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Tag: conversational commerce

5 Effective Strategies to Improve eCommerce Customer Service

Posted on Lauren Winder

More than ever before, eCommerce businesses’ overall revenue is directly tied with the quality of their customer service. Today’s customers value shopping experiences more than price or product selection and can easily transition to one of many competitors. 86% of consumers say they would spend more for a better experience, and 76% of consumers said it’s far easier now to take their business elsewhere than ever before.

According to the 2020 ROI of Customer Experience Report, 94% of consumers outstanding experience with a brand say they would recommend it to family and friends. In contrast, only 13% of consumers who had an abysmal customer experience with a brand would recommend it.

From these statistics, it’s possible to conclude that marketing and sales alone aren’t enough for eCommerce businesses to remain competitive, maintain a substantial market share, and grow their brand reputation. They need to go above and beyond to implement outstanding customer service strategies, before and after closing the sale.

Here are 5 successful customer service strategies that eCommerce brands can quickly implement to improve their overall customer experience.

1. Build a Strong Customer Service Team

Start by hiring an excellent customer service team and creating an environment that promotes staff retention.

Conversational Engagement Platforms, like Quiq, are meant to augment human agents, not replace them. When offering top-notch customer support, software can’t replace the need for well-trained and skilled customer representatives.

Here are six strategies to attract talented, customer service-minded professionals.

  • Hire the right people: Hire for attitude. Look for employee representatives with empathy, patience, and excellent communication skills.
  • Train employee representatives: eCommerce hiring managers must train their employee representatives to understand their products and services and connect with their customers on an emotional level.
  • Equip customer service agents: Brand leaders should provide a platform to offer the best consumer experience without stress, overwork, or burnout. For example, Quiq’s Conversational Customer Engagement Platform enables companies to engage with customers across different channels in one centralized place, providing easy, simultaneous responses.
  • Track agent’s performance: Using surveys, management teams should collect feedback from customers on their experiences with employees and use the insights from these ratings to evaluate each representative’s performance.
  • Reward excellent performance: Incentivize top-performing employee representatives to motivate others to do more.
  • Listen to employee representatives: Ask for and listen to worker feedback to understand their needs.

When hit by a significant financial setback, customer service might be one of the first places C-suite leaders look to cut costs. However, this strategy is counterproductive. According to customer experience research, 50% of consumers would switch to a competitor after a bad experience, and 80% would switch after more than one bad experience. To keep consumers from switching to competitors, managers must prioritize customer service.

When it comes to the finesse and care it takes to navigate complicated customer inquiries or assist distressed customers, nothing beats a knowledgeable, well-trained, and accessible human agent. That’s why many channels, like Apple Messages for Business and Google Business Messages require brands to have live agents to escalate conversations to.

2. Personalize Every Conversation With Consumers

customer service improvement strategies

Personalizing customer conversations means tailoring support and service to their exact needs and expectations.

Customizing services to meet consumer demand gives eCommerce businesses a competitive advantage in their industries, helps deliver faster support from team members, makes customers feel more connected, and reinforces a consistent sense of satisfaction.

Here are a few ways to offer personalized service:

  • Engage with consumers where they already are
  • Transfer consumers smoothly across employee representatives
  • Mention people by their name in every conversation
  • Make recommendations when the requested product or services is unavailable
  • Offer free demonstrations and training to educate customers

Shoppers look toward eCommerce providers to know their needs and provide what they want. Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences while 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.To win and keep business, eCommerce employees must treat consumers as people — not numbers in a sales report — with unique needs and expectations.

A conversational engagement platform can help employees provide highly personalized experiences. For example, Quiq clients, like Stio can send outbound messages to segmented customers and offer them targeted promotions. They can use Quiq’s intelligent routing feature to provide VIPs, who may spend at a certain level or who are part of their Pro Purchase Program with priority support.

3. Collect and Use Customer Feedback

Continually gathering feedback from shoppers on their experience can help eCommerce business leaders:

  • Understand their consumers’ needs, challenges, and pain points
  • Identify the positive and negative experiences shoppers have with their brand
  • Locate the cracks in customer service
  • Provide a more personalized experience for shoppers
  • Build trust and make shoppers feel valued

To obtain comprehensive and useful customer feedback, company decision-makers need to implement intuitive ways for consumers to communicate with them and ensure the information provides actionable insight for improving customer service.

Here are seven ways to collect customer feedback:

  • Send customer satisfaction surveys online
  • Organize feedback focus groups
  • Read reviews from third-party review sites
  • Build an online community for customers

Gathering feedback is only the first step. Next, it’s important for managers to create an action plan on cumulative insights and train employees to leverage this information when responding to customer complaints.

Continually requesting consumer feedback will help identify any cracks in customer service and reduce the chances of a shopper feeling unsatisfied with their transaction.

4. Use KPIs to Gauge Customer Service Performance

It is not enough for eCommerce managers to train and equip their customer service teams. Measuring and tracking customer experience with the right KPIs can help the entire team understand how their consumer experience ties to overall business success, and how shoppers’ interactions with them change over time.

KPIs help eCommerce leaders appreciate their shoppers’ satisfaction level and readiness to continue doing business with them.

Here are four customer experience KPIs to track:

  • Net promoter score
  • Customer effort score
  • Rate of returning visitors
  • Revenue per customer

See the breakdown of each KPI below.

Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score (NPS) is a reflection of an eCommerce business’s customer experience. An eCommerce business’s net promoter score shows the likelihood of shoppers referring their family and friends to do business with that brand.

To calculate NPS, send a survey including the question, “How likely are you to recommend our product?” Customers provide their answers on a scale of 1 to 10.

After collecting this information, calculate NPS by subtracting the total number of entries below 5 from the total number of entries above 5.

An NPS below zero indicates a low customer satisfaction level. An NPS between zero and 30 shows more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers. Above 30 implies that there are far more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers. Above 70 means that customers are loyal and will be the source of a lot of word-of-mouth referrals.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) reveals how much work consumers must put into researching products and services or completing a particular task. For example, how long does it take the average shopper to get a refund, sign up, or get a request ticket answered?

Customer effort score reflects how accessible a business is to its consumers.

As with NPS, calculate CES using a survey with the question, “How much effort did you have to put in to complete this task?” Ask customers to respond on a scale of 1 to 7 or 1 to 5.

Here’s the breakdown for each scale.

On a scale of 1 to 5:

  • 1 = Very high effort
  • 2 = High effort
  • 3 = Neutral
  • 4 = Low effort
  • 5 = Very low effort

On a scale of 1 to 7:

  • 1 = Extremely difficult
  • 2 = Very difficult
  • 3 = Fairly difficult
  • 4 = Neither
  • 5 = Fairly easy
  • 6 = Very easy
  • 7 = Extremely easy

To calculate the cumulative CES, divide the sum of all consumer effort entries by the total number of entries.

The best time to measure CES is immediately after a purchase or a concluded service interaction, or when an overall customer experience report is valuable.

On a 1-to-7 scale, aim for a CES of 5 or higher. A CES lower than 5 shows shoppers are struggling with a product or service and getting minimal satisfaction from it. Above 5 means consumers find it easy to use a product or service.

Rate of Returning Visitors

The rate of returning visitors (RVR) reflects the effectiveness of customer success strategies and user experience for an online service. If shoppers enjoy their experience on the site, they’ll be more likely to return.

For an online service, calculate RVR by dividing the number of returning visitors by the number of unique visitors. The higher the value, the better the customer experience on the site.

While RVR can vary for different industries, a good RVR is 30% or more.

Revenue Per Customer

Revenue per customer (RPC) ties the overall consumer experience to a company’s bottom line.

To calculate RPC, divide the total revenue by the total customer count.

A high RPC means consumers have a consistently positive experience with a business. They are loyal, repeat shoppers who recommend the brand to friends and family.

Combined, these four KPIs provide insight into the quality of customer service, the satisfaction consumers derive from a product or service, and areas for improvement.

For example, a CES below 5 for contacting support could mean one or more of the following:

  • Customers don’t receive a timely response
  • Consumers must try multiple channels to access the customer service team
  • Customers must repeat themselves to every new call center agent they interact with
  • It takes a long time for representatives to resolve their issues

Company executives should dig deep to uncover the factors producing the low KPIs and benchmark their KPIs with their competitors to know where they stand.

5. Provide a Consistent Cross Channel Experience

A cross-channel customer service strategy allows eCommerce employees to provide seamless and consistent customer support across different channels. Shoppers can switch between, SMS, webchat, and social media without any service interruptions or inconsistencies in quality.

Cross-channel customer service helps shoppers get quick responses to their needs, improves the brand’s reputation and trust, and boosts consumers’ positive experiences.

Here are seven strategies to implement a cross-channel experience:

  • Ensure customers can reach employee representatives offline and online on the platform of their choice
  • Implement seamless transition when moving customers from one call center agent to another
  • Maintain comprehensive documentation on each customer to help call center agents continue conversations based on the last engagement
  • Build mobile-friendly customer support pages to provide mobile consumers a smooth experience
  • Respond on time to customer queries on all channels and present practical solutions to their needs
  • Create a comprehensive self-service solution to help customers solve their problems by themselves
  • Present a unified front and ensure every team and department collaborate and share information

Today, 95% of customers use three or more channels to connect with a company in a single service interaction and that 65% of customers expressed frustration over inconsistent experiences across channels. Establishing a presence on all available platforms might spread a company’s resources too thin and lead to inconsistent, negative experiences. Instead, focusing on meeting consumers where they are and establishing unified, consistent experiences on their most used channels will create a better overall customer experience.

With Quiq’s cross-channel digital messaging platform, employees can provide a consistent experience for consumers across different digital platforms.

Also, to implement the best customer service strategy, nothing beats working with the right conversational customer engagement platform. Ideally, interacting with consumers will be easy and fun for employees and provide frictionless support for shoppers, while increasing the brand’s competitive advantage, market share, and overall revenue.

Invest in a Quality Customer Engagement Platform

More than ever, consumers want to do business with brands that make it easy to browse, shop, complete transactions, and get support on the consumers’ terms. eCommerce businesses can gain a significant competitive advantage by providing these experiences through seamless engagement via digital channels.

Improving customer success and satisfaction is a long-term plan that requires buy-in and commitment from management, investment in training employee representatives, collecting feedback consistently, measuring the right things, and investing in a platform to manage everything.

Quiq is a conversational customer engagement platform that enables enterprises to unify SMS, email, chat, and social media interactions with their consumers all in one place. Request a demo to see how Quiq can help employee representatives provide a seamless customer service experience.

Instagram’s New Messenger API – What It Is And How Your Business Can Use It

Posted on Lauren Winder

During their annual F8 Refresh conference, Facebook announced the Messenger API for Instagram has exited beta and is now available to all businesses looking to forge deeper relationships with their customers through scalable, 1:1 conversations.

The new API enables consumer brands to scale automated conversations within Instagram Direct Messages and presents a strategic opportunity to deliver premium customer experiences on one of today’s most popular social networks.

Common Uses

  • Send and receive text, media, stories, etc.
  • Retrieve conversation history from the IG business inbox.
  • Respond to public comments with private messages.

The API is open to all businesses. Prior to this release, brands handled customer conversations in one of two ways: either by  interacting with consumers on Instagram directly or using Facebook’s unified business inbox. Not surprisingly, these options were limited by how they can be used and what a business can do with them. 

The Messenger API can be integrated into any third-party application used to manage customer communications including social media management platforms like Hootsuite or Sprinklr, CRM applications like Salesforce or Oracle, and messaging platforms like Quiq.

According to Techcrunch the Messenger API will be available in a phased approach. Phase 1 will allow business accounts with 10,000 to 100,000 followers to connect to the API first. In July (Phase 2) Facebook will connect accounts with 100,000 – 1 million followers. Future updates will include all other accounts by the end of the year.

Before getting started with the new Messenger API, a brand must have access to the following:

  • An Instagram Business Account or Instagram Creator Account
  • A Facebook page connected to that account
  • A Facebook developer account that can perform tasks on that page
  • A registered Facebook app with basic settings configured

Generally, brands that work with Quiq have an Instagram account and Facebook page set up. Our team of knowledgeable conversation experts will handle the developer page and Facebook app setup for you.

How Businesses Use Instagram’s New Messenger API

Facebook reports that 500 million accounts visit Instagram’s stories daily and 130 million Instagram accounts tap on a shopping post to learn more about products every month. Given the widespread adoption of Instagram and more specifically, the engagement with shopping and product-specific posts, brands must develop a messaging strategy that includes Instagram in order to compete.

Here are four ways to get started with the new Messenger API: 

1. Engagement: How To Start Conversations on Instagram

Perhaps one of the most important new features of Messenger’s API support for Instagram is the ability for  customers and brands to initiate automated conversations through various entry points on the platform.

Customers can start conversations with businesses through the brand’s Instagram profile page.

Instagram Stories have also been enhanced to provide an additional opportunity for brands to initiate automated 1:1 conversations with customers.

Customers browsing Instagram Shops can also start conversations with brands when they have product or shopping-related inquiries.

Consumer brands can now initiate 1:1 conversations with shoppers who leave questions and comments on brands’ posts.

By integrating Messenger’s API Support for Instagram with highly-intelligent conversational automation, businesses can initiate conversations at each of these entry points and deliver highly-personalized messaging experiences — entirely at scale.

2. Consideration: Addressing Product Questions and Concerns

After driving shoppers to 1:1 conversations on Instagram, brands can leverage conversational automation to provide answers and responses to customers’ frequently asked questions. 

By addressing customer inquiries directly within Instagram, brands can further ensure a comprehensive online shopping experience without ever leaving the platform

3. Purchase: Helping Shoppers Find the Right Products 

Consumer businesses can also use automated conversations within Instagram to help drive shoppers to purchase. 

By leveraging Messenger’s API support for Instagram, brands can provide shoppers with guided shopping experiences that deliver highly-personalized product suggestions based on their conversational inputs.

4. Care: Seamless Order Management and Support

Lastly, after making a purchase, customers can leverage conversations within Instagram to get post-purchase order updates and more. 

Through this experience, shoppers can receive immediate responses to their current order status and more.

Try Instagram’s New Messaging API Yourself

Before you dive into deploying Instagram Messaging, you may want to experience it for yourself. Original Coast Clothing (OC) is a fictional clothing brand created for the purposes of showcasing Instagram’s features.

Try it now by searching for Original Coast Clothing on Instagram. You can initiate a conversation by tapping the “message” button. This demo should serve as inspiration for brands looking to deliver a great customer experience using both automation and live agents.

Getting Started with the New Messenger API for Instagram

As the new API exits beta and becomes widely available to consumer brands, many businesses are eager to get started using it to provide highly-personalized and scalable customer experiences on Instagram.

To get started, download our latest guide for Getting Started with The New API for Instagram DMs and learn how to deliver scalable customer experiences on one of today’s most popular channels.

Introducing Quiq Translate

Posted on The Quiq Team

We’re excited to announce the launch of Quiq Translate, a new feature that translates multi-language exchanges between customers and agents. With Quiq’s language translation services Quiq Messaging is enhanced to support the automatic translation of incoming and outgoing messages in a conversation.

Quiq’s digital conversation platform drives operational excellence in digital customer support and service with features that teams can use to manage and measure cross-channel messaging in a single intuitive workspace. With Quiq Translate, companies can translate over 100 languages making messaging even more accessible and convenient.

Why Translation Matters To Your Business

For many companies, providing service and support In their customers’ preferred language can seem daunting. How do you communicate in multiple languages and provide excellent customer service without hiring a native customer support agent for every language out there? Let’s start with another question – why should you?

There are a lot of great reasons our clients use Quiq Translate, not the least of which is making support more accessible to the people they serve. Let’s discuss a few of the more common driving factors that make multilingual customer support key for businesses to provide positive customer experiences. The kind of experiences that build trust and loyalty.

  • Your company’s growth

Customers become more linguistically diverse as businesses gain international buyers, or expand to new markets. As your company expands, you’ll need to remain sensitive to your customers’ needs. A global company with operations or offices in many different countries, has to communicate in multiple languages to provide excellent customer service. But the need to offer support in a customers’ native language isn’t just for big multinational companies. Even if you’re doing business in the US, the changing market requires multilingual customer service and support.

  • Changing demographics 

Every year, the U.S. Census asks survey recipients if they speak a language other than English at home. If the respondent answers “yes”, they are then asked “How well does this person speak English?”. Any answer other than “Very well” defines the respondent as Limited English Proficient (LEP).

Of the total US population, LEP individuals now account for about 9%. The consumer buying power of Limited-English proficient populations will continue to show considerable growth. Hispanic and Asian-American populations alone represent 70% of LEP consumers in the United States, and providing excellent language services means not missing out on the opportunity to connect with and serve new markets.

  • Security

Interacting with customers means highly sensitive data can be shared during the support interaction. When engaging with Limited-English speaking customers, companies may give agents the freedom to use free online translation tools, this can leave the door open to data leaks and not give the organization full view of the engagement.

<>If you think you need to hire agents with language specific skills, customer service interpreters, or professional translators, think again. It’s possible to enable fast, cost effective translation services with Quiq Translate to deliver superb customer service.

Translating Your Digital Conversations With Quiq

Agents specify which languages they can handle. The language of the conversation is detected based upon the customer’s message. If the agent doesn’t speak the customer’s language, incoming messages are automatically translated. The agent can still see the translated message and the original untranslated message.

Outgoing messages from the agent are automatically translated, so customers receive responses in their preferred language. Both the original and translated messages are stored as part of the saved message transcript.

Better Agent and Customer Experiences

Working as a customer service representative can be challenging, especially when managing multiple customer queries and claims. One of the most compelling reasons our clients choose to shift to digital channels is that asynchron

ous engagement makes it easy for agents to handle multiple conversations at one time.

A boost in productivity is just one advantage that messaging has over other methods like phone calls and emails. Add to that the absence of noisy environments that make it difficult to carry on a phone conversation, the ability for the customer to pick back up on a conversation when it’s convenient for them, and automation features like chatbots that make routing, queuing, and self service faster and more accurate and you see why messaging makes for good communication.

But language barriers can get in the way of good communication. Providing your teams with the right tools will enable them to better handle customer requests and keep them motivated. The benefits for support teams are both quantitative

, with less calls and substantial time saved, as they are qualitative: the dialogue with customers is also improved.

More Languages, One Workflow

Quiq Translate is a native feature of Quiq Messaging and available on all messaging channels. Messages are automatically translated in over 100 languages across the most popular digital messaging channels, including SMS/text, Apple Messages for Business, Google Business Messages, webchat, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Quiq Messaging Administrators have the ability to enable or disable the Quiq Translate feature with a quick toggle in the Admin UI. Once enabled, agents can set their preferred language, which is the language messages will be translated to. Quiq automatically detects the customers’ language or agents can manually select the customer’s preferred language, or the customer can select and set their preferred language from a list.

Once preferred languages are selected, Quiq Translate does the rest. For example, an agent has their preferred languages set to English. If they accept a conversation and the messages are in Spanish, Quiq Translate will automatically translate Spanish messages to English for the agent and any English responses will be translated to Spanish when the customer receives it.

The agent can view all messages as they were originally sent. The ability to toggle between the original message as it was written by the customer and the translated messages ensures that nothing, quite literally gets lost in translation.The conversation history can be viewed by agents, and managers within the systems they already use. Our platform integrates with the CS tools you already use such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud, and Shopify, so you can get started quickly. Or simply use our APIs to build custom integrations for what you need.

The City Of Knoxville, Quiq Translate In Action

The City of Knoxville, which has been piloting the technology, said that Spanish speakers are one of the fastest growing groups in the Knoxville area. The City is eager that its services reach this population, many of whom prefer mobile devices and text and messaging as their preferred method of communication.

“We’re trying to reach people where they are and speak to them in the language they’re most comfortable with,” Russ Jensen, director of the 311 Center for Service Innovation, said. “We want them to feel safe asking for help.”

The City has been working closely with Quiq for nearly a year. In April 2020, they launched a Covid-19 chatbot to help residents get important information related to Covid-19, such as a symptom checker, or to access services such as food banks.

Knoxville’s 211 service now has a chatbot available in English and Spanish with more languages on the way. Carter Hall, with the City of Knoxville, says that Rundia, an East African language is next.

Ready For Multilingual Customer Service and Support?

The world is getting smaller and more connected, and businesses are growing on a global scale. Language can no longer be a barrier to this. You can easily deliver exceptional customer service regardless of your customers’ preferred language with the help of Quiq’s Messaging Platform and Quiq Translation.

Schedule some time to speak with one of our conversation experts to learn how you can serve more consumers in their preferred language using Quiq Translate.

U-tron Makes Space For Messaging

Posted on The Quiq Team

Space. Not the vast, final frontier kind. We’re talking about the high demand, short supply, revenue generating variety that you find in New York, New Jersey, and California. When space is limited and parking is an absolute necessity, that can be a problem. That’s where U-tron comes in.

U-tron’s technology is a fully automated parking solution that saves space and reduces costs, while opening the doors to additional amenities. U-tron delivers a user friendly parking experience as simple and easy as valet parking, but without any human intervention. U-tron wanted the entire experience to be frictionless, right down to helping customers in need. The company turned to Quiq, so that customers who need help, get a fast, easy experience. Now 80% of the calls they use to receive now go through messaging.

Fully Automated, Highly Accurate, and Efficient 

With traditional parking structures, developers must work with often limited, complex space constraints. Imagine you’re developing an office complex in New Jersey. Local ordinances require you to provide 200 parking spots. The space available for parking will accommodate 90 cars on a flat surface. It used to be that the only options were an expensive dig to build down into the ground or building an eyesore up into the sky. 

If you order your car, it means you’re going somewhere. You might have an appointment, you might be going to work, or maybe you have a party to go to. Whatever it is, you need your car. So every second really counts when there’s an issue and your car is not coming out.

  • Michael Asmussen, Service Operations Manager, U-tron

That is until Unitronics, an industrial automation company applied 30 years of experience and knowledge to the problem and created U-tron. The company’s advanced automation solutions doubles the amount of parking spaces available.

A U-tron parking structure delivers a valet experience, without the valet. Drivers pull their car into a bay, lock their doors, and leave. The U-tron system will load the vehicle onto a pallet where it is smoothly delivered to its optimal parking spot. Pallets are transported by conveyors in an organized matrix designed to allow full flexibility and maximum capacity. Cars can be packed inches away from each other since there aren’t any humans who have to open doors to get in and out of cars. 

The absence of humans also means that there are different standards for safety and security. Garages are not lit or ventilated and there aren’t any stairwells or elevators to maintain. The lack of human access means that cars aren’t broken into and the robots that park the vehicles with precision and speed don’t ding cars. These things change the cost to build, insure, and operate a parking structure.

When drivers are ready to retrieve their vehicle they use the mobile app or kiosk to have the system retrieve their car. Cars arrive at a bay, facing forward and ready for the driver to head out. 

The entire operation is a modern, digital, fully-automated experience. Except when there was the rare instance a customer needed help at one of the garages. 

fully automated customer service is easy with Quiq Messaging and chatbots

When Every Second Counts Messaging Is The Answer

The expectation of an automated system is that it’s reliable and intuitive and when it’s not, that’s a problem. But U-tron isn’t a company of problem solvers. U-tron is a company of problem eliminators and one of the company’s key metrics is having zero customer calls to resolve. However, there are the inevitable software bugs or power outages that cause issues for customers.

Prior to implementing messaging, customers who had trouble retrieving their car would call a number. An answering service staffed by human agents would answer the call, take a message, and send an email to one of the technicians. The process required U-tron employees to vigilantly monitor their email for these infrequent requests so they could help customers as quickly as possible.

Quickly in this case was a relative term. The conversation with the answering service and transmission of the message through email could take 5 minutes or more in and of itself. If you’re the customer waiting for your car, that can feel like a lifetime.

One of the first things Michael Asmussen, Service Operations Manager at U-tron wanted to do when he joined the company was to reduce the customer’s wait time. Texting was the obvious channel. Given that 80% of calls have been deflected to SMS, it appears to have been the right choice.

U-tron Chooses Quiq Messaging For Flexibility

U-tron is a small, growing international company. There are between 15 to 20 technicians worldwide who handle approximately 5 inquiries a day in addition to monitoring and maintaining the complex equipment in the garages.

When the team looked for solutions it was important that the messaging platform was enabled across various channels like WhatsApp and SMS. Quiq was an obvious winner there. Quiq’s support of SMS, web chat, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, and Apple Messages for Business meant that messaging could work in the US and elsewhere.

What really sealed the deal for the team at U-tron was the ability to pay by the conversation and not by seat. This ensures that anyone who needs to be involved in the conversation to help the customer has access to messaging.

For Michael, who was the champion for messaging from the beginning, it meant that he could stretch his budget and get all of his technicians on messaging instead of having to pick a handful of technicians for the messaging channel or worse, share licenses. With Quiq, every technician can get instant access to any of the customer messages that come in and there is clean reporting for every technician and every conversation.

From a managerial standpoint, the transparency of messaging has been a big win. Unlike the black box of phone calls where it wasn’t clear what transpired in the conversation, messaging makes it easier to review activity and transcripts. As a manager, Michael is able to review conversations and provide Technicians with the coaching they need to deliver better service.

The Future of Fully Automated Parking

Messaging provides U-tron the flexibility it needs now and for their future growth. The company has plans to double the cars in service every year for the next four or five years. Part of the rationale for choosing Quiq was that it could easily scale, and do so quickly, as their business grows.

Anything I’m doing right now has to easily scale because the business is going to grow and Quiq fit the bill there. If I want to double the team tomorrow, it’s ten minutes to just add the users and train them.

  • Michael Asmussen, Service Operations Manager, U-tron

Messaging isn’t the only way the company is preparing for growth. Around the same time messaging went live for the company in September of 2020, U-tron also introduced their mobile app. Within the mobile app, the company prominently presents a help button which opens the native texting app on their customers phone so that they can initiate a conversation right away. 

The Operations team’s success with Quiq has their Marketing department looking into how to use messaging too. Down the road, the team plans to evaluate web chat, Facebook, and Google’s Business Messages for pre-sales support.

Naturally, it wouldn’t be a U-tron case study if the company didn’t have plans to expand their use of bots to automate transactions. Michael believes that their bots will evolve further to distinguish between standard customer issues and issues like billing. For now, the team is training and iterating their bots to recognize more customer intents.

What Your Customers Think About Using Customer Service Chatbots

Posted on The Quiq Team

Chatbots have become very popular because they save time and resources by automating customer support services. Bots are often used to address common customer inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on solving more complex problems.

We’ve seen our share of bots go to work within organizations. There’s a long list of companies that have been able to lift productivity, boost customer retention, increase customer referrals, and facilitate a better overall experience for their customer.

With all these benefits, there’s still an important question that might be nagging you. What do your customer’s think about using bots in their interactions with you? Read on and find out.

What do consumers think about chatbots?

Before we dive in, let’s consider the knowns.

  1. Consumers hate to wait

In a survey of “more than 2,500 consumers, nearly 60% of respondents believe that one minute is too long to be on hold,” PRWeb reports. “In addition, 32.3% of consumers believe that customer service departments should be answering immediately—with no hold time.”

  1. Customer experience is more important than ever

Not only do 80% of customers believe that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, according to Salesforce research. more than two-thirds (67%) say their standard of what defines a good experience has been raised. With 76% of consumers and business buyers saying that it’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere, the pressure is on for organizations to get the customer experience right.

Chatbots aren’t the silver bullet to correcting any and all service issues, but they can complement the support experience. Chatbots often act as the front line, giving customers a quick friendly greeting and providing answers to common questions — fast. And because we know that #1 holds, whether we’re talking about waiting in line for coffee, or waiting in a queue for support, it’s important that companies respond to customers quickly.

  1. Most consumers have already interacted with a bot

Voice of customer (VoC) platform Usabilla released a report showing that humans love AI and chatbots.The company surveyed 1,000 US consumers in August 2018 who used customer service options such as FAQs, chatbots, or automated options that allowed them to completely avoid human interaction for a customer service issue.

Nearly three out of four (70%) respondents said that they have used chatbots already, and of those who have not, 60 percent said that they would feel comfortable doing so.

All of these findings back what everyone already instinctively knows. Consumers want real-time interactions, and chatbots deliver. According to research, the majority (86%) of consumers would choose getting an answer from a chatbot over filling out a form on your website.

Why Consumers Like Using Chatbots

According to ZDNet, 54% of consumers would always choose a chatbot over a human customer service rep if it saved them 10 minutes. There are three simple reasons why consumers like using chatbots:

  • Always On

Chatbots don’t need coffee breaks, holidays off, or long weekends. Chatbots are the always-on extension of your contact center. Customers like that they can get some support no matter when they need it, even if it’s outside of your normal business hours.

  • Fast Responses

Unlike human agents, chatbots can access information with greater speed and consistency. Consider how quickly a bot can look up an order and provide a customer with a tracking number. Even transferring the customer’s conversation, either to another bot or to a human agent, happens with a lot less frustration and friction from the customer’s end than, say, being placed on hold during a phone call.

  • Convenient Access

With so much time spent on their phones, consumers appreciate how easy it is to engage with and respond to a chatbot on mobile messaging. Customers get the help they need, when they want, and wherever they prefer. Rich messaging experiences, such as those provided by Apple Messages for Business and Google’s Business Messages are examples of how bots can present options to schedule appointments, add products to a shopping cart, or look up order information. These experiences are beautifully-designed, media-rich, and offer simple touch targets for customers to engage on-the-go.

How Consumers Use Chatbots

Chatbots are on the company front lines in a wide-range of industries. Research shows that there are even some transactions that the majority of consumers expect to do without any human interaction.

Things such as scheduling appointments, receiving order status, updating personal information, and getting updates on recent transactions are common customer inquiries easily handled by bots. But, chatbots aren’t just for common, redundant tasks.

In the Forrester Webinar “How to Successfully Deploy Messaging and Bots In Your Business,” we heard from two very different companies using messaging and bots. Devlin O’Neill discussed how Lululemon is using bots to help retail customers find the right product, while Thomas Crawford from the Mortgage Center spoke about helping homeowners refinance.

As stated above, consumers are becoming more comfortable with chatbots. The reason is clear – whether it’s getting a product recommendation, promotion, or a reminder that their credit union can refinance their home, consumers want to get the information they need fast. If they feel like a solution gets them information more quickly and allows them to achieve a goal (like getting a better mortgage rate), they’re more likely to engage with it and feel satisfied with that interaction.

Redefine Support With A Chatbot In Your Organization

When the experience is done right, consumers love engaging with bots. Your customers will expect to find your bots to be quick, easy, informative, friendly, and dare we say, sometimes a little fun.

Quiq’s digital engagement platform enables you to design and deploy bots across your entire organization on all of the channels your customers want to use. Any combination of native Quiq customer service chatbots, bots developed in third-party bot platforms and human agents can participate in a conversation. Schedule some time with a conversation expert to see how bots can go to work for you and your customers.

Formal vs. Casual: Which Style Is Best for Customer Service?

Posted on Lauren Winder

How to Win Over B2B Customers and Build Trust

Interactions with business-to-business (B2B) customers are usually best suited for formal language. The goals are to increase trust and solve problems for current or potential clients while maintaining high standards.

A formal tone supports those aims and allows customer service experts to nimbly navigate corporate structures. Agents may engage with several decision-makers to guide their choices. Formal language shows a consistency that impresses people from highly structured industries.

Questions about using a formal vs. informal communication style also arise when helping customers with medical or legal issues. Those people frequently reach out when dealing with serious matters. A formal style is typically best for handling them, even when addressing consumers.

An informal style could make people conclude customer service agents don’t recognize the severity of their circumstances. They could also decide getting in touch was a mistake and go elsewhere for help — creating missed opportunities for agents and their employers.

How to Facilitate Better B2C Interactions and Stay On-Brand

Business-to-consumer (B2C) conversations succeed when shoppers connect with entities that address their unmet needs and make things easier or more enjoyable. Adopting a casual style for most B2C interactions works well because it allows agents to come across as highly relatable and well positioned to understand individual situations.

Conversations about lifestyle products or consumer goods often resonate more with shoppers when customer service agents use informal wording. This approach lets service specialists avoid overly stuffy language.

Adopting informal language can also aid customer service specialists who want to excite or inspire. Keeping the interactions casual supports a team’s efforts to convey how products tackle potential buyers’ challenges.

Many B2C companies gain ground in competitive marketplaces by using a humorous tone. An informal style supports such lighthearted approaches when they make sense for the audience or the products being sold.

Formal vs. Casual: Which Style Is Best for Customer Service?

No universal rules define formal vs. informal business communication, although the above examples provide useful starting points. If service teams feel unsure, following customers’ leads by mimicking the styles they use is an excellent practice. The use of emoticons can also help clue someone into the fact the person on the other end prefers informal language.

Employees who interact with customers may have internal documents or their supervisors’ orders to follow as well. Those elements take precedence over broader advice about how best to handle communications.

Learn How to Boost Survey Responses

Decisions about when to use formal vs. informal communication illustrate the evolution of how people engage with brands. The Quiq Conversational Customer Engagement Platform supports today’s business messaging needs by personalizing communications through consumers’ preferred channels. Contact us today or request a demo to learn about the benefits of instant messaging and text messaging in formal and informal settings.

Quiq’s Newest Partner – Snaps Brings End-to-End Sales and Support on Instagram and More

Posted on Lauren Winder

Quiq and Snaps Integration

Quiq is thrilled to announce its integration with Snaps, the leading platform for connecting consumers and businesses in messaging. As partners, Quiq and Snaps now offer retailers and eCommerce brands highly intelligent, end-to-end conversations on today’s most popular messaging channels including webchat, SMS, Apple Business Messages, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and more.

Most recently, Quiq and Snaps have updated their integration to deliver hybrid automated and human support for digital retailers on Instagram.

Through Snaps’ integration with Quiq, eCommerce brands can now provide shoppers with 24/7 instantaneous answers to frequently asked questions and personal complex order inquiries with automation or seamlessly connect to a live agent for additional sales or service support.

Quiq example chat

Agents using Quiq can follow the conversation, take over if desired, and then hand control back to the automated assistant.

Once shoppers request agent support, a transcript of their automated conversation, as well as key user properties like name and email, are passed along to the agent using Quiq’s customer service platform.

Quiq chatbot screen

Conversational interactions with the live agent will then continue directly within shoppers’ existing chat windows on Instagram.

For online retailers experiencing a surge of customer service inquiries amidst COVID-19 and peak shopping periods, Snaps’ integration with Quiq enables brands to provide faster and more efficient support to shoppers while freeing up agents to focus on more complex support and sales inquiries.

Interested in learning more about Snaps’ partnership with Quiq? Contact us to get more details about our integration and a personalized demonstration of how it works.

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How Business Messaging For Retail Delivers More Personal Service

Posted on The Quiq Team

Contactless payments, buy online pick up in store (BOPIS), and curbside pickup have become a big part of the acceleration of ecommerce brought about by COVID. Just because in-person interactions are becoming less of a thing doesn’t mean that personal service has to be. In fact, some might argue that consumers’ shift to online shopping should be more personal.

Take, for example, how consumers now behave and engage with brands on social media. Companies can not only sell directly on the social channels where consumers feel right at home, but consumers can share reviews and recommendations, consume multimedia content, and receive more personal recommendations based on previous purchase history.

Text messaging has come a long way from the character-limited days of SMS and retailers can use this channel to deliver jaw-dropping customer experiences. In this post, we’ll explore how retailers can use messaging to deliver a more personal experience.

Why Business Messaging for Retailers is Relevant

There’s been a sharp reduction in the number in-store interactions that consumers have with brands. Even before the pandemic, consumers were migrating online to save-time and expand their options.

According to McKinsey, high-income earners and millennials are leading the way in online spending across both essential and nonessential items. Gen X has experienced a similar online shift, although not at the same scale as millennials. Meanwhile, Gen Z has concentrated its shift online in particular categories: apparel and footwear, at-home entertainment, and food takeout/delivery. But the shift has been across every generational cohort.

According to the National Retail Federation Pre-COVID boomers “typically made less than half of their purchases online.”  Since this population has been more at risk during the pandemic they have accelerated adoption of technology like BOPIS and curbside pickup. Two thirds of this population say these services help improve their buying experience.

With more people working from home, online shopping has soared and consumers expect the store to come to them. “The crisis has prompted a surge of new activities, with an astonishing 75 percent of US consumers trying a new shopping behavior in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities” according to research.

The surge of online shopping means that companies have had to quickly adjust to digital engagement channels to help consumers through new buying behaviors. Now brands must invest quickly and aggressively to create enjoyable, memorable, and personalized experiences on these channels.


Now that mobile and online shopping is permanently ingrained into consumer’s shopping habits, retailers must consider digital experiences to be just as important as in-store experiences. Consumers’ ability to message a brand for pre-sales service or post-sales support is the equivalent of having friendly, knowledgeable associates on the floor and ready to serve the customer.

Messaging has helped brands like Overstock and lululemon keep up with the spike in online sales. Here are a few key ways retailers can use text messaging to deliver more personal service:

  • Ensure delivery of order status updates

Proactivity sending your customers updates on their order status is expected but sending these types of notifications through email misses the mark. With Quiq messaging you can push these time sensitive messages directly to your customers mobile devices. Messages can be sent individually or sent out to thousands of customers in no time from short or long codes. If customers have follow-up questions or want to place an order, they can simply reply and be connected to a bot or one of your employees.

  • Send trusted messages

Sending spammy messages from unknown phone numbers is something something brands should stop doing immediately. Quiq can provision your existing landline to send and receive messages. No random numbers here. Just the same 10 digit number that your customers use to call you.

Verified SMS, Apple Messages for Business, and Google’s Business Messages all provide the kind of next level branding that plain SMS doesn’t. Companies can send messages, loaded with logos, colors, and verification badges that signal to the consumer that the message is legit. If you want to make the experience more personal for your customer, make sure every touchpoint is trusted and secure, with your familiar branding.

  • Offering mobile personal styling services

Mobile engagement gives retailers room to really flex their creative muscles especially when it comes to providing personal styling and shopping services. To some, this concept might seem intimidating. How could you possibly offer customers the same attention and selection that they’d receive in store? The answer is – it’s not the same, but it can be better.

Imagine how much easier a digital personal shopping experience is when the consumer can quickly exchange product pictures back and forth. Overstock did exactly that and enabled their Customer Service Associates to help customers 24//7. Instead of a customer describing a style verbally, they could just send a screenshot of the space they are trying to fill. The two-way, conversational nature of texting allows designers to easily go back and forth with a customer, ask clarifying questions, add a personal touch and ultimately make a sale.

  • Share timely, targeted offers

Sharing information in a timely manner is what text messaging was made for. Text messaging allows you to quickly and easily send out alerts and promos to all opted-in shoppers.

Outbound notifications can be more than the transactional “your order has shipped” messages we’ve all come to know and love. Sending trusted, timely and relevant information to customers creates a stronger connection to your brand and a more personal experience for the customer.

Use messaging to target certain segments with info and promos that are specific to them. Want to send a special offer on cat litter to your feline loving customers – done. Need to notify everyone that ordered the new velvet throw that the matching accent pillows are back in stock – done. Unlike email, which has at best a 20%-ish open rate, text messaging has a 98% open rate, so you know your customers will get the message.

How To Use Business Messaging for Retail

There are so many different ways people can use smartphones today, including apps, email, music and social media. When it’s all said and done, text messaging is ubiquitous with 97% of smartphone owners using text messaging regularly, according to Pew Research’s most recent analysis of smartphone use. This remarkably high figure illustrates that basic communication remains a key driver of behavior even as the number and complexity of potential distractions increase.

This basic ability to connect with others is a driver as to why businesses of every size should look to leverage text messaging to communicate with their customers. For retailers, messaging has proven to be a highly reliable and personalized medium.

What’s more, messaging is ubiquitous across all platforms and mobile devices, allowing businesses to reach their customers. Even if your customer doesn’t have the latest device or if they’re using a basic prepaid handset they can still receive simple, timely SMS messages. These days, most customers are capable of receiving rich messages like Apple Messages for Business, and Google’s Business Messages—which deliver the kind of modern messaging experience that consumers have come to expect. Combine this with the fact that everyone carries their mobile device with them at all times (even to the point of sleeping with them), and you’ve got a recipe for success.

The market is ready for new brands to introduce messaging into their channel mix, but are you? If you need help with getting started Quiq is here to help. Contact us so that we can learn more about your business and how text messaging can help you provide more personal service.

Pella Resolves Pane Points with Messaging

Posted on The Quiq Team

Pella Corporation is a leading designer and manufacturer of window and doors.  Pella has over 7,000 team members, 17 manufacturing locations, and more than 200 showrooms across the country. Pella supports every step of the customer’s journey, from design to installation, and support after the sale. Pella’s unique advantage is that they distribute where their customers want to buy, through exclusive Pella distributors and custom builders, to big box retailers like Lowe’s.

Pella is committed to exceeding customer expectations, and that includes customer support. Pella recognized that strong sales growth directly impacted the need to scale their contact center. The company turned to Quiq’s Messaging platform to achieve efficiencies such as a 98% faster resolution time with messaging vs. email.

Pella Rolls Out Customer Support Messaging

Pella's shift to customer service messagingPella partnered with Quiq to implement messaging and went live with the platform in January of 2020 within the corporate contact center. The plan was to start with a subset of their customers and agents, build something and then learn from it.

The first Rollouts included:

  1. Messaging support for Pella’s National Account Sales Reps, who service some of Pella’s largest B2B customers like Lowe’s.
  2. The company chose four phone agents to go live with the messaging channel.
  3. The agents were provided with 2 hours of hands-on training and then allowed to spend time practicing with the system.
  4. Pella sent out a communication to their sales reps to promote the channel explaining how the new messaging channel worked and when it would be available. 
  5. Regional Managers were invited to a virtual meeting to unveil the new channel and were excited about this new support channel.

The Pella team was impressed with how smoothly the launch was executed and chose to expand the launch to include an Order Status chat bot that would handle any requests for Order status. This bot supports the sales reps and B2B customers as well.

  • Pella designed the order status bot, which includes an integration with Pella’s order system 
  • The bot is also able to seamlessly hand off any conversation that goes beyond order status or requires further research to a group of contact center agents.
  • With the help of the Quiq team, Pella was able to deploy the new bot quickly and effectively.

Flattening the Contact Center Growth Curve

Adoption began almost immediately. Volume quickly ramped up as many of the sales reps became early and eager advocates for messaging, sharing their experience with colleagues. Both agents and reps love the ability to share screen shots, gifs, and links within their conversations to quickly exchange information. Today, the entire National Account Support team takes conversations from sales reps. Agents typically handle up to 3 simultaneous messages at a time with the average conversation lasting 5 minutes. 

Prior to the implementation of messaging, the contact center received thousands of phone calls and emails from sales reps. Since implementing SMS, at least 15% of phone calls have been deflected to the messaging channel.  

Messaging helps sales reps get the information they need faster, making in-home meetings with customers more efficient. Now resolving something over text takes an average time of 8 mins on SMS vs. emails that could sit in a reps inbox, and were averaging over 7hrs, for resolution. The 98% faster response time is paying off.

In one example, a customer wanted to know if they could have windows that matched their existing trim while meeting with a Pella sales rep in their home. The rep was able to snap a picture of the trim and text the question and photo to an agent. Within 20 seconds the agent sent a picture of three trim options that would work. Because the customer immediately received the information they needed, the sales rep was able to close the sale that day.

“Agents prefer messaging over talking on the phone. Over the phone, if there are 10 seconds of silence while you’re looking up something in the system, it feels like an eternity. When you’re texting, the communication is asynchronous, so the messaging agents feel less stressed and hurried, yet they’re faster than the phone agents.”

~ Traci Scott, Pella

Pella’s Order Status Bot

With a successful implementation of SMS under their belt, the Pella team decided to automate some of their conversations with the help of a Quiq bot. The company rolled out an order status bot in May of 2019, integrating it with their order system.

The integration of Pella’s messaging bot with the company’s order system enables B2B customers and sales reps to simply type in the order number to receive an instant, real-time status of the order. Since launching the bot in May, customers have been able to quickly receive status updates without the need to speak to an agent. When a human agent needs to intervene, it is easy for the conversation to get transferred to one of the two agents who support order status inquiries.

What’s Next at Pella For Customer Messaging

Although COVID-19 changed the order of Pella’s project roadmap and drastically shortened the implementation time, messaging remains a priority for several use cases throughout the customer’s experience. The results achieved from messaging and chatbots for the National Account Sales Reps has Pella anxious to get started on the next project.

Pella sees no shortage of opportunities to help their B2B and B2C customers with messaging. Pella also sees the potential for a bot to do outbound appointment reminders. 

Messaging has helped the company craft a digital customer experience that is faster and more convenient for customers and more efficient for the company. A clear win for everyone.

About Quiq

Quiq is ready to help your company gain efficiencies within your contact center. Schedule a call or contact us to discuss how Quiq’s messaging platform and bots can work throughout your organization to streamline workflows, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Podcast: Is Messaging the Next Brand Channel?

Posted on Lauren Winder

Today’s digital and mobile environment is driving customer preferences to quickly evolve and affect how consumers choose to engage with brands. The capabilities of messaging are rapidly advancing to give brands more ways to have rich and meaningful conversations with their customers.

Quiq’s CEO, Mike Myer, is featured on this Heard on the Street podcast episode of StreetFight with Mike Boland.  Listen in and hear them discuss how they are seeing brands adopt and use messaging, as well as why messaging becoming the primary channel of communication for brands may be closer than it seems.

LISTEN TO THIS INFORMATIVE PODCAST

Podcast: How Asynchronous Messaging Is Disrupting Customer Communications

Posted on Lauren Winder

“It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”

Customer communications are changing and moving beyond traditional phone and email channels to an asynchronous messaging channel.  In listening to this conversation, the future of the contact center is clear: “You can either be an early adopter or a follower.”

Quiq’s CEO, Mike Myer, is featured on this Execs in the Know podcast episode of Customer Driven with Chad McDaniel.  Listen in and hear them discuss the following:

– Shift in preference of consumer adoption within self-service channels
– Which industries are successfully adopting these technologies
– Complex transactions and messaging channels
– Is it better to be an early adopter?

LISTEN TO THIS INFORMATIVE PODCAST

How Asynchronous Messaging Is Disrupting Customer Communications

Research Report: The Future of Customer Conversations

Posted on Lauren Winder

Conversations with customers are evolving and businesses are adapting to this fast changing landscape.  With over 70% of respondents saying they have engaged with a business over text messaging or web chat, all organizations need to be ready.

Check out this research report and see how businesses use messaging to increase conversion rates and improve customer satisfaction.

DOWNLOAD THIS RESEARCH REPORT

The Future of Customer Conversations