call centers Archives

5 Tips for Delivering Exceptional Real-Time Support to Customers

Posted on January 2, 2023November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

How often do you talk to your customers in real-time? Playing email tag or seeing customer comments pile up on social media frustrates customers and support agents alike. It drags out conversations, delays customer solutions, and puts undue stress on your team.

With the rise of digital technology, businesses have a plethora of options for connecting with customers. But nothing compares to the immediacy and personal touch of real-time support.

Whether through live chat (also known as web chat), phone support, or social media, customers prefer (and often expect) immediate responses. In fact, Zendesk’s 2022 CX Trends Report found that 76% of customers say they expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of real-time customer support and share tips to help you deliver it effectively.

Benefit #1: Increased customer satisfaction.

It’s no secret that modern customers expect immediacy, from same-day shipping to instant test results. The same goes for customer service. When customers have a problem or question, there’s no substitute for real-time conversations.

Here are a few ways real-time support increases customer satisfaction:

Customers get quick solutions.

Waiting 1–3 business days for an answer to a simple question is frustrating. What if a customer is buying airline tickets as a last-minute holiday gift, but they’re not sure if the tickets are transferable? Customers aren’t going to wait for an emailed response. They’re just going to go elsewhere.

Complex solutions get solved in one interaction.

Complex problems can drag out over asynchronous communications. From explaining the problem, finding a solution, and follow-up questions, it can take days for a customer problem to get resolved. Real-time support lets customers ask questions, test your solutions, and ensure they get their problems solved in just one interaction.

It’s easier to make connections in real time.

Making connections with asynchronous messaging is absolutely possible, but it’s easier to do over real-time online communication (and phone). A conversational cadence is essential when building rapport, and it’s easier to judge a customer’s mood when basing it on real-time information.

Benefit #2: Boost sales and customer retention.

There’s no denying that satisfied customers are more likely to buy from you again. Customer service has a big impact on buying decisions, whether it’s great customer service or bad customer service.

According to Zendesk, 61% of customers will defect to a competitor after just one bad experience—and 76% of customers are out the door after two. We don’t just underestimate the impact bad customer service has on sales. We also underestimate just have valuable good customer service is. Zendesk also found that 90% of customers will spend more with companies that personalize customer service.

Benefit #3: Enhanced reputation.

Real-time customer service can also help prevent negative reviews. When customers have an issue with a product or service, a quick response from your support team can turn a bad experience into a good one.

Your customer service itself can also have a big impact on your business reputation. Consider highly unpopular cable companies (that shall not be named). Their poor customer service, which includes long hold times and an unwillingness to value existing customers over new ones, was only tolerated because there were few options available. Now, more customers are cutting the cord and avoiding having to deal with cable companies altogether.

Embracing real-time support—and doing it well—improves your reputation and makes it easier for customers to choose to do business with you.

Benefit #4: Gain a competitive advantage.

In our increasingly digital world, it’s getting harder for customers to differentiate businesses from their competitors. Price and convenience are often the deciding factors for customers. But delivering outstanding customer service in real time can make you stand apart from the competition.

You’ll give customers peace of mind knowing that your team is available to answer questions as soon as they come up. There’s no waiting, back-and-forth, or fruitless searching for information. You’re there when customers need you.

5 tips for enhancing real-time support.

Implementing real-time customer service is a big task, and going from zero to 60 is a lot to ask of your team. Start slowly, and use these tips to enhance your live support as you go.

Prepare support agents for real-time conversations.

Making the switch from email conversations to real-time support can be intimidating for your customer service team. They’ll be expected to quickly assess situations and provide solid solutions.

Spend a little more time training agents in conflict resolution, empathy, and improvisation. They’ll be better prepared than simply memorizing product knowledge.

Contextualize interactions.

Real-time customer support, whether online or over the phone, brings some unique challenges—mainly, getting customers the right information at the right time. In order to personalize the conversation and provide unique solutions to customer problems, your support agents need easy access to information.

From customer data like previous purchases and support history to product information, support agents need to be able to gather information quickly. Ensure they have a customer relationship management system or conversational platform they can pull from to solve unique customer problems on the first interaction.

Implement live chat on your website.

The key to real-time online communication is making it easy and accessible. While phone support is a good option for traditional businesses, there are many barriers that can prevent customers from having a good experience. Long wait times, a lack of visuals, or even social anxiety can make customers avoid phone conversations altogether.

Adding live chat software to your website with a communications platform is the best way to get started. Customers can reach out for immediate support whenever they’re having difficulties, and they won’t have to wait on hold.

Provide agents with the right tools.

Look for phone and web chat software with robust features to help your agents succeed. Quiq provides features like sentiment analysis and AI-powered text prediction to help agents with real-time online communication.

Customers get fast answers to their questions, and agents feel better prepared to answer complex questions on the fly.

Consider chatbots to support your team.

Offering real-time customer support means you have to make a few important decisions. Are you going to hire agents around the clock to provide 24/7 service? Will you set real-time service to business hours? What will you do during peak service seasons?

A great option to support your team, without making them work 24/7, is to add chatbots into your agent mix. Chatbots can help answer simple questions while your customer service agents are unavailable. They can even help agents be more efficient by collecting customer information upfront.

Collect customer feedback.

The best way to make live chat work for your customers is to continuously ask them how to improve it. Send surveys immediately after conversations to help you assess how your customer service agents are performing, what you can do to make it better, and how you can better personalize the experience for each customer.

Real-time support is the way to go.

Real-time support is a crucial component of your overall customer experience. There’s a place for asynchronous communication—but it takes a healthy mix of that and real-time support to serve your customers. By following best practices and continuously looking for ways to improve, you can ensure your team is providing top-notch, real-time service to your customers.

5 Tips for Retailers to Reduce Call Volume

Posted on December 2, 2022November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

It’s peak busy season in the retail industry, but we all know what comes after the holidays. Returns will be at their highest—and you’ll be looking for ways to reduce call volume.

So what do you do when you know the slow season is coming?

Many businesses batten down the hatches during times of economic uncertainty. It’s easy to look for simple cost-cutting measures and avoid major process changes. But instead of hunkering down, now’s the time to take a deeper look at your processes and see what you can do to streamline the customer experience.

The holiday season puts pressure on your call center. Calls are at an all-time high, you’re agents are overwhelmed, but you’re looking to cut costs. The best way to do that? Look for ways to reduce call volume.

Keep reading for five ways to lighten the load on your call center.

1. Mitigate hang-ups by embracing messaging.

Hangups happen. Whether a new, inexperienced agent accidentally disconnects, an angry customer is tired of waiting, or the line just goes dead, hang-ups add to your overall call volume.

Every time a customer has to call back, you have to create a new ticket. Customers have to start the conversation from scratch and repeat their problem—something that customers hate doing that will also take up valuable agent time—all before you can solve the problem.

Embracing messaging is a great way to reduce call inefficiencies at the source. Messaging conversations don’t have to have a defined beginning and end. With conversational platforms like Quiq, conversations flow more naturally between agents and customers. Customers can pop in with a question while browsing the website or follow up on their shipping confirmation post-purchase. Without the commitment of a phone call, conversations can happen more easily.

Plus, chat history never goes away. Your agents have access to previous conversations, so customers never have to repeat information. Agents can deliver exceptional and friendly service, deliver a more personalized experience, and improve customer retention.

2. Make it easy to connect from any channel.

When phone calls are your only option for real-time customer service, you’re going to have higher call volumes. Email is a helpful alternative, but it often comes with longer response times. When a customer wants a quick answer, they’re going to pick up the phone.

Messaging falls somewhere between phone calls and email. It’s not as immediate as a phone call, but they can get answers more quickly than waiting for an email response.

Offering multiple channels, from the immediacy of live chat (also known as web chat) to more forgiving options like business text messaging, gives customers options besides the phone.

And you’re not just reducing call volume artificially by moving conversations from phone calls to messages. You’ll actually save time—even with the same number of service tickets. Since messaging is asynchronous (meaning both parties don’t have to be present at the same time), agents can increase the number of customers they’re serving at once. Agents can help 6–8 customers at the same time while providing excellent customer service. Plus, Quiq customers that implement messaging see work time reductions of up to 35%.

3. Reduce call volume by adding call-to-text to your IVR.

Reducing your call volume does take some buy-in from your customers. If they’re still used to calling you for service-related questions, it can take time to get them to embrace using alternative communication methods.

A great option to encourage text messaging by adding call-to-text to your interactive voice response (IVR) system. When customers call in, they’ll be given the option to text your customer service team instead.

This is a great option to implement during peak volume periods. When wait times increase and your team is overloaded, you can lighten the burden by encouraging customers to use call-to-text. Besides reducing call volume, customers will be pleased they don’t have to wait on-hold to get their questions answered.

4. Answer customer questions 24/7 with an ai chatbot.

Your call center will always be limited by your hours of operation. When customers have to wait to call in during business hours, your agents can quickly become overwhelmed.

Instead, give customers a chance to get their questions answered 24/7 with an AI-enhanced chatbot. Gather the most frequently asked questions and program your chatbot with the answers. By offloading simple questions, your agents will have fewer calls to manage during the day and can spend their time working on more complex customer problems.

5. Get ahead of questions.

Some questions you can’t anticipate—but some you can. Take a look at your most frequently asked questions and see how you can implement the answers throughout your customer journey.

For example, one of the most frequently asked questions for most retailers is “Where’s my order?” Many retailers have gotten ahead of this and have been able to reduce call volume by emailing customers tracking links and order statuses. But you can go an extra step by sending an outbound text message at various points, like when the order is received and once it has shipped. Customers are much more likely to read a text message than an email, which means they’re less likely to call customer service and ask.

You can also place things like your return policy, shipping costs, and store hours (if applicable) more prominently on your website. While hiding the return policy may seem like a good idea, in theory, it’ll just lead to more calls to your customer service team.

Reduce call volume with messaging.

As retailers get through the holiday season and look to do more with less, reducing call volume should be a top priority. Adding messaging to your customer service offering can not only ease the burden on your call center, but it can also give your customers a better experience.

Keep your call volume down with messaging, and manage in all with Quiq’s multi-channel conversational platform.

Best Practices for Call Center Agents

Posted on March 16, 2022November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

No, the call center isn’t dead.

In the last few years, digital channels have seen tremendous growth. People can go online to find answers, send a text, chat with a bot, or even reach out on social media.

But while the industry’s focus has shifted to text-based communications, call centers aren’t going anywhere.

Last year, Salesforce reported that customers ranked “phone” as their second most preferred customer service channel. That’s up from their #3 spot in 2019—overtaking in-person interactions (for obvious reasons).

Since customers are still dialing, we’ve put together some best practices to help call center agents shine.

Show customers you care.

Providing great customer service starts and ends with emotions. Answering customers’ questions is vital, but you’re really there to connect with them. And it starts with communicating effectively.

Listen.

Listening is the first step. It needs to be said because it sometimes conflicts with other productivity goals. Take the time to listen to a customer’s complaints before diving into a script. Not only will you be better equipped to solve their problems (without a bunch of clarifying questions), but you also give the customer a chance to vent their frustrations and feel heard.

Demonstrate empathy.

There’s a big gap between customer expectations and reality. Salesforce reports that 68% of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy, only 37% of customers feel brands actually do.

Make sure to use phrases like “I understand,” or try repeating back what your customer said to show you were listening. These types of responses are especially important over the phone when you can’t rely on visual cues like eye contact and head nodding.

Go off-script.

Scripts are great tools to help call center agents solve customer problems, but they can sound stiff and stale. Customers can tell when you’re reading from a script, and it can immediately put a wall up between you.

While it’s helpful to follow the general outline to ensure you don’t miss any important information, inject some of your own personality and mannerisms into it.

Add humor when appropriate, double-back if a customer didn’t give a clear answer, or pull together language from a variety of scenarios.

Customers will appreciate it. (Just make sure it’s within company policy first.)

Avoid transferring calls.

This one’s tough because it relies on so many other determining factors. But customers have come to expect quick resolutions to their problems, especially when choosing to call customer service over other channels.

In fact, Salesforce reports that 83% of consumers expect to solve their complex problems by speaking with one person.

The truth is, customers don’t want to speak with multiple people to solve their problems. It often means they have to repeat themselves (something customers don’t like), and it increases the time they spend on hold.

The best way to limit transfers?

It often comes down to infrastructure—something that is outside of call center agents’ control. This often includes bigger organizational initiatives like:

Setting up a knowledge base: Information should be easily accessible. That way, when you don’t know the answer, you can pull it up in the knowledge base instead of transferring the call to someone who does know.
Utilizing call center software: There are tons of call center software options that enhance agent and customer experience alike. Some offer options to notify a manager and have them listen to a call to help agents navigate more complex interactions.
Having a system to direct calls: If your company has multiple specialized departments, customer service centers should immediately direct calls to the right person. Call centers can accomplish this using an interactive voice response (IVR) system, web chat, or other self-service tools.
Training agents thoroughly: A knowledge base and customer service software are great tools, but they can’t replace thorough training. Agents should spend time learning the ins and outs of the business, in addition to customer service tactics.

Prepare to tackle complex issues.

Call centers aren’t the hub for information anymore. Online communications are growing in popularity.

Between easily accessible information and various other communication channels, making a phone call isn’t the go-to reflex for many customers.

According to Zendesk’s 2020 CX Trends report, 40% of customers choose a channel based on the complexity of their issue. That means when customers have a difficult problem, they’re reaching out to the call center.

Their problem is either too difficult to explain in an email, they’ve tried and failed to search for answers themselves, or they had a bad experience with online customer service in the past. Heck, some people just prefer to talk to someone over the phone. (Yes, they still exist!)

So what does that mean for call center agents? You need to be prepared for anything.

In addition to knowing your products and services inside out, consider conflict resolution training to help upset customers.

Keep these steps in mind when you have to deal with an angry customer:

Stay calm: Easier said than done (we know), but you’ll only escalate the problem if you respond aggressively or defensively. Take deep breaths, and try not to take any of it personally.
Validate your customers’ concerns: Tap into that empathy we talked about earlier. Show you’re listening and actually try to understand the core issue. Most of the time, customers just want to know that they’re talking to someone who can actually fix their problem.
Try not to argue: As much as you want to give the customer all the facts, now’s not the time to correct them. If they’re upset, they aren’t thinking rationally. So trying to rationalize with them won’t make a difference.
Take responsibility: Check with your company policy on this one first, but it’s generally a good idea to accept responsibility. Apologize when necessary.
Find the solution: Once you’ve figured out the problem, try to find a solution that works within the bounds of your capabilities and satisfies the customer.

Sometimes it’s walking them through a difficult application setup. Other times it’s offering a replacement product when there’s failed. Ask call center supervisors for guidance on what’s acceptable to offer a customer to keep them coming back.

Measure what matters.

There are all kinds of measurements used to evaluate call center agents. A lot of them have to do with speed. How quickly do you resolve calls? How many calls can you take in a day? How quickly do you answer calls?

As a call center agent, it’s important to know which measurements matter to management. But it doesn’t stop there.

To blow customers away with excellent service, focus on these metrics:

First-call resolution: Like we mentioned before, customers expect even their complex problems to be solved with just one call to customer service. If you focus too much on speed, this number is likely to drop.
Customer satisfaction: Many call centers send a CSAT survey immediately after a customer service interaction. In this case, that survey reflects directly on the call center agent.
Customer effort score: CES measures how easy the interaction was for the customer. Customers are hoping for easy interactions, so do your best to keep things simple. This often translates to not putting them on hold for too long, not transferring them to multiple departments, and providing answers that are easy to understand.

Call center agents are the frontline.

Call centers are still the backbone of the customer service industry. And the most important thing to remember as a call center agent is this: You are your company’s representative.

Follow company policy, but don’t stop there. Put these best practices to use to deliver stellar customer service experiences.

How Call Centers are Becoming “Text Centers:” Text Messaging for Customer Service

Posted on June 9, 2020November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Internet and mobile technology have fundamentally changed how business is done. With more people working from home and consumers spending increasing amounts of time on their mobile devices, businesses are having to adjust to meet technological advancements and new consumer preferences. There was a time when call centers only handled phone calls from customers. As customers have become increasingly digital, companies must find more efficient and effective ways to communicate with their customers.

Today, more than ever before, customer service has become one of the most important functions of the overall customer experience, and businesses are focusing on implementing personalized solutions rather than simply selling products. As a result, call centers have undergone a digital transformation — one that embraces the power of text messaging.

The Industry Follows Customer Preferences

Statistics show that in the United States alone, the average person sends and receives about 32 texts per day. What does this mean? In short, it means people like to text because it is easy and convenient. This provides the ideal opportunity to implement a digital customer service solution that supports messaging.

Today’s customer service is all about making the consumer experience as pleasant, personalized, and hassle-free as possible. Text messaging allows consumers to send questions and receive answers almost instantly. Better still is consumers get to drive the pace of the conversation, whether they are on-the-go or sitting on the couch, they can respond when it’s convenient for them, making text messaging the preferred method of communication over the phone for a vast majority of consumers.

Improved Satisfaction With Personalized Service and Dynamic Solutions

The issue with phone calls is they are a hassle for customers. that they tend to create an extra hassle for customers. Phone calls are a hassle because too often, they require the customer to sit on hold, repeat themselves, and interrupt their busy, on-the-go lives to have a voice conversation that can sometimes be hard to hear or understand. On the other hand, texting is fast and easy, with conversations capable of being on-the-go, and are aptly suited for our busy, digital lifestyles.

That’s why many companies are now converting their call centers into innovative digital centers. With messaging, businesses are providing customers solutions for resolving issues more quickly and in more engaging ways, like with the use of photos and videos, or even by expressing emotion with emojis ? . Messaging is suited for every kind of inquiry, and can even respond to seemingly complicated questions that include:

Replacement product options
Troubleshooting guide links
Important documents or disclosures

Chatbots Help Improve Messaging Efficiency

While human-to-human correspondence is necessary at times, many of the most frequently asked issues can be easily managed by chatbots. Chatbots can help save time and resources, freeing agents up for more complex or higher priority concerns.

Digital transformation and customer experience are culminating with the advancement of chatbot technology being sophisticated enough that AI bots are having high-quality, human-like conversations with customers. With chatbots, consumers can get the information they are looking for much more quickly, reducing the need for phone calls and face-to-face interactions.

Call Centers Digital Transformation

While phone calls can be helpful in certain situations, they limit you and your customer to a single platform of communication. Messaging can be used across apps, social media, mobile devices, and more. This allows businesses to stay in contact with customers 24/7.

When customers have a quick question, they want fast answers, without any hassle. Texting with customer service is so easy, even grandpa knows how to do it. Text messaging for customer service is solving problems faster and with greater convenience for customers and agents.

Contact Us Today About Our Solutions

The importance of technology in customer service has become more important than ever as call centers steer away from single-channel communication. To learn more about how text messaging will enhance your customer service, request a demo today.

See a Demo Today

Featured Resource

Forrester Report