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How To Add Digital Customer Service

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Don’t have a digital customer service strategy? There are no more excuses.

Today’s consumers exist primarily online, and they expect convenient and streamlined digital engagement from brands. With customer expectations increasing almost daily, companies are rapidly introducing digital channels to replace or co-exist with traditional channels like phone and email.

Now is the time to add or improve your digital customer service. Here’s how to add digital customer service to your existing channels:

  • Identify your common questions.
  • Implement the right channels.
  • Simplify your online engagement.
  • Promote your new digital channels.
  • Monitor and analyze conversations.

We’ll take a look at each step, but let’s define digital customer service first.

What is digital customer service?

Digital customer service is the act of providing customer service and support across online channels.

For most consumers, that means messaging—whether in-app, via text messaging, web chat, or social media.

Why use digital customer service?

There’s a lot more to digital customer service than answering a few direct messages on Instagram. In order to improve the digital customer experience, you need a well-rounded strategy that focuses on driving value.

Gartner identified top digital customer service trends in 2022. Here are three to keep in mind as you build out your strategy:

  • Delivering value over simply resolving issues: Digital customer service isn’t merely duplicating a call center. Yes, you’re there to solve customer problems, but you’re also acting as a sales rep for the brand. Validating purchases, offering product suggestions, and upselling/cross-selling should fall into your digital customer service strategy.
  • Privacy-led personalization: While personalization is still important to serving customers online, privacy is also a big concern. This means you should only collect information that’s absolutely necessary and always be completely transparent about what data you collect and how you use it.
  • Service in third-party channels: Brand-owned channels like websites and apps are still a popular option, but customers want to connect with you no matter where you are. Consider an omnichannel solution that brings the entire customer experience to the customer in the platforms they prefer.

6 reasons digital customer service is critical.

Post-pandemic, the question is no longer why use digital customer service—it’s how. Digital customer service is critical to a well-rounded customer experience. Here are 5 reasons you can’t ignore it.

1. You’re building relationships.

Your customers want experiences that are smooth, convenient, and hassle-free, regardless of whether it happens face-to-face or online. Since 230.5 million Americans shopped online in 2021—and the number is growing every year—the digital customer experience is more important than ever.

With the number of options available to consumers in nearly every industry, building relationships is vital to success.

2. It differentiates your business.

Mobile devices have put the power of apps, machine learning, automation, and rich messaging into the hands of pretty much every consumer. Tech-savvy customers are fully aware of what technology can do for them, and they expect to get what they want exactly when they want it.

Putting your digital customer experience first enables your organization to take advantage of this expectation.

We see the proof in our own customers. Companies like Tailored Brands are experiencing success doing just that.

“Retail is a highly competitive space, so we strive to set ourselves apart based on the service we provide our customers, whether online or in-store,” said Melissa Porter, VP of Customer Relations. “Adding text messaging from Quiq has allowed us to differentiate even more.”

3. You’ll upgrade your brand perception.

Customers want fast and easy interactions with brands, but they also want those experiences to be personal. In fact, Accenture found that 91% of customers are more likely to purchase from companies that recognize them by name, remember their purchase history, and provide personalized offers and product recommendations.

The right digital customer service strategy can help you get there. Quiq Messaging enables you to easily integrate messaging into your existing systems or customize the user interface to include data from your internal operations systems.

Your employees have visibility into the customer data that makes interactions personalized, including customer info, order history, and past conversations.

4. You can practice proactive outreach.

Your contact center agents aren’t limited to waiting by the phone or refreshing their email inbox to resolve issues. Digital customer service strategy can now include proactive outreach.

Sending notifications letting customers know that a product in their order is out of stock or that a flight has been delayed is the norm.

By being proactive, you can identify issues and resolve them before they become problems, which reduces the number of tickets you receive

5. It’ll boost efficiency and lower costs.

One-to-one phone calls with your human agents can reach capacity quickly. That’s why so many companies have diversified their engagement channels to provide more convenient options to their customers and cut down costs.

Digital channels not only improve the digital customer experience by providing effortless support and service but also reduces overall costs. Leveraging digital channels to scale service efforts saves on hiring new agents to handle increased volume and the 24/7 service needs from constantly connected consumers. On digital channels, agents can respond to multiple conversations at one time. That’s just not possible on a phone call.

6. You’ll increase revenue opportunities.

The pandemic created drastic consumer behavior shifts toward digital purchasing, and providing digital customer service goes hand in hand with increasing sales.

Even though retail has reopened, many consumers still plan on continuing the digital trends.

An Accenture survey revealed some key insights:

Consumers who increased usage during the pandemic.
Consumers who plan on continuing the trend.
In-app ordering
54% 84%
Social media sales
44% 80%
Curbside pickup
42% 78%
Livechat/chatbot/voice assistance
46% 77%
Shopping on the company website
36% 77%

All of these habits are revenue-generating and rely heavily on digital customer service to drive sales.

How to deploy digital customer service.

There’s a huge difference between offering multiple online channels and offering a seamless digital customer experience. Customers want instantaneous, convenient, and easy engagement—exactly how you should design your customer service experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the steps to add digital customer service to your existing channels.

1. Identify common questions.

The first step in your digital customer experience journey should be to take a look at the most common reasons your customers are contacting your contact center. Most of our clients can quickly identify a handful of the most common questions.

Some inquiries will be obvious like:

  • Where’s my order/when will I receive my order?
  • What is my login?
  • What is my account balance?
  • How do I change my reservation?
  • How do I make a return?

Start by creating digital self-service options. You can start with a simple FAQ page or dig a little deeper and build a chatbot to answer common customer questions and relieve the burden on your call center.

For example, outdoor apparel company Stio mails out 1.2 million catalogs a year. Before they expanded into digital customer service with business messaging, customers had to call customer service to remove themselves from the mailing list.

The company implemented messaging with a bot, enabling their customers to unsubscribe with just a few clicks. No human agent interaction needed. The company saw an immediate 9% decrease in phone calls and saved 83 agent hours in just the first two weeks of implementation.

2. Choose the channels your customers already use.

Once you have a good grasp of your customers and their needs, identify which channels you want to start with. Many of our clients tackle the highest volume channels first, which (surprisingly) often starts with the call center itself.

Think about streamlining the customer experience by getting the answers before they need them and getting them to the right person to solve their problems.

Here are the top 4 things our clients have done to integrate digital customer service:

  1. Integrate messaging into your IVR to give customers the option to immediately abandon a phone call to start chatting with an agent.
  2. Take a look at your desktop vs. mobile traffic. If you see a substantial portion of your traffic visiting your mobile page, it indicates that customers are willing to engage with you via SMS/text messaging. If it is still fairly high on desktop, that may indicate that you should deploy web chat.
  3. Don’t ignore your website traffic. Implement live chat on your website so that website visitors get the same benefits from messaging as your mobile customers do.
  4. Make sure you register with Google Business Messages and Apple Messages for Business so that customers can find and engage with you through search and maps on their mobile devices.

Give customers the freedom to choose their preferred channels depending on their specific problems. You’re also adding more bandwidth to your contact center by encouraging messaging over phone calls.

3. Improve digital customer experience.

Reaching out to engage with your brand should be simple and quick, as customers want their issues solved fast. Make it easy for customers to engage with the right department or agent that can resolve their inquiry most efficiently.

Here are a few things you can do to make it easier for your customer:

  1. Collect information from your customers by asking short questions that allow the customer to respond with a simple tap instead of typing in a response
  2. Implement a bot to collect information and apply rules to route the conversation.
  3. Make conversations sticky. If a customer spoke to a certain agent in a previous conversation, route the customer to that same agent or make sure the conversation history is easy to access for anyone that speaks to the customer.

Quiq makes it easy to set rules to route conversations to specific agents, departments, or queues based on set criteria.

4. Promote your new digital channels.

Let people know once your digital channels are available. Promote your new digital channels across your existing marketing channels:

  • Add a message to your IVR informing callers that web chat or text is available, even if you haven’t integrated messaging with your IVR.
  • Put a message on your website homepage and a “text us” call to action button at the bottom of your mobile site.
  • Make sure that messaging is prominent in the contact us section of your website.
  • Advertise it in your newsletters and social posts.
  • Add a message to the signature of all your contact center agents responding to emails reminding customers that alternate channels are available.

5. Monitor and analyze engagement.

Use analytics to monitor, analyze, and address areas within your digital customer experience that may need work along the way. For example, you can review closed and active conversations in real-time to determine if integration with your CRM or other business intelligence platform will help agents find critical information easier.

You’ll also want to evaluate agent performance on key metrics. Quiq’s messaging platform allows you to monitor the performance of human agents, as well as bots, so you always have a pulse on which types of inquiries may be stumping your team.

We’ve also made it easy to import and export data to and from our software, so you have the data you need, wherever you need it. Our out-of-the-box reports enable you to have an immediate view of your contact center’s performance, or you can combine the data in your BI tool for a broader understanding of your contact center.

Deliver the digital experience your customers want.

From start to finish, your customer experience must deliver. From the moment a consumer becomes aware of your brand to the point they become a customer, your digital customer experience will be a part of it all.

Your customers are trying to reach you on all digital channels—even if you’re not there yet. We’re ready to help you transform your contact center.

What Is Conversational Commerce?

Posted on Max Fortis

By now you may have heard the term conversational commerce. Aside from some catchy alliteration that, honestly, just makes it fun to say, you may not know much about it why everyone’s talking about it. Let’s clear things up a bit.

Example of conversational commerce on a smartphoneConversational commerce refers to the transactions that take place through digital conversations consumers have with brands on messaging apps like web chat, Apple Messages for Business, text messaging, and even Facebook Messenger.

The interactions that take place are powered primarily by chatbots that process consumer messages and offer relevant responses. Conversational commerce takes on many forms and can take place across a multitude of channels.

Here are a few examples of conversational commerce in real life:

  • Consumers shopping and completing transactions within a messaging conversation
  • Brands helping consumers shop by find a store location or online promotions and deals
  • Customer experience agents Interacting with a customer to reschedule an appointment or a delivery

These are just a few ways messaging has greased the commerce wheel, making it easier and faster for business to get done. In this article we’ll take a close look at conversational commerce and what companies need to do to fully leverage its benefits.

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How Does Conversation Commerce Work?

Consider the smartphone — you know, the thing that is essentially glued to everyone’s hands now-a-days — and reflect on how much searching, browsing, buying, and texting takes place on any given device on any given day. Even before it was egged on by mandates, Online purchase being made on a smartphone using Apple Paywhen our normal was just normal, consumers leaned on the ease, convenience, and speed that shopping from their smartphone offered.

As the world still works through “new normal” restrictions on physical locations, we’ve seen a surge in use as more consumers have looked to online shopping, delivery, and curbside pickup to get through their days. According to comScore consumers spend 85% of their smartphone time using only 5 apps, which tend to be either social media, messenger or other media apps. It makes sense that businesses would marry the power of messaging with consumers preferences.

He predicted these real-time conversations would facilitate more convenient online sales. Mr. Messina has yet to comment on where he picked up that incredibly accurate crystal ball of his, but looks like he was pretty spot on. Now, let’s talk about how your company can benefit from an investment in conversational commerce.

Why Invest In Conversational Commerce

Consumer expectations of speed and convenience have birthed new innovations that are opening up a seamless communication between brands and customers. Gone are the days where customers were satisfied with dialing an 800 number or having to write an email to get help.

Whether it’s a chatbot on Messenger, someone managing direct messages on Twitter, or taking orders via text message, consumers will choose brands that go that extra mile to make their experience personalized and efficient. Needless to say, businesses are investing to make that happen.

Consider these statistics by Gartner:

  • At least 60% of companies will use artificial intelligence to support digital commerce.
  • 30% of digital commerce revenue growth will be attributable to artificial intelligence technologies, such as those that power conversational commerce.
  • 5% of all digital commerce transactions will come from a bot, such as those that power conversational commerce.

All of the major trends in commerce over the past couple of decades have been in moving to where customers are. Rather than forcing customers to come to you, you go to where they are. The next generation of that is conversational commerce.

Create A More Natural Brand-Consumer Relationship With Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce, much like regular conversations, are meant to build relationships. Conversational commerce is an opportunity to move beyond email blasts, promotional posts on social media, and other communication methods that provide just one-way communication. SMS and other messaging apps enable you to keep your customers informed with updates, and allows them to respond on the same message thread. A real-time exchange of information? Now that’s a conversation.

Creating engaging experiences on these channels are better and easier if your agents have a single view of your customers. Quiq makes it easy for companies to manage conversations with an intuitive agent desktop and native integrations with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Shopify, and Oracle Service Cloud.

Quiq is architected with an “API First” strategy which means we seek to work in harmony with your existing systems. With Quiq’s integration frameworks you can customize our UI to include data from your internal operations systems or synchronize conversation data into your reporting, customer and other backend systems.

Get Started with Conversational Commerce

Getting started with conversational commerce isn’t complicated. Start with one new channel that customers visit every day such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Better still, start with text messaging, a universally accepted way to engage with consumers.

If you’re ready to put conversational commerce to work so that your business can thrive schedule some time to speak with one of our conversation experts today.

How to Use Conversational Commerce To Change Your Business

Posted on J.R. Rettenmeyer

From increasing conversion rates to receiving more on-time payments, the results from brands that have embraced conversational commerce speak for themselves. Conversational commerce can help brands resolve inquiries and satisfy customers.

Conversational commerce means using messaging and bots to enable two-way conversations with your customers. You won’t  just tell your customers things like “Hey, we’ve got a promotion on these products today.” You can have a conversation in real-time about ways you can help them shop, find what they need, and complete transactions..

Conversational commerce enables you to listen and learn from your customers while building a solid relationship. That relationship means everything to your business.

Here’s a few of the biggest benefits conversational commerce can bring to your business:

  • Increased sales  
  • Broader reach and engagement
  • Higher customer satisfaction 

In this article, we take a look at how conversational commerce can change your business. We review the solutions that help businesses enable conversational commerce for sales and customer service and the simple steps you can take today to get started.

As a quick refresher, we defined conversational commerce in a previous post as the transactions that take place through digital conversations consumers have with brands. These conversations take place on messaging apps like web chat, Apple Messages for Business, text messaging, and even Facebook Messenger.

Conversational commerce is all about answering customers’ questions and concerns when and where they prefer. Your customers are given hands-on, personalized support, across the digital channels they prefer like SMS/text, live chat, and social media platforms.

Consider how differently the conversational commerce experience is with technology’s help:

  • With proactive chat on your website, chatbots or human agents can intervene at critical moments, like when a visitor toggles back and forth between two product options or hesitates at checkout to help them make a decision
  • Rich Communication Services (RCS) like Apple Messages for Business and Google’s Business Messages enables agents to present products in carousels, schedule appointments, and collect payment, all within the messaging conversation.

The possibilities are limitless. Small and large brands alike are using conversational commerce to reach customers, boost sales, and interact in a personal way with consumers. But where do you start?

Conversational commerce is all about answering customers' questions and concerns

Where Do You Start With Conversational Commerce?

The answer for this question is the same as others where there is no hard, fast, or linear answer — it depends. Where you start depends on a few key things:

  • Your business goals and any identified opportunities for improvement
  • How your customers currently contact you
  • Pain points within your customer’s experience that you want to address

Let’s say you own retail stores that sell outdoor apparel. In-store sales have dropped dramatically so your company has decided to have a summer sale that is heavily promoted across your website. You’ve also decided to test Facebook ads to reach new customers. A lot of retailers probably can relate to this scenario and understand how important the sale is for year-end results. Every transaction counts.

Now, let’s say you’ve kicked off that sale and are getting inundated with calls. Customers are having trouble with the promo code at checkout. While some may stop and call, others may decide to just abandon their cart never to return again. Since you kicked off Facebook ads, you’re also seeing a huge spike in conversations in Messenger about the promo code and other product questions as well.

This is where conversation commerce changes the outcome. With messaging, customers are able to easily reach you either on your website, text, or Facebook Messenger while shopping or while they are trying to checkout. By bringing all interactions together in one platform your business saves time and your customers receive a faster, more fluid experience.

Quiq has helped many large retail clients overcome situations just like this by implementing messaging. Because Quiq supports messaging across SMS/text, web chat, social, Apple Messages for Business, and Google’s Business Messages, companies have the option to start with one or all of the channels.

How Do You Scale Conversational Commerce?

Now. you may be thinking, “That’s all well and good but I still need agents on the other side of the conversation.” Ah, yes but no one said they all had to be human agents. Remember when we mentioned chatbots before?

The beauty of conversational commerce is the ability to automate conversations using chatbots. Custom AI chatbots allow brands to scale while still offering a personalized experience.

In our retail scenario above, a chatbot could greet the customer, ask questions to understand the customer’s intent or issue, and then present information to guide the customer along. For example, after collecting some information, the chatbot learns that the customer needs help with a purchase, specifically, they need to know where they can enter the promo code.

The chatbot can inform the customer that they’ll have the opportunity to enter the promo code after they enter their credit card number and confirm their purchase. The chatbot can also share a screenshot of the screen with the exact field where the promo code can be entered. If the customer is still having trouble, the bot can seamlessly introduce a human agent into the conversation for further assistance if needed.

Quiq clients have seen call volumes drop by 20% as customers switch from phone calls to messaging. At the same time, customer service agents are able to handle 6 – 8 concurrent conversations. This boost in agent productivity translates directly to the bottom line and to customer satisfaction scores.

Elevate The Online Purchasing Experience With Conversational Commerce

Now is not the time to get sweaty palms about a digital-centric approach to your commerce business. Now is the time to use conversational commerce to change your business for the better.

Conversational commerce isn’t just an easier, more useful way for consumers to shop.  It’s also a way for brands to continue growing eCommerce revenue.

Ready to support your customers quickly, boost conversions, reduce sales and support costs, and increase customer satisfaction? Contact one of our conversation experts to discuss the future of conversational commerce in your business.

Why Use Google’s Business Messages

Posted on Max Fortis

The lion’s share of any and all research starts simply – with a search on Google. According to Hubspot, Google has 92.42% of the search engine market share worldwide. That translates to approximately 72% of all desktops and 92% of the mobile search engine market share with the United States leading in number of users.

All of this is to say that at some point, it’s basically guaranteed your customers will find you in a Google search or Google Map result. The only problem…those searches often result in a flood of calls because Google pushes your phone number front and center, essentially encouraging consumers to call you.

Most companies are looking for ways to decrease expensive phone calls while still delivering fast, easy, and convenient help. Fortunately, Google created a messaging channel that combines the visibility of search with the efficiency of asynchronous communication with Google’s Business Messages.

With Google’s Business Messages, your company can make it easy for consumers to reach you with text messaging instead of a phone call. In this post, you’ll learn the benefits of using Google’s Business Messages and why you should get started with this channel today.

A Refresh On Google’s Business Messages

Let’s do a quick refresh of what is Google’s Business Messages and why there’s so much buzz about it. According to Google, “Google’s Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that combines entry points on Google Maps, Search, and brand websites to create rich, asynchronous messaging experiences.”

If you want a little more background, check out this short video. Here you’ll get the breakdown of Google’s suite of business communication products. If you’re already pretty comfortable with Business Messages, let’s dive in.

Your Business Needs Google’s Business Messages

Business Messages does more than elevate a conversation for the consumer. Although, that is pretty valuable in and of itself. The main benefit of Google’s Business Messages is that it can drastically reduce the number of calls your live agents receive so they can focus on higher priority interactions.

Without Business Messages enabled, the click-to-call button that is presented in search results encourages consumers to call your business. With Business Messages enabled consumers can click the “Message” button to have their conversation through text.

A lot of companies are taking advantage of consumers’ preference to message and are implementing digital agents, or chatbots as their first line of defense to handle common customer support issues. For more complex customer journeys, the message can be routed to a live agent.

Businesses can take advantage of the discovery and reach of Google Maps and Search, while providing a more direct way to have meaningful conversations with consumers. Here are a few ways Business Messages makes conversations more personal:

  • Building consumer trust by showing expected wait times and answers to frequently asked questions,
  • Enhancing customer care with the ability to connect with a live agent and driving loyalty,
  • Purchasing, scheduling, and upselling through rich features like carousels, suggested replies, and photos.

With Google’s Business Messages you can leverage the power of the world’s largest search engine as an entry point for your customer service. With Quiq, your agents can efficiently manage these digital messaging conversations within our intelligent, intuitive platform.

In addition to being a super easy to use messaging feature, businesses can work with Quiq to implement bots and automate frequently asked questions. So far, we’ve seen that brands are excited about Business Messages because of the resulting high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, a decrease in call volume, and how quickly customer inquiries can be resolved on messaging.

At the surface, Business Messages may sound like another messaging channel. It’s more than that. Take a second to think about the definition and what it provides to consumers: to

  • A way for companies and consumers to have convenient and personalized 2-way conversations. Conversations take place on the customer’s preferred channel and mobile device.
  • A rich messaging experience that provides consumers with modern messaging features. Typing indicators, the ability to share gifs and videos take the conversation to a new level.
  • An easy way for consumers to start conversations with companies. It takes a quick tap on Google Search and Map results on Android mobile devices.

Research shows that 75% of consumers prefer to engage with a company in a seamless, convenient way and Business Messages delivers. Here’s a short video that explains more about Google’s Business Messaging:

Business Messages enables you to engage with your customer at their time of need  on their terms, on their preferred channel, and using their preferred device.

How To Get Started With Google’s Business Messages

As a partner, Quiq makes getting started with Google’s Business Messages easy. First, we’ll work with you during the registration process. You’ll be asked to fill out a short questionnaire that we’ll use to get you registered. Next, our team will walk you through implementation and deployment. Finally, we’ll work with you to ensure that messaging is optimized across all of your channels.

Since Quiq’s messaging platform supports Google, Facebook, live chat and more, we’ll be able to bring all of your digital channels together into one agent desktop. Working with Quiq means working with a team experienced in implementing messaging and bots across all of our supported channels and automating workflows for your entire organization. What’s more, you’ll have the 24/7 support of the Quiq team if you ever run into any hurdles with Business Messages.

Why wait? We’ve helped companies get started with messaging and bots in as little as 24 hours.  Schedule some time to talk to one of our conversation experts today.

The Cyborg Contact Center

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Augmenting Your Human Workforce with Bots

No, this article isn’t about The Governator or Tony Stark taking over your contact center. It’s about augmenting your human workforce with bots and giving them some superpowers of their own.

Bots have become commonplace in recent years thanks to platforms like DialogFlow. They’ve been deployed across numerous messaging channels as well as voice. They have become increasingly conversational – using natural language to collect data and trigger workflows. With all of these advances, it might seem as though we’re living in the golden age of chatbots. So what’s missing?

The biggest omission is that many bot services result in bots that are only aware of the messages they’re exchanging with customers. They neglect the presence of human agents, and possibly other bots, participating within the same environment.

It makes sense that we ended up here. So much of the recent progress has been focused on increasing the intelligence and capabilities of bots such that they can single-handedly address more types of interactions without human involvement. Indeed, many businesses wish to put a bot in place on their website with no possibility of escalating to a live agent. By this point, many of us have interacted with such a bot with a need that surpassed the bot’s capabilities.

The Right Way To Combine Bots and Human Agents

The best approach is to combine bots and human agents. The bots can handle the common and repetitive customer intents, which will keep wait times down. Meanwhile, the human agents can help with infrequent or difficult conversations and keep the customer base happy. It’s a win-win for the business and its customers. But what is necessary to create such an environment? We count the top 5 foundational principles of an automated contact center:

1. Shared Customer Session

The right way to combine bots and human agents involves shared customer sessionsThe first foundational requirement is a shared customer session. This means that all of the messages exchanged between the customer and a combination of human agents and bots are stored on the same conversation record. The same must be true of any structured data that is gathered or extracted from the exchanged messages. We’ve all been through the painful process of providing our personal info over a telephony system, getting transferred, and then being forced to provide the same information again.

This same problem is prevalent in chatbots and is no less annoying. Many bot services make it possible to receive the session data such that you can inject it into another platform, but this requires custom coding and can result in a disjointed customer experience. Ideally the session data will be tracked and transferred seamlessly and automatically by the system.

2. Escalation & Transfer as First Order Concepts

In order for bots and humans to cooperate, they must be able to pass conversations between them. This can be accomplished by direct transfer (e.g. a human agent transferring directly to a specific bot) or through escalation (e.g. a bot routes the conversation to a human agent queue based on the intent).

The concepts of escalation and transfer shouldn’t be arcane things that require custom coding. They should be first-order concepts that are visible in a workflow designer and thus configurable by administrators. Put another way, the ability to move conversations around between segments of your workforce (including bots) should be fully commoditized.

3. Open-Ended Workflows

The most obvious bot-enabled workflow is to have all conversations start with a bot, which will dutifully deflect as many inquiries as possible from live agents and escalate as necessary based on intent. However, there are many other useful workflows.

A human agent should be able to transfer to a bot mid-conversation (e.g. to help with a repetitive task) and know that the bot will send the conversation right back to them once the task is complete. Bots should also be able to conclude conversations by doing things like administering in-channel surveys. The bottom line is that, by virtue of commoditized escalation and transfer, you should be able to inject bots whenever the time is right.

4. Bot Awareness of the Contact Center & Workforce

In the spirit of bots being a cooperative part of a contact center, they should be able to see and make decisions based on information about the contact center and workforce. What sort of data might they inspect?

  • Business hours & holiday schedule
  • Human agent staffing (how many available agents)
  • Estimated wait times and depth of various queues

By making decisions on such data, the bot can do the following:

  • Take away the ability to escalate to live agents if queues are too deep
  • Limit the supported conversational intents based on the staffing of skill-based live agent queues
  • Provide the appropriate guidance and options after-hours or during holidays

The preceding capabilities should be readily accessible in the bot design experience because these types of requirements can change frequently.

5. Bot-to-Bot Cooperation

The last foundational element has been hinted at several times already. When you think about augmenting your contact center, you should consider not just one, but potentially multiple, bots with specific purposes. While “one bot to rule them all” may sound tempting, by utilizing multiple bots you can keep your bots simpler, more manageable, and independently updateable.

This is very useful if your business consists of multiple departments that need to administer their bot flows independently. Of course, the bots should be able to transfer to one another easily and all data should be shared in order to provide the best customer experience.

Robots spelling out the word TEAM

By now it’s hopefully clear that the ideal bot deployment will consist of bots that are an integral part of your contact center, not something bolted onto your existing operations. At Quiq, we designed our bot framework with this goal in mind from the outset.

The aforementioned foundational principles are all commoditized and available to visual designers. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us. We believe Quiq can truly give your contact center superhuman powers.

kyle facebook messages customer support using Quiq Author: Kyle McIntyre

How To Use Messaging And Bots To Increase Customer Referrals

Posted on Max Fortis

Referrals have always had their place in marketing. It’s just that now, your customers have more reach and influence than ever before. Not only can they tell their closest friends about your product or service, but they can post Google reviews, share a social post, or use any number of methods to amplify their voice.

Nielson showed us that consumers believe recommendations from their friends and family over all forms of advertising. An impressive 92% of consumers who responded to their study agreed. We all have seen the power of word-of-mouth marketing grow.

Reaching out to your customers manually, at just the right time, to encourage or request a referral is possible. It’s just that it’s time-consuming and expensive. That’s why so many companies have turned to business messaging to increase customer referrals.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the nitty-gritty details of how to use business messaging to increase customer referrals. We’ll also give you a great example of how one of our leading clients puts messaging and bots to work in their organization to boost their customer referrals.

Why Referred Customers Are So Valuable

Aside from being a really effective form of marketing and making your business look awesome, referrals contribute directly to your bottom line. Here are 3 reasons why you need to make sure you have a healthy mix of referred customers in your pipeline:

1. Referred customers have a lower acquisition cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the price you pay to obtain a new customer. That number includes your total Sales and Marketing. With other methods, you pay for each click and impression that lead up to converting that customer. 

Your CAC is significantly decreased when you recruit your current customers to do the sales and marketing for you. How much it decreases depends on the success of your referral program, if you offer incentives, and if you are manually doing outreach to your customers.

2. Referred customers are more loyal

In an era where consumers have so many readily available choices at their fingertips, it’s not a surprise that brand loyalty has dwindled. It’s more important than ever to reduce your customer churn.

The Journal of Marketing reports that referred customers are 18% more loyal than non-referred customers. When your customers refer you to their family, friends, or extended network, you receive the benefit of the trust and credibility they’ve built up among their community. It’s also likely that referred customers will have a stronger sense of commitment and attachment to your company because someone they know, like, and trust has matched them to your brand.

Customers that refer you also have a higher likelihood of having a long-term relationship with your company. This is why the intention to refer a company is frequently used as an indicator of loyalty to that brand.

3. Referred customers are more profitable

So far, we’ve determined that referred customers are less costly to acquire and have a higher likelihood to be more loyal. But that’s not all. There are also other ways they are generally more profitable for a business. Referred customers are also more likely to refer others to your business. Rinse and repeat #1 and #2.

In addition to that, your referring customer will likely have a deeper relationship with your product or service. That may mean a higher frequency of using your service or a history of exploring more features. These customers are a lot more advanced than a novice customer. 

Consistent positive experiences with different products means that these customers are likely to spend more over their entire life time as your customer. Think of it like this. If you’re a clothing brand and your customer loves the new pants they bought from you, it’ll be a lot easier to sell them the shirt and the jacket.

Why You Should Automate Your Customer Referral Program

business messaging to increase customer referrals can be automated with chatbotsWith these incredible benefits, you’d think every company would have a referral marketing campaign. The honest truth is that asking your customers at the right time to leave a review isn’t always as easy as it seems. And you will have to ask. 

According to a marketing survey conducted by Texas Tech, 83% of satisfied customers are willing to refer products and services. But, only 29% actually do. Implementing and managing customer referrals can be difficult to present at the right time if you have to do it manually.

A lot of companies out there know how painful it is to effectively execute a referral program where agents are making outbound calls to request a referral from their customers. Brinks Home Security has been able to automate their referral program using messaging and bots.

In a previous post, we examined how Brinks used messaging and bots to increase their customer retention. Now, let’s take a look at how the company was able to take their customer referral process to the next level with messaging and bots.

The Quiq bot that Brinks created combines their survey platform with their email service provider. The Quiq bot brings those two customer data streams together to invite new referrals to the Brinks family. 

Brink Bots customer referral bot for customer engagement

Once a current customer submits a survey indicating that they are a happy customer, the Quiq bot will ask for email addresses of anyone they think would enjoy Brinks service as well. The Quiq bot will pass those email addresses to Brinks Email Service Provider. 

Prospects are then informed that they were referred and invited to take a look at Brinks products and services. If the prospect signs up, then the Quiq bot will match the newly signed customer with the customer who referred them and send both customers free product options.

All of this is done with no human intervention. The process is streamlined and infinitely repeatable with none of the intense labor and expense of outbound calling.

Don’t Wait To Use Business Messaging To Increase Customer Referrals

It’s great when your customers eagerly act as advocates for your business on their own accord. That may happen now and again, but if you want to grow your business, retain the customers you already have, and reach your revenue goals, you’ll have to be more proactive with your referral program.

Implementing messaging and bots to automate your customer referral program will save time, money, and make the process easier for your company. More importantly, an automated process like the one Brinks uses makes it easier for your customers.

If you’d like to learn more about using bots in your current workflows visit our bot webpage or take a look at one of our bot webinar replays.

Quiq Earns 3 Capterra “Best” Badges

Posted on Lauren Winder

Provider of digital engagement solutions, Quiq is excited to announce we have earned three new badges from Capterra, one of the top software review sites in the world. Quiq was recognized within the Cloud Communication Platform category with “Best Ease of Use” and “Best Value” badges. The company was also recognized in the Conversational AI Platform category with the “Best Ease of Use” badge.

The Best badges aid in software research to help buyers make more informed decisions. Best badges are based on reviews spanning the Gartner Digital Markets network. The badges synthesize reviews to recognize the most highly-rated products in a given software category.

Why Quiq Has Been Recognized As The Best

Quiq’s recognition by Capterra in these categories originate from the company’s mission to help brands present their customers with consistently jaw-dropping customer experiences across business messaging, web chat, and with bots, the most popular channels that consumers care about. In order to help our clients deliver a great customer experience and realize significant productivity improvements, we focus on implementation and proven best practices.

Here’s what you can expect from working with Quiq:

  • A focus on your objectives to ensure success right from the start
  • A smooth implementation of Quiq as either a stand-alone product or as an integration into your existing systems.
  • An intuitive design that’s requires almost no training
  • Unlimited users so that everyone in your organization can use messaging
  • A seamless integration of automation such as routing rules and chatbots across all of Quiq’s digital channels
  • Robust reporting so that you can measure and manage the things that matter most
  • A responsive team that is eager to help you over hurdles and guide you with best practices

How To Use Reviews In Your Software Purchase

Finding the right software can be tough. With so many choices and differences in features, it helps to get recommendations from other buyers. Reviews help throughout the purchase process. Read our customer reviews on Capterra to understand why top brands chose to work with Quiq and why they continue to be delighted with their decision.

Quiq’s team of conversation experts are ready to help you make an informed decision and choose the best software for your contact center. Schedule some time to discuss your current and future business needs today.

About Capterra’s Best Badges

The Best badge recipients are determined by the subjective opinions of individual end-user customers based on their own experiences, the number and timing of published reviews on Gartner’s digital sites (Capterra.com, SoftwareAdvice.com, and GetApp.com) and review ratings for a given product in the category, and are not intended in any way to represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Gartner’s GetApp Names Quiq A Category Leader In Live Chat

Posted on Lauren Winder

2020 Category Leader for Live Chat

Quiq is pleased to announce that it was named a 2020 Category Leader for Live Chat by GetApp. Category Leaders are designed to help businesses evaluate which software products may be right for them.

Category Leaders are published on GetApp, a highly respected recommendation engine that companies rely on to make the right software choice. Category Leaders rank based on ratings submitted by verified users in five key areas:

  1. Ease of use
  2. Value for money
  3. Functionality
  4. Customer support and
  5. Likelihood to recommend

Quiq was named a category leader for Live Chat Software. Quiq scored an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 based on 34 reviews.

“From the Admin side: excellent customer service, ease of implementation, and timeliness of requested actions. From the User side: extremely intuitive for agents, high customer satisfaction, and efficiency. Overall, Quiq is a forward-thinking platform that really understands customers’ needs both internally and externally.”
– Kim E. Apparel & Fashion 

GetApp is a software review site that enables businesses to discover, compare, and choose the right business applications, ranging from live chat software to cloud-based messaging software. Software buyers can access customer reviews and product features to find the right software for their business.

Quiq is proud to receive this recognition which was based, in part, on the positive customer reviews received. If you’re exploring live chat options for your business, schedule some time to speak with one of our conversation experts.

 

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Chatbots vs Sales Reps: Which is More Effective?

Posted on Max Fortis

Automation and artificial intelligence are on the rise and many companies are finding ways to implement these new technologies to use to their advantage. Service isn’t the only department benefiting from the use of chatbots, marketing and sales have also been using them to gain an edge. With the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, companies can more effectively lead customers through the sales funnel.

What is the impact for sales reps? As we’ll discuss in-depth in this article, chatbots and sales reps each excel in different situations and prove the benefits and effectiveness of working as a team.

What Can a Chatbot Do?

Chatbots are a mix of automation and artificial intelligence. They answer user queries through chat interfaces like text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and web chat on a business’ website. Chatbots are able to provide fast answers to common questions, and they’re proactive so customers can get help before they hit a snag. As bots continue to learn, they’re ability to preempt customer inquiries and offer more and more helpful solutions will only grow.  

Chatbots are sometimes confused with live chats, but there’s a difference. In a live chat, there’s usually an actual person on the other end, while talking with a chatbot is essentially chatting with a robot.

Advantages of Using Chatbots

Using chatbots will offer your company many unique benefits that can help improve your business. For example, chatbots automatically capture and qualify leads on your website. If a consumer is looking for more product details or wants to inquire about pricing, a bot can capture their information and route to the appropriate agent queue. People are more apt to engage with chatbots when they know they can find what they are looking for more easily. Consumers are looking for fast answers and chatbots help them get on their way. 

Chatbots are also designed to reduce administrative tasks so agents can spend more time answering the tough questions or giving extra special care to customers or prospects.

Disadvantages of Using Chatbots

One major disadvantage of using chatbots is that at first, they typically can only provide limited responses. Conversation rules determine what messages are sent in response and those can only be built over time. Although, it doesn’t take long before they are able to have much greater depth in contextual conversation.  

While chatbots are gaining in artificial intelligence, today, they still have to be maintained and improved upon. It is important to not let your chatbot go stale to keep up with changes in the business and continue to improve customer engagements and enhance the experience.

Benefits of Using Sales Reps

Sales reps are essential to the process of bringing users further into the sales funnel and providing them with answers to higher-level questions about your company and its products and services. Context and emotional intelligence are crucial to meaningful conversations that will turn into sales, and the ability to emote and understand emotions is unique to your sales reps.

Each sales rep also brings their own unique personality to the exchange, which helps them form a personal connection with users that today is more difficult to achieve from a chatbot.

Disadvantages of Using Sales Reps

A significant disadvantage of using only sales reps is there are lots of engagements with customers that can be easily automated to help them more quickly. Administrative tasks take away time that could be spent having one-on-one interactions with customers to generate more sales.

How Can Both Be Used Collaboratively?

When it comes to a chatbot vs. a conversational agent, each has unique strengths that address the other’s weaknesses. When they’re used together, chatbots and sales reps can create an exceptional user experience that maximizes performance and increases sales.

Using Quiq’s chatbot feature will allow your call center to improve efficiency and reach optimal service rep effectiveness. For more information about our chatbot, contact us today to see a demo.

Gartner’s Software Advice Names Quiq A FrontRunner for Live Chat

Posted on Lauren Winder

Quiq is proud to announce that it has been named a FrontRunner for Live Chat by Software Advice. To earn an esteemed “FrontRunners” badge, a product must receive top user ratings and achieve high scores in functionality, ease of use, value for money, likelihood to recommend, and customer support.

The FrontRunners quadrant, powered by Gartner Methodology, provides a data-driven assessment of products in a particular software category. Published user reviews, public data sources, and data from technology vendors are used to determine which products offer the best in usability and customer satisfaction. Only products that earn top user ratings make the cut as FrontRunners.

Software Advice chart for FrontRunners of live chat

Why Quiq Ranks High For Usability

The usability score is evenly weighted on two fronts: functionality, and ease of use. Quiq strives to make customer engagement between consumers and businesses easy and convenient, so usability is always a top priority.

Here are a few ways for companies to realize immediate value with Quiq’s live chat:

  • Easy setup – We set our customers up for success right from the start by making implementation fast and friction-free.
  • Pre-built integrations – We built seamless Salesforce, Oracle Service Cloud, Zendesk, Kustomer integrations, as well as promote an “API First” strategy, allowing Quiq to work in harmony with your existing systems.
  • Intuitive design – The agent desktop is straightforward and easy to use, which makes training employees a “non-issue”.
  • Informative dashboard – Managers have full visibility to reports and dashboards to display important agent, queue, and performance metrics.

There are plenty more features that make Quiq’s live chat solution a highly functional, easy solution for live chat. Learn more by heading over to our Quiq web chat page.

“Easy install process, great customer service from the Quiq staff,”

– Rachell M. Higher Education

Why Quiq Ranks High For Customer Satisfaction

The Customer Satisfaction score uses ratings on value for money, likelihood to recommend, and customer support. As a customer-centric organization, our entire team is dedicated to providing value to our clients throughout our partnership..

Our commitment to customer service means that we’re monitoring and responding to customer needs 24/7. With Quiq, you have a team of Account Representatives, Customer Success Managers, and Developers committed to your success.

Quiq is dedicated to giving our clients the most effective, easy-to-use tools for delivering jaw-dropping customer experiences. The acknowledgment from Software Advice is proof that the entire Quiq team is passionate about helping the company achieve that goal.

“Quiq is very receptive to feature requests and they work with you to make sure that you and your team are satisfied!”

– Heather M. Consumer Goods

See a Demo Today

The Difference between Google RCS Business Messaging and Google’s Business Messages

Posted on Max Fortis

If you’re still wondering “What’s the difference between Google RCS and Business Messages?”, you’re not alone. You’ve probably heard a lot about the benefits such as the ability to send and receive longer messages, attach files, and send hi-res images. While there are similarities between the two, let’s dig into the differences.

The biggest difference between Google RCS Business Messaging and Google’s Business Messages is that “RCS” is actually a protocol adopted by the major telecommunication carriers and device manufacturers. It sets the standard of what rich messaging is. On the other hand, Google’s Business Messages is a mobile conversation channel that uses the RCS standard.

There are a few more nuances to examine. To understand the differences further, we’ll have to get into the details on each. Let’s dive in.

What is RCS Business Messaging

The standard for sending text messages began with SMS (Short Message Services) in the 90’s with 160 character limits sent over mobile networks. MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service introduced images and videos to messages, but SMS is still the most prevalent method. Rich Communication Services (RCS) is the next evolution of messaging.

Google RCS Business Messaging uses the RCS standard. RCS Business Messaging is Google’s managed platform that allows businesses to send rich messages between their business and a consumer’s phone. Brands can communicate with consumers through Messages, Google’s native messaging app, while using the range of rich media and Rich Conversations capabilities available with RCS.

Brands and consumers get a better messaging experience because of it. Take a look at just a few of the features consumers and brand enjoy:

Consumers:

  • Trusted branding like logos and sender verification so that they can be sure they are talking to a representative from the respective brand
  • Suggested replies, which are a set of short responses that consumers can use to reply to questions, help expedite conversations and guide consumers through choices

Brands:

  • The ability to send outbound messages for promotional campaigns, proactive notifications, or to pass transaction details like shipping alerts
  • Brands can integrate business systems such as a CRM or marketing automation to share notifications of real-time business actions with consumers on Google RCS Business Messaging

With Google’s RCS Business Messaging, brands engage with consumers through Messages, Google’s native messaging app, using rich media and the rich conversations capabilities available with RCS. This is really important to remember. Currently only Android users that are using Android Messages for their messaging application will experience RCS Business Messages.

Currently only Android users that are using Android Messages for their messaging application will experience RCS Business Messages.

Currently, access to the RCS Business Messaging program is only available through Google partners like Quiq. Our team would be happy to walk you through the registration process.

What is Google’s Business Messages

Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that combines entry points on Google Maps, Search, and brand websites to create rich, asynchronous messaging experiences that delight customers and drive business results such as lower call volume, higher customer satisfaction, and increased conversion rates.

Consumers reach out to companies that use Google’s Business Messages for help via text instead of calling a phone number. Because of this, Business Messages is a great way to drive call deflection. Business Messages can tie into search results in multiple locations as shown in the screenshots:.

  • Answer Card results – These results are one of Google’s featured snippets that are typically displayed in a box at the top of Google’s results page above the organic results, but below ads. The screenshot below shows the answer card results for the consumers search for “Neiman Marcus customer service”.
  • Site Link results – These are the links that are shown below some of Google’s search results and are meant to help users navigate your site. The middle screenshot below displays results with sitelinks helping consumers find other areas of the Neiman Marcus site they may find interesting..
  • Place Card results – These location based results provide more comprehensive information about a place in search results such as its complete address, phone number, user rating and reviews. The third screenshot shots Place Card results for Men’s Warehouse.

With this channel your business registers as an “Agent”. This is a separate registration than the RCS Business Messages registration.  When a consumer messages your business, you are not given access to their phone number, you are given a unique identifier for the user and their display name used on their Android device. Because of this Business Messages has the following advantages:

  • Because consumers are not messaging you from their phone number, there are no carriers and messaging app restrictions. Virtually all Android users can use this technology.
  • Messages are encrypted.
  • ALL messages, images and rich messages, are branded and verified, creating a high trust channel

It’s also important to remember that these messages won’t live in the Messages app like RCS Business Messages. These messages persist  in Google Maps for Place Card results and within the Android device’s notifications area for Answer Card and Sitelinks results.

A Side By Side Comparison Of Google RCS And Google’s Business Messages

Both RCS Business Messages and Google’s Business Messages  provide consumers and brands with an elevated experience. Whether your focus is driving “unforgettable” conversations or simply providing quick transactions, these branded, media-rich messaging experiences can help you get there.

Still a little confused? Here’s a chart comparing the two side by side. As you can see, both have their advantages and limitations. The good news is that companies don’t have to choose between one or the other.  One of our conversation experts can help you decide which program works best for you or if you should apply for both depending on your unique business needs.

As a Google program partner, Quiq can help you get started with either or both programs. We handle the registration process for you. Once we get started, you’ll work with the Quiq Customer Success team to optimize messaging for your organization.

Quiq’s messaging platform supports Google, Facebook, live chat and more. Our platform brings all of your digital channels together into one intuitive agent desktop. Quiq has worked with companies from large enterprises to mid-sized companies to implement messaging across all of our supported channels and automating workflows for your entire organization.

Ready to leverage the power of Google to help your business grow? Schedule a call with one of our conversation experts today.

What is Google’s Business Messages

Posted on Max Fortis

google my business messaging

When consumers have questions, they turn to Google for answers. When consumers want quick and convenient conversations, they turn to messaging. So, what if I told you there was a way to combine the power of Google’s search with the convenience of messaging to make it super easy for your customers to find and engage with you?

Learn More About the End of Google Business Messages

Well there is. Google’s Business Messages provides brands a comprehensive messaging solution across Android devices through Google search and Maps.

DEFINITION: Google’s Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that combines entry points on Google Maps, Search, and brand websites to create rich, asynchronous messaging experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at Google’s Business Messages and all of the great features that make this channel a must have for every company.

How Your Customers Will Use Google Business Messages

Google Search and Google Maps are two features that your current and potential customers use on their phones all the time. Consider these following stats:

  • 35% of product searches start on Google. (eMarketer), and
  • 34% of “near me” searches done via desktop and tablets result in store visits. (HubSpot)

With Google’s Business Messages, customers can click the “Message” button presented within the search results to start a conversation with your company.

If you’re curious about what the experience will be like for your customers, you can try out Business Messages for yourself. If you have an Android device, you’ll want to make sure you have RCS enabled on your phone. Once you do, do a Google search for “Quiq Bozeman”. You’ll find the “Message” button in the overview section. Click and start a conversation with us.

The conversation will start with a greeting from our Quiq HQ Bot. Feel free to ask a question or send an emoji. You should expect one of our conversation experts to be with you quiq-ly.

Features of Google’s Business Messages

Business Messages isn’t just for brands that want to be discovered. Here’s an example of a well known brand using Business Messages to deliver a better experience for their customer.

Luxury department store Neiman Marcus is a juggernaut in retail and customer experience circles. The retailer worked with Quiq to implement Business Messages and elevate their customer’s shopping experience.

When Neiman’s organic search result is shown, “Message with a live agent” is presented at the bottom along with the company’s typical response time. When clicked, customers are then taken to their messaging app to continue the conversation. But that’s not the end of the story, in fact, it’s where the benefits begin.

Within the messaging conversation, consumers are able to shop, ask questions, and complete secure payment transactions. Customers are also able to easily get updates such as order tracking, refunds, and handle service inquiries.

Google’s Business Messages enhances customer care, with rich features like:

  • product photos and carousels that expand the conversation to drive purchasing, scheduling, and upselling,
  • suggested replies that enable consumers to respond with just a tap of a button,
  • typing indicators, delivery confirmations and read receipts that keep conversations moving along,
  • the ability to send and receive emojis, hi-res images, and videos ensures that the conversation is personalized.

Since messaging is the channel preferred by consumers, businesses will see more of their customers turn to messaging instead of calling their contact center for pre-sales service and post-sales support. Business Messages integrates directly with a company’s digital customer service platform, like Quiq, so handling these conversations happen in one, easy-to-manage agent desktop.

Don’t Wait To Get Started With Business Messaging

Quiq is part of Google’s partner program for Business Messages which enables us to onboard brands, influence the roadmap and standards, and be among the first to offer our customers an upgraded messaging experience through Google Search and Maps.

We’re ready to help you get started with Google’s Business Messaging and can help you get registered, implement, and deploy Business Messaging for your business. Ready to explore Google’s Business Messages and Quiq? Schedule some time to talk to one of our conversation experts today.

Black Hills Federal Credit Union: Serving Members Goes Mobile

Posted on Mike Zinne

John Buxton - QuoteBlack Hills Federal Credit Union (BHFCU) is proud to be a part of the community they serve. They help members who are spread out across SouthDakota buy their first home, their first car, that second home, and even start businesses.

They know that no two members are alike, but they’re also certain that there’s some common ground for all of their 75,000 members.The need for convenient and secure ways to engage with the credit union was one thing all members wanted.

Free online bill payment, mobile check deposits, and Apple Pay are a few of the ways the credit union has made managing money from anywhere possible. Now messaging is part of that list of digital conveniences helping BHFCU live up to their mission of “We Improve Lives”.

Why Black Hills Federal Credit Union Chose Messaging

John Buxton - Quote

BHFCU wanted to provide a communication channel that members preferred. Text messaging was an obvious choice since mobile banking has grown steadily over the years. Statista reports that over three quarters of Americans used a mobile device the last time they checked their account balance. Since text messages also have a 98% open rate and a 209% higher response rate than traditional methods of engagement like phone and email, the messaging channel held the promise of reaching members with higher success rates since many frequently wouldn’t answer calls from the credit union or see an email as quickly.

Prior to working with Quiq, BHFCU handled questions ranging from balance inquiries, transaction info, name changes, adding joint members, disputes, and general account questions through phone, email, and social media platforms. Working with Quiq provided a way to not only add chat and text messaging, but enabled employees to gain efficiency by consolidating channels into a single platform.

Going Live With Messaging

John Buxton - Implementation was super smoothThe team at Black Hills decided to take things slowly to get a feel of the new channel and implemented Quiq for inbound texts only. Getting started with Quiq was straightforward and happened quickly. In the words of SVP/CIO John Buxton, “Implementation was super smooth.” The credit union has since added web chat, outbound messaging, and integrated messaging with their IVR system.

Contact center agents were provided hands-on training and practiced texting with each other before going live. Black Hills used their member newsletter, Facebook, email, and website notifications to promote messaging to their members.

There are currently 35 total employees using Quiq. The credit union has approximately 18 contact center agents, with one agent solely dedicated to handling chats and texts, in addition to employees in the mortgage lending and card services departments. The team plans to continue adding users and are focusing on collections and consumer lending next.

Improving The Member And Employee Experience

Members have eagerly adopted messaging. Not only has it made banking with Black Hills Credit Union more convenient, it also saves them time and money. The credit union doesn’t have to charge members any fees to get help on the messaging channel. Many members text to receive their balances or to initiate transfers for free with just a few taps on their phone.

The Black Hills team has been surprised how many members have become regulars to the messaging channel and the overall response rate they’ve seen. When reaching out to update addresses, agents offered text as an option with higher than average responses. “I feel like many of those people wouldn’t have called back or responded to a letter. The text was easy for them, and it worked well.  I thought that was awesome!” says John.

Chat forms to be filled out shown on a phone

What’s Next For Messaging At Black Hills Federal Credit Union

The popularity of the channel among agents has Black Hills FCU taking a look at how to more evenly distribute the messages among agents. Currently, the team is using a round robin system, but feels they could improve that process so that more agents have the chance to handle text inquiries.

Black Hills credit union

BHFCU sees a plethora of opportunities to use Quiq in the future. BHFCU developers recently utilized the APIs to create a secure authentication snippet to identify members with a pre-existing password that is stored on the core banking system. Future releases will add more options integrated with other systems, such as online banking credentials.

This summer, the credit union will also build extensibility with an enterprise preference management system to retrieve and maintain opt-ins required by TCPA.  By end of the year, the team is planning to create bot-based workflows to manage common inquiries from members.  Having authentication capabilities in place will allow the credit union to potentially realize additional cost savings.

See a Demo Today

Northwest Community Credit Union Blazes New Trail With Messaging

Posted on Mike Zinne

Lines wrapped around branch locations that were three lanes deep and 45 minute wait times on the phone. That’s what 108,000 members at Oregon-based Northwest Community Credit Union experienced after branches closed due to COVID-19. Messaging instantly became a valuable channel that enabled members to get a response in 1.5 minutes or less.

Even before the pandemic, the team at NWCU knew that messaging was their next frontier.  Members had started to request the ability to communicate with their loan officers via text. The team set their focus on making engagement more convenient for members on their preferred channel.

Messaging Was The Silver Lining

Northwest Community partnered with Quiq in Feb of 2020 with plans to start with outbound messaging for the member solutions and lending teams in early 2020. That was before COVID-19 required the 14-branch credit union to evacuate buildings and close branches. The challenges imposed by the pandemic drastically changed the roadmap, shortening implementation to days instead of months, and reshuffling priorities. 

When the team went live with Quiq in the first week of April, 2020, the world was well into the pandemic. The contact center was overwhelmed with flooded phone lines and crowded inboxes. Instead of introducing another channel to the contact center, NWCU pulled together a team composed of branch employees to manage messaging. 

The intuitive nature of texting and Quiq’s interface made employee training easy, providing the flexibility the organization needed during the staffing turmoil of the pandemic. “The beauty is that it’s so easy we’ve been able to have employees from all over the organization, including many employees who have never talked to members, using the channel, supporting them, and it’s just been seamless, so that’s been really great. It’s been the silver lining in rolling out something in the midst of COVID.” says April Cooper, Director of Digital Experience at Northwest Community Credit Union.

When a live chat is initiated, members are greeted by a chatbot, which presents a menu of topics members are most interested. Options, such as branch availability, scheduling appointments with a branch, processing a skip payment, checking the status of stimulus checks or Payment Protection Program loans, provide members the information they need without having to call in or speak to a human.

Increased Productivity and Beyond With Business Messaging 

Northwest Community acknowledges that they’re still pretty new with the channel but considers it a success. Not only were they able to roll out the channel quickly and include a bot, members love it, and the credit union has seen immediate efficiencies. In fact, 1 agent is handling the same number of messaging conversations as 3 FTEs would handle over the phone.

Normally human agents handle as many as 1500 to 1800 calls a month or 60 to 80 calls a day. With messaging, 1 agent is handling conversation volumes comparable to 3 phone agents.

“Implementing messaging was a real moral boost for us” says April. “ It gave all of us a chance to say, ‘Yes we’re in this. We’re closing our branches, but look at what we have to support you.’” April says that managing the messaging channel has now become a coveted position in the contact center as employees prefer the channel over the phone.

Match Your Members Changing Needs With Bots

As branches start to open, the information that members need will change. When they do, NWCU employees will be able to quickly and easily update the bot to reflect those needs within Quiq’s bot designer. The credit union has already had some experience with this.

Shortly after opening the messaging channel, the credit union began to receive hundreds of inquiries about the status of stimulus checks through the messaging channel. Due to some Goggle tagging, the credit union had become the top search result for a lot of non-members across the country who had questions on their stimulus check, not realizing they were contacting a credit union in Oregon.

Thankfully, the credit union was able to quickly insert logic into the bot to filter out those conversations. If the visitor chooses “Stimulus Check” from the menu of options, they are now asked if they are a member or not. If not, they are redirected to the IRS website. The credit union happily saw a 50% drop in these inadvertent messages after implementing this change. April says, “We’re able to learn on the fly and update our bot. Right now, our bot is still pretty simple, but this just shows how you can iterate and add additional layers of logic.

What’s next

Northwest Community still has a lot of plans for the messaging channel in the near future. Their first priority is to move management of the channel from the team of branch employees to the contact center and to entrust that team to monitor and measure the channel.

Soon, the collection team will use text messaging for payment reminders and enable the credit union to move away from the calls the contact center team would make to notify members when their payment was 10 days late. The team also plans to embed a secure link  in the text so that members can get the information they need and take action to securely a payment.

In the future, expect to see the Northwest Community Credit Union leverage messaging to make banking more convenient for members with features like integration with their IVR so members can dynamically shift to a text message instead of waiting on hold. Plans are in place to roll the channel out to the lending team who will use messaging to schedule loan signing appointments or document collection notices.

The credit union is proud to say that “‘Uncommon’ is a way of life for Northwest Community Credit Union”. Lucky for the employees and members that they’ve taken an uncommon way to serve their members and community with messaging that helps everyone thrive.

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How Stio Geared Up For Growth

Posted on Mike Zinne

Since opening its doors in 2012, Stio has embraced a direct-to-consumer model selling high-quality, active apparel for outdoor enthusiasts online and in-store. Clearly, the market has embraced them right back, experiencing rapid growth, especially in eCommerce which makes up 75% of the company’s revenue.

The mountain lifestyle brand, headquartered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming realized that it had to scale its digital customer experience to keep up with that growth. The company looked for technology that was just as adaptable and functional as their gear, turning to Quiq’s messaging, web chat, and bot platform for support.

The Good Problem of Growth

Stio's use of web chat messaging bots for retailers has helped the company deflect phone callsWhen Kim Essensa, Stio’s Customer Experience Manager, joined the company in June of 2018, Stio had been experiencing annual growth rates of 52 percent. In the second quarter of 2018, Stio’s growth accelerated to an impressive 70% year over year.

That kind of growth comes with a few growing pains, especially in a contact center of 7. Based on previous experience in both her personal and professional life, Kim felt that live chat could help alleviate some of the load. The company already had a simple version of live chat available on their website but hadn’t turned it on. Her instincts were right. Turning on web chat helped the contact center feel an immediate relief.

Kim knew that text messaging was the next natural progression for engagement with consumers. While she had experience with other vendors like Live Chat, Olark, and Boldchat, she knew that having SMS and text messaging were key to take the company to the next level. Kim had used Quiq at her previous employer and evaluated it for Stio, knowing that it was going to have to make an impact on their efficiency, while working with their current systems.

“A few other programs were vetted. The relationship I had with Quiq before and knowing how responsive everyone is there, especially with tech issues, is what made Quiq stand out for me. When something is not working, you just need it fixed.”

~Kim Essensa, Stio

Quiq fit with the vision of where Stio wanted their contact center to be and the company went live with Quiq’s web chat on October 1. Implementation was short and successful, and employees only had to receive a small amount of training to get started,

“The platform is so intuitive and easy to use that the amount of training it takes to give it to my staff was super minimal,” says Kim. Having Quiq in place with a trained and ready staff was crucial since Q4 was looming on the horizon and like other retailers, the holiday season would make up a good portion of the company’s annual revenue.

Improving Efficiency 

Before the holidays, Stio onboarded an after hours contact center to handle chat when the in-house team was offline. The after-hours answering service has been able to take some of the pressure off of Stio’s team during business hours as well, easily managing chat on Quiq’s messaging platform with very little training or day to day management from Kim and her team.

The increase in productivity helped employees and customers over the holiday season. Kim puts it this way, “Last year we were leaving the office with 300 emails in the inbox. This year we’re leaving with like 30.” After the holidays, Stio turned on text messaging and saw call volumes drop by 9%. 

“Agents love Quiq. It’s just intuitive and super easy to use.”

~Kim Essensa, Stio

Now, Stio’s agents handle inbound messages from SMS, web chat, and Facebook Messenger all within Quiq’s intelligent workspace. Questions are typically focused on orders, with inquiries around shipping status or price adjustments. Now, if a customer just placed an order and the final cost didn’t reflect the promo code entered, they don’t have to call in and wait on hold for help. Now, they can send a text and get a faster response, since Stio’s agents can handle multiple conversations simultaneously.

Bots

In 2019, Stio took another step toward more efficient operations. Stio was one of the first companies to embrace Quiq’s bots across their messaging channels. Kim worked with the Quiq team to scope out what the Stio bot experience should be. It was important for Kim to keep the bot language short, simple, and casual, so it would feel like consumers are engaging with a human. It was also important to give customers easy access to a human agent whenever they wanted . Within a few days, the bot was up and running on the site.

Stio saw immediate results from implementing bots. The company, which drops 1.2 million catalogs for the holidays, used to take requests from customers who wished to be removed from the physical mailer. Today, a bot does it all on behalf of the agents- from beginning to end. During the first two weeks after implementing this single bot, Kim saved 83 precious agent hours on the catalog process alone. Agents can now concentrate on helping customers find the gear they want instead of managing catalog removals.

Quiq’s Shopify Integration

Stio recently integrated Quiq Messaging with their Shopify account. This integration gives agents incredible visibility into what the consumer is doing. They can see which web page the customer is looking at and what’s in their cart in real-time. According to Essensa, this has drastically reduced the time it takes agents to collect that information from customers and makes the experience smoother and faster for customers.

Stio is focused on keeping their agents available for customers who need human attention. That’s why they’ve introduced bots. When a customer uses messaging, a bot will collect core information from customers and take action on that information, sending the conversation to the best-suited human agent.

Kim believes the integration of Quiq and Shopify will increase overall cart value and conversions because agents will be better equipped with the information they need to close the transaction with the customer.

What’s in Store For Messaging

Stio is approaching conversational commerce from a very personal level and they are using technology to help “For us, it’s that natural conversation between the customer and the agent. We really want the customer to feel at home with Stio, like they’re talking to their best friend who just recommended the best ski kit in the world. We really try to make it a personal experience.” states Kim.

Stio continues to look for ways to make their customers experience more fluid and personal. “From the epic to every day”, that’s the mantra that inspires the team at Stio to create gear known for technical performance, quality, and versatility. Leave it to them to bring that same ingenuity to their customer experience with Quiq’s messaging platform.

Let’s put technology to work for you in your company to streamline workflows, increase efficiency, and deliver a seamless customer experience. Schedule a demo to discuss messaging and how Quiq can work with your company’s unique processes and systems.

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