Month: February 2019

Don’t deliver good customer service. Aim for the exceptional service that sets you apart from your competition. Customers demand convenience, speed, and ease when they need to engage with a company. When it comes to live chat, it’s critical to provide an experience that welcomes the customer to engage with your brand.

Live chat serves as your front line to the customer on your website. This messaging channel allows you to engage with your customers at their point of purchase for higher conversions. With live chat, customers can reach your brand at their convenience and receive the pre-sales support or post-sales service they need. This article gives you the 11 live chat best practices to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

11 Live Chat Best Practices to Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience

#1: Be Transparent With Your Availability

While larger brands may have a customer support team working 24/7, other businesses may have limited hours. If you’re one of the companies that limits the hours of support, make sure that you simply disable live chat when your team is unavailable or when your company is closed. Quiq’s chat feature allows you to remove the chat bubble on your site during non-supported hours.

If your chat function isn’t available 24/7 and you prefer to receive after hour messages, tell your customers that you’ve received their message and let them know when you will get back to them.

#2: Choose the Right Place For Your Chat Button

To ensure that your customers know you are easily reachable through chat, one of the best live chat best practices to implement is to place the chat button on the bottom right side of the screen. You should also make sure that the button isn’t too big. You don’t want it to be a distraction. You will, however, want to use a bright color, so your site visitors have a visual indicator that it’s there.

While you don’t want your chat to be a disruption to your customer’s experience on your site you don’t want them to stall for too long in their process searching for help. Sometimes, your customers may need an invitation to start a conversation with you. You can offer proactive chat based upon predetermined criteria such as time spent on a page, page view history or customer segment.

In addition, you should place the chat button on every page of your website, not just the home page. You never know when your customers may have a question or need your help.

#3: Collect Information Upfront

Make it easy for employees to provide a more personalized experience to your customers by collecting a little information upfront. Use a short web form to collect information. This information can be used to route incoming conversations to the best queue or employee. Not only that, this extra information will help your employees identify the customer and the nature of their inquiry immediately instead of having to spend valuable time asking for it. Knowing full name, account number, topic category, or order number will help your team know who they are talking to and allow them to get a jump on helping the customer faster.

#4: Personalize The Experience With Images And Emojis

Today’s connected consumers gravitate to modern chat platforms that allow them to send hi-res images, videos, gifs, and emojis. These are the elements that make live chat conversations more personal, expressive, and fun.

Quiq allows your team to share images, videos, gifs, and to enable approved emojis so that messaging conversations always stay on brand. Customers and agents can use all of these visual elements within chat conversations to provide better context and to more effectively resolve inquiries.

#5: Always Be Ready To Respond

Customers want answers fast and at their pace. That’s one of the reasons they’re avoiding the phone and having to be tied to it. With live chat, customers can send messages in at their pace, whether they do so in 3 minutes or 3 hours. Companies can set service level agreements (SLA’s) so that everyone understands what an acceptable response time is for customers when they do reach out.

Quiq helps employees meet those SLAs with our Adaptive Response Timer (ART). This feature not only provides visual cues to notify employees when a conversation needs attention but it also automatically prioritizes multiple conversations based on how slow or fast the customer is responding to messages. This is critical because chat agents tend to handle 5 or more conversations at one time. Staying on top of the right ones is easy with Quiq.

#6: Never Get Disconnected

Your customers are busy and at times, may need to step away from a chat conversation. Sometimes, it’s only for a few minutes while they check another tab on their desktop. At other times, it may be a lot longer. When customers don’t respond after a certain time limit, most chat platforms will “time out” of chat sessions requiring the customer to initiate a new chat session and start their entire process from the beginning.

Unlike many traditional chat tools, Quiq’s chat platform is asynchronous, which means conversations never end and never have to be restarted. This avoids customer frustration of having to restart a chat conversation and agent uncertainty when a customer goes dark. Customers can return to the chat conversation whenever it is convenient for them. This conversational continuity gives your agents and your customers peace of mind.

#7: Present The Chat Conversation History

Sure, some customers may only need to contact you once, but there are some who need to reach you on a more frequent basis. It’s important that a record is kept of all the past chat interactions you’ve had with a customer. This conversation history serves as an excellent reference point and helps agents or employees know what kind of issues the customer may have encountered previously and the guidance they were given.

Quiq presents the entire chat conversation history to the agent, along with the most recent inquiry. Let’s say a customer starts a conversation with one agent, walks away during the conversation and comes back while that first agent is on break, the newly assigned agent will have the same latest interaction, as well as past interaction history, presented.

#8: Provide A Seamless Experience

From time to time, one of your employees may not know how to answer a specific question from the customer. So, they will need to transfer the customer to another team member. When this happens, you need to guarantee that the customer doesn’t have to explain her question or problem all over again. The new team member should have access to the previous conversation and simply continue the conversation.

Quiq’s transfer and collaboration features allow employees to ask for help behind the scenes from peers or managers. Customers can be easily transferred to other team members with or without them even knowing. Anyone invited to help with the conversation can see the entire history of the conversation and any additional information available on the customer. These features create a seamless experience for your customers while optimizing efficiency.

#9: Provide a Seamless Human-Bot Experience

Bots have gained a lot of attention lately, and with good reason. Bots have become time-saving customer experience superheroes helping companies serve customers more efficiently. From greeting customers to helping troubleshoot issues to soliciting feedback, bots are being used in a myriad of ways.

Consider using a bot to automate some of your redundant live chat processes to reduce the time and money it would take for an employee to do the same thing. Simple and repetitive tasks, such as gathering an order number, updating an address, or even finding the right department to route the customer to, can all be done via bot.

Deliver a seamless experience where humans and bots co-exist peacefully within conversations. Quiq treats bots and agents both like first class citizens. Bots can welcome customers and gather additional information for routing or in order to have an order proactively pulled up on an agent’s desktop. Agents can transfer to a bot during an active conversation and the customer doesn’t even need to know. The bot can collect a few pieces of information and then return the conversation to the agent. During that time, the agent can be assisting other customers. Bots will help you reduce the time to serve your customers and delight your agents as well.

#10: Use Sentiment Analysis

Use sentiment analysis to understand how customer conversations are going. This is particularly important for companies that may have a large number of chat conversations to manage. Managers can see at a glance which conversations are going well and which may be at risk.

Quiq uses simple visual cues that identify if customers mood shifts during a conversation. Agents and managers can quickly see if a conversation needs extra attention or needs to be prioritized.

#11: Ask For Feedback At The End

Your customers’ feedback or opinion about how the live chat interaction went is definitely a best practice. You trained your team members to provide the best service they could but the ultimate test will be what your customers thought about their overall experience. This is a timely way to know that you’re on the right track, as well as a great way to continuously improve your live chat experience.

Live Chat Is Your Front Line

It wasn’t so long ago the only way customers could get in touch with a company was by picking up the phone and calling. Now, with live chat and messaging options, customers can simply click-to-chat with a representative who can provide the pre-sales support or post-sales service they need.

Being available to your customers at their “moment of need” is where businesses turn visitors to their website into customers who love their product and service and rave about their experience. Live chat may be one of the first interactions your customers have with anyone from your company. Make sure you leave a great first impression by implementing these 11 live chat best practices.

We’ve all been there. February 15th rolls around on the calendar and all of those great intentions for the new year begin to slowly fade into memories. This year will be different. This year hasto be different, especially if you’re one of the many business leaders who are determined to create a better experience for your customers in 2019.

Now, we’re not saying you should ignore those aspirations to organize your closets, meditate every day, or strive for more balance. Those things are really important too, but if you have plans to create a better customer experience (CX) in 2019, there is no better time to become laser-focused on this goal.

There is one sure-fire way to improve the customer experience that is actually fairly painless. Add the ability for your customers to have conversations with you via messaging – text messaging, rich messaging, and live chat. We are here to tell you that this is the latest holy grail in customer experience – save money by shifting phone calls to messaging, increase your customer satisfaction scores with the loved messaging channel, and close more business faster.

In this post, we’ve pulled together the most popular resources and advice to transform the way your customers can engage with your company.

Messaging conversations have grown over 450%

Over the past few years, we have been working really hard here at Quiq to make interactions between customers and companies just plain easier. We’ve seen first-hand, with clients like Brinks Home Security, Overstock, and Pier 1, the amazing impact of adopting technology that allows customers to have a more convenient and effortless experience with a brand.

Although we beat the effortless customer experience drum all year long, we’re putting a little extra weight on it in 2019. Why?

1. Because customers are demanding it. Did you know that top brands who added messaging channels to their business have seen customers naturally adopt and clamor to the channel? In our client base alone, the number of conversations our clients have had with their customers grew over 450% over 2017.
2. Not only are customers expecting the ability to message brands, but the introduction of Apple Business Chat and Google Rich Business Messaging has also put the biggest names behind the growth in the messaging channel.
3. There is no doubt that mobile usage and the desire to communicate with companies over mobile devices continues to increase.

Messaging is quickly becoming the standard method to communicate with companies and the companies who don’t adopt this channel will simply lose customers.

But, you don’t have to take our word for it. We’ve gathered advice from some authorities in the customer experience space to save you the time of hunting and gathering the information yourself. Let’s start with the general outlook for customer experience and then look at what the industry experts have to say about improving customer experience in 2019.

There’s going to be a dust-up over customer experience

According to Forrester, 2019 is a pivotal time for customer experience. Less than impressive gains in CX quality, coupled with rising customer expectations, will drive some significant watershed events this year.

• Stagnant CX quality levels will cause short, destructive price wars as some companies decide not to differentiate on CX and start a “race to the bottom” fueled by slashed prices.
• The need to present more sophisticated business plans to leadership will be critical for CX pros who want to maintain support for their CX transformations.
• Hot job markets may see more movement for CX pros who look for firms willing to invest in CX.

In order for companies to improve CX quality, Customer Experience leaders will have to put themselves in their customer’s shoes and understand them on a deeper level. According to Shep Hyken, customer service/CX expert, keynote speaker, and NYT bestselling author, one of the ways to do this is by making it easier to do business with your company. Providing customers with ways that are convenient for them to contact you such as webchat, social channels like Facebook and SMS/text messaging.

“A large portion of your customers want – and expect – a quick answer or resolution to a question or problem, and unlike an older generation (as in Baby Boomers), they don’t want to make a phone call to get it.”
~Shep Hyken

In Shep’s recent Forbes article, “Ten Customer Service/Customer Experience Predictions for 2019”, he predicts customers will continue to get smarter and compare companies against their competitors, as well as the best service they’ve ever received. He encourages customer experience leaders to identify who they personally enjoy doing business with and use that as a benchmark to bring their own organization to the same level.

What about Bots?

There were a few recurring themes that popped up while researching this article. One of the biggest themes woven into all of the trends and predictions for 2019 is the increased use of technology. With so many companies focused on creating a more customer-centric organization, it makes sense that leadership will look for ways to provide speed and efficiency with uncompromising attention to delivering a great customer’s experience.

Adopting technology, such as Quiq Messaging and our bot approach, enables companies to do just that. According to customer experience speaker, futurist, and author Blake Morgan, the increased use ofRobotic Process Automation or RPA(think chatbots) will allow humans more time to dedicate themselves to tasks such as innovation, problem-solving and giving customers the human interaction they crave.

“Most of those changes are driven by consumer demand. Customers crave personalized, frictionless experiences, and companies are sprinting to deliver them.”
~Blake Morgan

International market intelligence company,Aberdeen Group, recently surveyed top CX leaders to understand what technology they plan to adopt in 2019. The top 10 technologies include a few classic tools that have been utilized by customer service and experienced leaders for a long time such as live chat, knowledge management, and customer self-service tools. Although these tools have been around for some time, more than a quarter of the respondents stated that they plan to employ them in 2019.

Other tools such as artificial intelligence, real-time decision assist and guidance, and workflow automation come to the forefront. At Quiq, we’ve seen how the automation trend has developed over the years and created our platform to provide many of these features and providing tools to increase productivity.

Take the Quiq Bot API, for example, which allows clients to create their own custom bot to help augment interactions with human agents. Bots can be used to collect information to help inform the agent/customer interaction, determine the nature of the customer’s inquiry and route to the appropriate department or agent. Depending on the nature of the customer inquiry a bot can even handle a customer conversation from beginning to end.

We’ve also included workflow automation features, such as the ability to route conversations based on pre-set rules and our Adaptive Response Timer, which automatically prioritizes conversations based on how quick or slow customer’s responds to agents. These features greatly improve the overall customer experience by increasing the speed companies can respond to customer needs.

A look ahead at 2019

Synthesizing all of the information above, we can see there are three really strong forces that are acting on the customer experience in 2019:

1. The market demands more convenient, frictionless interactions that rival the best customer experiences they’ve received.
2. Companies are searching for ways to deliver those experiences as a way to differentiate themselves in hyper-competitive markets.
3. Technology, such as Quiq Messaging, provide the tools that increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction and reduce service costs. These outcomes add up to a very compelling business case that can immediately impact a company’s bottom line.

We predict that more companies will join the likes of Brinks Home Security, Pier 1, Tailored Brands, Overstock.com, and Tile to provide their customers with the convenience of the messaging channel. If you’re ready to join other high-performing CX brands, request a demo.

Author:

Marciela Ross

Marciela is the Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Quiqwhere she gets to use her love of writing to share how messaging is changing the face of customer service. When she’s not writing, Marciela spends time with family, crafting and looking at dog photos on Pinterest.

Love is a pretty strong word. For those who think that it might be too strong of a word to describe the way consumers feel about text messaging, take a look at these stats:

• Over 6 billion text messages are sent in the U.S. each day.
• 90% of text messages are read in 3 minutes or less
• Texts have an astounding 96% open rate
• Texting is the most widely-used feature on a smartphone – even more than making calls

Considering these stats, maybe obsession is a better word.

Regardless of what you call it, the attachment to texting is real. But it’s not just customers who love texting. Companies, from retail to credit unions to consumer services, and everything in between, have increased engagement, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction by using business to customer text messaging.

Effortless, Connected, and Proactive Customer Experiences

Messaging enables companies to deliver exceptional customer support by providing what has become fundamental tenets of customer-centric companies:

• Effortless
• Connected
• Proactive

We feel so strongly about messaging and how it can transform customer experiences, we wanted to dive into those three points a little deeper. We’ve pulled together a list of 23 reasons everyone, and we mean everyone, from customers to agents to company leadership, loves business to customer texting.

Some customer service leaders may be hesitant to disrupt the status quo. We wanted to make it clear that there’s already a disruption underway. If you’ve been looking for a reason to implement messaging for your customers or a reason to disrupt the status quo, here are 23 of them.

23 Reasons Everyone Loves Customer Texting

1. 1. Just Human EnoughIt’s not that your customers hate human interaction, it’s just that they’d rather interact with their family and friends instead of waiting on hold to talk to one of your customer service representatives. Messaging delivers interactions that are just human enough. Customers know that there is someone on the other end who cannot only sympathize with their situation but serve as their advocate.
   2. On-demand
      Customers expect to get the support they need, however, and whenever they want it. It can be frustrating for customers to have to work around your business hours. Messaging provides customers an outlet to engage with a company on their terms.
   3. Asynchronous
      We get it — sometimes customers have to step away from the computer in the middle of a chat session. That’s why our chat platform is asynchronous, meaning conversations can be picked up at a later time, right where they left off. There’s no need to restart the conversation — just keep it going!
   4. Convenient
      Waiting on hold to talk to customer support is no one’s favorite pastime. Cut out the holding music and let your customers get in touch through their preferred messaging channel. Customer texting doesn’t require a huge time investment or just the right conditions. The asynchronous nature of text messaging allows the customer to send a text message while they go about their day. Your customer can be on a noisy train, in a room full of people, or just on the go and too busy to make a call.
   5. Intuitive for Agents
      Nearly everyone, including your agents, uses text messaging on a daily basis. That includes your agents. That makes training agents for text support a breeze — often taking less than a day.
   6. Natural for Customers
      There’s no need for customers to download an app or follow any complex instructions. All they do is shoot you a text. In fact, your customers are probably trying to text you already. When Quiq clients get started with business text messaging, they are usually surprised to find that their customers are already trying to message them on their 1-800 number.
   7. Easy
      Finding the right number to call for help, taking a break from your day to call customer support, waiting on hold, and navigating a confusing IVR presents hurdles for your customers. Messaging removes those hurdles by making it easy for your customers to contact you.
   8. Succinct
      People who use customer texting are conditioned to be succinct and to the point. Agents don’t necessarily have to sacrifice the personable, “get-to-know-you” messages with customers but those conversations won’t go too long on messaging.
   9. Fun
      Emoji’s and gifs are a fun way to interact with customers. Agents can set a more casual tone to a conversation with these fun features. Rich text messaging can even allow exciting augmented reality experiences.
   10. Fast
       Quiq clients have discovered that many of the conversations received on messaging are relatively quick questions, like order status. These conversations can usually be resolved in just a couple of short exchanges and take a lot less time than making a phone call.

More Benefits of Texting for Customer Service

1. 11. Affordable
       Via text, customer service agents can handle multiple conversations at a time — often up to 8. Add in the convenience of AI-powered chatbots, and you have a customer support system that is affordable, efficient, and easy to implement.
   12. Accessible
       We may not all check Facebook regularly or use web chat when it’s available, but everyone has their mobile phone for the majority of the day and will consistently check SMS messages.
   13. Flexible
       Messaging provides multiple ways to share information. PDFs, links, videos, and images can be easily exchanged within a conversation.
   14. Enhanced Interactions
       The rich media offered from Apple Business Chat and Google Rich Business Messaging extends the interaction to include rich cards and list pickers that help customers choose open appointment times or browse a catalog. They can even complete transactions via Apple Pay or Google Pay.
   15. Interactive
       Customer texting provides a way for customers to interact with your company. There’s a natural back and forth, just like a phone call. Messaging gives your customers a way to converse and interact in a way that an FAQ page cannot.
   16. Discreet
       There’s just some information that people are more prudent about discussing, especially when they are in a public place. Instead of sharing their home address or phone number with a company while waiting in line, where anyone can overhear, messaging allows private information to stay private.
   17. Responsive
       In today’s always-on world, you’re either instantaneous or you’re out. Your customers can get a response from a chatbot immediately after they send you a text, and they can then be routed to an appropriate agent if necessary. Quiq messaging helps agents prioritize conversations based on how fast the customer expects a reply.
   18. Unobtrusive
       Making a phone call means a customer has to take time out of their day, to do business on your terms. Customer texting is an easy, convenient, and unobtrusive way to engage with a company where the customer is in control of the conversation.
   19. Efficient
       Agents who use Quiq Messaging have powerful tools that increase efficiency at their fingertips. Tools like pre-written snippets can help agents avoid retyping the same answers to frequently asked questions. This feature really helps customers by ensuring they receive consistent, up-to-date responses.
   20. Effective
       The nature of customer texting requires messages that are brief and clearly expressed. When customers need a quick reply on a simple question, messaging helps the customer and agents get to resolution fast.
   21. Personal
       Quiq clients and the customers they serve have told us that they love the outbound message feature available in the Quiq Messaging platform. Clients who use Quiq messaging are able to send targeted and personal messages that are more relevant to their customers, like appointment confirmation and order status.
   22. Easy to reference
       Customers are able to reference previous messages sent and received by simply scrolling through their conversation history. Agents have the same advantage of having conversation history so there’s no need to ask customers to repeat themselves. Also, a transcript of the conversation is available after the interaction has ended that agents can send via email.
   23. Insightful
       Managers who use Quiq messaging love the insight available to them from the reporting dashboard. Data on customer wait time, the amount of customers in the queue, and information on agent activity helps managers make more informed decisions for their contact center.

Customer Texting: The Way Forward

As you can see, customer texting is rife with benefits to businesses of all kinds. When you’re ready to explore the potential of texting for customer service, click the button below to see it in action!

Customer success is vital to your product or service achieving the desired goals you or your company has set. Customer success is the methodology you take to ensure that your customer’s needs are met in a manner that aligns customer, vendor, and company goals. If you are implementing your customer success correctly then you will see your pipeline activity increase and your customer metrics improve. So, the question is, how can you be sure your customer success initiatives are performing? The way you can be absolutely sure how well your company is performing and what areas are performing well is by tracking the correct metrics, gathering them, and then analyzing them. You cannot properly gather, organize, or analyze your data if you do not know which metrics to look for. That is why we wrote this article.

This article looks at which metrics are most important to track the health and vitality of your customer success initiatives. Customer success key performance indicators (KPIs) will not only speak to the health of your customer success strategy, but they will also speak to the health of your relationship with your customers.

Background

Traditionally, the disciplines that were used to measure customer success KPIs were customer service and customer support. Customer service and support have been previously been labeled as ‘cost drivers’ but now, due to advances in customer success technology, service and support are seen as potential sources of revenue generation. The shift in perspective on customer service and support is also due to the paradigm shift in the customer journey. Previously, customers have only had interactions with businesses at certain points in the funnel, but now businesses are finding it extremely valuable to interact with every stage of the customer journey.

This increased focus on the granular aspects of the customer journey has led to an increased focus on the metrics associated with customer perceived value; this is a technical way of saying businesses are now more focused on their customers and their customers’ desired outcome. Companies are making customer pain-points a higher priority than ever before, pouring company assets, time, and capital into strategies and solutions that look to address the concerns of their clients. All of this effort, focus, and investment requires an awareness of the measurements that indicate success or failure. Leaders want to know if their customer success efforts are working. In order to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns, they are analyzing key performance metrics associated with customer success.

Top 5 Customer Success KPIs

Identifying key performance indicators (KPI) for your customer success programs will allow you to track, measure, and properly analyze your customer success initiatives. Being able to properly assess your customer success campaigns is vital to ensuring their effectiveness. So, let’s jump right in.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is the metric that indicates how likely customers would be to recommend your product or service to their friends and family. A good net promoter score means that your customers are more likely to promote your brand via word-of-mouth. You generally want a score that is in the 50 or higher, with 75 being a great score (keep in mind that no company scores 100).

While there are many different ways to gather this information, the most popular way is through a survey of customers. The survey is comprised of one question. Yep, you guessed it: “How likely would you be to recommend this product or service to your friends and family?” The respondents would be asked to rate their willingness on a scale of 0 to 100, the NPS is then calculated by taking your “promoters” (those who give higher scores) and subtracting your “detractors” (those who give lower scores).

Net promoter score is important because it indicates the health of your pipeline and your brand. Just as it is cheaper to retain employees, it is also cheaper to retain customers. Your NPS is THE metric for showing how well you are treating your customers and how likely they are to promote your product or service.

2. Upselling and Cross-Selling Rate

These metrics speak to the number of sales you have made through an alternate offer. Amazon attributes over 35%of its revenue from upselling, and JetBlue used its upselling program to generate an additional $190M. Shoot for a 1-2 percent additional increase in revenuethrough upselling and cross-selling. Upselling your customers is a great way to generate more revenue, but it cannot be accomplished effectively without your customers feeling valued. Customers want to be in a relationship with companies who will meet their needs, both from a product or service fulfillment standpoint and a customer success standpoint. A customer’s willingness to pay for additional or alternative products is very indicative of how well you are doing in the customer success department.

3. Revenue Per Customer (RPC)

This straightforward, but important metric looks at the average revenue a customer brings the business over a certain period of time. In order to calculate this important data, we need to gather the total amount of revenue generated in our period of interest and divide it by the total number of customers in the same time period. Knowing your RPC is a great way to benchmark your revenue objectives and analyze your strategy. Facebookand Apple both use this metric as key portions of its investor reports, these giants both know the importance of knowing your revenue per customer metrics. Customer success initiatives can be judged on the amount of revenue per customer; whether it increases or not is a great indicator of how your customer success program is actually impacting your bottom line.

4. Rate of Returning Visitors (RVR)

RVR is a very meaningful metric for retail, travel, gaming, consumer services, or other consumer-oriented B2C industries. The rate of returning visitors calculates the number of returning visitors to your site. In order to calculate RVR, look at the number of repeat visitors to your site and divide that number by unique visitors. This metric can provide additional insight into your customer success strategies, especially as they relate to your content and user experience. Customers that like the onsite experience and can easily navigate to resources will return again and again. If your RVR is low, you may want to consider options to increase the overall experience of your site.

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

There is perhaps no other metric more important for customer service accountability than customer effort score. CES refers to the amount of work a customer had to go through in order to accomplish a certain task, like return an item, upgrade their subscription, or any other task that can be accomplished on the client side of your business model. This metric is measured through surveys, where customers are asked “How much effort did you have to put in to make a purchase?” The answers are then scored on a scale of 1 to 7, or 1 to 5, with one being low effort and higher scores indicating higher effort. CES is a great way of examining any barriers or pain points in the customer journey. Once pain points have been identified by CES, it is up to you and your team to fix them.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, there are many different metrics that can be tracked and analyzed in order to gain a more granular perspective on different aspects of your customer success strategy and execution. The above KPIs should be viewed as a foundational starting point for gauging the health of your customer success program and for a way to gain insights into areas of your business that can be augmented with additional customer success solutions. If you should want more information on how to gain an even deeper, more impactful look at your customer success programs, you can reach us here.

In today’s climate, customer service is an essential part of any business. With so many  choices and resources at a buyer’s fingertips, companies must continue to invest in their customer service infrastructure in order to get ahead of the competition. That’s where digital customer service comes in. If you’re asking, “what is digital customer service?” then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will define digital customer service, provide some examples, and discuss ways you can improve your own customer service across the digital channels your customers care about. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Definition

The most basic definition of digital customer service is the practice of meeting customers’ needs across digital channels and platforms. Customer service can take place across multiple digital channels, such as live chat, SMS/text, or Apple Business Chat. The popularity of direct messaging with brands on social channels like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Twitter have also opened up new ways for consumers to engage with companies.

The channels that are best for your business will depend on your customer’s preferences. For some businesses, offering live chat on the company’s website may be the best way to serve your customer, while others may find consumers reaching out to them on social media. The biggest benefit of digital customer service is deflecting phone calls to lower cost digital channels. Reducing customer wait times and automating part or all of a conversation resulting in higher agent productivity are huge benefits that Quiq’s clients have realized in addition to higher customer satisfaction scores

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at a few examples of digital customer service channels and dig a little deeper into the benefits they provide.

Digital Customer Service Channels

Business Text Messaging

One of the most popular channels for digital customer service is business text messaging. SMS text messaging has grown exponentially in terms of popularity and use due to the fact that 66% of consumers prefer text messages over calls.

Consumers use their cell phones for everything from banking to shopping. Business text messaging gives customers resolution in 25% less time than a phone call or an email. From an operational standpoint, messaging is a real boost to agent productivity, With asynchronous messaging, agents can handle multiple simultaneous conversations.

This is accomplished largely through the automation of routine tasks that were once handled with expensive manual labor. Make sure you are automating every routine task in your customer service pipeline. This will free up labor hours to work for you in another, more profitable area. When digital customer service is done right, it saves you and your customer both time and money.

The ability to engage with a brand over social media has become a foregone conclusion for most consumers. It shouldn’t come as a shock that people expect to see the brands they trust on these apps since they spend so much time interacting with others. For example, Facebook Messenger has over 1.3 billion monthly users and Twitter has 145 million daily users

It’s also not a shock that companies have responded by meeting their customers where they already are.There are 60 million active business pages on Facebook and 92% of companies tweet more than once a day. That’s a lot of activity and companies have seized the opportunity to engage with their consumers.

Live Chat

Using your website as a portal for customer service issues is a great way to make use of the digital infrastructure you already have in place. You can efficiently meet customers’ needs by being exactly where they expect you to be, waiting to talk with them about their needs or concerns. While this feature used to be a high-priced upgrade, it is now considered an essential part of a web presence by 44% of online consumers.

If a customer is browsing your site and has a question, it is much easier for them to click on a chat bubble than to call your contact center With messaging you can offer customer service without having to interrupt their  experienceAs with SMS or social chat, customer service agents can handle multiple conversations.

Now that we’ve looked at a few examples of digital customer service, let’s talk about what you can do to improve customer service channels. Since everyone’s business, market conditions, goals, and budget are different, the best way to approach the improvement of your digital customer service channels is to ask yourself a few questions:

Are you accessible…enough?

When you look across the channels that are available to your customers do you see lengthy queues or spikes in abandonment rates in any channel or during certain times of the day? These are definitely signs that your customers aren’t reaching you on their terms. There may be others you should keep an eye out for but Quiq clients have found long wait times and abandonment rates are the tell tale signs that they aren’t being accessible enough.

Many of Quiq’s clients have implemented messaging to reduce wait times and help customers after normal business hours. Messaging, along with features like routing rules, suggested replies, and bots have helped Quiq’s clients manage conversations with the efficiency their customers  need.

Do you know what options are available to you?

Have you done your research on the latest digital channels? Offering SMS/Text, live chat, and social media channels are the basic channels that your customers expect. Are you familiar with verified SMS, Apple Business Chat, and Google’s Business Messages?

These messaging channels are some of the latest developments that help brands present customers with trusted, secure channels to get pre-sales support or post sales service. For example, Apple Business Chat and Google’s Business Messages are rich communication services (RCS) that can expedite appointment scheduling and shopping. These messaging channels even enables customers to complete transactions without ever leaving their conversation.

Are you keeping it simple?

By encouraging you to keep things simple, we’re not advocating for you to rely on traditional channels like email and phone calls. Quite the opposite actually. We’ve seen companies simplify engagement by adding digital channels. Adding digital channels or implementing more advanced features like chat bots are not as complex as you may think and makes initiating and managing conversations simple for both your agents and your customers.

Quiq’s messaging platform has an intuitive agent desktop that makes it easy for agents to manage multiple, simultaneous conversations across all of our supported channels. Your customers get the freedom to choose their preferred channel to engage with your company while agents have the technology they need to deliver great service.

Final Thoughts

As you begin to investigate your digital customer service strategies and methodologies, remember that the fundamentals of customer service have not changed. People still want to be treated fairly, with respect, and in a professional manner — they just want to get that treatment when and where they want it. As you look to vendors to help you accomplish your customer service goals, look for those can provide all of the things your customers are looking for in a manner that is seamless, fast, and integrated.

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Today’s purchaser has evolved to a savvy, well-researched shopper who is quite comfortable online. With the prevalence of personalized options and experiences across the wide range e-commerce sites, your buyers are not only used to a personalized experience — they expect it. Therefore, it stands to reason that your website must be able to live up to the expectations of your customers. That means you need to offer up a seamless customer service experience that is both customer-centric and intuitive. You must create a customer service infrastructure that can take into every channel because you never know which channel your sales will come from.

This means developing an omni-channel customer service experience that you can count on. That’s why we made this list of 10 omni-channel customer service best practices. Use these best practices to increase the performance of your customer service platforms and continue to meet the expectations of your customers.

10 Omni-channel Customer Service Best Practices

1. Make the Digital Experience More Appealing

Shoppers today expect their experience on your website to be just as appealing, if not more appealing, than their experience in-store. That means your website needs to be simple, easy to navigate, and overall pleasant to look at. It has also has to be able to handle a wide array of support capabilities that the customer cannot see. In order to pull this off, you really need to understand who your target customers are and then create product descriptions and visualizations that appeal to your target customer’s point of view. Among other things, you will also need to enhance your onsite navigation with features like site search and an automated chat feature that assist your visitors in real-time. Providing a great user experience will alleviate many customer service pain points, freeing up time, resources, and energy that can be directed at more complex issues.

2. Provide a Self-Service Section

Another way to augment your customer service strategy is to let your customers find the information they need, without using your customer service agents. Empowering your customers is a great way to save time and resources, while also serving the customers needs. Set up a self-service section that your customers can access. This area will include a multitude of digital assets that your customers can reference including product images, PDFs, white papers, operator manuals, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and answers, instructional videos, or anything that is specific to your business you feel would be a great resource for your customers.

3. Share Information Across Departments

One of the hallmarks of a great customer service program is the ability to enable your sales team to perform better. The best way to create an organization where the customer service department is an asset to the sales department is by installing a framework that allows for the timely transfer of information across departments. Customer service portals, agents and chat windows, are filled with customer insights that you or your sales team can use to better plan and message your value proposition to potential customers. All of that purchase history, search terms, and website analytics needs to be shared across departments so that it can support the omni-channel experience.

4. Have a Responsive Web Design

This is a fundamental and extremely critical aspect of customer service. Responsive design allows your customers to access your website in any format, whether it be a tablet, cell phone, or desktop computer. Mobile usage surpassed desktop usage over 2 years ago and shoppers are researching and making purchases on their phones more than ever.

Allowing for responsive design will not only make it easier for customers to get in contact with you, as well as allow customers to do whatever they need to on their mobile device. This is more convenient for your customers and will result in a great experience that keeps them returning.

5. Know Your Buyer

Just like your product or service catalog is set up with messaging that is directed at your target buyer, so too must your customer service strategy be positioned in a way that speaks to your target buyer. Millennials are now the largest generation in the US workforce and are handy with every type of digital resource. Not only that, the new generations have the power of customer reviews at their fingertips. Before the dawn of review sites, businesses were solely in control of their brand image. In the modern market, new buyers have the power of social media and review networks.
Millennials have high expectations. They demand great mobile experiences and expect to be able to access the information they need whenever they want. If their expectations are not met, they will let the world know about it. This should underline the importance of providing a stellar omni-channel customer service experience that speaks directly to these influencers.

6. Centralize Internal Information

This best practice goes hand-in-hand with number 3 (share information across departments). No matter what business model you operate under, maintaining and organizing every single source of information related to your business in a single location allows customer service employees to know where they can find the “truth” their customers are after. No matter which channel your customers choose to reach you through, your customer service representatives will be able to access the central hub of information for any of the resources they need to resolve the issue. A centralized hub for your internal information will ensure the consistency of the answers and information that is being put out to customers, whether from a person, automated chatbot, or another messaging system.

7. Create a Highly Adaptive Environment

The nature of the modern technological environment all but guarantees that there will be advances in technology, shifts in customer perception, and market factors that demand flexibility. When you are designing your customer service infrastructure, make sure that you create it in a way that allows for additional adaptability and flexibility. If you make your structure to rigid, you will find it difficult to adapt to future trends, technology, or market conditions. Make sure you use technology that is easy to implement and can be configured easily to ensure a smooth transition into the future.

8. Facilitate a Real-Time Environment

Customers are trying to get their problems solved quickly. In fact, per CCW Digital’s recent customer experience study, 70% of customers demand resolutions on the first contact. Making your customer service an omni-channel environment that supports real-time conversations is, without a doubt, one of the best features you can incorporate.

When a customer wants help, its imperative you interact and solve their issues before they find another company who will. With technology like text messaging, web chat, and social messaging, you can have your customer service agents solving your customers’ problems as soon as you become aware of them, increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in the process.

9. Prepare for the Next Generation

Preparing for the next wave of customers is paramount to your business’ future success. A streamlined self-service capability is a great way to do just that. Setting up your customer service strategy to let customers handle any account specific issues like updating permissions, address changes, and other administrative duties themselves is a great way to ensure that the next generation can solve their problems quickly and easily.

10. Use a Data-Driven Approach

Off all the best practices, this is perhaps the hardest yet most valuable best practice you can implement. Think about it from a strategic perspective for a second: data should be influencing your decisions across the wide spectrum of your business. Data is what supports your decision to market towards a certain customer segment, its what directs your attention to growth opportunities — it should be no different for your customer service strategy. Allowing data to guide your approach means that you prioritize the gathering, storing, and analysis of data. Throughout your customer service platform channels, make sure you that you are using the appropriate solutions. Are you using the right solution? You are if it meets customer needs AND provides quantitative feedback.

How do you know if your customers are abandoning the customer service pipeline if you are not tracking the abandonment rate? That is challenge businesses face: how do we collect data from multiple channels and organize it in a manner that we can act on? The first step is to make sure your solutions are able to provide you the data you need to take actionable steps on reporting metrics.

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