business text messaging Archives

Quiq Customer Spotlight: Learn How evo Uses Quiq Messaging

Posted on October 30, 2017November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

Customer Spotlight: evo & Quiq Messaging

evo, a leading online retailer of outdoor gear and fashion apparel is known for exploring the collaboration between culture and sport by seamlessly joining art, music, streetwear, skateboarding, snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking and wakeboarding. Their aim is to bring all things relevant to the urban, action sports lifestyle into one creative space.

Why Messaging?

Focused on going beyond the typical sales experience, evo knew it had to provide a cutting-edge support experience. Based in Seattle, Washington, evo is a retailer that offers top-notch gear and clothing for outdoor sports enthusiasts.

When consumers had questions, they used to only be able to call or email the company to get an answer. Now, using Quiq Messaging, evo’s customers get swift responses via Facebook Messenger, live chat and text messaging-channels that are often preferred or more convenient for their active, on-the-go consumers.

Easy For Customers to Engage

Some customers contact evo for help during the purchasing process with very specific product comparison questions. Others have questions about shipping and a possible return. While still others need technical help with a product they just purchased. Regardless of the question, evo’s customer care center is ready to answer. And customers are happy with the choices of channels over which to contact evo.

When a customer is on evo’s website, if an agent is available, the live chat image will automatically appear on the bottom-right of the desktop, making it easy for a customer to start a chat conversation. And, text messaging is offered on its mobile website. Customers are excited to be able to engage with evo via text messaging. It’s fast and it’s convenient.

“Certain people like to communicate via specific channels and with Quiq Messaging we are able to serve more people in the manner in which they want to engage. That’s a big win for us and our customers.”

Justin Courtney, Customer Care Manager, evo

Efficient For Agents

Top agents can easily handle live chat and text messaging conversations, on top of the phone calls and emails they are already answering. Since Quiq supports live chat, text messaging, and Facebook Messenger, evo agents only have to log into one application. Quiq is so easy-to-use that all agents are able to support all channels. During peak winter months, evo has the ability to dedicate agents to manage real-time interactions based on increased volumes to ensure response times are kept in-check.

After introducing live chat, it immediately accounted for 11% of support inquires. Phone volumes dropped by 8% and emails inquires decreased by 3%. That trend has continued to follow the same track with Quiq’s live chat and text messaging solution, which now represents 22% of the overall support volume.

What the Future Holds

Looking ahead, evo plans to integrate Quiq Messaging with their NetSuite implementation to consolidate all customer contact data, which will both improve the customer experience and yield additional opportunities through improved reporting. They are also planning to build out the visibility and promotion of its new messaging capabilities on their mobile website.

About Quiq

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

Mobile Millennials – How to Attract Them to Your Credit Union

Posted on October 27, 2017November 15, 2024 Mark Kowal

Credit unions have long been viewed as the more local, approachable place for multiple generations to manage their finances. During times of financial crisis – recessions and dot-com busts, Credit Unions have gained the trust and admiration of Boomers and Gen-Xers who make up two-thirds of today’s total credit union membership. Today, the average age of a credit union member is 48. Credit Unions continue to appeal to these generations with the right products, services, and messaging. However, in order to increase members and grow revenue, Credit Unions will need to attract and engage Millennials as well.

How Credit Unions Can Appeal to Millenials

Boomers and Gen-Xers have a fairly high satisfaction level with Credit Unions. Millennials, not so much. Millennials are roughly between the ages of 18 – 34 and make up about 42 percent of the US population. Many of them are coming into their financial own, possibly needing financial products as they navigate college, first homes, and saving plans as they start new careers.

According to a CFI study, the CUSI (Credit Union Satisfaction Index) score is lowest among Millennials. This could have detrimental effects on membership growth among this population since Millennials tend to trust brands and services based on recommendations of others. A low satisfaction score translates into a low adoption of other products and referrals to their family and friends.

One of the main reasons for the lower satisfaction score is the digital experience gap. The Millennial generation is much more digitally connected and comfortable with online transactions than previous generations. Targeting Millennials and increasing overall customer satisfaction will require credit unions to reduce the effort it takes to do business with their institution. Obstacles, such as members having to repeatedly contact the credit union or repeat information, can be eliminated with the use of technology like Quiq, which enables customers to easily connect with their institution over their mobile device and at their convenience.

According to a FICO survey on Millennial banking, a large percentage of the Millennial generation feel that their bank does not communicate with them through their preferred communication channel. Mobile apps, text messaging, and the bank’s mobile website are the preferred methods of communication. Credit Unions have the opportunity to build a multi-channel digital engagement approach using the channels most attractive to Millennials.

“43% of Millennials don’t think that their bank communicates to them through their preferred communication channels.
~Fico, Millennial Banking Insights and Opportunities”

It’s not just Millennials who want to message you; 66% of customers prefer mobile messaging for contacting a company because it is easy and more convenient than making a call or sending an email. Building and maintaining a relationship with these customers doesn’t need to be just a one-way street. Credit unions have personal relationships with their members, so facilitating a two-way conversation via messaging is critical. Quiq clients have found that engaging with customers to answer questions is just as important as the ability to send outbound text messages with new product and promotion alerts.

At Quiq, our clients have seen a 5-10% higher customer satisfaction rate for messaging than any other channel. It is clear that consumers are already comfortable with using messaging to resolve issues and receive information. This could not be more true for Millennials. In a research study conducted earlier this year, Quiq discovered that 76% of Millennials “view messaging as an extremely/very effective channel” as compared to 58% of non-Millennials.

Cater Your Engagement to Younger Generations With Quiq

Quiq offers the messaging solution organizations need to attract all generations, especially Millennials. Our messaging solution allows all members to start or continue a personal one-on-one conversation over their preferred communication channel with your organization. Request a demo to see how easily your Credit Union can implement Quiq messaging and grow their Millennial membership.

Terror Filled Tales of Customer Service – (Part I)

Posted on October 26, 2017November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

We all heard the tale and hoped it was just urban lore or fake news, but the Equifax security breach was real. After hearing the news, everyone felt the creeping chill of vulnerability and helplessness as we all scanned for signs that we could be prey to identity theft or scams. Equifax confirmed the security breach compromised sensitive data like birthday’s, social security numbers, and account information of 145.5 million US customers. The highly debated topic raised a lot of questions since Equifax announced on September 7th.

We at Quiq, who built the leading asynchronous platform for business messaging, continue to watch the story unfold. In a two-part series, we explore the data breach that recently rocked the news and attempt to find learnings and insights. Gather ’round as we share this spine-tingling tale and the value-added opportunities that exist for any company that wants to advance their customer service experience.

In the case of Equifax, there was indeed an opportunity for a sense of urgency. The credit reporting agency revealed the data breach in September, approximately 40 days after the cyber attack, leading many to question why there was such a delay. Some even report that Equifax was aware of the vulnerability that led to the breach as early as two months before the data breach occurred. We want to get immediate answers to questions or updates on situations in this age of instant digital gratification.

Web Chat Provides Immediate Customer Service

In response to their announcement, Equifax created a website, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com to help consumers answer the one question that everyone wanted answered: “Am I affected?”. The response website was a self-serve customer service option to help people take some immediate action.

Once consumers entered their information, the follow-up page gave them the option to click to an FAQ page. While the gravity of the situation likely spawned lots of questions, many of the site’s users wanted answers that were relevant and specific to them and their data. Some consumers found the message confusing and wanted definitive answers.

The Equifax Security Breach service page left some customers wanting more definitive answers.[/caption]

Quiq’s Web Chat could have provided consumers a place to chat live with an Equifax Customer Service agent to help guide them through the process at this critical point. We see a lot of companies use this powerful tool to help guide customers when they need it the most, like when they find themselves stuck on a page with questions needing more direction.

Text Messaging Snippets Ensure Consistency

Sadly, the well-intentioned effort of setting up a response site also paved the way to another customer experience snafu. TheVerge reports how Equifax mistakenly mistyped the URL as www.sercuirtyequifax2017.com. The tweet sent visitors to a phishing site set up by developer Nick Sweeting to expose the vulnerabilities of the Equifax response page.

Quiq recognizes the need for agents to quickly and accurately share helpful, repetitive information to avoid situations like this. We have the ability to use “snippets”, or pre-populated content. Snippets are easy to create, organize, find, and use to ensure consistency and expedite communication.

Increase Service Speed with Outbound Notifications

While the response website was a great resource, it could not deflect the onslaught of calls the company received. Concerned consumers wondered if they would be responsible for charges they didn’t make. This type of crisis control is where a readied front line of knowledgeable customer service agents shines; but therein lies the rub. A Fast Company article details how customer service agents that took calls on the day of the announcement had not yet learned of the breach and were unprepared to answer questions about the event.

Quiq can send outbound messages that make alerting employees, partners, and customers easy and fast. With our outbound messaging service, Equifax could have informed everyone, including all of the front-line service agents, in an instant. In addition to the news an outbound message could provide helpful resources to help agents deal with the calls.

Sure, there are plenty of cringe-worthy moments in this tale, but there are lessons to be learned. While this story is extreme, we see real opportunity from crisis mode to the day-to-day status quo to elevate customer service. We invite you to learn more about how Quiq Messaging can help your company come out of the dark (ages) of customer service and into the light of messaging for business.

Customer Service Messaging: Ovum Puts Quiq On The Radar

Posted on June 20, 2017November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

Quiq Messaging is recognized by Ovum in the customer service messaging and consumer messaging app space.

“Unlike other messaging platforms, Quiq’s technology takes a sharp focus on managing messaging at scale.”

– Mila D’Antonio, Principal Analyst Ovum

Ovum’s On the Radar is a series of research notes about vendors bringing innovative ideas, products, or business models to their markets. On the Radar vendors bear watching for their potential impact on markets.

Why put Quiq on your radar?

Asynchronous Messaging – Quiq offers a messaging solution that mimics the way consumers interact via messaging in their daily lives.
Fast Deployment– The platform’s ability to integrate into various external and internal applications enables fast deployment.
Flexible Pricing – Its bundle pricing model provides flexibility allowing companies to scale as customers or volumes grow.

Here is a bit more detail from the report regarding Quiq’s functionality. Feel free to watch a short product video to put pictures to all these words!

Quiq’s Messaging Capabilities:

Quiq Messaging supports SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, and Kik. It can be purchased as a standalone customer channel, or companies can deploy one of Quiq’s pre-built CRM integrations, which include Oracle, Zendesk, and Salesforce.com.

Additional features for Agents include:

Multi-conversation UI – enables agents to manage multiple conversations simultaneously
Text snippets – offers reusable text blurbs retrieved with simple keyboard shortcuts for on-the-fly responses
Collaboration – allows managers to watch the conversation and lend advice to the agent in the background
Emoji sharing – creates personal interactions between agents and customers
Adaptive response time coaching – measures the customer’s level of engagement and coaches the agent, suggesting which conversation needs the next response
Image and video – enables video and image sharing when necessary

How Quiq Caters to Managers

Notable features for Managers include:

Rerouted conversations – automatically reroutes ongoing conversations when agents go off-shift
Real-time monitoring – shows aggregate metrics such as current load, number of customers waiting, wait times, and individual agent performance, including the number of conversations handled, average response time, and times unresponsive
ACD-like conversation handling – keeps incoming demand at manageable rates with auto-responses delivered to customers when queues overflow
Unresponsive agent timers – automatically puts a conversation back in the queue to be handled by another agent if an agent fails to respond within goal thresholds
Conversation observation – provides visualization of the entire conversation thread, provides whisper advice, and, if necessary, takes over the conversation without interruption the conversation
Historical statistics – can send conversation statistics in realtime to other systems for cross-channel reporting and BI analysis

Learn more about the Messaging space and Quiq here.

Part 1: Four Reasons to Add Messaging to The Contact Center

Posted on March 6, 2017November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

The Messaging Mandate

This is Part 1 in a 3 Part Series focused on The Messaging Mandate. This article highlights why your company should consider adding Messaging to your customer service organization. Part 2 will discuss the criteria against which to rank consumer to business messaging providers. Finally, Part 3 will outline what to consider to successfully implement messaging. We hope you enjoy the series.

Messaging is not new…in fact, it has been around for quite some time. We have been using messaging to send messages, photos, and emojis to our friends and family for over 20 years–to the tune of over 6 billion text messages daily in the U.S. alone (Forrester). According to Pew Research, 97% of Americans use text messaging on a daily basis, making text the most widely and frequently used app on smartphones. So if text messaging is not new, what is new? The answer: Consumers messaging customer service.

The vast majority of messaging occurs between individuals, friends, and family members. Messaging a company is just taking off. Business text messaging is simply the ability for consumers to contact businesses and exchange information over mobile devices. Messages can be sent as text (Short Message Service/SMS), pictures, video, or audio (Multimedia Messaging Service/MMS) over a variety of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Kik, etc.

Done correctly, messaging is a powerful tool to help consumers connect with businesses – especially when it come to customer service.

1. Customers Expect It

Consumers are demanding the ability to communicate via messaging with brands and businesses. Consumers don’t want to just receive messages from businesses, they want the ability to message them back. No longer is messaging simply a one-way channel for companies to market to consumers. Customers now expect to be able to initiate a two-way, one-to-one conversations with the companies and brands they use.

In fact, the majority of U.S. consumers would prefer texting over the current methods of reaching customer support (eWeek). As Forbes writer, Micah Solomon, stated: “ If your customers won’t even call Mom on the phone anymore (they’re texting her instead), why are you forcing them to call your business on the phone any time they need customer service or support?” Consumers prefer messaging as a channel of communication and when given a choice, they use it.

2. It’s a Competitive Advantage

“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”
– Jerry Gregoire, Chief Information Officer at Dell.

According to Gartner, 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience and the main driver of the customer experience lands smack dab in the middle of the customer service and support organization. In fact, Harris found that 88% of customers prefer doing business with a company that offers quality customer service over a company that has the latest and most innovative products. A good product is expected of every company. Innovative and quality customer service is the competitive advantage.

With the continued focus on delivering great experiences via customer service, it is critical that companies constantly innovate and adapt their service approach to exceed customer expectations. The interest, preference, usage, and demand for consumer-to-business messaging is already evident and companies that don’t already offer messaging are quickly falling behind.

Messaging is not only what consumers want, but it is also what businesses should want. Adding messaging as a customer service channel delivers significant cost savings due to offloading phone calls, while improving customer satisfaction (CSAT).

3. Significant Cost Savings

Activating messaging for customer service not only provides a better experience for the customer, it is also much more efficient for agents compared to phone calls and emails. Messaging is cost-efficient and time-efficient for customer support teams for many reasons:

Agent supported phone calls cost several dollars per conversation, while agent supported texts cost pennies per conversation. (Forrester & ContactBabel)
Implementing a messaging channel allows companies the ability to deflect calls to a lower cost channel. It is common to see a 20% or higher offload of phone calls to messaging.
Messaging allows each agent to handle multiple conversations simultaneously, improving productivity over one-to-one voice calls. Additionally, agents can typically handle 6-8 messaging conversations at once due to the asynchronous nature of messaging, dramatically improving agent productivity.
Agent familiarity and comfort- Messaging allows agents to use an interface they are already familiar with because they message their friends and families too. This makes it easy for agents to quickly come up to speed to support a new channel.

Customers want it. Agents understand it. It makes agents even more productive and saves you money. If your business isn’t taking advantage of the opportunity to activate Messaging to interact with customers, what could possibly be holding you back?

4. Higher Customer Satisfaction

We are now living in a world where businesses need to move past being customer-centric or customer-focused into being customer-obsessed (Forrester). Customer-obsessed companies focus on customer satisfaction and retention, understanding that these measurements are key metrics for any company trying to compete.

It is notable then that texting is the highest rated contact method for customer satisfaction compared to all other communication channels (Text – 90%; Phone – 77%; Facebook – 66%). (eWeek).

Why is text so highly rated? Because it blends the real-time answers of a phone call with the portability of a mobile device. The customer benefits from the convenience and control they get from messaging. Their interaction with a company can happen at their pace, on their terms, instead of on the company’s terms. With messaging, consumers are able to get customer support at the speed of life.

With mobile devices, customers can interact with an agent from wherever they are, even in places where there may not be an internet connection. Unlike web chat, customers no longer need to be tied to their computer. Wherever they go, the conversation can continue.

While voice offers the advantage of “real time” interaction, it usually occurs after the customer has navigated an IVR system or been placed on hold. Studies show that customers are increasingly frustrated by being placed on hold. Texting is as “real-time” as a voice call, but without the hold times. The immediacy of communication brings about a feeling of connection and importance, allowing brands to be more human and relatable.

Conclusion

Consumer’s preference for messaging in both their personal and business lives continues to grow, with no end in sight. They appreciate that texting is a fast and efficient customer support option, and expect businesses to respond accordingly. Customers want real-time responses to their support issues. By adding messaging to your Contact Center, managers and agents have the tools necessary to provide a better customer experience, while saving money.

About Us

Quiq connects customers and companies via Messaging (Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Kik), resulting in more efficient customer service and happier customers. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com, or email sales@goquiq.com for a free product demo.

Featured Resource

Forrester Report