How Do You Train Your Agents in a ChatGPT World?

Posted on September 6, 2023November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

There’s long been an interest in using AI for educational purposes. Technologist Danny Hillis has spent decades dreaming of a digital “Aristotle” that would teach everyone in the way that the original Greek wunderkind once taught Alexander the Great, while modern companies have leveraged computer vision, machine learning, and various other tools to help students master complex concepts in a variety of fields.

Still, almost nothing has sparked the kind of enthusiasm for AI in education that ChatGPT and large language models more generally have given rise to. From the first, its human-level prose, knack for distilling information, and wide-ranging abilities made it clear that it would be extremely well-suited for learning.

But that still leaves the question of how. How should a contact center manager prepare for AI, and how should she change the way she trains her agents?

In our view, this question can be understood in two different, related ways:

How can ChatGPT be used to help agents master skills related to their jobs?
How can they be trained to use ChatGPT in their day-to-day work?

In this piece, we’ll take up both of these issues. We’ll first provide a general overview of the ways in which ChatGPT can be used for both education and training, then turn to the question of the myriad ways in which contact center agents can be taught to use this powerful new technology.

How is ChatGPT Used in Education and Training?

First, let’s get into some of the early ways in which ChatGPT is changing education and training.

NOTE: Our comments here are going to be fairly broad, covering some areas that may not be immediately applicable to the work contact center agents do. The main purpose for this is that it’s very difficult to forecast how AI is going to change contact center work.

Our section on “creating study plans and curricula”, for example, might not be relevant to today’s contact center agents. But it could become important down the road if AI gives rise to more autonomous workflows in the future, in which case we expect that agents would be given more freedom to use AI and similar tools to learn the job on their own.

We pride ourselves on being forward-looking and forward-thinking here at Quiq, and we structure our content to reflect this.

Making a Socratic Tutor for Learning New Subjects

The Greek philosopher Socrates famously pioneered the instructional methodology which bears his name. Mostly, the Socratic method boils down to continuously asking targeted questions until areas of confusion emerge, at which point they’re vigorously investigated, usually in a small group setting.

A well-known illustration of this process is found in Plato’s Republic, which starts with an attempt to define “justice” and then expands into a much broader conversation about the best way to run a city and structure a social order.

ChatGPT can’t replace all of this on its own, of course, but with the right prompt engineering, it does a pretty good job. This method works best when paired with a primary source, such as a textbook, which will allow you to double-check ChatGPT’s questions and answers.

Having it Explain Code or Technical Subjects

A related area in which people are successfully using ChatGPT is in having it walk you through a tricky bit of code or a technical concept like “inertia”.

The more basic and fundamental, the better. In our experience so far, ChatGPT has almost never failed in correctly explaining simple Python, Pandas, or Java. It did falter when asked to produce code that translates between different orbital reference frames, however, and it had no idea what to do when we asked it about a fairly recent advance in the frontiers of battery chemistry.

There are a few different reasons that we advise caution if you’re a contact center agent trying to understand some part of your product’s codebase. For one thing, if the product is written in a less-common language ChatGPT might not be able to help much.

But even more importantly, you need to be extremely careful about what you put into it. There have already been major incidents in which proprietary code and company secrets were leaked when developers pasted them into the ChatGPT interface, which is visible to the OpenAI team.

Conversely, if you’re managing teams of contact center agents, you should begin establishing a policy on the appropriate uses of ChatGPT in your contact center. If your product is open-source there’s (probably) nothing to worry about, but otherwise, you need to proactively instruct your agents on what they can and cannot use the tool to accomplish.

Rewriting Explanations for Different Skill Levels

Wired has a popular Youtube series called “5 levels”, where experts in quantum computing or the blockchain will explain their subject at five different skill levels: “child”, “teen”, “college student”, “grad student”, and a fellow “expert.”

One thing that makes this compelling to beginners and pros alike is seeing the same idea explored across such varying contexts – seeing what gets emphasized or left out, or what emerges as you gradually climb up the ladder of complexity and sophistication.

This, too, is a place where ChatGPT shines. You can use it to provide explanations of concepts at different skill levels, which will ultimately improve your understanding of them.

For a contact center manager, this means that you can gradually introduce ideas to your agents, starting simply and then fleshing them out as the agents become more comfortable.

Creating Study Plans and Curricula

Stepping back a little bit, ChatGPT has been used to create entire curricula and even daily study plans for studying Spanish, computer science, medicine, and various other fields.

As we noted at the outset, we expect it will be a little while before contact center agents are using ChatGPT for this purpose, as most centers likely have robust training materials they like to use.

Nevertheless, we can project a future in which these materials are much more bare-bones, perhaps consisting of some general notes along with prompts that an agent-in-training can use to ask questions of a model trained on the company’s documentation, test themselves as they go, and gradually build skill.

Training Agents to Use ChatGPT

Now that we’ve covered some of the ways in which present and future contact center agents might use ChatGPT to boost their own on-the-job learning, let’s turn to the other issue we want to tackle today: how to train ChatGPT to agents today?

Getting Set Up With ChatGPT (and its Plugins)

First, let’s talk about how you can start using ChatGPT.

This section may end up seeming a bit anticlimactic because, honestly, it’s pretty straightforward. Today, you can get access to ChatGPT by going to the signup page. There’s a free version and a paid version that’ll set you back a whopping $20/month (which is a pretty small price to pay for access to one of the most powerful artifacts the human race has ever produced, in our opinion.)

As things stand, the free tier gives you access to GPT-3.5, while the paid version gives you the choice to switch to GPT-4 if you want the more powerful foundational model.

A paid account also gives you access to the growing ecosystem of ChatGPT plugins. You access the ChatGPT plugins by switching over to the GPT-4 option:

There are plugins that allow ChatGPT to browse the web, let you directly edit diagrams or talk with PDF documents, or let you offload certain kinds of computations to the Wolfram platform.

Contact center agents may or may not find any of these useful right now, but we predict there will be a lot more development in this space going forward, so it’s something managers should know about.

Best Practices for Combining Human and AI Efforts

People have long been fascinated and terrified by automation, but so far, machines have only ever augmented human labor. Knowing when and how to offload work to ChatGPT requires knowing what it’s good for.

Large language models learn how to predict the next token from their training data, and are therefore very good at developing rough drafts, outlines, and more routine prose. You’ll generally find it necessary to edit its output fairly heavily in order to account for context and so that it fits stylistically with the rest of your content.

As a manager, you’ll need to start thinking about a standard policy for using ChatGPT. Any factual claims made by the model, especially any references or citations, need to be checked very carefully.

Scenario-Based Training

In this same vein, you’ll want to distinguish between different scenarios in which your agents will end up using generative AI. There are different considerations in using Quiq Compose or Quiq Suggest to format helpful replies, for example, and in using it to translate between different languages.

Managers will probably want to sit down and brainstorm different scenarios and develop training materials for each one.

Ethical and Privacy Considerations

The rise of generative AI has sparked a much broader conversation about privacy, copyright, and intellectual property.

Much of this isn’t particularly relevant to contact center managers, but one thing you definitely should be paying attention to is privacy. Your agents should never be putting real customer data into ChatGPT, they should be using aliases and fake data whenever they’re trying to resolve a particular issue.

To quote fictional chemist and family man Walter White, we advise you to tread lightly here. Data breaches are a huge and ongoing problem, and they can do substantial damage to your brand.

ChatGPT and What it Means for Training Contact Center Agents

ChatGPT and related technologies are poised to change education and training. They can be used to help get agents up to speed or to work more efficiently, and they, in turn, require a certain amount of instruction to use safely.

These are all things that contact center managers need to worry about, but one thing you shouldn’t spend your time worrying about is the underlying technology. The Quiq conversational AI platform allows you to leverage the power of language models for contact centers, without looking at any code more complex than an API call. If the possibilities of this new frontier intrigue you, schedule a demo with us today!

Contact Center Managers: What Do LLMs Mean For You?

Posted on August 3, 2023November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Whether it’s quantum computing, the blockchain, or generative AI, whenever a promising new technology emerges, forward-thinking people begin looking for a way to use it.

And this is a completely healthy response. It’s through innovation that the world moves forward, but great ideas don’t mean much if there aren’t people like contact center managers who use them to take their operations to the next level.

Today, we’re going to talk about what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT mean for contact centers. After briefly reviewing how LLMs work we’ll discuss the way they’re being used in contact centers, how those centers are changing as a result, and some things that contact center managers need to look out for when utilizing generative AI.

What are Large Language Models?

As their name suggests, LLMs are large, they’re focused on language, and they’re machine-learning models.

It’s our view that the best way to tackle these three properties is in reverse order, so we’ll start with the fact that LLMs are enormous neural networks trained via self-supervised learning. These neural networks effectively learn a staggeringly complex function that captures the statistical properties of human language well enough for them to generate their own.

Speaking of human language, LLMs like ChatGPT are pre-trained generative models focused on learning from and creating text. This distinguishes them from other kinds of generative AI, which might be focused on images, videos, speech, music, and proteins (yes, really.)

Finally, LLMs are really big. As with other terms like “big data” no one has a hard-and-fast rule for figuring out when you’ve gone from “language model” to “large language model” – but with billions of internal parameters, it’s safe to say that an LLM is a few orders of magnitude bigger than anything you’re likely to build outside of a world-class engineering team.

How can Large Language Models be Used in Contact Centers?

Since they’re so good at parsing and creating natural language, LLMs are an obvious choice for enterprises where there’s a lot of back-and-forth text exchanged, perhaps while, say, resolving issues or answering questions.

And for this reason, LLMs are already being used by contact center managers to make their agents more productive (more on this shortly).

To be more concrete, we turned up a few specific places where LLMs can be leveraged by contact center managers most effectively.

Answering questions: Even with world-class documentation, there will inevitably be customers who are having an issue they want help with. Though ChatGPT won’t be able to answer every such question, it can handle a lot of them, especially if you’ve fine-tuned it on your documentation.

Streamlining onboarding: For more or less the same reason, ChatGPT can help you onboard new hires. Employees learning the ropes will also be confused about parts of your technology and your process, and ChatGPT can help them find what they need more quickly.

Summarizing emails and articles: It might be possible for a team of five to be intimately familiar with what everyone else is doing, but any more than this and there will inevitably be things happening that are beyond their purview. By summarizing articles, tickets, email or Slack threads, etc., ChatGPT can help everyone stay reasonably up-to-date without having to devote hours every day to reading.

Issue prioritization: Not every customer question or complaint is equally important, and issues have to be prioritized before being handed off to contact center agents. ChatGPT can aid in this process, especially if it’s part of a broader machine-learning pipeline built for this kind of classification.

Translation: If you’re lucky enough to have a global audience, there will almost certainly be users who don’t have a firm grasp of English. Though there are tools like Google Translate that do a great job of handling translation tasks, ChatGPT often does an even better job.

What are Large Language Models for Customer Service?

Large language models are ideally suited for tasks that involve a great deal of working with text. Because contact center agents spend so much time answering questions and resolving customer issues, LLMs are a technology that can make them far more productive. ChatGPT excels at tasks like question answering, summarization, and language translation, which is why they’re already changing the way contact centers function.

How is Generative AI Changing Contact Centers?

The fear that advances in AI will lead to a decrease in employment among inferior human workers has a long and storied pedigree. Still, thus far the march of technological progress has tended to increase the number (and remuneration) of available jobs on the market.

Far from rendering human analysts obsolete, personal computers are now a major and growing source of new work (though, we confess, much less of it is happening on typewriters than before.)

Nevertheless, once people got a look at what ChatGPT can do there arose a fresh surge of worry over whether, this time, the robots were finally going to take all of our jobs.

Wanting to know how generative pre-trained language models have actually impacted the functioning of contact centers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond looked at data from some 5,000 customer support agents using it in their day-to-day work.

Their paper, “Generative AI at Work”, found that generative AI had led to a marked increase in productivity, especially among the newest, least-knowledgable, and lowest-performing workers.

The authors advanced the remarkable hypothesis that this might stem from the fact that LLMs are good at internalizing and disseminating the hard-won tacit knowledge of the best workers. They didn’t get much out of generative AI, in other words, precisely because they already had what they needed to perform well; but some fraction of their skill – such as how to phrase responses delicately to avoid offending irate customers – was incorporated into the LLM, where it was more accessible by less-skilled workers than it was when it was locked away in the brains of high-skilled workers.

What’s more, the organizations studied also changed as a result. Employees (especially lower-skilled ones) were generally more satisfied, less prone to burnout, and less likely to leave. Turnover was reduced, and customers escalated calls to supervisors less frequently.

Now, we hasten to add that of course this is just one study, and we’re in the early days of the generative AI revolution. No one can say with certainty what the long-term impact will be. Still, these are extremely promising early results, and lend credence to the view that generative AI will do a lot to improve the way contact centers onboard new hires, resolve customer issues, and function overall.

What are the Dangers of Using ChatGPT for Customer Service?

We’ve been singing the praises of ChatGPT and talking about all the ways in which it’s helping contact center managers run a tighter ship.

But, as with every technological advance stretching clear back to the discovery of fire, there are downsides. To help you better use generative AI, we’ll spend the next few sections talking about some characteristic failure modes you should be looking out for.

Hallucinations

By now, it’s fairly common knowledge that ChatGPT will just make things up. This is a consequence of the way LLMs like ChatGPT are trained. Remember, the model doesn’t contain a little person inside of it that’s checking statements for accuracy; it’s just taking the tokens it has seen so far and predicting the tokens that will come next.

That means if you ask it for a list of book recommendations to study lepidoptery or the naval battles of the Civil War (we don’t know what you’re into), there’s a pretty good chance that the list it provides will contain a mix of real and fake books.

ChatGPT has been known to invent facts, people, papers (complete with citations), URLs, and plenty else.

If you’re going to have customers interacting with it, or you’re going to have your contact center agents relying on it in a substantial way, this is something you’ll need to be aware of.

Degraded Performance

ChatGPT is remarkably performant, but it’s still just a machine learning model and machine learning models are known to suffer from model degradation.

This term refers to gradual or precipitous declines in model performance over time. There are technical reasons why this occurs, but from your perspective, you need to understand that the work has only begun once a model has been trained and put into production.

But you’re also not out of the woods if you’re accessing ChatGPT via an API, because you have just as little visibility into what’s happening on OpenAI’s engineering teams as the rest of us do.

If OpenAI releases an update you might suddenly find that ChatGPT fails in usual ways or trips over tasks it was handling very well last week. You’ll need to have robust monitoring in place so that you catch these issues if they arise, as well as an engineering team able to address the root cause.

Model degradation often stems from issues with the underlying data. This means that if you’ve e.g. trained ChatGPT to answer questions you might have to assemble new data for it to train on, a process that takes time and money and should be budgeted for.

Harassment and Bias

You could argue that harassment, bias, and harmful language are a kind of degraded performance, but they’re distinct and damaging enough to warrant their own section.

When Microsoft first released Sydney it was cartoonishly unhinged. It would lie, threaten, and manipulate users; in one case, it confessed both its love for a New York Times reporter along with its desire to engineer dangerous viruses and ignite internecine arguments between people.

All this has gotten much better, of course, but the same behavior can manifest in subtler ways, especially if someone is deliberately trying to jailbreak a large language model.

Thanks to extensive public testing and iteration, the current versions of the technology are very good at remaining polite, avoiding stereotyping, etc. Nevertheless, we’re not aware of any way to positively assure that no bias, deceit, or nastiness will emerge from ChatGPT.

This is another place where you’ll have to carefully monitor your model’s output and make corrections as necessary.

Using LLMs in your Contact Center

If you’re running a contact center, you owe it to yourself to at least check out ChatGPT. Whether it makes sense for you will depend on your unique circumstances, but it’s a remarkable new technology that could help you make your agents more effective while reducing turnover.

Quiq offers a white-glove platform that makes it easy to leverage conversational AI. Schedule a demo with us to see how we can help you incorporate generative AI into your contact center today!

Before You Develop a Mobile App For Your Business—Read This

Posted on May 12, 2023November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

Remember when every business was coming out with an app? Your favorite clothing brand, that big retail chain, your neighborhood grocery store, and even your babysitter jumped on the bandwagon and claimed real estate on their customers’ mobile devices.

It probably made you think: Do we need an app for our business?

Despite the many benefits of an app, diving headfirst into development can drain your team’s time and resources without the guarantee of a return. Done poorly, it can even hinder your customer experience. Before you do any mobile app development, you need a plan.

This article will take you through some of the lessons learned from working with brands that deliver world-class experiences within apps and beyond.

Why do companies build apps?

Apps are powerful marketing tools for all kinds of businesses—and none more than e-commerce. Here are some of the top reasons why businesses build an app.

A place for loyal customers.

Almost by default, a mobile app is an exclusive space for your loyal customers. Think about the last time you downloaded an app. It probably wasn’t for a business you buy from once a year. It’s almost always a brand you follow closely or a service you use frequently.

Providing an app is basically like creating a direct line of communication with your best customers. You can create exclusive content, provide a better shopping experience, and unlock early access to products and services. Apps are great ways to turn good customers into great ones.

Mobile device real estate.

On average, Americans check their phones 344 times per day—or once every 4 minutes. And 88% of the time we spend on our phones is spent in apps, according to Business Insider. Having your brand logo as an icon on your customers’ home screens is invaluable real estate.

Push notifications.

When customers have push notifications turned on, it’s another way to speak directly to your customers. Push notifications are great engagement tools, and you can connect with customers using timely and personalized communications and ultimately drive in-app sales.

Beating out or keeping up with competitors.

Standing out from the competition is another reason many businesses build apps. If your competitors are using apps to stand out from the crowd, then it often compels businesses to do the same.

What are the drawbacks of using building an app?

While mobile apps are still extremely popular, they have some major drawbacks for brands not ready to invest in them.

Phones are overcrowded.

Whereas building an app five years ago meant you stood out from the crowd, now you’re just one of many. People have an average of 80 apps on their phones, but they’re only using around nine a day.

Basically, that means mobile users are downloading apps and not using them on a regular basis. In fact, 25% of apps are used once and then never opened again, according to Statista.

Having an app doesn’t guarantee your customers’ attention or engagement—that’s still up to your marketing team.

There’s a big upfront investment.

Whether you enlist the help of your development team or outsource app creation, it’s a big lift. Getting a mobile app up and running takes significant resources, and while there may be a return on investment, it isn’t guaranteed.

When you’re already overwhelmed with your current development efforts, adding another microsite to manage could just make it worse.

You’ll double your marketing efforts.

More push notifications, more campaigns, more content. An app just means you have to do more to see an increase in revenue. While it could be a valuable asset, there are other, smaller steps you can take that will help you see the same revenue boost without the exponential effort.

Can you deliver rich customer experiences without an app?

Yes! But don’t think we’re anti-app. In fact, a lot of our clients create great apps that are sticky because they provide ongoing value to their customers. These clients are able to reach a whole set of people in their moment of need and build trust as they continue to look to the app for help.

However, many of the marketing and customer service goals that drive businesses to create an app can be achieved through rich business messaging. Here are a few examples.

Want to speak directly to your customers? Try outbound SMS.

Push notifications are extremely effective at connecting with customers, but it only takes a few taps to turn them off.

A similar communication method is outbound SMS messaging. You can personalize messages and deliver real-time communications via text messaging. Plus, with rich messaging capabilities, you can send interactive media like images, cards, emojis, and videos to enhance every conversation.

Want to engage with your customers? Use Google Business Messages.

Get customers from Google directly in communication with your customer service agents using Google Business Messages.

Customers can tap a message button right from Google search to connect with your team. (And since 92% of searches start with Google, there’s a good chance your customers will take advantage of this feature.)

Learn More About the End of Google Business Messages

Want to enhance your customer experience? Use Apple Messages for Business.

If you’re after a branded experience and want to meet user expectations, Apple Messages for Business delivers. Apple device users can simply tap the message icon from Maps, Siri, Safari, Spotlight, or your company’s website and instantly connect with your team.

You’ll deliver a rich messaging experience, plus your branding upfront and center. Your company name, logo, and colors will be featured in the messaging app, delivering a fully branded experience for your customers.

Want to be more social? Connect Quiq with social platforms.

Clients using Quiq are uniquely equipped with a conversational engagement platform that provides rich experiences to users across chat and business messaging channels.

This means that companies can provide content-rich, personalized experiences across SMS/text business messaging, web chat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Your brand can be on social platforms without working across them. Quiq gives your team access to all these messaging channels within one easy-to-use message center. So, unlike an app, adding more channels doesn’t necessarily increase the workload. It just gives your customers more ways to connect with you.

Should you consider business messaging over an app?

There’s no either/or choice here. Both can be part of a thriving marketing and customer service strategy. But if you’re looking for a way to engage your customers and haven’t tried business messaging—start there.

If you’re on the fence, consider this:

You don’t have to build an app—you only have to implement business messaging.
Customers don’t have to download and learn anything to connect with you. Business messaging is right there in communication channels they already know and love, like texting and social media.

Engage customers with or without an app.

The main goal of most apps is to help build long-term relationships with customers. Whether you choose to build an app or not, business messaging supports this goal by providing information, support, and help at the customer’s exact moment of need.

Quiq powers conversations between customers and companies across the most convenient and preferred engagement channels. With Quiq, you’ll have meaningful, timely, and personalized conversations with your customers that can be easily managed in a simplified UI.

Ready to see how business messaging can help you engage your customers with or without an app? Request a demo or try it for yourself today.

Agent Efficiency: How to Collect Better Metrics

Posted on April 12, 2023November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Your contact center experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. A positive customer experience can nudge them toward a purchase, encourage repeat business, or turn them into loyal brand advocates.

But a bad run-in with your contact center? That can turn them off of your business for life.

No matter your industry, customer service plays a vital role in financial success. While it’s easy to look at your contact center as an operational cost, it’s truly an investment in the future of your business.

To maximize your return on investment, your contact center must continually improve. That means tracking contact center effectiveness and agent efficiency is critical.

But before you make any changes, you need to understand how your customer service center currently operates. What’s working? What needs improvement? And what needs to be cut?

Let’s examine how contact centers can measure customer service performance and boost efficiency.

What metrics should you monitor?

The world of contact center metrics is overwhelming—to say the least. There are hundreds of data points to track to assess customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness, and call center success.

But to make meaningful improvements, you need to begin with a few basic metrics. Here are three to start with.

1. Response time.

Response time refers to how long, on average, it takes for a customer to reach an agent. Reducing the amount of time it takes to respond to customers can increase customer satisfaction and prevent customer abandonment.

Response time is a top factor for customer satisfaction, with 83% expecting to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

When using response time to measure agent efficiency, have different target goals set for different channels. For example, a customer calling in or using web chat will expect an immediate response, while an email may have a slightly longer turnaround. Typically, messaging channels like SMS text fall somewhere in between.

If you want to measure how often your customer service team meets your target response times, you can also track your service level. This metric is the percentage of messages and calls answered by customer service agents within your target time frame.

2. Agent occupancy.

Agent occupancy is the amount of time an agent spends actively occupied on a customer interaction. It’s a great way to quickly measure how busy your customer service team is.

An excessively low occupancy suggests you’ve hired more agents than contact volume demands. At the same time, an excessively high occupancy may lead to agent burnout and turnover, which have their own negative effects on efficiency.

3. Customer satisfaction.

The most important contact center performance metric, customer satisfaction, should be your team’s main focus. Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, typically asks customers one question: How satisfied are you with your experience?

Customers respond using a numerical scale to rate their experience from very dissatisfied (0 or 1) to very satisfied (5). However, the range can vary based on your business’s preferences.

You can calculate CSAT scores using this formula:

Number of satisfied customers ÷ total number of respondents x 100 = CSAT

CSAT’s a great first metric to measure since it’s extremely important in measuring your agents’ effectiveness, and it’s easy for customers to complete.

There are lots of options for measuring different aspects of customer satisfaction, like customer effort score and Net Promoter Score®. Whichever you choose, ensure you use it consistently for continuous customer input.

Bonus tip: Capturing customer feedback and agent performance data is easier with contact center software. Not only can the software help with customer relationship management, but it can facilitate customer surveys, track agent data, and more.

How to assess contact center metrics.

Once you’ve measured your current customer center operations, you can start assessing and taking action to improve performance and boost customer satisfaction. But looking at the data isn’t as easy as it seems. Here are some things to keep in mind as you start to base decisions on your numbers.

Figure out your reporting methods.

How will you gather this information? What timeframes will you measure? Who’s included in your measurements? These are just a few questions you need to answer before you can start analyzing your data.

Contact center software, or even more advanced conversational AI platforms like Quiq, can help you track metrics and even put together reports that are ready for your management team to analyze and take action on.

Analyze data over time.

When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to contextualize your data. You need benchmarks to know whether your CSAT rating or occupancy rates are good or bad. While you can start with industry benchmarks, the most effective way to analyze data is to measure it against yourself over periods of time.

It takes months or even years for trends to reveal themselves. Start with comparative measurements and then work your way up. Month-over-month data or even quarter-over-quarter can give you small windows into what’s working and what’s not working. Just leave the big department-wide changes until you’ve collected enough data for it to be meaningful.

Don’t forget about context.

You can’t measure contact center metrics in a silo. Make sure you look at what’s going on throughout your organization and in the industry as a whole before making any changes. For example, a drop in customer response time might have to do with the influx of messages caused by a faulty product.

While collecting the data is easy, analyzing it and drawing conclusions is much more difficult. Keep the whole picture in mind when making any important decisions.
How to improve call center agent efficiency.
Now that you have the numbers, you can start making changes to improve your agent efficiency. Start with these tips.

Make incremental changes.

Don’t be tempted to make wide-reaching changes across your entire contact center team when you’re not happy with the data. Select specific metrics to target and make incremental changes that move the needle in the right direction.

For example, if your agent occupancy rates are high, don’t rush to add new members to your team. Instead, see what improvements you can make to agent efficiency. Maybe there’s some call center software you can invest in that’ll improve call turnover. Or perhaps all your team needs is some additional training on how to speed up their customer interactions. No matter what you do, track your changes.

Streamline backend processes.

Agents can’t perform if they’re constantly searching for answers on slow intranets or working with outdated information. Time spent fighting with old technology is time not spent serving your contact center customers.

Now’s the perfect time to consider a conversational platform that allows your customers to reach out using the preferred channel but still keeps the backend organized and efficient for your team.

Agents can bounce back and forth between messaging channels without losing track of conversations. Customers get to chat with your brand how they want, where they want, and your team gets to preserve the experience and deliver snag-free customer service.

Improve agent efficiency with Quiq’s Conversational AI Platform

If you want to improve your contact center’s efficiency and customer satisfaction ratings, Quiq’s conversational customer engagement software is your new best friend.

Quiq’s software enables agents to manage multiple conversations simultaneously and message customers across channels, including text and web chat. By giving customers more options for engaging with customer service, Quiq reduces call volume and allows contact center agents to focus on the conversations with the highest priority.

The Rise of Conversational AI: Why Businesses Are Embracing It

Posted on March 16, 2023November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

Movies may have twisted our expectations of artificial intelligence—either giving us extremely high expectations or making us think it’s ready to wipe out humanity.

But the reality isn’t on those levels. In fact, you’re already using AI in your daily life—but it’s so ingrained in your technology you probably don’t even notice. Netflix and Spotify both use AI to personalize your content recommendations. Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use it as well.

Conversational AI, like what Quiq uses to power our chatbots, takes artificial intelligence to the next level. See what it is and how you can use it in your business.

What is conversational AI?

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is a collection of technologies that create a human-like experience. It combines natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and other technologies to enhance streamlined conversations. This can be used in many applications, like chatbots and voice (like Siri and Alexa). The most common use case for conversational AI in the business-to-customer world is through an AI chatbot messaging experience.

Unlike rule-based chatbots, those powered by conversational AI generate responses and adapt to user behavior over time. Rule-based chatbots were also limited to what you put in them—meaning if someone phrased a question differently than you wrote it (or used slang/colloquialisms/etc.), it wouldn’t understand the question. Conversational AI can also help chatbots understand more complex questions.

Putting technical terms in context.

Companies throw around a lot of technical terms when it comes to artificial intelligence, so here are what they mean and how they’re used to improve your business.

Rules-based chatbots: Earlier chatbot iterations (and some current low-cost versions) work mainly through pre-defined rules. Your business (or service provider) writes specific guidelines for the chatbot to follow. For example, when a customer says “Hi,” the chatbot responds, “Hello, how may I help you?”

Another example is when a customer asks about a return. The chatbot is programmed to give a specific response, like, “Here’s a link to the return policy.”

However, the problem with rule-based chatbots is that they can be limiting. It only knows how to handle situations based on the information programmed into it. So if someone says, “I don’t like this product, what can I do?” and you haven’t planned for that question, the chatbot won’t have a response.

Machine learning: Machine learning is a way to combat the problem posed above. Instead of giving the chatbot specific parameters complete with pre-written questions and answers, machine learning helps chatbots make decisions based on the information provided.

Machine learning helps chatbots adapt over time based on customer conversations. Instead of giving the bot specific ways to answer specific questions, you show it the basic rules, and it crafts its own response. Plus, since it means your chatbot is always learning, it gets better the longer you use it.

Natural language processing: As humans and speakers of the English language, we know that there are different ways to ask every question. For example, a customer who wants to know when an item is back in stock may ask, “When is X back in stock?” or they might say, “When will you get X back in?” or even, “When are you restocking X?” Those three questions all mean the same thing, and as humans, we naturally understand that. But a rules-based bot must be told that those mean the same things, or they might not understand it.

Natural language processing (NLP) uses AI technology to help chatbots understand that those questions are all asking the same thing. It also can determine what information it needs to answer your question, like color, size, etc.

NLP also helps chatbots answer questions in a more human-like way. If you want your chatbot to sound more human (and you should), then find one that uses NLP.

Web-based SDK: A web-based SDK (that’s a software development kit for non-developers) is a set of tools and resources developers use to integrate programs (in this case, chatbots) into websites and web-based applications.

What does this mean for your chatbot? Context. When a user says, “I need help with my order,” the chatbot can use NLP to identify “help” and “order.” Then it can look back at previous conversations, pull the customers’ order history, and more—if the data is there.

Contextual conversations are everything in customer service—so this is a big factor in building a successful chatbot using conversational AI. In fact, 70% of customers expect anyone they’re speaking with to have the full context. With a web-based SDK, your chatbot can do that too.

The benefits of conversational AI.

Using chatbots with conversational AI provides benefits across your business, but the clearest wins are in your contact center. Here are three ways chatbots improve your customer service.

24/7 customer support.

Your customer service agents need to sleep, but your conversational AI chatbot doesn’t. A chatbot can answer questions and contain customer issues while your contact center is closed. Any issues they can’t solve, they can pass along to your agents the next day. Not only does that give your customers 24/7 service, but your agents will have less of a backlog when they return to work.

Faster response times.

When your agents are inundated with customers, an AI chatbot can pick up the slack. Send your chatbot in to greet customers immediately, let them know the wait time, or even start collecting information so your agents can get to the root of the problem faster. Chatbots powered with AI can also answer questions and solve easy customer issues, skipping human agents altogether.

For more ways AI chatbots can improve your customer service, read this >

More present customer service agents.

Chatbots can handle low-level customer queries and give agents the time and space to handle more complex issues. Not only will this result in better customer service, but agents will be happier and less stressed overall.

Plus, chatbots can scale during your busy seasons. You’ll save on costs since you won’t have to hire more agents, and the agents you have won’t be overworked.

How to make the most of AI technology.

Unfortunately, you can’t just plug and play with conversational AI and expect to become an AI company. Just like any other technology, it takes prep work and thoughtful implementation to get it right—plus lots of iterations.

Use these tips to make the most of AI technology:

Decide on your AI goals.

How are you planning on using conversational AI? Will it be for marketing? Customer service? All of the above? Think about what your main goals are and use that information to select the right AI partner.

Choose the right conversational AI platform.

Once you’ve decided on how you want to use conversational AI, select the right partner to help you get there. Think about aspects like ease of use, customization, scalability, and budget.

Design your chatbot interactions.

Even with artificial intelligence, you still have to put the work in upfront. What you do and how you do it will vary greatly depending on which platform you go with. Design your chatbot conversations with these things in mind:

Your brand voice
Personalization
Customer service best practices
Logical conversation flows
Concise messages

Build a partnership between agents and chatbots.

Don’t launch the chatbot independently of your customer service agents. Include them in the training and launch, and start to build a working relationship between the two. Agents and chatbots can work together on customer issues, both popping in and out of the conversation seamlessly. For example, a chatbot can collect information from the customer upfront and pass it to the agent to solve the issue. Then, when the agent is done, they can bring the chatbot back in to deliver a customer survey.

Test and refine.

Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know until it happens. Test your chatbot before it launches, but don’t stop there. Keep refining your conversations even after you’ve launched.

What does the future hold for conversational AI?

There are many exciting things happening in AI right now, and we’re only on the cusp of delving into what it can really do.

The big prediction? For now, conversational AI will keep getting better at what it’s already doing. More human-like interactions, better problem-solving, and more in-depth analysis.

In fact, 75% of customers believe AI will become more natural and human-like over time. Gartner is also predicting big things for conversational AI, saying by 2026, conversational AI deployments within contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion.

Why should you jump in now when bigger things are coming? It’s simple. You’ll learn to master conversational AI tools ahead of your competitors and earn an early competitive advantage.

How Quiq does conversational AI.

To ensure you give your customers the best experience, Quiq powers our entire platform with conversational AI. Here are a few stand-out ways Quiq uniquely improves your customer service with conversational AI.

Design customized chatbot conversations.

Create chatbot conversations so smooth and intuitive that it feels like you’re talking to a real person. Using the best conversational AI techniques, Quiq’s chatbot gives customers quick and intelligent responses for an up-leveled customer experience.

Help your agents respond to customers faster.

Make your agents more efficient with Quiq Compose. Quiq Compose uses conversational AI to suggest responses to customer questions. How? It uses information from similar conversations in the past to craft the best response.

Empower agent performance.

Tools like our Adaptive Response Timer (ADT) prioritizes conversations based on how fast or slow customers respond. The conversational AI platform also uses AI to analyze customer sentiment to give extra attention to customers who need it.

This is just the beginning.

This is just a taste of what conversational AI can do. See how Quiq can apply the latest technology to your contact center to help you deliver exceptional customer service.

Does Your Chatbot Sound Robotic? 7 Ways to Fix It

Posted on March 7, 2023November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

Does your chatbot sound like a robot?

Okay, chatbots are robots (hence the name), but they don’t have to sound like something out of a 70s sci-fi flick.

Chatbots have come a long way and are getting better at understanding and mimicking human interactions. According to Zendesk’s CX Trends 2023 report, 65% of leaders believe the AI/bots they use are becoming more natural and human-like.

It turns out customers agree. Sixty-nine percent who seek support find themselves asking bots a wider range of questions than before. But companies are still struggling to keep up with customers’ AI expectations.

Seventy-five percent of customers think AI should be able to provide the same level of service as human agents, and 75% expect AI interactions will become more natural and human-like over time.

So if your bot is still sounding a little wooden (or metallic), your customer satisfaction could be taking a hit. Here are some ways to make your chatbot sound more human.

But first, should chatbots sound human?

We think so. Yet, there’s a difference between making your bot sound human and pretending your bot is a human. No matter how advanced your chatbot is, we always recommend full transparency to our customers.

While chatbots can be as much a part of your team as your human agents, there are definitely limits to what they can do. If you don’t introduce your chatbot as such, customers might feel like you’re trying to trick them. And in today’s landscape, customer trust is everything.

Now back to the fun stuff.

1. Name your chatbot.

Amazon has Alexa, Apple has Siri, and Iron Man has Jarvis (and Friday). Chatbots and AI are instantly more relatable when you stop calling them bots.

We worked with Daily Harvest to develop their chatbot, aptly named Sage. Sage fields common questions and gathers data for conversations with human agents. Sage also helps minimize the stress on the Daily Harvest customer service team by containing 60% of conversations. While containment (where customers’ conversations aren’t transferred to a human agent) isn’t the goal, it’s good to know customers are gaining enough valuable information for Sage to resolve their own questions.

2. Consider putting a face to your AI.

Admittedly, this tip is controversial. Do Alexa and Siri have faces? No, that’d be weird. But they’re associated with objects already. Since your chatbot lives on the screen, giving it a face isn’t a bad idea.

Consider giving your bot a friendly avatar. It doesn’t have to be a literal face. It can be an icon, an inanimate object, an animal, or whatever represents your brand. Go with your gut on this one—it can really go either way.

Here’s a bad example:

3. Give your chatbot some personality.

What’s the first thing human agents do when they start a new chat? They introduce themselves! Your chatbot should do the same. On the first message, have your chatbot introduce themselves, say they’re a chatbot/virtual assistant/virtual agent/etc, and ask how they can help.

Beyond introductions, include some casual language in your chatbot’s script. Instead of “What’s your question?” say, “How can I help you today?”

Remember that your chatbot is an extension of your brand, so its personality should reflect it. If your brand is quirky and whimsical, infuse that language into your chatbot.

4. Teach your chatbot empathy.

Typically, low-tech chatbots can only repeat preprogrammed phrases. However, humans adapt to mood, personality, and behavior. To make your chatbot really feel more friendly and human-like, it needs to be able to do the same.

Look for a chatbot that Interprets questions through natural language processing (NLP) to determine how to answer it. NLP allows bots to pick up on human speech patterns in a much more sophisticated way.

You can also add empathetic language to various points in the chatbot script. Phrases like “I understand” and “I’m sorry to hear that” go a long way in soothing customer frustrations.

5. Give your chatbot context.

Start with the customer’s name. Whether the customer already has a profile or you program the chatbot to ask for it, have your chatbot use the customer’s name in conversation. But don’t stop there.

Context makes conversations go a lot smoother, whether with a chatbot or with a human agent. Program your bot to pull in context from your customer’s web behavior into the conversation. For example, if a customer has been looking at Hawaiian vacations, have the bot ask if they need help with their trip to the islands.

Context will make the conversation flow more naturally and give your customers a better overall experience.

6. Make your chatbot and human agents a team.

The human-like quality of understanding shouldn’t be underestimated in a chatbot. Having a bot that understands what a customer is asking—and knows when to bring in reinforcements—is key to a great customer experience.

Instead of trying to replace your human agents, make your chatbot and agents a team. Jewelry retailer Blue Nile is a great example of how chatbots and humans can work together to elevate the customer experience.

Blue Nile’s initial chatbot attempt routed customers all across the company without considering what they were asking. Customers looking to buy were sent to service reps instead of sales, and vice versa.

So the dazzling diamond dealer worked with Quiq to create a much more intuitive and human-like chatbot. A better chat experience led to 70% more sales interactions and a 35% conversion rate.

7. Combine logic and rules for a more responsive experience.

Low-tech chatbots might ask you to write responses for a specific chain of events. For example, your customer mentions a return, the chatbot pulls up return directions, the problem is resolved. That’s chatbot logic.

But one thing a human has that many chatbots lack is the ability to pick up on queues and respond accordingly.

With AI-enhanced chatbots, you can also define specialty rules for your chatbot to follow. Going back to our return example, most are simple and straightforward. Sometimes, however, a customer is extremely unhappy with the product or service and needs extra attention. AI chatbots, like Quiq’s, can use sentiment analysis to pick up on customer behavior to identify an unhappy customer (or whichever other sentiment you choose) and reroute to a human agent.

This way, you don’t have a cheery chatbot irritating your already irate customer.

Embrace AI to humanize your chatbot.

Humanizing your chatbot comes down to two factors:

A dedicated effort to give your chatbot personality
The AI technology to make it happen

With both those components, you can make your chatbot sound more human and embrace it as part of your customer service team.

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Quiq Compose: Learning the Language of your Contact Center

Posted on February 22, 2023November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Hi! I’m Kyle, Head of AI Engineering at Quiq, and I’m excited to share our latest product with you: Quiq Compose!

What is Quiq Compose?

Quiq Compose is generative AI technology that provides your agents with adaptive, contextually relevant response suggestions. The result? Agents spend less time typing and more time helping customers!

How does it work?

Compose learns by studying past conversations. Every message sent by live agents represents a teachable moment for AI. The AI’s job is to learn a mapping from the context in which the agent authored the message to the message content that was ultimately sent.

The context refers not only to prior messages in the conversation (including outbound notifications and prior bot interactions), but also to important non-conversational data like whether or not we know the customer’s email address, the time of year, and more. By providing Compose with a complete view of the context, we enable it to generate more accurate responses.

How does it compare to other LLM technology?

Since the release of ChatGPT, the world has been abuzz about LLMs and their capabilities. Compose uses the same underlying technology as ChatGPT (transformers), but there are some important differences to consider:

Compose has a much smaller scope of language that it needs to learn compared to a general-purpose model like ChatGPT. This enables us to train AI that is more lightweight and cost-effective
Compose is trained specifically on your data with the option to skew training to act more like some agents and less like others. It will learn important phone numbers and URLs that a general-purpose LLM won’t know about
Compose has a more explicit understanding of rich messaging concepts (e.g. payment messages) and non-conversational (CRM) data
General LLMs may exhibit overconfidence as a result of their eagerness to complete your prompt, whereas Compose simply remains silent in situations where it’s unconfident
Compose doesn’t require an integration. It can learn from any conversations that occur within the Quiq platform.
Compose has important enterprise features such as full control over the AI’s vocabulary, support for the isolation of different brands within a single business, SOC2 compliance, and more.

In short, Compose is laser-focused on learning the language of your contact center and streamlining live agent workflows in digital CX.

The Journey

At Quiq, we’re always working hard to bridge the gap between the latest AI breakthroughs and cost-effective solutions that are ready for enterprise deployment, and Compose is no exception. We’ve spent more than a year adapting cutting-edge AI algorithms to digital CX and rich messaging use cases and are proud of the impact it’s had on our customers to date.

Learn more about Compose here.

7 Ways AI Chatbots Improve Customer Service

Posted on January 18, 2023November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

If you’ve been using business messaging for a while, you know easy and convenient it is for your customers—and its impact on your customer service team’s output.

With Quiq’s robust messaging platform, it’s easy for contact centers to manage customer conversations while boosting conversion rates, increasing engagement, and reducing costs. But our little slice of digital nirvana only gets better when you add chatbots into the mix.

Enter the business messaging bot. Bots can help increase your agent productivity while delivering an even better customer experience.

We’re diving into seven times business messaging bots made a customer conversation faster and better.

1. Collect customer information upfront.

Let’s say, for example, you own an airline with a great reward program. With Quiq, you can create a bot that greets all your customers right away and asks them to enter their rewards number if they have one.

This “reward bot” will use the information gathered to help recognize platinum-status members—your most elite program. The reward bot reroutes platinum members to a special VIP queue where wait times are shorter and they receive higher support. This is done consistently and without hesitation. Your platinum members don’t have to wade through the customer service queue. It makes them feel more valued and more likely to continue flying with you in the future.

The reward bot can also collect other information, such as confirmation numbers for reservations, updated email addresses, or contact numbers. All of this data gathering can be done before a human agent steps into the conversation. The support chatbot has done the work to arm the agent with the information they need to deliver better service.

2. Decrease customer abandonment.

Acknowledging customers with a fast, friendly greeting lets them know they’ve started on a path to resolution. Agents may be busy with other conversations (we’ve seen agents handle upwards of eight at a time), but that doesn’t mean the customer can’t start engaging with your business. A support chatbot can greet customers immediately while agents are busy.

Instead of waiting in a stagnant queue over the phone or trying to talk to a live chat agent (also known as web chat) who has disappeared, a bot can send a welcome message and let the customer know when they’ll receive a response from a human agent.

3. Get faster, more accurate customer responses.

Remember the last time you had to spell your name out over the phone or repeat your birthday again and again because the call bot couldn’t pick it up? Conversational chatbots eliminate that frustration and ensure it collects fast and accurate information from the customer every time.

Over messaging, the customer can see the data they’re providing and confirm right away if there’s an error. The customer can at least reference the information and catch any typos in their email address or that they’ve provided their old phone number. It happens.

4. Prioritize customer conversations.

In our above example, the reward bot was able to recognize platinum rewards members so they could get the perks that came with their membership. Chatbots can help you prioritize conversations in other ways too.

For example, you can set rules within Quiq to recognize keywords such as “buy” or “purchase” to prioritize customers who may need help with a transaction. Depending on the situation, the platform can prioritize that conversation (likely with high purchase intent) over a password reset or return.

A chatbot platform like Quiq can also use natural language processing (NLP) to predict customer sentiment and prioritize based on that. That way, you can identify a frustrated customer and bump them up in the queue to handle the problem before it escalates.

5. Get customers to the right place.

Chatbots can help route customers to the appropriate department, agent, or even another support bot for help. Much like a call routing system (but more sophisticated), a chatbot can identify a customer’s problem and save them from bouncing around between support agents.

The simplest example is when a bot greets customers and asks, “What can I help you with today?” The bot can either present the user with several options or let them state their problem. A customer can then be routed directly to the support agent best fit for solving their problem.

This also eliminates the need for customers to repeat themselves at each step of the way. Instead of having to explain their situation to the call router and then again to the service agent, the chatbot hands off the messages to the human agent. The agent already knows the problem and can start searching for a solution right away.

6. Reschedule appointments.

Appointment scheduling and rescheduling is a time-consuming and frustrating process. Chatbots can help you reduce delays, ensuring customers avoid back-and-forth emails and long hold times just to move an appointment.

With Quiq business messaging, you can present customers with available dates and times. Customers can choose and confirm a date from available calendar options.

A support chatbot with the right integrations can help present customers with available dates to choose from and schedule the selected appointment.

7. Collect feedback for even more improvement.

Businesses shouldn’t underestimate the power of feedback. Believing you know what customers want and actually asking them can lead to completely different results. Yet, the biggest roadblock to collecting feedback is distributing the survey at the moment when it counts.

A support chatbot can ensure every customer service interaction is followed up with a survey. You can program the bot to send unique surveys based on the conversation and get specific feedback on the spot. Collecting that survey information and putting it into place will help your team improve.

Take the Leap with Quiq.

Implementing customer service chatbots within your organization may seem intimidating now, but Quiq can help you navigate it. We can help you orchestrate bots throughout your organization, whether you need one or many.

With Quiq, you can design conversational experiences your customers will love. Once you create a bot, you can run it across all of our supported channels to deliver a consistent experience no matter where your customers are.

11 Ways to Navigate High Call Volumes

Posted on January 13, 2023November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

There are some high call volume spikes you can prepare for—like the holidays or a new product launch—and some you can’t.

When you get a sudden spike in calls, it can feel like the sky is falling. Your support team is overwhelmed with calls and struggling not to let it show in customer interactions.

While there are some things you can do when you’re in the thick of it, planning now for those intermittent spikes is the best way to set your team up for success.

And it all comes down to doing more with less, so you can make the most of finite agent resources while improving customer service.

Let’s look at what you can do now and in the future to prepare for unexpectedly high call volumes.

1. Dive into the data.

Unexpected call volume spikes always seem out of the blue—but are they really? Besides the obvious and expected busy periods (the holidays, the January return season, and new product launches), other reasons could trigger your support center surge.

Look at your call center data to see if there’s a rhyme or reason to your surges. Do they follow the busy season? Do they happen after new influencer launches? Do they align with college semesters?

Even if you can’t find any hard-and-fast patterns, maybe the data can help you with scheduling.

2. Optimize customer service agents’ schedules.

There’s something to be said for strategic scheduling. Poor scheduling can make a normal call day feel like a torrent. Take a look at what time of day your call volume peaks, and pull agents from other shifts to cover it.

More than that, you can get more granular by scheduling agents based on their strengths and abilities.

Move agents with faster resolution times to the busiest part of your day, and put agents with a slower, more methodical approach during your off time.

You can also schedule agents based on their specialties. For instance, if you’re dealing with a high volume of returns, make sure your team members with the most experience doing returns are working.

3. Cross-train other staff.

A great short-term solution to call volume spikes is to have additional staff you can call on to help. Cross-training a few team members on customer service means they’ll be ready to go when you need them most.

Call volumes aside, things happen. A bug can work its way through your customer service team, hiring can take longer than expected, the works. Having staff you can call on to help goes a long way.

Additionally, cross-training staff from other teams can also help reduce customer service agents’ burnout. When employees constantly handle high volumes of calls, it can take a toll on their mental and physical well-being.

By rotating staff from other teams, you can ensure that customer service agents are not overworked and are able to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

4. Embrace asynchronous messaging.

Asynchronous messaging (sometimes called async messaging or asynchronous chat) allows customers to converse with brands as it is convenient for them. Think about text messaging. While you can have a live back-and-forth conversation, you can also send a message and receive a reply an hour or two later.

Asynchronous messaging lets customers respond at their leisure and gives your customer service agents some breathing room to answer questions. Since customer responses stagger, your customer service agents can manage conversations with multiple people—as many as 8 at one time. That’s something you can’t do with live support.

File this under the category of “not something you can implement when you’re in a pinch.”

While embracing asynchronous messaging enables your customer service agents to handle multiple conversations at once, you need a runway to implement and train your team on using it to the fullest. Managing asynchronous messaging also works best with a powerful conversational platform behind it, like Quiq.

5. Take advantage of predictive text.

Another advantage of adding messaging to your help center tech stack is the use of predictive text. If you can’t deflect calls enough to lighten your team’s load, then the best thing to do is make them more efficient.

A conversational platform with AI-enhancing capabilities can actually make your team faster. AI-powered snippets in Quiq’s platform, for example, can help predict responses and provide answers for agents to tweak, personalize, and send off. That way, instead of searching for the answers, customer service agents always have them at their fingertips.

6. Add call-to-text to your IVR.

There’s no doubt that phone conversations take more of your agents’ time than messaging. Although you can’t keep customers from making phone calls to your help center, you can encourage them to message.

Most customers hang up after being on hold for 90 seconds, so when your call center is slammed, your customer satisfaction rates can plummet. Instead, give them the option to take the conversation to messaging.

Call-to-text can work through SMS text messaging or WhatsApp. Customers who don’t want to wait to get live support can get their answers via messaging as they go about their day. It’ll give your call center some much-needed relief.

7. Outsource some of your calls.

When under pressure, you can always look for an outside team to pick up the slack temporarily.

Make sure you set them up for success by putting together your best practices, important product knowledge, and policies and procedures. While you may not have time to thoroughly train them in the short term, they can help in a pinch.

8. Implement a queue system.

Whether you stick with calls or add messaging to your customer service feature, implementing an automated (and intelligent) queue management system can manage high volumes.

Ideally, the system can let customers know how long they should expect to remain on hold and give them other options to contact customer service if they don’t want to wait. This can include call-to-text as we mentioned earlier, but it should also include options like receiving a callback or sending an email.

9. Make ai chatbots a part of your team.

Chatbots aren’t going to replace your team, but they can support it. If you’ve made the leap to messaging, leaning on AI-enhanced chatbots can lighten the load on your team. There are several ways chatbots can help you do more with less:

Charge your chatbot with answering basic questions: When call volume is high, use your team to answer the more complex questions and have a chatbot answer the easy ones.
Collect information upfront: Chatbots can help gather information and route calls to the right agent to cut down on service time.
Walk customers through troubleshooting: If the reason for your call volume spike is a product issue, use chatbots to walk customers through the first few phases of troubleshooting. If the problem persists, then a customer service agent can pick up where the bot left off.

10. Proactively get ahead of problems.

Take care of issues before they reach your call center. While you can’t anticipate every problem and prevent people from calling altogether (nor should you), you can get ahead of issues.

Sometimes it’s as simple as putting your return policy in a more easily accessible place on your website. Or when a product issue arises, send emails and outbound text messages to address it before it blows up your call center.

Being upfront and transparent with customers will prevent a lot of anger and frustration before it gets to your call center.

11. Scale up when you need to.

As efficient as you are, there are times when you’ll need to scale up your help center quickly. If a volume spike turns into a sustained deluge, then it might be time to look at the budget and see if hiring additional support is feasible.

Manage high-volume calls with Quiq.

Predict high-volume call spikes when you can, and turn to Quiq when you can’t. Quiq’s Conversational AI platform can help you improve efficiency across the board—and especially during busy periods. Let agent overwhelm become a thing of the past and start improving your customer service strategy now.

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.

How Messaging Delivers a Modern Customer Experience

Posted on November 23, 2022November 15, 2024 Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Customer service has moved from call centers to contact centers—and they’ve gone next-gen. Technology has seen rapid growth over the last few years, and your customers’ expectations have grown with them.

Nothing has made this clearer than messaging’s rise as the ultimate customer service channel.

Keep reading to see how messaging delivers a modern customer service experience.

What customer service looks like at the end of 2022.

We’re at the end of 2022 and 2023 is coming up fast. Countless headlines threaten a looming recession (while others say it’s already here), you see inflation in every trip to the grocery store, and national conversations are filled with high emotions. The doom and gloom news cycle has everyone feeling down, and unfortunately, it’s spilling into everyday interactions with customer service.

The consumer mindset.

Expectedly, the current climate is affecting consumers across the board—and customer service teams are feeling it. According to Zendesk, 66% of companies report that customers are less patient when interacting with agents or service teams this year. What’s more, 18% of companies are more likely to report that customer satisfaction is somewhat or significantly below expectations than in 2021.

So, although we say it constantly, customer expectations truly are higher than ever. For contact centers, that generally means the need for faster response times, faster resolution times, and more one-touch resolutions.

Digital expectations remain high.

While businesses were forced to focus on digital customer service as in-person stores were closed during much of 2020, they’ve slacked off as the world returns to pre-pandemic lifestyles. Forrester’s US 2022 Customer Experience Index showed a 19% drop in CX across US consumer brands.

So while many consumers are returning to in-store shopping, they still expect the stellar service they received over the last two years. Anything less fails to meet expectations.

More conversations.

But there’s more at play than just speed. Customers are also looking for organic, conversational interactions. Zendesk reports that upwards of 70% of customers say they expect conversational experiences when interacting with brands.

What’s more conversational than messaging? Email has some formality (a holdover from its predecessor, letter writing), and phone calls require both parties to stop what they’re doing and focus on the one-to-one conversation. Messaging fits into the way people already have conversations—making it a natural next step in the evolution of modern customer service.

Messaging has revolutionized the customer experience.

There’s no doubt that messaging has changed the game when it comes to delivering a modern customer experience. It’s made customer service more accessible to younger generations who favor messaging over phone conversations, and it’s increased the speed at which contact centers can help customers.

Here are a few ways you can revolutionize your customer experience with messaging.

1. Deliver personalization with data.

One of the most frustrating things for customers is having to repeat their problems to every new person talk to in customer service. Plus, the rise of personalization has made access to customer databases a critical business need.

Opt for a conversational platform that integrates with the client databases (CRMs, ERPs, etc.) that you already use. Whether you use Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, etc., having easy access to customer information will help contact center agents personalize conversations and improve the customer experience.

2. Enhance conversations with AI.

How many chatbots have you encountered that felt like you were talking to a robot? Probably a fair amount. If you don’t ask your question the right way or put your answer in the right format, it’s all over. Basic chatbots rarely understand the nuances of human language, and they aren’t able to read context to make sense of a conversation.

But AI-enhanced chatbots aren’t like the others. Chatbots like Quiq’s use Natural Language Processing (NPL) to identify customer intent and base the conversation in the right context. This means more natural conversations between bots and customers and less of a strain on your contact support team.

3. Uplevel conversations with rich messages.

Messaging is more than a replacement for phone conversations—it’s a way to create rich, modern customer experiences. Rich messaging is an advanced form of text messaging that lets you send more visually engaging and interactive messages.

Instead of sending a message with a link to your website—where it’s easy for customers to get lost or distracted—you can send images and videos within the conversation. You can even securely complete the transactions right within the messaging app. Schedule appointments, send GIFs, or share high-resolution photos and videos—everything you need for modern customer service.

Optimize customer interactions with Quiq.

Meet the future of customer service head-on with Quiq’s Conversational AI Platform. Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via messaging, the channel your customers already use to connect with family and friends. With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, web chat, in-app, WhatsApp, and more for a more modern customer service experience.

If you want to learn how you can easily deliver the modern customer experience by connecting with your customers contact us for a short demo.

[Infographic] 9 Effective Call Center Strategies You Can’t Miss

Posted on November 10, 2022November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Effective call center strategies are essential to running a contact center. It’s not as simple as setting up a few phones and handing your team a script (although we’re sure no one has thought that since 2005). But it’s equally as likely that you’re so bogged down with managing the everyday realities that you can’t see the forest through the trees.

That is, you can’t see just how cluttered the contact center has become.

From staffing and training to managing operations and tracking KPIs, you spend too much time keeping a contact center running instead of doing what you do best: Connecting with customers.

That’s where Quiq comes in. Our Conversational AI Platform uses breakthrough technology to make it easier to engage customers, whether, through live chat (also known as web chat), text messaging, or social media.

Let’s take a look at ways to improve your call center efficiency and how Quiq can help you reduce the clutter with 9 effective call center strategies in a handy infographic:

Download as a PDF instead

The 9 effective call center strategies recap

Check out these call center strategies below:

Streamline your current system.
Boost agent productivity and efficiency.
Drive down costs.
Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.
Remove friction.
Improve the quality of your conversations with rich messaging.
Engage more qualified leads.
Increase conversions.
Increase customer satisfaction.

1. Streamline your current system.

How do you currently connect with your customers? Fielding phone calls, emails, and the occasional DMs can leave communications scattered and your systems fragmented.

Here’s what can happen with you don’t have a single, consolidated platform:

Customer conversations can slip through the cracks.
Your team wastes time switching between apps, programs, and windows.
Disparate technology becomes outdated and overpriced.
With no support for asynchronous communication, conversations can only happen one at a time.
Measuring performance requires pulling metrics from multiple sources, a time-consuming and arduous process.

Quiq lets your agents connect with customers across various channels in a singular platform. You’ll improve your contact center operational efficiency with conversations, survey results, and performance data all in one easy-to-use interface.

2. Boost agent productivity and efficiency.

How do your customer service agents go about their day? Are they handling one call at a time? Reinventing the wheel with every new conversation? Switching between apps and email and phone systems?

Outdated technology (or a complete lack of it) makes handling customer conversations inherently more difficult. Switching to a messaging-first strategy with Quiq increases the speed with which agents can tackle customer conversations.

Switching to asynchronous messaging (that is, messaging that doesn’t require both parties to be present at the same time) enables agents to handle 6–8 conversations at once. Beyond conversation management, Quiq helps optimize agent performance with AI-enhanced tools like bots, snippets, sentiment analysis, and more.

3. Drive down costs.

It’s time to stop looking at your contact center as a black hole for your profits. At the most basic level, your customer service team’s performance is measured by how many people they can serve in a period of time, which means time is money.

The longer it takes your agents to solve problems, whether they’re searching for the answer, escalating to a higher customer service level, or taking multiple conversations to find a solution, the more it impacts your bottom line.

Even simple questions, like “Where’s my order?” inquiries needlessly slow down your contact center. Managing your contact center’s operations is overwhelming, to say the least.

Need a Quiq solution? We have many. Let’s start with conversation queuing. Figuring out a customer’s problem and getting to the right person or department eats away at time that could be spent finding a solution. Quiq routes conversations to the right person, significantly reducing resolution times. Agents can also seamlessly loop in other departments or a manager to solve a problem quickly.

Beyond improving your contact center’s operational efficiency, messaging is 3x less expensive than the phone.

4. Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.

All contact centers face the eternal hiring/firing merry-go-round struggle. You probably get busy around the holidays and slow down in January. Or maybe September is your most active season, and your team shrinks through the rest of the year. While you can’t control when you’re busy and when you’re slow, you can control how you respond to those fluctuations.

Manage seasonal spikes by creating your own chatbot using Quiq’s AI engine. Work with our team to design bot conversations that use Natural Language Processing (NPL) to assist customers with simple questions. Chatbots can also improve agent resolution times by collecting customer information upfront to speed up conversations.

Daily Harvest’s chatbot, Sage, was able to contain 60% of conversations, which means their human agents saw a vast reduction in call volume. Perfect for managing the holiday rush.

5. Remove friction.

How hard is it for your customers to contact your help center? Do they have to fill out a web form, wait for an email, and set up a phone call? Is there a number in fine print in the depths of your FAQ page? Some companies make it difficult for customers to interact with their team, hoping that they’ll spend less money if there are fewer calls and emails. But engaging with customers can improve company perception, boost sales, and deepen customer loyalty.

That’s why Quiq makes it easy for your team and customers to connect. From live chat to SMS/text and Google Business Messaging to WhatsApp, customers can connect with your team on their preferred channel.

6. Improve the quality of your conversations with rich messaging.

Email and phone conversations are, in a word, boring. Whether you’re an e-commerce company selling products or a service provider helping customers troubleshoot problems with their latest device, words aren’t always enough. That’s why Quiq offers rich messaging.

What is rich messaging? It’s an advanced form of text messaging that includes multimedia, like GIFs, high-resolution photos, or video. It also includes interactive tools, like appointment scheduling, transaction processing, and more.

You can use rich messaging to give customers a better service experience. Whether sending them product recommendations or a video walkthrough, they’ll get a fully immersed experience.

7. Engage more qualified leads.

Do leads die in your contact center? Let’s face it: your contact center isn’t the place to handle high-value leads. Yet when warm leads find themselves there, you need a way to track, qualify, and engage them.

Here’s where chatbots can help with marketing. Quiq’s chatbots can help you identify qualified leads by engaging with your prospect and collecting information before it ever gets to your sales team.

A great example we’ve seen is from General Assembly. With the Quiq team by their side, they created a bot that helped administer a quiz and captured and nurtured leads interested in specific courses. This helped them strengthen the quality of their leads and achieve a 26% conversion rate, which leads us to our next factor for an effective call center strategy.

8. Increase conversions.

If you haven’t stopped viewing your call center as a cost center, this next topic should change your mind. While many contact centers focus on customer service, which can lean heavily toward complaints and post-purchase problems, there’s also tons of profit potential via effective call center strategies.

Adding messaging to your contact center opens up more opportunities to engage with your customers across the web. Live chat is a great way to talk to your customers at key points in the buyers’ journey. Using a chatbot to assist shoppers in navigating your website makes shoppers 3x more likely to convert to a sale than unassisted visitors.

Combining AI and human agents with Quiq’s conversational platform gives your customers the best experience possible without adding to your contact center’s workload—and it can lead to an 85% reduction in abandoned shopping carts. Plus, Quiq integrates with your ERP system so customer data is always at your team’s fingertips.

9. Increase customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is likely your call center’s #1 goal. Yet outdated phone systems and substandard technology isn’t the best solution to improve call center agent performance.

Quiq empowers agents to be more efficient, which reduces your customer’s wait time and helps ensure customers get the best service possible. Quiq customers often increase their customer satisfaction ratings by about 15 points.

And the best way to increase your ratings? With regular, in-context surveys. Our conversational platform helps you and your agents get instant customer feedback. Customers can seamlessly respond to surveys right from within the channel they used to connect with your customer service.

Give contact center clutter a Quiq goodbye with effective call center strategies.

There’s no place in an efficient business for a cluttered contact center. Outdated systems, slow processes, and a lack of support can overwhelm your agents—and keep them from performing their best for your customers.

Now that you’re equipped with ways to improve call center efficiency, it’s time to see it in action. Quiq’s Conversational AI Platform empowers your team to work more efficiently and create happier customers.

How to Use Live Chat Throughout Your Customer Journey

Posted on July 22, 2022November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

How do you connect with customers throughout their purchase journey? Are you using live chat at every touchpoint?

Many businesses see live chat, also known as web chat, as just another tool for your customer support center. Leaders may see it as a necessary expense in order to connect with today’s online customers.

But live chat is so much more than that.

Let’s take a look at how you can use live chat at every stage of the customer journey.

What is customer journey mapping, anyway?

Customer journey mapping is the exercise of laying out how customers engage with your business before, during, and after they make a purchase.

Traditionally, it consists of five stages.

Awareness
Consideration
Decision/acquisition
Retention
Advocacy

In the stone age—that is, back before the age of the internet—consumers would identify a problem, see an advertisement, compare prices, walk into a store, and make a purchase. If they liked the product or the store, they would make frequent trips back and tell their friends about it.

Things are a little more complicated these days. While today’s customers follow a similar path, a few things have changed. Customers often move back and forth between each stage, with many smaller steps in between.

The biggest change is that now your website is the main hub—and it has to do a lot more of the heavy lifting. It’s where you drive all your traffic, convert customers, and impress them enough to come back. It has now become the main pillar of your customer journey.

When mapping your customer journey, your goal is to get people to your website and serve them to meet their current stage. That’s where live chat comes in.

Serve customers at every stage of their purchase journey with live chat.

Live chat typically lives on the bottom right corner of your website, and it can follow customers as they navigate across pages. Based on which pages they spend time on, you can craft unique messaging (using live agents or chatbots) to target where they are in their customer journey.

And it’s vital to meeting today’s customer expectations. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 83% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when contacting a business.

Instantaneous messaging channels like live chat satisfy that need for instant answers.

Let’s take a look at how you can incorporate live chat into your customer journey.

Be helpful during the awareness stage.

The awareness stage is all about customers realizing they have a problem and that there’s a solution out there to solve it. For retailers, this could be as simple as a customer who’s suffering in the heat, so they realize they’re ready to buy an air conditioner.

They likely don’t know what kind, their budget, or where, but they know they want one.

Maybe they searched for top air conditioners and found themselves on your website. While some businesses may see them as a lead to be captured, their not at that place yet. They are simply gathering information.

For customers in the awareness stage, live chat is best spent welcoming a customer and directing them to various resources on your website.

The best way to do that? With a chatbot.

How to loop in a chatbot: At this stage, it might not be feasible for agents to dedicate their time to answering broad questions. Leverage a chatbot to welcome newcomers to your website and direct them to informational resources—like your knowledge base, blog posts, or frequently asked questions.

Quiq’s AI chatbot helps resolve 80% of inbound inquiries, freeing up your customer service agents to spend time farther down the customer journey.

Wow them at the consideration stage.

At the consideration stage, your customers have likely narrowed down the competition but haven’t made a decision yet. Maybe they know they’re going to Hawaii but are still considering whether to go to a boutique hotel or stay at an Airbnb. Or perhaps they’ve selected an island and just need to pick between the swath of available resorts.

This is the point where you need to stand out. Customers are looking to narrow down their options. If you don’t impress them right away, you won’t make the shortlist.

Proactively engage with customers using live chat to help them navigate your website. Ask them questions to gauge their needs and direct them to the appropriate high-converting pages.

How to loop in a chatbot: When customers reach the consideration phase, they’re closing in on making a purchase. While it’s a good idea to engage live agents to help customers one-on-one and close the deal, a chatbot can help get the conversations started. Design the bot to answer simple questions and direct customers to an agent for more personalized help.

Push them over the decision hump at the acquisition stage.

You’ve made the shortlist—heck, you’re probably #1 on that list—and the customer is *this* close to making a purchase. This is when your live chat function is crucial.

Make sure your live chat is visible and engaging with users at key points in the decision-making process. For example, be available when customers get to their cart. That’s typically when they have last-minute questions, and any clicking away from that page could interrupt their momentum.

Here are a few ways you can entice buyers with live chat at the decision phase:

After answering a few product questions, suggest a product demo.
Remove friction by ensuring easy access to frequently asked questions.
Offer personalized incentives on the purchase page.
Loop sales team members into live chat conversations.

How to loop in a chatbot: Program engagement triggers that start with your chatbot. If a customer has been stalled in their cart for more than three minutes, send in a bot to answer those hesitations or offer them a well-timed discount code. If a user has bounced around between pricing tiers, send over a blog post that helps them compare. Figure out which obstacles are in your customers’ way and use automation to help get past them.

Increase retention with always-on support.

Customer retention is all about meeting expectations. Did the customer get the results they expected from your product or service? Did they have the experience they were hoping for?

Great customer service is the best way to improve customer retention—and live chat makes that happen with speed and accessibility.

Think about the last time you needed customer service. Chances are, you were in the middle of something and needed immediate help. Your customers face the same hurdles. They’re implementing your software and run into a roadblock. They have to reschedule a guided kayak tour and can’t remember the policies.

Whatever the case may be, stopping for a phone call or waiting hours (or days) for a return email stalls their momentum and complicates their customer experience. Live chat makes it easy for customers (whether they’re in the middle of making a purchase or actively using your product or service) to get quick answers. Quick answers lead to higher customer satisfaction and a better chance they’ll come back for repeat business.

How to loop in a chatbot: Always-on support isn’t realistic without the help of chatbots (unless you hire a lot of agents to cover your chat 24/7. Use a chatbot to respond to customers when your agents are out of office. At the very least, you can design conversations that collect information for agents to respond to when they’re available. You can also have bots walk customers through troubleshooting, answer simple questions, and direct them to helpful resources on your site.

Make advocates out of all your customers.

Not every customer will become an advocate for your company, but you should certainly do everything in your power to encourage it. And live chat can help you do just that.

Since live chat is…well, live…it’s a great tool to encourage in-the-moment reviews and survey responses. Make it easy for customers to leave reviews by including it right in the conversation so they never have to leave the chat.

How to loop in a chatbot: Chatbots are ideal for this task. After your live agent finishes helping the customer, hand off the conversation to a chatbot to collect feedback and encourage reviews.

Embrace live chat in the customer journey.

It’s easy to see live chat as just another support tool. It functions a lot like phone conversations in your call center—and you probably use the same people to staff it. But with the right tools and strategy in place, live chat enhances every stage of the customer journey.

Do You Know Your Customer Churn Rate?

Posted on July 7, 2022November 15, 2024 Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Customer churn rate is a scary metric. Left unchecked, it’s a silent business killer.

It’s especially important for companies who rely on recurring revenue, such as subscription clothing services, meal delivery, or membership programs. But that doesn’t mean other types of businesses should ignore it. Repeat customers are important to any business—which is why understanding churn is critical.

Before we give you the strategies to improve your churn rate, let’s back up and discuss what it is and why it matters to your business.

What is customer churn?

Customer churn rate (or customer attrition rate) measures how many customers you lose over a given period of time. It’s also the exact opposite of your customer retention rate.

It’s important to look at churn along with your customer acquisition (which measures how effectively you’re acquiring customers). The two measurements and their respective strategies essentially keep your business running: One gets customers in the door, and the other tells you how to keep them.

Why is customer churn rate important? Because your average customer needs to stick around long enough (or make high enough purchases) to more than cover your customer acquisition costs. If they don’t, you’re operating at a loss.

How to calculate churn:

Figure out how many customers you have at the beginning of a period of time.
Find the number of customers you lost in that time period (don’t forget to account for new customers).
Divide the number of customers you lost by the number of customers you started out with.
Multiply by 100 to determine the percentage.

For example, here’s what it would look like if we had 100 customers at the beginning of the month and 90 customers at the end of the month:

Customers lost ÷ customers at the start of the month x 100 = customer churn

10 ÷ 100 x 100 = 10%

In this example, your customer churn rate would be 10%.

The first step to reducing customer churn is to understand it.

Now that you’ve calculated your customer churn rate, it’s time to understand what that number really means.

Before you jump to sweeping conclusions (we’ve all been there!), take a wider look at your business. Was there anything unique happening in your business, the industry, or even globally that could be skewing your numbers? Make sure to account for it.

Next, figure out how to benchmark your numbers. Is there an industry standard? Are you comparing year over year? There’s no wrong way to do it—you just need to be consistent.

It’s also important to remember that despite your best efforts, you will have customer churn. And it isn’t always bad. If you’re revamping a service, targeting a new customer, or redesigning products, some churn is expected, or even a good thing, as long as it’s controlled with a new influx of customers.

Another example of expected churn is when subscription services, be it clothing, meal delivery, or SaaS, see a drop-off in the first month or two of service.

New customers are trying your service or product and determining if it’s a fit for them. When the product doesn’t click, they drop off quickly.

Now, if it gets out of control and you have a hard time keeping clients, you need to rethink your service. But it’s mostly an expected and planned occurrence.

Keep that in mind when you take a first look at your numbers.

Find the problem areas.

Once you have your churn rate, you can start figuring out how to reduce it. The best place to start? Customer surveys.

Survey customers at pivotal moments in their customer journey—particularly where you see the biggest drop off. Start with these three key junctures.

1. After their first purchase.

Theoretically, this is when they’re most excited. Use this survey to see how to capture that excitement and share it with all of your customers. Of course, the opposite could also be true. This is when they feel that first wave of disappointment. As uncomfortable as that is, you need to know when it’s happening and why so you can prevent it from happening again.

2. When they haven’t logged in or made a new purchase.

When customers aren’t excited, they often go silent. They forget you exist, forget they signed up for a program, or even that they purchased a subscription. Pick a time period that makes sense for your business and reach out with a survey. Maybe it’s 15 days or even a month. (Pro tip: Try to avoid those passive-aggressive, “Did you forget about us?” emails that no one likes.)

3. When they’ve canceled or gone completely silent.

At this point, you know something is wrong. Whether they haven’t made a purchase in six months or outright canceled your services, it really helps to know why. While it can be difficult to ask a customer who no longer uses your product to help you improve, this will give you the most valuable feedback on how you can reach customers like them in the future.

Once you have your churn rate and feedback from customers at these key stages, you can take decisive action.

4 ways to reduce customer churn.

There are many factors that go into your churn rate, but messaging is a big one. How you connect and engage with customers impacts their experience, whether you’re selling a flight to Rome or a healthy version of cacio e pepe.

Here’s how messaging helps reduce churn rate and where you should implement it.

1. Revamp new customer onboarding.

We tend to think that customer onboarding only applies to software technologies or online classes, and the like, but any business can build an onboarding experience. When a customer makes their first purchase, don’t just send an order confirmation. Craft an experience that walks them through the first purchase and leads them toward the next. Start with these messaging ideas:

Send a welcome email.
Share product or service information.
Point them toward a knowledge-base or FAQ page.
Invite them into a brand community and to connect on social.
Text them a discounted offer on their next purchase.
Tell them about your rewards program.
Encourage them to connect with customer support when they have questions.

Welcoming your customers with support and extra benefits will demonstrate your brand’s value right from the start.

2. Revisit brand and product messaging.

Your churn rate heavily depends on customer expectations. If customers expect something that your product or service doesn’t give them, they’ll be disappointed—no matter how great it actually is.

Take a look at your brand messaging, your product descriptions, and any other marketing materials. Is everything accurate? Are you overpromising? Make sure you leave some room to overdeliver and wow your customers from the first interaction.

3. Make customer service fast and accessible.

Churn rates are often attributed partly to the customer service team (although it’s merely a very important piece of a larger puzzle). And it makes sense to involve your customer service team. After all, the opposite of customer churn is customer retention. In Zendesk’s CX Trends Report, 60% of business leaders agreed that customer service improves retention.

Make your support team easily accessible from wherever your customers are. Save the call center for complex problems, and instead answer questions with business messaging. Start by identifying which digital channels they frequent most and make your service team available on them.

4. Be proactive with at-risk customers.

After you’ve collected data to help you determine your customer churn triggers (think immediately after the tutorial, after a week of not logging in, or on the checkout page), engage customers at those key points. See if they need extra support, resources, or help checking out.

Being proactive helps you prevent customer churn by solving issues early in the process before a customer disengages.

Embrace messaging to lower customer churn.

Now that you have a better idea of what churn rate is, you can take the steps to reduce it. When you spend time on keeping your customers instead of just attracting new ones, your business benefits on both ends (revenue and costs).

How to Anticipate Customer Needs (With Examples)

Posted on June 30, 2022December 6, 2024 The Quiq Team

When was the last time you heard a story about exceptional customer service? Or an innovative way a company figured out how to meet customer needs?

You know the kind: An observant hotel employee rescues a beloved stuffed animal. The considerate customer service agent sends a gift card to apologize for a shipping error. A software company sees you’re having trouble with their platform and sends you a private video walkthrough.

These are all great examples, but what really makes a difference day after day is simply anticipating customer needs before they become problems.

Some companies seem to have an uncanny ability to get ahead of their customer’s issues. But it doesn’t just happen. Exceptional customer service is designed with dedication and built into company cultures.

We get it. Sometimes merely meeting customer needs is a struggle. Anticipating them? Now that seems daunting. After all, you can’t read minds.

The good news is that your customers don’t expect you to. (In fact, they often find it creepy when you know too much about them.) But they do want you to anticipate their problems and help them reach a resolution as quickly as possible.

For all of the work it requires to make anticipating customer needs happen, the payoff is well worth it. Let’s take a look at how to anticipate customer needs and what it means to your customer service.

What will you gain by anticipating customer needs?

In a word: loyalty.

We’ve touched on customer loyalty before, but we can’t stress its importance enough. In a digital-first age, customers have endless choices—and you need to make them choose you. Winning their loyalty has become more important than ever.

Customer service has become a major competitive advantage. According to Microsoft, 90% of customers say customer service is important to their brand choice and loyalty to that brand.

And should those customer service expectations fall short, 58% of customers show little hesitation in severing the relationship. The days of implicit loyalty are long gone.

While customer loyalty should be enough of a draw, here are some more benefits to anticipating customer needs:

Increased revenue. When your customers feel taken care of, they’re more likely to come back. They’re looking for easy, frictionless experiences and will frequent the businesses that give them that.
Less strain on your customer service team. You read that right. Making things simple for customers will have a direct impact on your customer service team. Even when you provide more customer service, it’ll still be better for your agents. Customers will have fewer questions, there will be less urgency in their questions, and they’ll be less frustrated overall.

Start by identifying customer expectations.

You’ve probably heard of the surprise and delight customer service strategy. It suggests that the best way to retain customers is to keep them guessing. Following its doctrine, you should go above and beyond the normal call of duty to give the customers something they weren’t expecting. The examples in the introduction are all great cases of using surprise and delight.

While it works when customers are already pleased with your company, it probably won’t make an angry customer come back. And since 55% of customers expect better customer service year over year, according to Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service report, simply meeting expectations is often a struggle.

Hubspot’s Annual State of Service Report shows even greater numbers. 88% of respondents agreed that customers have higher expectations than in the past, and 79% said customers are smarter and more informed.

So what are customers’ needs? What do they expect from today’s businesses?

Simplicity.

They want frictionless experiences, easy-to-navigate interfaces, and fast solutions to their problems.

But you shouldn’t just take our word for it. The best way to figure out what your customers want is to ask them. More and more businesses are conducting post-purchase surveys to ensure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and more. According to Hubspot, 70% of businesses report they are tracking customer satisfaction/happiness—a jump from 60% in 2020 and around 55% in 2019.

Similarly, a majority of respondents—85%—say customers are more likely to share positive or negative experiences now than in the past.

While CSAT and other surveys can help you improve customer service, expand your research to include those that don’t buy from you. Ask why they didn’t purchase, and dive deep to figure out which of their needs weren’t met—and see how you can meet them in the future.

Give customers convenient service.

Regardless of whether they’re shopping for a vacation getaway, office supplies, or looking for subscription-based fashion, your customers expect convenience and fast service.

When you walk into a store, you expect orderly displays and friendly staff ready to serve you. When you visit a company’s website, you expect the same: A streamlined digital presence, complete with an easy-to-use website and customer service agents at the ready.

Just how fast? According to Hubspot’s Annual State of Service report, 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question—which customers define as under 10 minutes.

Here are a few ways to give customers fast, convenient service:

Make customer service digital. Customers don’t want to interrupt their day to call customer service, wait on hold to speak to a representative, or spend days waiting for an email response. These slower communication methods are helpful in a pinch, but customers now want something more. They want digital customer service.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see that consumers are using mobile devices to communicate. Implementing business messaging to reduce wait times, deflect calls, and provide faster assistance disrupts and resets the consumer expectation that contacting a company for help is slow and inconvenient.

Be easily accessible. It sounds easy, right? If they found your website, surely they can find your customer service contact info hidden on your help page, which is hidden in your footer, or beneath a menu in your header. Yes, customers can probably find you, but make the process easier by being available to them wherever they are.

Have a web chat (also known as live chat) box on your website so customers can instantly chat with a customer service agent—no matter how far down your website rabbit hole they’ve gone.

Don’t stop there. Are your customers on Instagram? What about Twitter? The more places you’re available to answer questions, the happier your customers will be. They won’t have to go searching for help, and you’ll always have someone there when they need you.

Offer proactive customer service. Heading off a problem before it happens is almost always better than waiting for them to come to you. And customers agree— more than two-thirds want an organization to reach out and engage with proactive customer notifications, according to Microsoft.

Being proactive can be as simple as sending tracking links to limit “where’s my order?” inquiries. Consider collecting top customer questions and sharing them during the purchasing process, or feed answers to a chatbot for quick customer service response times.

At Quiq, we help our clients provide convenient ways for customers to engage with a brand and allow consumers to reach out to companies on their terms. Communicating with companies via messaging is still pretty new, and we’ve seen so many consumers respond with surprise and delight at the ability to text a company for help.

Stop communication inefficiencies before they start.

Many customer needs examples revolve around their time. As we mentioned above, inefficient communication just adds to your customers’ frustrations. You’ve likely experienced the struggle of having to navigate IVR systems (those interactive voice response systems that use automation to collect customer information and point them in the right direction). Whether you’re waiting on hold or waiting for an email response, that’s time you can’t get back.

During those moments of need, the last thing your customers want is to interrupt their day. Customer loyalty is won (or lost) in these critical moments.

Anticipate customers’ needs by working within their schedules and workflows. Here are a few ways to get started.

Make communication asynchronous. The biggest frustration when calling help centers is that you must put your day on hold to do so. Don’t force your customers to conform to your service center’s schedule. Instead, offer asynchronous messaging.

Communication methods like web chat and voice are helpful for getting answers to more complex questions, but they also require customers to block out their time and respond immediately. Asynchronous messaging, however, lets customers respond whenever they’re available. As a bonus, your customer service agents can handle multiple interactions at the same.

Take advantage of chatbots. Chatbots are the key to giving customers the immediate responses they crave without overwhelming your customer service team. They’re always available to provide simple answers to questions or, at the very least, acknowledge the customer’s question and let them know when an agent will be available to chat.

You can also use chatbots to help you anticipate customers’ needs by having them prompt customers with messages as they navigate through your website. Start with a welcome message, offer product suggestions based on browsing history, or provide answers to FAQs during checkout.

Eliminate repetitive tasks. Speed up redundant tasks by creating pre-build responses for common questions. Not only will you be able to speed up response times, but you’ll also ensure customers get the same accurate and helpful information no matter which customer service agent they talk to.

Imagine how your customers would perceive your brand if they were able to text a question to your contact center and get immediate help and resolution. No interruptions to their day, no inconvenience or waiting involved.

Aligning your people, processes, and technology to reduce effort and streamline communications will do wonders for your customer service. With each positive interaction, customers will anticipate great service well into the future.

When your customer expects to be taken care of, they can engage with your company without feeling that they have to play offense, which leads to more pleasant interactions for both sides.

Empower CSAs to make the right decisions for customers.

Sometimes, anticipating customers’ needs means understanding that you can’t predict them all. Problems come up, mistakes get made, and website bugs happen. The trick is coming up with a plan to handle things that have no plan.

How do you do that? Empower customer service agents to take action to solve customer issues.

Unfortunately, right now, not everyone has that power. Around 20% of service agents say their biggest challenge is not having the ability to make the right decisions for customers, according to Hubspot. But it’s likely that many more face this issue on a regular basis.

Ensure your customer agents have the authority to do things like:

Offer discounts when customers encounter problems.
Expedite orders when shipments are lost or damaged.
Take as much time as they need to solve customer issues.

Without the authority to make these decisions on their own, agents have to wait for approvals or miss out on opportunities to surpass customer expectations.

Equip your team with the tools to meet future needs.

While you can’t predict every need that pops up (unless you found that crystal ball), you can ensure your customer service is always on point. Set your team up for success with the right tools to meet customer service needs now and into the future.

Regardless of the issue, the one thing you can anticipate is that your customer wants resolution in the fastest, most pain-free way possible. Quiq helps companies across multiple industries do just that with our Conversational AI platform.

Let customers talk to you the same way they chat with their family and friends. Whether a customer needs to text you to ask about an exchange or new car loan, needs assistance via chat in finding and buying the perfect gift, or wants to schedule a service and pay for it through Apple Messages for Business, Quiq messaging powers your customer connections.

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How Messaging Helps Hospitality Get Personal

Posted on June 15, 2022November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

The hospitality industry is, by nature, a very human business. Whether you’re in hotel and lodging, travel and transportation, food and beverage, or recreation, hospitality is all about creating a unique and personal experience for your guests. Have you considered how technology like SMS hospitality messaging can actually make guest experiences more personalized?

While technology has changed the game, it can sometimes feel antithetical to the warmth the hospitality industry is beloved for. However, when messaging tech is used correctly, it helps you do what the hospitality industry has always done best: Make human connections.

SMS hospitality messaging connects you to guests on their terms.

It’s exactly for this reason that messaging can help transform the customer experience by giving service providers a way to connect and engage with guests in an easy, convenient, and preferred way.

There are major opportunities to leverage SMS hospitality messaging in a way that doesn’t detract from the human connection—but adds to it. Messaging liberates guests from standing in line, waiting for an email, or sitting on hold.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can use SMS hospitality messaging to connect with customers and personalize the industry.

High tech and high touch.

Providing a memorable guest experience is part physical and observable. What thread count are the sheets? What’s the ambiance of the restaurant (do they have table cloths and sommeliers or barstools and air hockey)?

The intangibles are just as important to the overall experience—the care and attention of the staff, the ease of changing bookings, how payments are handled, etc. These smaller details are often your differentiators and play a big factor in how you make your customers feel.

SMS messaging can make all the difference. Instead of forcing customers to stand in lines, wait on hold, or hunt down information on in-room pamphlets, you can bring the service to them.

In fact, guests now expect it as a standard part of their hospitality experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruption in the hospitality industry.

While travel is starting to return to 2019 levels (along with occupancy rates and room revenue, according to Accenture), it has permanently influenced customer expectations.

There are fewer business travelers, more local vacationers—and more digital nomads. This is reshaping the hospitality industry in everything from loyalty programs and digital amenities to a demand for SMS booking.

And customer service has only increased in importance.

Accenture’s Life Reimagined report says 53% of consumers think customer service has become more important than price—and 54% of consumers believe it will continue to be so over the next 12 months.

Transparency, clarity, and simplicity have become top decision drivers. More than half of customers who have reimagined life due to the pandemic say they would switch brands if the brand doesn’t create clear and easy options for contacting customer service, according to Accenture’s report.

For hospitality, text messaging is a natural step toward delivering high-touch experiences. Customers are already using their mobile devices to find fun things to do (70%), research destinations (66%), and book transportation or airfare (46%).

With so much emphasis already placed on mobile, a move to messaging is a natural and organic option that customers are likely already looking to do. Continuing to use customers’ mobile devices throughout their stay just makes sense.

In fact, messaging can enhance the customer’s experience across the entire guest journey.

Tap into the power of SMS hospitality messaging.

Messaging allows you to connect and engage with guests in a way that is already an important part of how they communicate daily.

SMS text messaging upgrades your customer communications with more than simple text conversations. Rich messaging brings the hospitality experience to your guests long before they reach your doorstep. With rich messaging, you can:

Process secure transactions, from SMS booking for hotel rooms and excursions to in-room upgrades and payments.
Send reservation reminders, confirmations, and up-to-the-minute notices.
Increase guest excitement with content like images, GIFs, videos, and more.

Easy ways to start using SMS/texting in hospitality.

Getting started with hospitality text messaging may seem overwhelming at first, but there are many ways to introduce it into your existing customer journeys.

Here are some examples of ways you can use SMS hospitality messaging to elevate experiences in hotels, restaurants, and recreational activities.

SMS for hotels.

Answer pre-booking questions. While your website is a great booking tool, nothing beats one-on-one conversations. Your guests may have simple questions about things like early check-in or room preferences. Messaging helps you address these questions quickly and secure the booking right from your customers’ text messages.
Use SMS booking. Schedule stays and process payments right from SMS/text messaging using rich messaging features. Your guests can book their trip right from their phones without ever having to make a phone call or wait on hold.
Get guests excited about their stay. Your guest experience begins before they even arrive. Build the anticipation with a welcome message, semi-personalized itineraries, and local sites and events. If you know guests are there with children, send them itineraries that include amusement parks, a trip to the local zoo, or some family-friendly live shows. For couples on a romantic getaway, suggest date night ideas, local spas, or more secluded beaches. Sending a text message with these personalized touches will go a long way to build excitement and make guests feel welcomed.
Streamline the check-in process. While we love vacations, traveling to get to them is another story. And it’s only gotten worse in the last few years with travel restrictions, fewer flights, and more crowds. When travelers finally reach their destination, they’re tired, frustrated, and likely want as little interaction as possible before reaching their beds. (In other words, they’re 3 of Snow White’s 7 dwarves: Grumpy, Sleepy, and Bashful.) Have guests complete the check-in process through SMS messaging so that all they have to do when they get to their destination is pick up their key. Digital keys are also becoming more popular and complete the contactless check-in experience.
Handle in-room requests. Instead of forcing guests to decide between the front desk, guest services, maid services, and other departments on the hotel phone (not to mention waiting on hold), centralize in-room requests via SMS/text messaging. Quiq’s clients, including those within the hospitality segment, have found that servicing customers via messaging has reduced service costs and work time and increased customer satisfaction scores by 5–10 points.
Close out stays with a bang. Offer a contactless checkout, removing the last bit of friction guests face as they leave your hotel. Plus, give them one final reminder of the excellent service and attention they received with a thank you message.
Ask for reviews. If you’ve given the guest a memorable experience, they may be enticed to share it with others and become your brand ambassador.

Today, reviews are a critical part of the buyers’ process, and word of mouth can build or block that path to purchase.

Not only is this a great opportunity to instantly address any negative feedback, but you can also send exclusive offers and discounts to encourage guests to come back.

You can also encourage guests to share their positive comments about your business with their social networks.

SMS for restaurants.

Accept reservations. Use rich messaging features to schedule reservations right from your guests’ mobile phones.
Send reservation reminders. Help customers remember the reservation they made (especially if you’re booked out for weeks) with a friendly reservation reminder. A text message won’t get lost in junk mail, and you’ll decrease no-shows. SMS hospitality messaging to the rescue!
Enable easy cancellations and rescheduling. Instead of holding a table for no-shows and missing out on potential revenue, give guests an easy way to cancel or reschedule their reservation ahead of time. They’ll be happy with the streamlined customer experience, and you’ll be able to fill those seats with last-minute reservations and walk-ins.
Provide directions and parking information. Sure, everyone has Apple Maps or Waze, but parking can be a beast if you live in a high-tourism city. Add a link for directions and parking information to your appointment reminder to ensure your guests make it to your restaurant.
Streamline take-out orders. Take-out has grown in popularity over the last few years. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, even fine-dining restaurants have jumped in on the action. 54% of adults say purchasing takeout or delivery food is essential to the way they live, including 72% of millennials and 66% of Gen Z adults, according to the National Restaurant Association’s 2022 State of the Restaurant Industry report. Use SMS/text messaging to confirm you’ve received an order, that it’s ready for pickup, or that it’s out for delivery.
Ask for reviews. Restaurants live and die by their online reviews. Encourage guests to leave feedback on a popular review site and offer them an incentive. If you’d rather collect feedback directly, send them a link to a survey and be sure to answer any questions and address concerns quickly.
Get the opt-in. SMS marketing is a great way to connect with customers, and the open rate for text messages often far exceeds that of email.

Ask for permission to send marketing messages, then craft a strategy that personalizes offers and earns repeat business.

SMS for recreational activities.

Book through text messaging. Rich text messaging is a simple way to answer questions, book a reservation, and securely collect payments all in one place.
Take special requests. SMS/text messaging is a convenient and private way for guests to ask about special accommodations like wheelchair accessibility, assistance for people who are hard of hearing, or private tours.
Send links to helpful information. Don’t send guests hunting for information on your website. Send them links to details, like what type of attire participants should wear, dos and don’ts, parking information, and more.
Send reminders. Email reminders get lost in all the itinerary bookings (and junk email) your customers are likely dealing with. Send reservation reminders and any up-to-the-minute notifications via text messaging.
Suggest their next adventure. SMS messaging is a great marketing tool for small business operators, like tour guides, but it’s also easy to scale for larger operations. Once your guests have finished their activity, use text messaging to suggest their next adventure.

If they took a ghost tour of downtown, offer suggestions to other haunted hotspots. If they went on a guided hike, suggest kayaking or another outdoor activity. Personalize messages and include timely discounts to increase the next booking.

Disrupt with SMS hospitality messaging or be disrupted.

The time for hospitality text messaging is here. There’s endless opportunity for hotels, resorts, restaurants, and others within the hospitality segment to simplify and personalize the customer experience.

With new expectations born from the pandemic and an ever-increasing number of millennial and Gen Z travelers, it’s even more critical for the hospitality industry to embrace text messaging.

At Quiq, we help companies in the hospitality industry (and others) engage with guests in personal and meaningful ways. Our Conversational AI Platform makes it easy for customers to connect with your business, so you can provide the information they want in the way they want to receive it.

Connect with customers—and let them connect with you—using Quiq.

How to Rewire Omnichannel Service with Messaging

Posted on May 26, 2022November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

Omnichannel customer service is changing.

It used to be about being everywhere. About connecting your in-store customer experience to your website to your social channels. Omnichannel meant that your customers would get the same excellent customer experience no matter where they found you.

As customer behavior changed, more businesses moved online—and so did customer service.

Customers are harder to get, harder to please, and harder to retain. So omnichannel messaging is bringing the complete purchase experience to the customer.

While it’s critical that customers can still reach you on any of their preferred channels, now they can also complete the entire customer journey—including purchases—right from their messaging apps.

First, let’s discuss traditional omnichannel customer service and how you can level up your customer experience.

Your customers don’t want to be treated like strangers.

What’s the most important factor about omnichannel customer service? Personalization.

Delivering “in-store” customer service isn’t enough. Customers want the experience of a small-town, high-end boutique. They want personalized recommendations, purchase history, and some personal information available to agents whenever they engage with customer service.

An overwhelming 75% of respondents want a customer service agent to know who they are and their purchase history. And this isn’t a new expectation—it has remained steady for the past five years.

Yet it’s still far from customers’ reality. In Microsoft’s 2020 survey, respondents reported that only occasionally (31%) did the agent have this information.

The customer service stakes are higher than ever.

While online shopping has made it easier than ever to connect with your customers, it’s also made it easier for them to jump ship. According to Zendesk, 60% of customers are willing to walk away after just one bad experience. It’s a scary statistic that we often repeat. In the online e-commerce world, it doesn’t take much to shatter brand loyalty.

And omnichannel is an expectation—not a benefit.

The same Zendesk survey reported that 72% of customers expect agents to have access to all relevant customer information. That often includes when the customer checks in for the first time after a purchase, talks to a new agent, or switches communication channels.

These high expectations extend to omnichannel service. 73% of customers want the ability to start a conversation on one channel and pick it back up on another.

How is messaging changing the omnichannel strategy?

More and more messaging channels are popping up and gaining popularity every day, and it’s changing the omnichannel landscape. There are two significant factors influencing omnichannel strategies:

1. Customers are eager for help.

More channels mean more access to customer services—and consumers are open to it. Zendesk reports that 64% of U.S. customers want help when buying or returning an item. Before, customers might have been more likely to choose various chat options. Now, they’re more willing to reach out to customer service, even for simple transitions.

2. Customers are more likely to jump around on channels.

According to a 2021 survey from Airkit, 40% of consumers have used three or more conversation channels to engage with customer service. Customers want to be able to connect with your customer service team wherever they are, without leaving the app. Since they’re becoming more comfortable switching apps, your customer service team needs to be able to keep up.

The benefits of omnichannel customer service.

While omnichannel once meant having a seamless in-store and web experience, it’s expanded to include the multitude of communication channels available on the web and mobile devices.

The majority of customers use 3 to 5 channels to get their issues resolved, according to Zendesk. And since they’re bouncing around channels, your team must be able to serve them anywhere they are.

Take a look at the benefits of introducing and perfecting an omnichannel strategy.

Meet your customers everywhere.

When customer service issues strike, your customers never have to go far to find you. Not only will this please your customers, but it’ll also expand your reach.

The same can be said for when the inspiration to make a new purchase strikes. If your customers are able to make a purchase from anywhere, whenever they want, you have a better chance of making the sale.

Deliver a flawless customer experience.

Improve customer satisfaction and meet high expectations when you deliver a true omnichannel experience. Your ability to help customers with their specific problems on whichever channel they prefer improves overall customer satisfaction—and increases the likelihood they’ll buy from you again.

Increase selling opportunities.

Every touchpoint with a customer is an opportunity to increase sales. According to Zendesk, 51% of customers are open to product recommendations from agents. Agents can use the interaction to cross-sell additional products, recommend items based on the customer’s purchase history, or provide an opportunity to renew subscriptions.

Collect more relevant customer information.

Since omnichannel service relies so heavily on continued conversations and customer history, it gives your team an opportunity to collect information on customer behavior. Use this information to make key decisions on which products to buy, how to talk to your customers, and how to improve customer service.

How to improve your omnichannel strategy.

From omnichannel marketing to customer service, you need a well-rounded plan that can serve your customers across the web.

Dive into these omnichannel service strategies and tips to elevate your customer experience.

Be omnichannel, not just multi-channel.

To truly be omnichannel, you need to provide a united front—a seamless customer experience. Customers don’t see a company as individual departments but as an overall brand. They expect consistency in their experience, whether their issue is about the latest sales promotion or dealing with a support complaint.

In order to provide the best customer experience, you have to eliminate the silos and truly provide a singular experience across channels and issues.

How do you achieve this internally? Make sure the lines of communication are open, and departments share systems, goals, and metrics. A unified and consistent approach to service will be a significant step forward in improving the customer experience.

Don’t pick channels over service.

Despite the name, omnichannel customer service doesn’t mean you have to be on every messaging and social platform. It’s more about giving your customers a frictionless experience from one channel to the next. So start with quality first, and increase the number of channels accordingly.

A great (bad) example to look at is live chat. Live chat is a great tool when used correctly, and it can give customers an experience similar to what they’d expect from in-store shopping.

And while most companies have a live chat component on their website, many don’t give it the attention it needs to be successful. This leads to long wait times to chat with an agent or ineffective chatbots that are little more than glorified FAQ search engines.

The moral of the story? Don’t prioritize new channels over customer service.

Pick the right channels for your customers.

You likely already have an idea of which channels your customers use frequently. (If you don’t, your marketing team probably does.) A common rule of thumb is that older demographic groups prefer traditional channels like voice, Millennials prefer text, and Gen Zers opt for social channels like WhatsApp.

However, that’s changing. With technology adoption increasing, more and more people—no matter their age—are using a variety of communication channels. The best option? Ask your customers! Use those valuable insights to focus on the channels your customers are the most active.

Then, make sure you staff, resource, and empower your employees in those channels to best represent the brand.

Ensure customer service agents have information at their fingertips.

This is the key to making an omnichannel customer service experience work. Information like purchase history and previous conversations is what will help your customer service team connect with customers.

Make sure customer service agents have access to a CRM and conversation history right from within their messaging platform, no matter which channels your customers are using.

Include self-service in your omnichannel strategy.

Many businesses think of self-service as a static FAQ page or web forum that’s wholly separate from your omnichannel strategy. But self-service is just another channel you can offer customers when they’re looking for answers.

In fact, many customers prefer it. Microsoft reports that 86% of respondents expect a self-service option, and two-thirds try self-service before contacting a live agent. Investing in your self-service options will not only improve customer satisfaction, but it’ll also lighten the load on your customer service team.

Lean into omnichannel marketing.

Omnichannel doesn’t stop with customer service. The benefits of omnichannel marketing mirror those of omnichannel customer service. Marketing through communication channels, like SMS/text, can help your business connect with customers on their terms.

And when combined with payment integration features, customers can complete the entire customer journey without ever leaving their preferred messaging channel.

Quiq: Your omnichannel solution.

It takes a few key capabilities to have a successful omnichannel presence. Your customer service team needs access to customer information and the ability to continue conversations across channels.

With a multi-channel conversational engagement platform like Quiq, you can serve customers however they prefer from one simple solution.

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