Tag: customer engagement

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 to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

Customer satisfaction has a direct impact on a company’s ability to retain existing customers and attract new ones. The level of satisfaction customers feel is largely defined by the experiences they have with customer service representatives. As a result, companies that succeed must monitor and improve call center and customer service performance continuously.

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is an essential metric companies use to determine how customer service teams are performing and how they could do better. This score is generated by asking customers to rate their experiences and provide feedback after interactions. A low overall CSAT score indicates a problem with the current approach to customer service. Even if a team has a high CSAT score, there is usually still room for improvement.

4 Steps to Improve Your CSAT Score

  1. Create a Customer-Focused Work Environment
  2. Conduct Customer Surveys
  3. Make Changes in Response to Customer Feedback
  4. Create Personalized Conversations With Customer Messaging

If you’re wondering how to increase customer service ratings, you are already on the right path. The following tips can help improve CSAT scores at your call center.

1. Create a Customer-Focused Work Environment

One of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction is to ensure agents put the customer first in all interactions. All aspects of workflow and policy should be designed to produce the most positive result for the customer. This includes giving agents the tools they need to serve customers efficiently in the manner they prefer.

To improve CSAT scores, companies should analyze the customer journey and consider how certain strategies may make customers feel. When the whole team places customer needs and expectations at the heart of operations, customer satisfaction goes up, along with sales.

2. Conduct Customer Surveys

Call centers struggle to make meaningful changes to the customer experience when they lack the data to back up their decisions. Unless you ask your customers how you are doing, you’ll never know exactly how they feel.

To make more informed adjustments to policy and show an active interest in your customers’ opinions, consider conducting customer surveys after every conversation. Just remember to keep it short and respect each individual’s decision whether or not to participate, as overly time-consuming surveys can backfire.

3. Make Changes in Response to Customer Feedback

Gathering customer feedback is only the first step toward improving customer satisfaction. Customers want to feel heard, so it’s important to listen to negative feedback and implement solutions designed to address the root cause.

To repair damaged customer relationships and further increase CSAT, consider following-up with customers. When you acknowledge the problem and explain how you are working to fix it, customers will be more willing to trust your customer support team in the future.

4. Create Personalized Conversations With Customer Messaging

While some customers may find phone conversations convenient, others would rather send a message using social media or SMS. People view text messaging as a comfortable, safe, and enjoyable form of communication. As a result, companies have the opportunity to significantly improve the customer experience and increase CSAT scores when they implement a business messaging platform like Quiq.

Our platform allows customer service agents to engage multiple customers in their preferred form of communication. Text conversations allow for more personalization, and rich messaging features enable agents to provide easy, direct, and actionable solutions. Agents can send and receive helpful pictures and videos to streamline the conversation, and they can even process secure transactions.

Get Started by Requesting a Quote

By reducing call volume, messaging systems allow call center employees to work more efficiently and ensure customers receive answers quickly. To find out how Quiq can help improve your company’s CSAT rating, request a demo today.

How to Use Live Web Chat to Increase Sales on Your Website

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

The transition to eCommerce has transformed the shopping experience. Whether people are looking to purchase electronics or other consumer goods, they expect to complete the entire transaction online.

When shoppers have questions about an online retailer’s products, they need an easy way to contact a representative. Live web chat enables agents to speak with consumers in their preferred mode of communication, right at the point of purchase. When you implement a website sales chat feature, you can improve your sales conversion rate, build customer loyalty, and alleviate friction at key points in the sales funnel.

Quiq is a business messaging customer engagement platform that helps eCommerce companies conduct productive conversations and get more sales for their online businesses. Learn more below about how companies use Quiq to improve the online shopping experience.

Have Personal Conversations That Engage Customers

Shopping online is convenient, but it can also feel impersonal. Live web chats enable online retailers to create a personal connection with each individual shopper. A customer engagement platform like Quiq enables agents to respond to customers in real-time, ensuring shoppers can get their questions answered at a moment’s notice. When consumers feel that a company’s employees truly care about their needs, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Sell and Troubleshoot Proactively

When shopping online, some consumers may navigate away from your website rather than ask for clarification or assistance. A website sales chat feature cannot increase sales or engagement if people don’t use it. With customer engagement software, representatives have the ability to start conversations proactively, prompting customers to engage even if they normally aren’t accustomed to. Live chat gives agents the ability to address purchasing issues and product-based questions before customers abandon their cart or leave the website altogether.

Integrate Conversations Across Channels

Today, people want to engage with eCommerce companies through the channels that are most convenient for them. To convert leads who prefer to communicate through both text and web chat, businesses need to integrate cross-channel conversations. This enables agents to not only respond to messages consistently and efficiently as customers switch devices, this also creates a seamless customer service experience for the customer by adapting to their preferences.

Use Chatbots to Achieve 24/7 Coverage

Today’s consumers shop at all times of the day, including after normal business hours. A customer engagement platform with integrated chatbots empowers eCommerce companies to serve consumers and increase sales around the clock. Allow chatbots to handle simple inquiries after-hours or reduce service volume for agents so they can focus on answering queries with the highest conversion potential.

Boost Sales With Quiq’s Conversational Customer Engagement Platform

Quiq’s robust customer engagement platform is packed with features to help eCommerce businesses boost sales and engage with shoppers more effectively. For consumers, Quiq’s software makes interacting with customer service simple and enjoyable. Behind the scenes, the software allows employees to:

  • Simultaneously engage with multiple customers across multiple channels
  • Preview what customers are typing to provide answers more quickly
  • View previous conversations to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction
  • Work alongside bots to streamline customer service conversations

To discover how Quiq’s live chat software will increase online sales for your eCommerce business, request a demo today.

Text Messaging: The New Era of Customer Engagement

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

Customer engagement is constantly evolving and the trend towards more customer-centric experiences hasn’t slowed. Businesses are increasingly having to provide faster, easier, and more friendly ways of initiating and responding to customer’s inquiries.  Businesses that adapt to this continually changing environment will ensure they are not only delivering desirable products but also superior service with better ways for customers to engage. 

Enter text message customer service. This mode of communication has taken over traditional means like phone and email as consumers prefer the ease, convenience, and hassle-free nature of text messaging. It isn’t just for friends and family anymore and consumers are choosing this channel more often as it fits their on-the-go lifestyle. The move to text messaging is a part of this new era of customer engagement, and both businesses and consumers are benefiting.

Old Ways of Customer Engagement Are Gone

As few as two decades ago, the world of business and customer service was a completely different place. Company agents and representatives used forms of engagements like trade shows, promotional emails, letters, and phone calls to promote their products and services. Today, while these methods are still used in a wide range of industries, many companies are finding new ways to maintain customer loyalty.

Person holding smartphone and textingAccording to the Pew Research Center, about 96% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind. Text messaging is a highly popular form of communication in people’s everyday lives. As such, it only seems natural that companies would use texting as a service, sales, and marketing tool — and the results have been astounding.

Capabilities of Digital Customer Service

While sending text messages to customers may be a new frontier for many companies, businesses are finding the personal and casual nature of this medium are a part of the qualities for why it’s so effective. Some of the benefits that come with digital customer service include:

  • Hassle-free customer service access: Consumers love instant messaging because it’s easy and allows them to engage, ask questions and get information without having to make a phone call or meet face-to-face.
  • Timely responses and service: Few things turn a customer off faster than when they send an email or make a call and then have to wait days for a response. With text message customer service, you can stay connected 24/7 and provide timely responses and solutions.
  • The personal touch: Customers are more likely to stick around if they believe you care about their personal needs. Texting will allow you to take a more individualized approach, communicating with customers in the same way they might communicate with friends.
  • A dynamic variety of solutions: Text messaging provides unique opportunities for marketing, sales, and customer support. For example, you might use texting to help troubleshoot a product, promote new sales, send coupons, and more.

Why This Matters

These benefits matter because 64% of Americans would rather receive a text than get a phone call. It’s clear what the consumers want, and it’s the business’s job to deliver. Because text messaging can help you engage with customers on a more personal level, it can increase customer loyalty and even lead to more conversions.

By satisfying more customers, you’ll increase profits and make room for business growth over time. Texting will also provide your agents with more flexibility, allowing them to manage multiple customers at a time. As volume increases, you can even use chatbots and automated processes to connect with customers, which enhances efficiency and saves time.

Request a Demo From Quiq Today

Customer service will change in the future as new technologies and strategies develop. Contact Quiq today for a demo if you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of text messaging customer service.

See a Demo Today