd, President, Luggage Free

SMS Software for Better Mobile UX

Luggage Free supported chat, email, and phone channels to engage with customers, but they wanted to be at the front of the competitive curve by offering text messaging. As President, Jeff Boyd puts it “Some people live and die by their email and check it all day, some only check it once a week, but even the ones that check it once a week are always on their phone and we know they constantly check their text messages.” With Quiq Messaging, chat and text messaging are where the vast majority of Luggage Free’s customer interactions take place.

Luggage Free has a worldwide reach and messaging allows customers, no matter what time zone they’re in to reach either of the company’s offices. Their offices are closed for only 6 hours per day worldwide, and Quiq’s messaging platform offers customers who need support outside of business hours, something more dynamic than an automated out of office email. The messages are queued and responded to immediately when agents return to the office.

What’s Next

Following a smooth implementation and ramp up with Quiq Messaging, the company has seen success with pre-sales interactions and can easily communicate with customers during the purchase, booking, and pickup process. Outbound notification messages are next, with an eye towards alerting customers that their bags have been picked up and then delivered to their final destination.

About Quiq

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with our friends and family. With Quiq, customers can now engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App,and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

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5 Critical Times to Set Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Customer Experience

Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) are agreements that companies use to help their customers understand what kind of service they can expect. SLA’s are commonly used in managed IT services, but that’s not the only place SLA’s are applicable.

SLA’s aren’t just for large companies, service companies, or suppliers. The truth is, every company should use SLA’s to better serve customers – internally and externally. In fact, using SLA’s for customer service is one use that can improve your customer experience and customer satisfaction. The better your SLAs, the more you and your customers benefit. In this post, we’ll take a look at what you can do to make sure your SLA’s improve the experience you deliver.

What an SLA Says About Your Company

A company’s Service Level Agreements can be used to improve customer service levels by instituting an appropriate response time to clients across the entire organization. Setting SLA’s also keeps team members up-to-date on what needs to be addressed.

Setting SLA’s speak volumes about how customer experience is viewed by the company. Setting, measuring, and reporting on SLA’s communicates the importance of timely communication with your customers, sets boundaries and expectations for your staff, and can help define remedies when expectations aren’t met.

While it’s important to meet your customer expectations on every channel, it’s critical for chat and messaging. When it comes to the messaging and chat channels, customers expect, if not demand, timeliness. The ability to get fast, convenient answers or help on demand and on-the-go are exactly why your customers are using messaging in the first place.

There are a number of opportunities where you can set SLA’s in Quiq’s messaging solution. We’ve recognized these events as critical to yield a successful interaction. Let’s look at 5 critical times SLA’s improve your customer experience on the messaging channel.

5 Critical Times to Set SLAs

When we built Quiq’s messaging platform, we wanted to make sure that our clients could set standards in order to consistently deliver an excellent experience on the messaging channel. For the customer service use case, we identified several areas where setting SLA’s could help support the agent workflow, in addition to meeting customer expectations.

Clients who use Quiq can set values that define acceptable standards for specific processes. These values are all editable and may be applied in increments of minutes or seconds.

1. Accepting a conversation –  You can set an SLA to monitor the amount of time an agent has to accept a conversation. A higher threshold increases the time a customer will wait for a response, but also allows multi-tasking agents to finish a task before being presented with new conversations they can accept. Customers don’t want to wait to talk to someone. Setting this SLA can ensure customers receive timely attention. If an agent doesn’t acknowledge the conversation (either accepting or declining the conversation), the conversation before the timer expires, the message will be re-queued. At that point, the agent who didn’t accept that conversation will be placed in a special status called “Current Conversations Only” because the system recognizes the agent may have all the conversations they can handle for now and it doesn’t want an incoming response to a customer to be delayed.

2. Responding to a customer – When an agent is in an active conversation with a customer and a customer responds, the agent must respond back within a timeframe specified by the organization. Much like accepting a conversation, if the agent does not respond before this timer expires, the conversation is re-queued, and the agent is placed in Current Conversations Only status.

3. Pacing the conversation – Quiq’s Adaptive Response Timer (ART) intelligently measures the pace of a conversation based on the customers speed to respond. With that insight, as agents handle multiple conversations at once, the system automatically prioritizes multiple conversations based on which customer is ready for a response. It is important to note that SMS/text, and even chat, conversations may have gaps in time as agents wait for the customer to respond. The customer may be busy with something else, so their cadence has slowed. ART takes this dynamic cadence between replies and responses into account and in addition to automatically prioritizing multiple simultaneous conversations, provides a visual queue for the agent to know how much time is left to respond based on the customer expectations. The settings in Quiq Messaging have been enhanced to even allow clients to control how much the customer’s pace should influence the agent’s response time.

4. Identifying inactive conversations – The beauty of messaging is that customers can step away and go about their lives while engaging in a conversation, unlike a phone call. Conversations, therefore, can take place quickly, or over an extended period of time. Quiq clients have the ability to mark conversations as inactive if the customer has not responded in a certain time period.

What is important to note is that these conversations aren’t closed or disconnected. They are simply set to “inactive”.Marking conversations as inactive allows customers to keep the conversation connected and going with the agent whenever they’re ready. Meanwhile, the agent can focus on other active conversations or accept new ones. Quiq clients can set a timer to determine when a conversation will automatically be marked inactive. An attentive agent will typically mark a conversation inactive before this timer expires.

5. Closing conversations – This timer begins when a conversation is marked inactive, either by an agent or by the system. This allows inactive conversations to be removed from agent lists and closed out. The conversation history is displayed for the agent for every given conversation, so no information is lost as a result of closing a conversation. As for the setting, setting this too low will result in a single interaction spanning multiple, separate conversations. A high setting will cause inactive conversations to accumulate in agents’ queues.

Determining Timeframes for SLAs

Every company is different, so every SLA policy will be different. Defining the values for all of the timers above will be determined by factors such the volume of inquiries from each channel, how many conversations each agent can handle, as well as customer’s expectations.  We’ve made it easy for companies to have access to a myriad of setting around SLA’s so that these values can change as business needs change.

Once you’ve determined initial SLA’s, you can easily monitor and report on the performance of your contact center and adjust as needed. Our real-time reporting dashboards will help you spot any trends, such as missed SLA goals at a company or agent level, which may be an indication that the SLA’s need to be re-evaluated or more training is needed.

SLA’s are really important tools, so it’s worth the investment to hone in on the values for each of the settings mentioned above. Timely responsiveness has always been a priority for our solution and for the company. When you’re ready to talk about implementing messaging and estabilishing SLA’s text us at 646-887-8398 or schedule a demo and we’ll get back to you asap.

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

Messaging: Making The Right Choice

You’ve been chartered to deploy messaging and web chat in your contact center. You already have a CRM vendor and are hesitant to add any more complexity. You wonder if it is just easier to turn on the messaging and capabilities that your CRM provider offers.

Here are the  3 considerations to help you decide which path to take.

Treat Customers Like People, Not Cases or Incidents

1. Messaging is the new, always-on channel, so think about it differently. The reason you are considering messaging is because it is convenient for customers and offers them a better experience. So don’t just turn the messaging tool on within your existing CRM suite until you understand what you may be giving up when you just flip the switch

CRM systems, like Salesforce.com and Zendesk, were built on “cases” and “tickets.” Since when do customers want to be treated like a case or a ticket?

The only way to deliver a customer-driven messaging experience is to choose a vendor that built it that way, from the ground up. Selecting an incumbent CRM vendor that has either purchased another company to get messaging functionality or tried to build messaging on top of a case/ticket-based system will only lead to frustration and failure.

cases and tickets stop and end, interrupted interactions that are one and done. Messaging conversations are continuous, persistent, connected ongoing dialog

Start the Transition from Contact Center to Digital Engagement Center

2. Do you remember when all the talk was about moving from a Call Center to a Contact Center? That simply meant that it wasn’t just about letting customers contact you via the phone. It meant adding and supporting other channels like email and chat to become a “contact center” in order to help customers reach a company on their terms. We are facing the same type of shift again.

Everyone knows we all have our mobile device practically sewn to our hands. Texting and messaging happens all day, every day, by each and every one of us. Ensuring your organization is prepared to handle all the digital engagement channels is critical. Today, the Contact Center manages phone calls, emails, and web chats in a synchronous fashion.

 Synchronous: Conversations where the customer and the company need to both be available at the same time - like a phone call or like most traditional web chats. Asynchronous: Conversations where the customer can communicate whenever they have time and the interaction is never closed down - like text messaging with friends.

A Digital Engagement Center takes the latest channels and manages them asynchronously. Customers never have to re-start and re-explain when they use messaging. The conversation becomes an ongoing dialog that never has to end.

How CRM & Messaging Fit Together

3. The decision to turn messaging and chat on within an existing CRM solution or to select a purpose-built solution is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. A Digital Engagement Platform can be the connective tissue between the phone channel and your CRM application.

Your organization already has the tools in place to manage phone calls and you already have a repository for customer interaction history. Now you need one place to turn for all your digital interactions that can span texting, web chats, and social.

Quiq offers the Digital Engagement Platform purpose-built for asynchronous, always-on communications. It is the single application that manages SMS/text messaging, web chats, and social conversations. It is incredibly straightforward to integrate Quiq with your existing CRM system. You can also add the option to your phone channel (IVR) for customers to “press 3” if they prefer to text. See how the Digital Engagement Platform really is the connective tissue between your existing contact center systems.

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

Digiday: Overstock’s customer service texts have a 98 percent open rate

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Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

 

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Impact: Best Practices for Getting Started with Conversational Marketing & Sales

Think Quiq!

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Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Learn more about Quiq today at goquiq.com.