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Tag: customer experience

How Customer Service AI Can Change Your Business

Posted on Max Fortis

AI is one of the most exciting new developments in customer service. But how does customer service AI work and what it makes possible? In this piece, we’ll offer the context you need to make good decisions about this groundbreaking technology. Let’s dive in!

What is AI in Customer Service?

AI in customer service means deploying innovative technology–generative AI, custom predictive models, etc.–to foster support interactions that are quick, effective, and tailored to the individual needs of your customers. When organizations utilize AI-based tools, they can automate processes, optimize self-service options, and support their agents, all of which lead to significant time and cost savings.

What are the Benefits of Using AI in Customer Service?

There are myriad advantages to using customer support AI, including (but not limited to):

1. AI will automate routine work.

As with so many jobs, a lot of what customer service agents do day-to-day is fairly repetitive, as little imagination is required to do things like order tracking, balance checking, or password resetting. These days, customers are obsessed with quick and convenient service, so utilizing customer service AI to automate and speed up routine tasks benefits both customers (who want answers now) and agents (who don’t have to do the same thing all the time).

2. Scalability and Cost Savings

A related point concerns the fact that AI automating routine tasks and supporting agents with data-driven insights allows businesses to scale customer service without a proportional increase in costs. This lowers operating expenses, increases capacity to handle peak volumes, and frees-up human agents for high-value tasks.

3. Customer service AI can help make ‘smart’ documentation.

Many customers will begin by checking out your documentation to see if they can’t solve a problem first, so it’s important for yours to be top-notch. You can use large language models (LLMs) to draft or update documentation, of course, or you can go a step further. Modern AI agents can use documentation to answer questions directly, and can also guide customers to use the documentation themselves.

4. Customer Support AI Supercharges Chat.

Customer service leaders have long recognized that AI-powered agents for chat support are a cost-effective (and often preferred) alternative to traditional phone or email support. AI agents for chat are rapidly becoming a mainstay for contact centers because they can deliver personalized, round-the-clock support across any channel while seamlessly integrating with other tools in the CX, eCommerce, and marketing tech stacks.

5. AI contributes to a better customer experience.

All of the above ultimately adds up to a much better customer experience. When customers can immediately get their questions answered (whether at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m.), with details relevant to their specific situation, or even in their native language, that’s going to leave an impression!

6. Use customer service AI to learn about your customers.

Before moving on, let’s discuss the amazing capacity customer service AI has to help you discover trends in your customers preferences, predict customer needs, identify patterns, and proactively address issues before they become major problems. This can significantly speed up your response time, reduce churn, improve resource allocation, and establish your reputation for anticipating customer desires.

Where to Get Started with AI in Customer Service

If you’re looking to get started with customer support AI, this section will contain some pointers on where to begin.

Deploy AI Agents for Maximum Efficiency

The next frontier in customer service AI is ‘agents,’ which have evolved from the AI chatbot and are capable of much more flexible and open-ended behavior. Whereas a baseline large language model can generate a wide variety of outputs, agents are built to be able to pull information, hit APIs, and complete various tasks from start to finish.

Use Customer Service AI to Guide Humans and Optimize your Business Processes

AI-powered tools in customer service are changing how support teams operate by enhancing the productivity of human agents, as well as the efficiency of workflows. By providing agents with response suggestions specifically tailored to each customer’s unique needs, for instance, these tools enable agents to burn through issues more swiftly and confidently. This can be especially helpful during onboarding, where agents benefit a great deal from additional guidance as they learn the ropes.

More broadly, AI can automate many aspects of customer service and thereby streamline the support process. To take just one example, intelligent, AI-powered ticket routing can use sentiment analysis and customer intent to direct inquiries to the agent best able to resolve them.

As mentioned above, AI can also participate more directly by suggesting changes to responses and summarizing long conversations, all of which saves time. In addition to speeding up the overall support process, in other words, these optimizations make agents more efficient.

Use Voice AI for Customer Calls

Another exciting development is the rise of ‘multimodal models’ able to adroitly carry on voice-based interactions. For a long time now there have been very simple models able to generate speech, but they were tinny and artificial. No longer.

Today, these voice AI applications can quickly answer questions, are available 24/7, and are almost infinitely scalable. They have the added advantage of being able to translate between different natural languages on the fly.

Effectively use AI in Emails

In customer service, email automation involves leveraging technologies such as generative AI to automate and customize email interactions. This enhances your agents’ response speeds, increases customer satisfaction, and improves overall business efficiency. It enables businesses to handle a large number of inquiries while maintaining a high quality of customer interactions.

Given the email channel’s enduring importance, this is a prime spot to be looking at deploying AI.

Make the Most Out of Digital Channels

For a while now, people have been moving to communicating over digital channels like Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple Messages for Business, to name a few.

As with email, AI can help you automate and personalize the communications you have with customers over these digital channels, fully leveraging rich messaging and text messaging to meet your customers where they’re at.

AI can Transform your E-Commerce Operations

When you integrate AI with backend systems – like CRM or e-commerce platforms – it becomes easier to enhance upsells and cross-sells during customer support sessions (an AI agent might suggest products tailored to a customer’s previous purchases, items currently in their shopping cart, or aspects of the current conversation, for instance).

Moreover, AI can proactively deliver notifications featuring customized messages based on user activity and historical interactions, which can also increase sales and conversion rates. All of this allows you to boost profits while helping customers–everyone wins!

Things to Consider When Using AI in Customer Service

Now that we’ve covered some necessary ground about what customer support AI is and why it’s awesome, let’s talk about a few things you should be aware of when weighing different solutions and deciding on how to proceed.

Augmenting Human Agents

Against the backdrop of concerns over technological unemployment, it’s worth stressing that generative AI, AI agents, and everything else we’ve discussed are ways to supplement your human workforce.

So far, the evidence from studies done on the adoption of generative AI in contact centers have demonstrated unalloyed benefits for everyone involved, including both senior and junior agents. We believe that for a long time yet, the human touch will be a requirement for running a good contact center operation.

CX Expertise

Though a major benefit of customer service AI service is its proficiency in accurately grasping customer inquiries and requirements, obviously, not all AI systems are equally adept at this. It’s crucial to choose AI specifically trained on customer experience (CX) dialogues. It’s possible to do this yourself or fine-tune an existing model, but this will prove as expensive as it is time-intensive.

When selecting a partner for AI implementation, ensure they are not just experts in AI technology, but also have deep knowledge of and experience in the customer service and CX domains.

Time to Value

When integrating AI into your customer experience (CX) strategy, adopt a “crawl, walk, run” approach. This method not only clarifies your direction but also allows you to quickly realize value by first applying AI to high-leverage, low-risk repetitive tasks, before tackling more complex challenges that require deeper integration and more resources. Choosing the right partner is an important part of finding a strategy that is effective and will enable you to move swiftly.

Channel Enablement

These days, there’s a big focus on cultivating ‘omnichannel’ support, and it’s not hard to see why. There are tons of different channels, many boasting billions of users each. From email automation for customer service and Voice AI to digital business messaging channels, you need to think through which customer communication channels you’ll apply AI to first. You might eventually want to have AI integrated into all of them, but it’s best to start with a few that are especially important to your business, master them, and branch out from there.

Security and Privacy

Data security and customer privacy have always been important, but as breaches and ransomware attacks have grown in scope and power, people have become much more concerned with these issues.

That’s why LLM security and privacy are so important. You should look for a platform that prioritizes transparency in their AI systems—meaning there is clear documentation of these systems’ purpose, capabilities, and limitations. Ideally, you’d also want the ability to view and customize AI behaviors, so you can tweak it to work well in your particular context.

Then, you want to work with a vendor that is as committed to high ethical standards and the protection of user privacy as you are; this means, at minimum, only collecting the data necessary to facilitate conversations.

Finally, there are the ‘nuts and bolts’ to look out for. Your preferred platform should have strong encryption to protect all data (both in transit and at rest), regular vulnerability scans, and penetration testing safeguard against cyber threats.

Observability

Related to the transparency point discussed above, there’s also the issue of LLM observability. When deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) into applications, it’s crucial not to regard them as opaque “black boxes.” As your LLM deployment grows in complexity, it becomes all the more important to monitor, troubleshoot, and comprehend the LLM’s influence on your application.

There’s a lot to be said about this, but here are some basic insights you should bear in mind:

  • Do what you can to incentivize users to participate in testing and refining the application.
  • Try to simplify the process of exploring the application across a variety of contexts and scenarios.
  • Be sure you transparently display how the model functions within your application, by elucidating decision-making pathways, system integrations, and validation of outputs. This makes it easier to model how it functions and catch any errors.
  • Speaking of errors, put systems in place to actively detect and address deviations or mistakes.
  • Display key performance metrics such as response times, token consumption, and error rates.

Brands that do this correctly will have the advantage of being established as genuine leaders, with everyone else relegated to status as followers. Large language models are going to become a clear differentiator for CX enterprises, but they can’t fulfill that promise if they’re seen as mysterious and inscrutable. Observability is the solution.

Risk Mitigation

You should look for a platform that adopts a thorough risk management strategy. A great way to do this is by setting up guardrails that operate both before and after an answer has been generated, ensuring that the AI sticks to delivering answers from verified sources.

Another thing to check is whether the platform is filtering both inbound and outbound messages, so as to block harmful content that might otherwise taint a reply. These precautions enable brands to implement AI solutions confidently, while also effectively managing concomitant risks.

AI Model Flexibility

Finally, in the interest of maintaining your ability to adapt, we suggest looking at a vendor that is model-agnostic, facilitating integration with a range of different AI offerings. Quiq’s AI Studio, for example, is compatible with leading-edge models like OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and GPT4, as well as Anthropic’s Claude models, in addition to supporting bespoke AI models. This is the kind of versatility you should be on the look out for.

What is the Future of AI in Customer Service?

This has been a high-level overview of the ways in which customer support AI can make you stand out in a crowded market. AI can help you automate routine tasks and free up agent time, personalize responses, gather insights about customers, and thoroughly optimize your internal procedures. However, you must also make sure your models are observable, your offering is flexible and dynamic, and you’re being careful with sensitive customer data.

For more context, check out our in-depth Guide to Evaluating AI for Customer Service Leaders.

How a Leading Office Supply Retailer Answered 35% More Store Associate Questions with Generative AI

Posted on Mike Zinne

In an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming various industries, the retail sector is no exception. One leading national office supply retailer has taken a bold step forward, harnessing the power of generative AI to revolutionize their in-store experience and empower their associates.

This innovative approach has not only enhanced customer satisfaction but has also led to remarkable improvements in employee efficiency. In fact, the company has experienced a 35% increase in containment rates (with a 6-month average containment rate of 65%) vs. its legacy solution.

We’re excited to share the details of this groundbreaking initiative. Keep reading as we examine the company’s vision, their strategic approach to implementation, and the key objectives that drove their AI adoption. We’ll also discuss their GenAI assistant’s primary capabilities and how it’s improving both customer experiences and employee satisfaction. By the end, you’ll see how much potential lies in applying this use case to additional employees—not just in-store associates—as well as customers. There’s so much to unlock. Ready? Let’s dive in.

The Vision: Empowering Associates with GenAI

This company is dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes become more productive, connected, and inspired. Their team recognized the immense potential of GenAI early on. The vision? To create a GenAI-powered assistant that could enhance the capabilities of their store associates, leading to improved customer service, increased productivity, and higher job satisfaction.

Key objectives of the GenAI initiative:

  • Simplify store associate experience
  • Streamline access to information for associates
  • Improve customer service efficiency
  • Boost associate confidence and job satisfaction
  • Increase overall store associate productivity

Charting the Course to Building a GenAI-Powered Assistant

By partnering with Quiq, the national office supply retailer launched its employee-facing GenAI assistant in just 6 weeks. Here’s what the launch process looked like in 9 primary steps:

  1. Discovery of AI enhancements
  2. Pulling content from current systems
  3. Run a Proof of Concept with Quiq team
  4. Run testing through all categories of content
  5. Approval to Pilot with Top Associate Group
  6. Refine content based on associate feedback for chain rollout
  7. Run additional testing through all categories
  8. Starting chain deployment to larger district of stores
  9. Maintain content accuracy and refine based on updates

Examining the Office Supplier’s Phased Approach to Adoption

Pre-launch, the teams worked together to ensure all content was updated and accurate. Then they launched a phased testing approach, going through several rounds of iterative testing. After that, the retailer shared the GenAI assistant with a top internal associate team to test and try and break it. Finally, the internal team utilized a top associate group to share excitement before launch.

At launch, the office supplier created a standalone page dedicated to the assistant and launched a SharePoint site to share updates for the internal team. They also facilitated internal learning sessions and quickly adapted to low feedback numbers. Last but not least, the team made it fun by branding the assistant with a fun, on-brand name and personality.

Post-launch, the retailer includes the AI assistant in all communications to associates, with tips on what to search for in the assistant. They also leverage the assistant’s proactive messaging capabilities to build excitement for new launches, promotions, and best practices.

Primary Capabilities and Focus

Launching the GenAI assistant has been transformative because it is trained on all things related to the office supply retailer, which has simplified and accelerated access to information. That means associates can help customers faster, answering questions accurately the first time and every time, regardless of tenure. Ultimately, AI is empowering associates to do even better work—including enhanced cross and upselling with proactive messages.

Proactive messaging to associates helps keep rotating sales goals top of mind so they can weave additional revenue opportunities into customer interactions. For example, if the design services team has unexpected bandwidth, the AI assistant can send a message letting associates know, inspiring them to highlight design and print services to customers who may be interested. It also provides a fun countdown to important launches, like back-to-school season, and “fun facts” that help build up useful knowledge over time. It’s like bite-size bits of training.

GenAI Transforms the In-Store Experience in 4 Critical Ways

Implementing the GenAI assistant has had a profound impact on in-store operations. By providing associates with instant access to accurate information, it has:

  1. Enhanced Customer Service: Associates can now provide faster, more accurate responses to customer questions.
  2. Increased Efficiency: The time it takes to find information has been significantly reduced, allowing associates to serve more customers.
  3. Boosted Confidence: With a reliable AI assistant at their fingertips, associates feel more empowered in their roles. Plus, new associates can be as effective as experienced ones with the assistant by their side.
  4. Improved Job Satisfaction: The reduced stress of information retrieval has led to higher job satisfaction among associates. Not to mention, the GenAI assistant is there to converse and empathize with employees who experience stressful situations with customers.

Results + What’s Next?

As a result of launching its GenAI assistant with Quiq, our national office supply retailer customer has realized a:

  • 68% self service rate resolution rate, allowing associates to get immediate answers to questions 2 out of 3 times
  • Associate satisfaction with AI 4.82 out of 5

And as for next steps, the team is excited to:

  • Launch a selling assisted path
  • Expand to additional departments within stores
  • Add more devices in store for easier accessibility
  • Integrate with internal systems to be able to answer even more types of questions with real-time access to orders and other information

The Lesson: Humans and AI Can Work Together to Play Their Strongest Roles

The office supply retailer’s successful implementation of GenAI serves as a powerful example of how the technology can transform retail operations by helping human employees work more efficiently. By focusing on empowering associates with AI, the company has not only improved customer service but also enhanced employee satisfaction and productivity.

Interested in Diving Deeper into GenAI?

Download Two Truths and a Lie: Breaking Down the Major GenAI Misconceptions Holding CX Leaders Back. This comprehensive guide illuminates the path through the intricate landscape of generative AI in CX. We cut through the fog of misconceptions, offering crystal-clear, practical advice to empower your decision-making.

Email AI Webinar Recap: Quiq Announces AI for Email Responses, Triage, Insights & More

Posted on Mark Kowal

Quiq is dedicated to helping enterprises move to the next generation of CX through customer-centric AI. Our journey began with an AI assistant that can improve your CX, grow revenue, and manage your costs. This is powered by Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)—it all started in digital messaging, your customers’ most preferred channel, but has grown to encompass voice and email, too.

I sat down with my colleague Greg Dreyfus to take a deep dive into Email AI, explain why we decided to build it here at Quiq, show how it works, and explore the most effective ways to use it to drive CX outcomes.

Applying AI to Email Creates an Omnichannel Approach

Earlier this year, we launched Voice AI, applying the latest AI to your most expensive channel: phone. This delivers multimodal interactions with Voice and text messaging. It’s built with Large Language Models, state-of-the art language processing, text-to-speech, and fits with your existing telephony infrastructure.

Omnichannel AI that you can leverage across all channels

And now Quiq is delighted to announce Email AI! With the addition of AI for email responses through Quiq, you can now maximize your AI investment across your most meaningful channels, increasing the impact and time to value for your organization.

Our AI assistants use the same underlying platform, which means you can build once and run everywhere. You can also reuse all of your data, business logic, and system integrations across touchpoints. We’ve proven that these AI assistants can drive outcomes with the dozens of live examples we have in the market.

Why Apply AI to Email?

For a lot of businesses, email is their most voluminous channel. This is a statistic from the Connected Customer report from Salesforce, that cites that customers use multiple channels sometimes 8 or more.

Salesforce Connected Customer Report

Source: Salesforce Connected Customer Report

Other channels are growing quickly, but email continues to rank #1 for popularity with customers.

Traditional Email Challenges are Well-Known

Email has a few problems that have plagued it as a channel from day one. During the webinar, I asked attendees:

Which of these is your biggest challenge with email?

  1. High inbound email volumes & constant backlog mean high turnaround times & costs
  2. Poor CSAT & CX
  3. Low agent satisfaction

65% of respondents chose High inbound email volumes & constant backlog mean high turnaround times & costs, which reinforces the fact that email is persistently expensive and hard-to-tackle for brands.

But beyond the high costs, which are driven by volume, email has other challenges, the biggest of which are:

1. Poor CX

According to Deloitte, 88% of companies are prioritizing the customer experience created from their contact centers. Yet, 26% of consumers feel that contacting customer support, especially through email, has become more challenging over time.

There’s a clear disconnect between the amount of time, effort, and money enterprise businesses are investing in CX and the experiences their customers are having on the other side of that—particularly via email.

2. Low agent satisfaction

Agent morale gets impacted with high ticket volumes and seasonal surges. Constant backlogs and broken threads further complicate the channel for agents, making it a frustrating experience for your contact center employees.

Email AI Solves Stubborn Channel Challenges

Quiq’s Email AI works across every stage of your email journey. It uses AI to triage, draft, respond to and analyze emails efficiently and quickly, ensuring consistent and personalized communication to your customers.

How Email AI works in nutshell

 

Let’s say a customer email comes in. With Email AI, we can improve agent efficiency by routing that to the right agent. You can resolve routine issues through generative responses or drafts for your agent. If you implement customer account specific information, you can extend this to answer even more complex questions. And finally, you can use AI and automation to analyze existing emails to identify opportunities to improve.

The best part is that it is easy to deploy: Email AI works with your existing email management platform, so no need to rip and replace.

Email AI Demo #1: Using AI to Respond to a Customer Inquiry

My colleague, Greg Dreyfus, Head of Solutions Consulting, showed how Quiq’s Email AI works with Zendesk to respond back to a customer inquiry with information about the order.

Check out how this all works, ultimately improving not only the customer experience but also the ticket record left behind in the email management platform thanks to spot-on AI categorization.

 

As you can see, the AI-powered categorization is extremely useful for ticket routing and analytics, too. After showing this first use case, we polled the audience to understand where they could see the generative component of Email AI being the most valuable in their contact center operations. Here is what they said.

Audience Poll #2

This made a lot of sense to us because, of course, your agents are the ones responding to customer emails. So, to the extent that you can use AI to provide responses for them to edit or review, you can make email incrementally more efficient with a phased approach to introducing AI into your existing workflows.

Email AI Demo #2: Using AI to Flag a Customer Inquiry as Sensitive

Knowing how to best use AI is critical to capitalizing on the efficiency gains it offers while minimizing risk. Quiq’s Email AI can deal with sensitive inquiries differently than those deemed not sensitive. Watch Greg demonstrate exactly how this works and how our AI handles sensitive communications differently.

Of course, we wanted to get a sense from attendees about how often they think their teams would need sensitive conversations treated differently by AI, so we polled them a third time after demonstrating the use case.

Audience Poll #3

Poll #3

Unsurprisingly, 90% of those who responded indicated that they need AI to handle sensitive communications differently—which is exactly why we’ve approached Email AI with the customizability that we have.

To recap, Greg went over Triage and Response use cases for Email AI. While we didn’t cover a demonstration of Insights, that’s a third area of major business impact that we’d love to talk to you about if you’re interested.

Email AI Uses

5 CX Outcomes You Can Expect from Email AI

Now with our application of GenAI to email, we’re super excited to impact the CX outcomes that matter to your business. Here’s the top 5 benefits you can expect to realize first when you adopt Quiq’s AI for email responses, triaging, insights, and more:

  1. Faster response times
  2. Personalization at scale
  3. Boosts customer retention
  4. Enhanced data insights
  5. Improves bottom line

Watch the Full Webinar On-Demand

If you attended the webinar live, thank you for joining us! If not, we invite you to experience the complete walkthrough directly: Watch the webinar on-demand. You can learn more about AI Studio, the environment we use to build all AI assistants, right here.

How to Automate Email for Customer Service – Complete Guide

Posted on Mark Kowal

In our last article, we made the case for email automation for customer experience by pointing out that it’s easy to use, reduces work for your agents, and allows you to utilize the personalization that customers today have come to expect.

But that still leaves the ‘how’ of choosing and setting up a platform to automate email for customer service, which is what we’ll focus on today. By the end, you’ll have a much clearer picture of what to look for and how to make the overall process run as smoothly as possible.

Let’s dive in!

An Overview of Email Automation for Customer Service

First, let’s briefly recap what email automation for CX actually is. Email automation in customer service refers to using technologies like generative AI to automate and personalize email communications, positively impacting the speed of your agents’ response times, how satisfied your customers are, and how efficiently your business runs. It helps businesses manage large volumes of inquiries while still retaining high standards for the quality of customer interactions.

Chances are, you’re already using email to communicate with customers, but by leveraging AI for email responses, you can rapidly address queries about warranties or recent purchases, thus dramatically decreasing the inbound issues requiring your agents’ attention. This is a net win for everyone–you, your team, and your customers.

How to Automate Email for Customer Service

Now that you’re sufficiently excited by the possibilities represented by robust email AI assistants, let’s walk through what’s actually involved in using them.

In the next few sections, we’ll cover two big topics: how to select an email automation for CX platform, and what to do with it afterward.

Decide on a Good Email Automation Solution

Any attempt to implement email automation for customer experience has to revolve around a certain set of features. When you’re shopping around, check that your preferred tool has them.

1. One of the first things you’ll want to check is that a platform supports email AI assistants based on large language models (LLMs).

We’ve alluded to these assistants a few times already, and that’s because they play a major role in effective automation. AI for email responses is what drives the ability to personalize each email to the recipient, for example, but that’s hardly all. These days, customer-facing AI assistants can often answer questions directly (in text and voice), without the need of hassling a human agent, freeing them up to laser in on those interactions requiring more judgment.

Moreover, they can intelligently classify and route issues by topic, urgency, etc. You will want to ensure your software provider is using the latest generation of AI and large language models because it is much better at reasoning over the nature of your customer inquiry and generating a response.

Plus, in some cases, email automation for customer experience platforms support native data analytics (even if they don’t support it currently, it’s important to make sure it’s on the roadmap since analytics is an important feature). There’s a reason they’re calling data the new oil, and that’s because it can unlock dramatic insights into your customers’ preferences and how your business is operating. When a platform makes it easy to collect and utilize this data, you can make far more informed decisions.

2. Next, you want to make sure that your preferred email automation solution integrates well with other software.

Obviously, it’ll need to play well with your email client, but at minimum, you’ll also want to verify that it’ll plug into your CRM and any knowledge management systems you use (such as databases of customer purchases).

A related advantage is to pick a tool that allows you to deploy once and run everywhere. Integration is part of this, because it requires the platform to be built on business logic that allows it to utilize the same data as your other applications (i.e., to fit seamlessly into your data layer.)

3. Then, you’ll want to assess its adaptability and channel support.

In the beginning, you may only need the barest functionality—in fact, it’s often best to test these tools with simple proofs of concept that don’t make use of any fancy bells and whistles. But, as you grow, your needs will change, and you want a platform that will grow along with you.

Migrating later is always an option, but that will require a certain expense in time and money that could be avoided by making sure you’re using the right platform in the first place.

In a similar vein, when you automate email for customer service you want something with support for multiple channels. Even when a conversation begins with a customer emailing you it might quickly move to voice or text, and you want something that can move seamlessly over all these channels with the least friction possible.

“Ground” Your Email Automation Software

Once you’ve got this lined out, you’ll need to ensure that the AI email assistant lying at the heart of the software only references your company’s trusted knowledge and data. The most recent large language models work quite well out of the box, but even the best of them will still need to be programmed to your specific circumstances.

There are a few parts of this cycle. First, you must gather the relevant data, with a particular focus on two things:

  1. Company-specific data that helps capture your brand, vision, and approach;
  2. User-specific data that helps your email AI assistant to generate better replies.

The former is necessary to strike the right tone (are you going for ‘playful’ or ‘professional’, for example) and converse with customers in a way that reflects your basic values. One way to do this is to offer a model brand voice examples in instructions or prompts.

Less abstractly, the second is needed to make sure models are responding in the most helpful possible ways, by drawing on your data. This could involve using techniques such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) or fine-tuning. RAG involves pointing a model to a CRM, a Notion table, etc., so that it can utilize this data in answering a customer inquiry.

Fine-tuning is another technique that could involve something like showing a large language model many instances of your best agents helping a customer, then using that to have the model make suggestions to more junior agents as they resolve an issue or respond directly on its own.

3 Best Practices for Using Automated Email for Customer Service

Now, we’ll spend a few sections explaining some of the best ways to successfully automate email for customer service, in a way that makes your life easier and pleases your customers.

1. Personalize your Emails

The first is straightforward but very important: make sure you’re personalizing your communications to your customers. This is one of the great use cases for modern AI email assistants. Unlike prior generations of AI tools that relied entirely on templates and brittle rules, good email AI assistants use powerful language models to grasp the context of each email and generate responses customized to a given customer.

This means that every customer feels seen in a way that’s not possible with generic boilerplate responses. For you, this drives positive outcomes like reducing response times, increasing issue resolution, and boosting customer satisfaction.

2. Make Privacy and Safety a Priority

Another thing that’s important is emphasizing customer privacy and safety. On the one hand, consumers today are accustomed to providing credit card information or their social security online (to make purchases or to file taxes), but they also see endless examples of data breaches compromising millions of people and putting them at risk of identity theft.

There’s no easy way to guard against this, but our purpose here is to highlight how crucial this part of your enterprise is. Your customers will trust you more if they believe that you’re doing everything you can to keep their confidential information from prying eyes. Learn more about security and compliance in the context of email automation for CX here.

3. Always be Testing and Monitoring

Finally, settling on a platform to automate email for customer service and deploying it are the start of your journey, not its end.

One reason for this is that the underlying language model technology that powers AI for email responses is stochastic. There are successful methods which make the models much more reliable. With prompt chaining, for example, you might check an incoming user email, reformat it for better results, generate an answer (making sure it’s included citations to its sources), then fact check it.

Nevertheless, you still have to monitor its output over time to make sure it’s still providing timely, helpful responses to your customers. A good platform will handle a lot of this monitoring while providing you a way to provide feedback if you’re seeing outputs that are problematic in some way.

Make The Most Use of Email Automation for Customer Service

Automating the workflows involved in addressing customer queries is one of the exciting new frontiers in customer service—and it’s already supercharging agents in contact centers.

You can learn more about the unique benefits of Quiq’s email AI right here!

The Truth About APIs for AI: What You Need to Know

Posted on The Quiq Team

Large language models hold a lot of power to improve your customer experience and make your agents more effective, but they won’t do you much good if you don’t have a way to actually access them.

This is where application programming interfaces (APIs) come into play. If you want to leverage LLMs, you’ll either have to build one in-house, use an AI API deployment to interact with an external model, or go with a customer-centric AI for CX platform. The latter choice is most ideal because it offers a guided building environment that removes complexity while providing the tools you need for scalability, observability, hallucination prevention, and more.

From a cost and ease-of-use perspective this third option is almost always best, but there are many misconceptions that could potentially stand in the way of AI API adoption.

In fact, a stronger claim is warranted: to maximize AI API effectiveness, you need a platform to orchestrate between AI, your business logic, and the rest of your CX stack.

Otherwise, it’s useless.

This article aims to bridge the gap between what CX leaders might think is required to integrate a platform, and what’s actually involved. By the end, you’ll understand what APIs are, their role in personalization and scalability, and why they work best in the context of a customer-centric AI for CX platform.

How APIs Facilitate Access to AI Capabilities

Let’s start by defining an API. As the name suggests, APIs are essentially structured protocols that allow two systems (“applications”) to communicate with one another (“interface”). For instance, if you’re using a third-party CRM to track your contacts, you’ll probably update it through an API.

All the well-known foundation model providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) have a real-world AI API implementation that allows you to use their service. For an AI API practical example, let’s look at OpenAI’s documentation:

(Let’s take a second to understand what we’re looking at. Don’t worry – we’ll break it down for you. Understanding the basics will give you a sense for what your engineers will be doing.)

The top line points us to a URL where we can access OpenAI’s models, and the next three lines require us to pass in an API key (which is kind of like a password giving access to the platform), our organization ID (a unique designator for our particular company, not unlike a username), and a project ID (a way to refer to this specific project, useful if you’re working on a few different projects at once).

This is only one example, but you can reasonably assume that most protocols built according to AI API best practices will have a similar structure.

This alone isn’t enough to support most AI API use cases, but it illustrates the key takeaway of this section: APIs are attractive because they make it easy to access the capabilities of LLMs without needing to manage them on your own infrastructure, though they’re still best when used as part of a move to a customer-centric AI orchestration platform.

How Do APIs Facilitate Customer Support AI Assistants?

It’s good to understand what APIs are used for in AI assistants. It’s pretty straightforward—here’s the bulk of it:

  • Personalizing customer communications: One of the most exciting real-world benefits of AI is that it enables personalization at scale because you can integrate an LLM with trusted systems containing customer profiles, transaction data, etc., which can be incorporated into a model’s reply. So, for example, when a customer asks for shipping information, you’re not limited to generic responses like “your item will be shipped within 3 days of your order date.” Instead, you can take a more customer-centric approach and offer specific details, such as, “The order for your new couch was placed on Monday, and will be sent out on Wednesday. According to your location, we expect that it’ll arrive by Friday. Would you like to select a delivery window or upgrade to white glove service?”
  • Improving response quality: Generative AI is plagued by a tendency to fabricate information. With an AI API, work can be decomposed into smaller, concrete tasks before being passed to an LLM, which improves performance. You can also do other things to get better outputs, such as create bespoke modifications of the prompt that change the model’s tone, the length of its reply, etc.
  • Scalability and flexibility in deployment: A good customer-centric, AI-for-CX platform will offer volume-based pricing, meaning you can scale up or down as needed. If customer issues are coming in thick and fast (such as might occur during a new product release, or over a holiday), just keep passing them to the API while paying a bit more for the increased load; if things are quiet because it’s 2 a.m., the API just sits there, waiting to spring into action when required and costing you very little.
  • Analyzing customer feedback and sentiment: Incredible insights are waiting within your spreadsheets and databases, if you only know how to find them. This, too, is something APIs help with. If, for example, you need to unify measurements across your organization to send them to a VOC (voice of customer) platform, you can do that with an API.

Looking Beyond an API for AI Assistants

For all this, it’s worth pointing out that there’s still many real-world AI API challenges. By far the quickest way to begin building an AI assistant for CX is to pair with a customer-centric AI platform that removes as much of the difficulty as possible.

The best such platforms not only allow you to utilize a bevy of underlying LLM models, they also facilitate gathering and analyzing data, monitoring and supporting your agents, and automating substantial parts of your workflow.

Crucially, almost all of those critical tasks are facilitated through APIs, but they can be united in a good platform.

3 Common Misconceptions about Customer-Centric AI for CX Platforms.

Now, let’s address some of the biggest myths surrounding the use of AI orchestration platforms.

Myth 1: Working with a customer-centric AI for CX Platform Will be a Hassle

Some CX leaders may worry that working with a platform will be too difficult. There are challenges, to be sure, but a well-designed platform with an intuitive user interface is easy to slip into a broader engineering project.

Such platforms are designed to support easy integration with existing systems, and they generally have ample documentation available to make this task as straightforward as possible.

Myth 2: AI Platforms Cost Too Much

Another concern CX leaders have is the cost of using an AI orchestration platform. Platform costs can add up over time, but this pales in comparison to the cost of building in-house solutions. Not to mention the potential costs associated with the risks that come with building AI in an environment that doesn’t protect you from things like hallucinations.

When you weigh all the factors impacting your decision to use AI in your contact center, the long-run return on using an AI orchestration platform is almost always better.

Myth 3: Customer-Centric AI Platforms are Just Too Insecure

The smart CX leader always has one eye on the overall security of their enterprise, so they may be worried about vulnerabilities introduced by using an AI platform.

This is a perfectly reasonable concern. If you’re trying to choose between a few different providers, it’s worth investigating the security measures they’ve implemented. Specifically, you want to figure out what data encryption and protection protocols they use, and how they think about compliance with industry standards and regulations.

At a minimum, the provider should be taking basic steps to make sure data transmitted to the platform isn’t exposed.

Is an AI Platform Right for Me?

With a platform focused on optimizing CX outcomes, you can quickly bring the awesome power and flexibility of generative AI into your contact center – without ever spinning up a server or fretting over what “backpropagation” means. To the best of our knowledge, this is the cheapest and fastest way to demo this API technology in your workflow to determine whether it warrants a deeper investment.

To parse out more generative AI facts from fiction, download our e-book on AI misconceptions and how to overcome them. If you’re concerned about hallucinations, data privacy, and similar issues, you won’t find a better one-stop read!

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8 Strategies to Improve Customer Retention

Posted on Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Recruiting new customers costs seven to nine times as much as required to keep current customers from leaving. Besides the obvious foregone revenue, dissatisfied customers are not going to recommend you to the people they know, and they might even go out of their way to tell their friends and family about their negative experiences.

For all these reasons, it’s imperative not to let customers slip away – and one of the best ways of doing that is to implement an effective customer retention strategy.

Even a small increase in customer retention could substantially improve your bottom line, but customer retention can be extremely challenging. Having said that, enhancing customer retention can be challenging and generally requires an intentional strategy that many companies don’t choose to prioritize.

In this post, we will examine the big picture of why improving customer retention is important and offer advice that any customer experience team can use to keep its customers happy and loyal.

What Is Customer Retention?

“Customer retention” refers to any effort to keep a customer satisfied enough with you to keep them using your product or service.

Customer retention is an important aspect of business strategy and, done correctly, can help you gain a competitive advantage. Tragically, many businesses don’t invest enough in it – they spend vast amounts of time and money trying to bring in new customers while neglecting the ones they’ve already worked so hard to get.

But with the right approach and high-quality service, there’s no reason that excellent customer retention can’t be one of the things setting you apart.

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

We’ve already established that getting new customers is more expensive than keeping old ones, but it’s also worth pointing out that existing customers spend an average of almost 70% more than new customers.

Even better, loyal customers are far more likely to share their experiences with their social circles and purchase from your company again.

These customers are not only your best cheerleaders, they also help you better understand your brand in various other ways, like via CSAT and NPS (Net Promoter Score®) surveys. If you ask them, they will provide honest feedback about your product and customer service, allowing you to make the course corrections required to succeed. We’ll have more to say about all of this in the section on improving customer retention.

Calculating Customer Retention

Determining your current customer retention rate (CRR) is an important first step in improving customer retention.

The CRR measures how many customers are retained over a particular period (usually one year) and allows you to gauge the long-term profitability of your marketing and sales efforts. The math is pretty straightforward: we just need to divide the number of repeat customers by the total number of active customers over the same time period.

So, if we have 50 return customers and 200 active customers for the year 2023, our CRR would be 25%.

A related metric worth tracking is the cost per acquisition (CPA). The CPA measures the cost a company incurs to acquire one new customer (ideally, a new customer who becomes loyal to the company’s brand).

If you have both the CRR and the CPA, you should have a good chunk of the context needed to make smart, data-driven decisions. If you want to increase your retention rate, read the next section.

8 Customer Retention Strategies That Work

Now that we’ve made a strong case for trying to enhance customer retention, let’s discuss specific strategies that’ll help you actually do it.

1. Good Values Build Good Relationships

Many companies have “mission” or “vision” statements that explicitly state the values they live by. Though these statements are sometimes viewed as hot air that only serves to give the marketing team something to put on the company website, the truth is that your processes, the quality of your products, and the way you treat your customers are all a reflection of them.

This is a long way to say that values are important, but you don’t have to take our word for it. When asked, many customers who stated they had a relationship with a brand indicated that it was due to shared values. This isn’t surprising – customers will naturally be attracted to brands that mirror their beliefs while enhancing their lifestyles, especially when they’re younger.

Building a brand that your customers can easily relate to will foster trust. This is key to creating strong relationships and, by extension, a successful business. Let your customers know what you stand for, and be sure to act on these convictions (by donating to worthy causes, for example). Having common values with your customers makes it easier to attract and retain them.

2. Empower Your Customer Service Team to Build Trust

As a CX leader tasked with building, operationalizing, and scaling your contact center, you undoubtedly think about human agents’ interactions with customers. An important element in that equation is how you empower your team of customer service representatives to build trust with your customers.

To achieve this, focus on comprehensive training programs that emphasize empathy, active listening, and effective problem-solving. For instance, role-playing scenarios can prepare agents to handle various customer concerns with confidence and care. Keep your team up to date on best practices and emerging trends with regular workshops and continuous learning opportunities, too.

Implementing a customer feedback loop can help your team understand and respond to customer needs more effectively. Encourage your agents to ask for feedback after interactions and use this information to improve service delivery. Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Scores® (NPS), and first-call resolution rates can provide valuable insights into how well your team is building trust.

That validation helps to reinforce your team’s hard work, deepening a healthy internal culture. Speaking of culture, creating an internal culture centered around customer love, advocacy, and even “customer obsession” is foundational to trust building.

But as a CX leader, you must also factor in ways to highlight your team members’ success in putting customers first. This could involve recognizing and rewarding team members who exemplify customer-first values. For example, a monthly “Customer Hero” award can highlight and incentivize exceptional service.

3. Make Yourself Transparent and Easy to Work With

A great way to stand out is by making it as easy as possible for customers to find what they need. If your documentation or website is complex or confusing, this is certain to become a problem at one point or another. Clear, concise information, on the other hand, can help enhance customer retention.

Take the issue of refunds. If a customer is looking for a refund, they’re obviously dissatisfied. How much worse will they feel if they must then struggle to find a way to contact you, only to be faced with a maze of robotic voices endlessly repeating a menu of options?

If your agents are sympathetic and your information is easy to navigate, a refund needn’t be the end of a professional relationship. More broadly, it pays to invest the time required to make your content easy to follow and your agents easy to contact.

4. Meet Your Customers Where They Are

Customers love great offers and discounts, but they also love when they can get help solving problems with as little friction as possible.

A good way to do this (and improve customer retention simultaneously) is to provide support through the channels that make the most sense for your customers. There are a few other advantages to this omnichannel approach:

  • It enables you to respond very quickly to incoming queries, which can be a huge advantage for reasons already discussed above.
  • By integrating with technology like large language models, you can personalize your replies at scale and even offer services like real-time translation.
  • You can drive faster resolution times, contributing to customer satisfaction and retention.

5. Prioritize Quick Turnarounds

As a general rule, people have never enjoyed waiting around. But now that we’ve grown accustomed to 30-minute DoorDash deliveries and same-day shipping from Amazon, it’s only gotten worse.

For this reason, it pays to focus on replying to issues as quickly as possible.

Note, however, that this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to resolve an issue right off the bat. Many customers will feel less anxious and frustrated simply by knowing they’ve been heard and someone is working on a solution. Respond immediately, even if it’s just to say, “We’re sorry you’re running into issues, and we’re committed to getting you up and running again as soon as possible.”

You can also take this initial message as an opportunity to manage expectations about how long it will take to find a solution. Obviously, some problems are relatively straightforward, while others are more substantial, and you can communicate that to the customer (assuming it’s appropriate to do so). It’s never fun to hear that you’ll have to wait a week to get some issue sorted out, but it’s far worse to find that out after you’ve already made a bunch of plans that are difficult to change.

6. Be Sure to Personalize Your Communications

Artificial intelligence has a long history of delivering personalized content. You’re probably familiar with Spotify, which can discover patterns in the music and podcasts you enjoy and use algorithms to recommend songs and artists that align with your tastes.

With the power of generative AI, platforms like Quiq are elevating this to unprecedented levels.

Once upon a time, only human agents could analyze a customer’s profile and tailor their responses with relevant information. Now, a well-optimized generative language model can achieve this almost instantaneously – and on a much larger scale.

For a contact center manager focused on enhancing customer experience, this is a significant step forward.

7. Let Customer Data Work for You

Customer data can help determine your customers’ needs, and surveys are an effective way to gather that data — including NPS (Net Promoter Score®) surveys. Some of the benefits of conducting customer surveys include:

  • They’re a great way to interact with your customers
  • Customers tend to give honest and open feedback
  • These customers will be more likely to give feedback in the future if they see changes implemented based on prior concerns
  • Survey feedback can result in positive adjustments to your products, services, or processes
  • Surveys show your customers that you value their opinions and are willing to do whatever it takes to make them happy.
  • It can help ensure you’re pursuing the right targeting strategy
  • They can help you identify dissatisfied customers before they leave and create campaigns or offers to win them back

Of course, surveys aren’t the only way to do this; you can also treat customer complaints that come through other feedback channels in a similar manner.

Regardless of how you choose to proceed, interacting with your customers in this productive, proactive way is a great opportunity. Seventy percent of customers who complain will purchase your product again if their complaints are favorably resolved.

8. Reward Loyalty

Though nothing beats exceptional customer service, thoughtful gestures go a long way. In addition to standard discounts and other offers, think of things that will make your customers feel good about using your product.

A thank you note or any positive acknowledgment can keep your customers coming back, thus enhancing your customer retention rate.

Key Benefits of Customer Retention

Retaining customers is one of the most effective ways to drive business growth and ensure long-term stability. Here are the key benefits:

Cost Efficiency

Acquiring new customers is typically much more expensive than retaining existing ones. By fostering relationships with your current customers, you can lower marketing and acquisition costs while maximizing the value of customers who already know and trust your brand. This cost efficiency allows you to allocate resources more strategically, ensuring a higher return on investment.

Increased Revenue

Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and spend more over time. As trust in your business grows, they may explore additional products or services, increasing their lifetime value and boosting overall revenue. Retained customers also offer a more predictable revenue stream, helping stabilize cash flow and support sustainable growth.

Stronger Customer Relationships

Retaining customers allows businesses to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships. Over time, these connections lead to a greater understanding of customer needs, resulting in more personalized experiences. This not only enhances satisfaction and loyalty but also positions your business as a trusted partner, fostering long-term advocacy.

Positive Word-of-Mouth

Satisfied, loyal customers are natural brand advocates. They share positive experiences with friends, family, and colleagues, generating valuable word-of-mouth marketing that helps attract new customers without additional spending. Word-of-mouth is particularly impactful because it builds trust quickly, as recommendations from peers are often more credible than traditional advertising.

Competitive Advantage

Strong customer retention differentiates your business from competitors. When customers consistently choose your brand, it signals reliability, quality, and a superior experience. This loyalty gives you a competitive edge in crowded markets, making it harder for competitors to sway your customers with lower prices or flashy campaigns.

Common Challenges with Customer  Retention and How to Avoid Them

Retaining customers is essential for sustainable business growth, yet many organizations need help keeping their customers engaged and loyal. By understanding and addressing common challenges, businesses can create stronger relationships, reduce churn, and foster long-term customer satisfaction. Here are some of those main challenges:

Lack of Personalized Solutions

Problem: Customers today expect businesses to understand their unique needs and preferences. When businesses rely on generic communication, it can make customers feel undervalued and disengaged.

Solution: Use customer data and segmentation to create personalized experiences. Tailor messaging, product recommendations, and offers to align with individual needs. Personalization helps build stronger emotional connections, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Poor Customer Service

Problem: Slow response times, unresolved issues, or impersonal service experiences can frustrate customers and drive them to competitors.

Solution: Implement omnichannel support systems that allow customers to connect seamlessly across platforms (email, chat, phone, social). Equip your customer service team with thorough training to deliver quick, empathetic, and effective solutions. Exceptional support reduces churn and turns customers into loyal advocates.

No Clear Value After Purchase

Problem: If customers don’t see ongoing value from your product or service after the initial purchase, they are less likely to stay engaged or continue their subscription.

Solution: Consistently communicate the value of your product through customer education, feature updates, and exclusive benefits. Offer webinars, newsletters, or loyalty programs to showcase how your product continues to solve their challenges. Keeping customers aware of your product’s impact ensures long-term engagement.

Failure to Build Trust

Problem: Inconsistent quality, transparency issues, or broken promises can damage the trust customers have in your brand, making retention difficult.

Solution: Focus on transparency and delivering on commitments. Clearly communicate timelines, policies, and product changes. Regularly gather and act on feedback to address concerns. A trustworthy brand builds credibility, leading to stronger relationships and increased retention.

Neglecting Customer Feedback

Problem: Ignoring customer feedback makes customers feel unheard, leading to frustration and disengagement.

Solution: Proactively gather feedback through surveys, reviews, or direct conversations. Analyze the data to identify trends and make improvements. Most importantly, communicate to customers how their input influenced changes. Demonstrating that you value their opinions builds loyalty and encourages advocacy

Building Customer Relationships

Customers are the foundation of any business. But it’s not enough to just get customers, you must also ensure that you invest in improving customer retention. You can do this by using the strategies presented in this post to build world-class relationships with your customers.

To find even more such strategies, check out our free ebook on resolving common customer-service pain points. It’s got excellent advice on dealing with angry or frustrated customers, elucidating their expectations, and more. With it, you’ll have everything you need to send your customer retention rates into the stratosphere!

Leveraging Agent Insights to Boost Efficiency and Performance

Posted on The Quiq Team

In the ever-evolving customer service landscape, the role of contact center agents cannot be overstated. As the frontline representatives of a company, their performance directly impacts the quality of customer experience, influencing customer loyalty and brand reputation.

However, the traditional approach to managing agent performance – relying on periodic reviews and supervisor observations – has given way to a more sophisticated, data-driven strategy. For this reason, managing agent performance with a method that leverages the rich data generated by agent interactions to enhance service delivery, agent satisfaction, and operational efficiency is becoming more important all the time.

This article delves into this approach. We’ll begin by examining its benefits from three critical perspectives – the customer, the agent, and the contact center manager – before turning to a more granular breakdown of how you can leverage it in your contact center.

Why is it Important to Manage Agent Performance with Insights?

First, let’s start by justifying this project. While it’s true that very few people today would doubt the need to track some data related to what agents are doing all day, it’s still worth saying a few words about why it really is a crucial part of running a contact center.

To do this, we’ll focus on how three groups are impacted when agent performance is managed through insights: customers, the agents themselves, and contact center managers.

It’s Good for the Customers

The primary beneficiary of improved agent performance is the customer. Contact centers can tailor their service strategies by analyzing agent metrics to better meet customer needs and preferences. This data-driven approach allows for identifying common issues, customer pain points, and trends in customer behavior, enabling more personalized and effective interactions.

As agents become more adept at addressing customer needs swiftly and accurately, customer satisfaction levels rise. This enhances the individual customer’s experience and boosts the overall perception of the brand, fostering loyalty and encouraging positive word-of-mouth.

It’s Good for the Agents

Agents stand to gain immensely from a management strategy focused on data-driven insights. Firstly, performance feedback based on concrete metrics rather than subjective assessments leads to a fairer, more transparent work environment.

Agents receive specific, actionable feedback that helps them understand their strengths and which areas need improvement. This can be incredibly motivating and can drive them to begin proactively bolstering their skills.

Furthermore, insights from performance data can inform targeted training and development programs. For instance, if data indicates that an agent excels in handling certain inquiries but struggles with others, their manager can provide personalized training to bridge this gap. This helps agents grow professionally and increases their job satisfaction as they become more competent and confident in their roles.

It’s Good for Contact Center Managers

For those in charge of overseeing contact centers, managing agents through insights into their performance offers a powerful tool for cultivating operational excellence. It enables a more strategic approach to workforce management, where decisions are informed by data rather than gut feeling.

Managers can identify high performers and understand the behaviors that lead to success, allowing them to replicate these practices across the team. Intriguingly, this same mechanism is also at play in the efficiency boost seen by contact centers that adopt generative AI. When such centers train a model on the interactions of their best agents, the knowledge in those agents’ heads can be incorporated into the algorithm and utilized by much more junior agents.

The insights-driven approach also aids in resource allocation. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their team, managers can assign agents to the tasks they are most suited for, optimizing the center’s overall performance.

Additionally, insights into agent performance can highlight systemic issues or training gaps, providing managers with the opportunity to make structural changes that enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Moreover, using agent insights for performance management supports a culture of continuous improvement. It encourages a feedback loop where agents are continually assessed, supported, and developed, driving the entire team towards higher performance standards. This improves the customer experience and contributes to a positive working environment where agents feel valued and empowered.

In summary, managing performance by tracking agent metrics is a holistic strategy that enhances the customer experience, supports agent development, and empowers managers to make informed decisions.

It fosters a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement, leading to operational excellence and elevated service standards in the contact center.

How to Use Agent Insights to Manage Performance

Now that we know what all the fuss is about, let’s turn to addressing our main question: how to use agent insights to correct, fine-tune, and optimize agent performance. This discussion will center specifically around Quiq’s Agent Insights tool, which is a best-in-class analytics offering that makes it easy to figure out what your agents are doing, where they could improve, and how that ultimately impacts the customers you serve.

Managing Agent Availability

To begin with, you need a way of understanding when your agents are free to handle an issue and when they’re preoccupied with other work. The three basic statuses an agent can have are “available,” “current conversations” (i.e. only working on the current batch of conversations), and “unavailable.” All three of these can be seen through Agent Insights, which allows you to select from over 50 different metrics, customizing and saving different views as you see fit.

The underlying metrics that go into understanding this dimension of agent performance are, of course, time-based. In essence, you want to evaluate the ratios between four quantities: the time the agent is available, the time the agent is online, the time the agent spends in a conversation, and the time an agent is unavailable.

As you’re no doubt aware, you don’t necessarily want to maximize the amount of time an agent spends in conversations, as this can quickly lead to burnout. Rather, you want to use these insights into agent performance to strike the best, most productive balance possible.

Managing Agent Workload

A related phenomenon you want to understand is the kind of workload your agents are operating under. The five metrics that underpin this are:

  1. Availability
  2. Number of completions per hour your agents are managing
  3. Overall utilization (i.e. the percentage of an agent’s available conversation limit they have filled in a given period).
  4. Average workload
  5. The amount of time agents spend waiting for a customer response.

All of this can be seen in Agent Insights. This view allows you to do many things to hone in on specific parts of your operation. You can sort by the amount of time your agents spend waiting for a reply from a customer, for example, or segment agents by e.g. role. If you’re seeing high waiting and low utilization, that means you are overstaffed and should probably have fewer agents.

If you’re seeing high waiting and high utilization, by contrast, you should make sure your agents know inactive conversations should be marked appropriately.

As with the previous section, you’re not necessarily looking to minimize availability or maximize completions per hour. You want to make sure that agents are working at a comfortable pace, and that they have time between issues to reflect on how they’re doing and think about whether they want to change anything in their approach.

But with proper data-driven insights, you can do much more to ensure your agents have the space they need to function optimally.

Managing Agent Efficiency

Speaking of functioning optimally, the last thing we want to examine is agent efficiency. By using Agent Insights, we can answer questions such as how well new agents are adjusting to their roles, how well your teams are working together, and how you can boost each agent’s output (without working them too hard).

The field of contact center analytics is large, but in the context of agent efficiency, you’ll want to examine metrics like completion rate, completions per hour, reopen rate, missed response rate, missed invitation rate, and any feedback customers have left after interacting with your agents.

This will give you an unprecedented peek into the moment-by-moment actions agents are taking, and furnish you with the hard facts you need to help them streamline their procedures. Imagine, for example, you’re seeing a lot of keyboard usage. This means the agent is probably not operating as efficiently as they could be, and you might be able to boost their numbers by training them to utilize Quiq’s Snippets tool.

Or, perhaps you’re seeing a remarkably high rate of clipboard usage. In that case, you’d want to look over the clipboard messages your agents are using and consider turning them into snippets, where they’d be available to everyone.

The Modern Approach to Managing Agents

Embracing agent insights for performance management marks a transformative step towards achieving operational excellence in contact centers. This data-driven approach not only elevates the customer service experience but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and empowerment among agents.

By leveraging tools like Quiq’s Agent Insights, managers can unlock a comprehensive understanding of agent availability, workload, and efficiency, enabling informed decisions that benefit both the customer and the service team.

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities, contact us to schedule a demo today!

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5 Types of Customer Service Software for E-Commerce Businesses

Posted on Mark Kowal

Customer service takes more than a team of hardworking agents. It takes a solid technology strategy, too.

E-commerce brands, in particular, face chaotic customer service challenges. Between omnichannel support, the demand for 24/7 availability, and higher overall requests, there’s a lot to manage.

Unfortunately, it’s getting even more challenging. Many retailers know their customer service needs to improve, and customers aren’t making it easy. Customer engagement is up 14% in 2022, and so are customer standards. 60% say they have higher customer service standards than before, but only 26% say the overall quality of their customer service is extremely strong.

This year is tough. There’s a big gap between customer expectations and reality, and the talent shortage isn’t helping. But there is a way to fill that gap and deliver exceptional service to your customers.

You need customer service software.

Dive in to see how you can make things easier for your customer service team while improving customer satisfaction, and see the five must-have support tools that can help you do it.

What is customer service software?

Customer service software helps your support agents serve your customers. From CRM to analytics, you can put together an ecosystem of tools to enable efficient and effective customer support.

What kind of software do you need for e-commerce customer service?

Your support team is spread thin. They’re handling the rapid influx of inquiries, dealing with shipping delays, and stressed customers—plus they’re likely dealing with a short staff.

Give them the gift of efficiency. Here are the five must-have types of software to streamline your customer service.

1. CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is software that helps your team organize customer information, from storing historical information to analyzing data to facilitating conversations.

CRM software is a foundational purchase for an e-commerce business. Many of the following tools are available as add-ons or integrations so that everything can work together as one.

2. Ticketing system

Simply put, a ticketing system keeps track of customer issues. It helps customer service agents to organize and manage all customer inquiries, no matter which channel they come through, to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

You can also automate ticketing systems to help route customers to particular departments, prioritize based on category, or even tag using perceived customer sentiment.

3. Conversational engagement platform

Conversational commerce for customer serviceA conversational platform, like Quiq, seamlessly connects agents and customers through a variety of messaging channels. Messaging has proven to be a more efficient and affordable form of customer engagement than voice and enables agents to manage multiple conversations at once.

You can also use conversational engagement platforms to connect with your customers where they are, like Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, and more. Zendesk even reports that third-party messaging apps receive the highest average CSAT score (98%).

Quiq also delivers enhanced conversational AI to connect your customers through chatbots. Chatbots lighten the load for your customer service agents, filling in at various points in the conversation.

Designate a chatbot as the welcome wagon to collect customer information and route the issue to the appropriate department, automatically capture customer feedback at the end of an interaction, or even have bots answer common customer service questions.

4. Analytics software

Every team can benefit from more data. Analytics software helps you understand customer behavior, trends, and pain points. Use this information to identify areas of improvement in your customer service team or uncover problems before they happen.

For example, if you see a jump in “Where’s my order?” inquiries, test what happens when you send tracking links via text message, which has a much higher open rate than email.

5. Knowledge base

This software allows you to create and manage a customer self-service portal. Customers can find answers to their questions without having to contact customer service. According to a 2022 Zendesk survey, 83% of customers will spend more money with companies that allow them to find answers online—without having to ask anyone.

Knowledge-based software can be as simple as a content management system, but there are also specialized services that help you catalog information so that it’s easier for your customers to find.

How customer service software can all work together

As you piece together best-of-breed solutions for your customer service, look for software that integrates with each other to enhance your workflows. Investing in solutions that play well together is vital for the success of your customer service team.

For example, Zendesk’s Quiq integration enables your customer support agents to work with customers right from the Zendesk interface. When customers send a message to your company, no matter which platform, it automatically creates a ticket and fills in information like assignee, ticket type, priority, and more.

Agents can also use the customer information that’s already in Zendesk to help them solve issues. Access information like order history, past conversations, and more. Quiq will even scan conversations to identify pain points and pull up answers from Zendesk’s knowledge base.

You can find other Quiq integration opportunities here.

What are the benefits of customer service software?

Enhancing your team’s workflows with customer service software provides tons of benefits, felt by your customers, your agents, and your bottom line.

  1. Quicker response times: When customer service agents have the right information at their fingertips, they can respond to customer questions faster. Customer order information or past interactions can be stored within a CRM and automatically pulled up a the beginning of a conversation. Or, when agents are asked a question they don’t know, they can simply search their knowledge base.
  2. Faster resolutions: Above all else, customers want their problems solved quickly. Since agents have a more comprehensive picture of the customer and their problem, they’re more likely to resolve their issue with fewer messages.
  3. Reduced costs: Automating manual tasks and improving efficiency enables customer service agents can handle more customer requests in a shorter time.
  4. Happier agents: Customer service agents spend a lot of time dealing with unhappy customers, which can really take its toll. Only 15% of agents report that they’re extremely satisfied with their amount of work. When work is easier to manage—and customers are happier—your team benefits, too.
  5. Improved customer service: Support agents can deliver even better customer service with insights pulled from customer analytics. They can track things like sentiment and easily escalate problems to a manager when needed.

Plus, customers don’t need to repeat themselves when their information and conversation history is readily available. That itself provides a premium customer experience—one they’re willing to pay for. 88% of surveyed shoppers said they would spend more money with companies that ensure they won’t need to repeat information. (Wow!)
Digital_Conversations_Pricing_Integrations_Business_Messaging_Channels

Start with Quiq

If you’re looking for customer service software to deliver exceptional customer experiences, Quiq’s conversational AI is the place to start.

Unlock the power of conversations with rich messaging, intelligent chatbots, and tools to help your agents thrive. Plus, you can meet customers on whatever platform they prefer.

Start using asynchronous messaging and deliver stellar customer service.

With customers flocking to messaging channels, it’s a great time for your customer service team to adopt asynchronous messaging. The best way to set your team up for success? With a conversational platform, like Quiq.

Turn any messaging channel into an asynchronous experience. With Quiq, you can:

  • Manage conversations across multiple channels
  • Serve customers based on sentiment
  • Increase agent efficiency and boost customer satisfaction

Sign up for a Quiq demo and see how it can help you deploy asynchronous messaging and elevate your customer service.

Asynchronous Messaging: How to Use it to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service

Posted on The Quiq Team

Messaging is good. Asynchronous messaging is better.

Let’s face it. Customers have little tolerance for inconveniences of any kind. Whether that’s waiting around for a response, repeating information, or finding an immediate solution to their problem.

Customer service teams aim to serve, so having the available channels to give customers the exact experience they want is crucial to increasing customer satisfaction.

What is asynchronous messaging?

Imagine you’re the customer. You’re busy but need help returning a pair of boots (that just aren’t your style) that your well-meaning dad bought you for your birthday. A completely random example…

You reach out to the live chat service on the eCommerce website to initiate the return, but you’re interrupted midway through the conversation. There’s an immediate work problem that needs your attention. The kids are fighting. The sky is falling. Whatever it may be, you have to start the process all over again.

Frustrating, right? It’s just a simple return!

Well, asynchronous messaging (sometimes called async messaging or asynchronous chat) takes the stress out of that conversation. It doesn’t require both parties to be present at the same time to complete the interaction. You can simply jump back in once you’ve taken care of life’s responsibilities. This is asynchronous messaging at its best.

SMS/text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook Chat are all prime examples of asynchronous messaging in action. Conversations can start, stop, and resume whenever either person is available.

At the other end of the spectrum is synchronous messaging. It’s typically a live, one-to-one chat between a customer and a customer service representative.

What makes it so different? There’s usually a clear beginning and end to a synchronous chat. A customer reaches out with a specific question or to find a solution to their problem, and the conversation ends once those needs are met.

Think of it like a typical phone interaction—just using messaging instead of voice. And since synchronous messaging is so similar to phone interactions, it often comes with the same drawbacks.

  • Customers have to wait for a live agent.
  • If the agent can’t answer a question, the customer has to be rerouted.
  • Agents can only serve one person at a time.
  • Complex problems take up more of your agents’ time.
  • If a customer gets interrupted, the chat ends without a resolution.

Now that you know what asynchronous messaging is, keep reading to learn about the benefits for your customers, your support team, and your bottom line.

Getting started: 7 benefits of asynchronous messaging.

Think of asynchronous messaging somewhere between live chat and email. Customers typically expect a quick—but not instant—response. This flexibility allows your team to deliver exceptional customer service in a time that works for the customer and your team.

But that’s not the only benefit. Here are seven benefits of adding asynchronous messaging to your customer service arsenal.

  1. Customers can fit you into their busy days. Life is busy. We’re always multitasking. There are too many distractions—it’s a lot. Asynchronous messaging gives customers the flexibility to fit you into their schedules. They don’t have to block time out of their day for a lengthy live chat or wait for business hours to get someone on the phone. Instead, they can get their support requests taken care of on their own time, at their own pace.
  2. Less wait time. Since agents can jump in and out of multiple conversations—as many as 30 at a time—customers spend less time “on hold” waiting to connect with a live agent. And that is really important to customers. Zendesk reports that over 60% say getting their issues resolved quickly is the most important aspect of good customer service. With asynchronous messaging, customers can get answers while going about their day.
  3. No repeated information. One of the things that frustrates customers the most is to have to repeat their problem. No matter whether they get disconnected from a live chat or transferred to multiple people before they get an answer to their problem, repeating themselves almost always leads to a bad experience. With asynchronous messaging and a conversational platform behind it, customers (and agents) can pick up the conversation right where they left off. There’s no information lost between sessions. Their conversation history is available for agents to reference at any time.
  4. Resolve problems in less time. While asynchronous messaging potentially drags out conversations (depending on how quickly your customers respond), agents often spend less working time per interaction. Quiq clients can reduce work time by 25–40% when converting calls to messaging. This is because agents can quickly address those frequently asked questions that don’t necessarily require a phone call (think password reset process and hours of operations). Simple problems get solved faster, while more complex problems have the breathing room to come to a thorough resolution.
  5. Prioritize customer requests. During peak times, when your team is truly overwhelmed, asynchronous messaging helps your agents triage customer requests. Collect customer information, sentiment, and problem upfront to determine how quickly the problem needs to be addressed. A customer service agent can immediately help an angry customer with a simple problem and close out the ticket quickly. While a neutral person with a more complex question can wait a little longer for your agents to figure out the right response.Asynchronous messaging agent efficiency customer engagement performance channels sms facebook instagram whatsapp conversations
  6. Meet support demands with fewer agents. Much like phone calls, synchronous messaging requires one agent per customer interaction. To meet demand and avoid long wait times, you need a higher volume of staff members at all times. This also means that you likely have to hire extra team members to support peak times. Asynchronous messaging can help with that. Since your support team can take part in multiple conversations at once, you can serve more customers with fewer agents. This is particularly helpful now when baseline support ticket requests have gone up 20% since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Zendesk.
  7. Get more opportunities to initiate a conversation. Since conversations are more flexible, customers are more likely to engage with customer service reps at different stages within the the customer lifecycle. Customers don’t have to set aside big chunks of time for conversations and your team will have more context to help serve them better. From starting a conversation from Maps with Apple Messages for Business or using Facebook Messenger to ask about size options, there’s ample opportunity to serve customers and increase revenue.

How to make the most out of asynchronous messaging.

Messaging as a whole has significantly grown in popularity since the pandemic began, and it has done so at a faster rate than any other channel. Support tickets coming in from messaging channels rose by 48%, compared to a 15% increase from live chat.

If you haven’t embraced asynchronous messaging yet, we have a few best practices to shape your approach and help you get started.

  • Design your asynchronous messaging strategy around your agents waiting for the customer—not the other way around. While it gives your agents the ability to manage multiple conversations, the benefit should really be for the customers’ flexibility. If you use asynchronous chat to spread your team too thin, the experience can end up feeling like email, which no one likes.
  • One way to improve response times and decrease the time agents spend per interaction? Use a chatbot to welcome customers and collect pertinent information beforehand. This way, customers get served quickly, and agents can spend their time problem-solving instead of gathering information.
  • Want to stand out? Don’t treat messaging like email. In 2020, Zendesk reported that it takes more than 11 hours, on average, to close messaging tickets. That’s compared to 30 minutes for voice and live chat and 11.5 hours for email or web form tickets.
    While messaging gives your team more flexibility to respond, customers still expect a response time in under 5 minutes. Try staffing it as you would with voice and live chat to start. Then, adjust as your team becomes more efficient and you invest in other ways to streamline service.
  • Remember to track actual work time. Overall, asynchronous messaging will have high-resolution times since you can resolve issues in two minutes, two hours, or two days. Giving customers the freedom to respond at their own convenience can superficially elevate those numbers. But remember: if a customer is responsible for the delay, a two-day conversation can result in a lower work time and a higher customer satisfaction rate. So take resolution times with a grain of salt. A conversational platform like Quiq can help you measure actual work time.

Start using asynchronous messaging and deliver stellar customer service.

With customers flocking to messaging channels, it’s a great time for your customer service team to adopt asynchronous messaging. The best way to set your team up for success? With a conversational platform, like Quiq.

Turn any messaging channel into an asynchronous experience. With Quiq, you can:

  • Manage conversations across multiple channels
  • Serve customers based on sentiment
  • Increase agent efficiency and boost customer satisfaction

Sign up for a Quiq demo and see how it can help you deploy asynchronous messaging and elevate your customer service.

Top 3 Things to Know About Apple Messages for Business

Posted on Max Fortis

How much do you know about Apple Messages for Business?

We know what you’re thinking. Not *another* messaging platform.

But hear us out. Business Messages is one of the most organic messaging experiences you can offer your customers.

There’s no denying that Apple knows how to create a great customer experience. From their Genius Bars to their MacBook packaging, there’s care and attention paid to every small detail.

And that extends to their Business Messages feature. We’re answering three basic questions to help you discover what it is and how to use it to improve your customer experience below.

What is Apple Messages for Business?

Apple Messages for Business allows users to connect with your business through Apple’s native Messaging app on their iOS- or macOS-enabled devices. With more than 1 billion iPhone users, you have a simple way to connect with your customers.

When you enable Apple Messages for Business, users get one-on-one access to your representatives directly in Maps, Safari, Search, Siri, Spotlight, and even within your iOS app. All they have to do is click the messaging icon, and they’re taken to their messaging apps.

Your customers don’t need to navigate through an automated phone tree, search for an email address on your website, or download an app—they can simply open up the Messages app and start chatting with a customer service representative right away.

What can you do with Apple Messages for Business?

Besides enabling customers to connect with you as easily as they do with their favorite people, Apple Messages for Business offers a variety of features you can leverage to improve your customer experience.

Rich messaging

So much more than a text. Rich messaging allows you to send images, links, share a location, read receipts and more.

Send a rich link that displays website information from within the message. Customers can verify it’s the information they’re looking for before tapping the link, and they’re provided an easy way to get back to the conversation after they’ve visited the site.

Retailers can use messaging to send product images, insurance companies can ask for pictures of car damage, or you can share nearby brick-and-mortar locations.

Appointment scheduling

Let customers schedule appointments right from within messaging. Customers can see if it conflicts with their schedule, automatically add the appointment to their iCal, and get reminders to ensure they don’t miss it.

Augmented reality

Help customers decide if a product fits in their home. Using their iPhone camera and augmented reality, customers can visualize a product in their homes.

List picker

Simplify customer choice by letting them pick from a pre-populated list. Use it to help them pick locations, item size, color, or service.

pay to chat apple pay

Accept payments with Apple Pay

Eliminate abandoned carts by completing sales right within Messages. You can send payment requests with Apple Pay and make it so much easier for customers to complete a transaction. No more entering in extra information, and no getting up from the couch to get your credit card… Just instant gratification.

Collect (secure) customer information

What’s one thing customers hate most about customer service? Having to repeat themselves and give out their information to multiple people. Apple Business Chat removes this obstacle by providing the customer information you need. Plus, messages are long-lived. No matter when a customer reaches out, their previous conversation will live in the messaging platform so you can pick up right where you left off. Just like messaging a friend.

What are the benefits of using Apple Messages for Business?

Apple Messages for Business provides many opportunities to delight customers while still streamlining your customer support process. Benefits of Apple Messages for Business include:

  1. The ability to encourage messaging with Message Suggest.
  2. Delivery of a seamless customer experience.
  3. Incorporation of both live agents and chatbots.

Encourage messaging with Message Suggest

Typically, customers can message you by tapping a messaging icon. But you can boost messages and reduce your call volumes with Apple Message Suggest. Customers can tap on your business phone number from anywhere within iOS or macOS, including websites, social media, business directories, etc., and they’ll be given the option to message instead of call.

Adding Message Suggest can help reduce call volume and drive traffic to messaging, which is often more efficient and cost-effective.

Deliver a seamless customer experience

Think of Apple Messages for Business as an extension of your brand experience. You control your business contact info the user sees when they search your name, including logo, contact information, and more.

You can even customize the call-to-action text for Apple Suggest. Instead of the standard, “Why call when you can message?”, consider a simple “Text us” or an encouraging “Get faster service when you send a text.”

Incorporate both live agents and chatbots

One of the requirements for having an Apple Messages for Business account is having live agents available to respond to customer inquiries. But that doesn’t mean you have to have someone at the ready at all times. You can still use chatbots at specific points of the interaction to ensure instant service at all times.

Use bots to:

  • Welcome customers
  • Automate the checkout process
  • Gather customer information
  • Troubleshoot simple customer issues
  • Collect feedback

Since messaging can happen at any time, you can use bots to service customer questions 24/7, such as:

  • Checking order statuses
  • Canceling an order
  • Scheduling appointments
  • Confirming account balances

You can still utilize bots to help you deliver the best experience to your customers while tapping in live agents to provide that one-on-one support.

Take a deep dive into Apple Messages for Business.

We’ve just scratched the surface on what you can do with Apple Messages for Business to surprise and delight your customers. By giving customers a way to connect with your business that they know, love, and use daily, you’re creating a comfortable and inviting experience for them. P.S. To use Apple Messages for Business, you’re required to use a messaging service provider like Quiq.

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Is Your Service Center Busy? Don’t Turn Off Messaging!

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Knee-jerk reactions happen. It gets busy. You see your agents struggling. And when your agents are overwhelmed, it’s natural to want to go back to what you know. So you turn all your agents to the phone while turning messaging off.

But this can make things ten times worse.

Instead of controlling the funnel of customer requests, you simply create a ticket backlog that frustrates your customers and further overwhelms your team.

Hear us out about why you should resist the urge to suspend messaging when you get busy.

Don’t turn off messaging. Here’s why.

1. Customers prefer it.

Business professional woman holding a cell phoneGlobally, messaging has increased in popularity significantly in 2021. According to Zendesk’s 2021 CX Trends Report, in-app messaging popularity grew by 36%, SMS/text messaging by 75%, and social messaging by 110%.

While customers value human connection, younger generations don’t consider emotional connections and text communications mutually exclusive.

If your customers are used to messaging options, they’re likely to get frustrated when you take it away. The worst-case scenarios? They become unsatisfied, switch to a competitor, or take their complaint to social media.

2. Messaging is more efficient.

It might seem counterintuitive. Rather than focusing on a single call, agents are juggling multiple customer messages at the same time. But with the right tools and sufficient planning, messaging can be a lot more efficient.

With phone calls, agents can only serve one person at a time. They’re wholly tied down to one call. And they may or may not know how serious the problem is, the customer’s mood, or how long it’ll take to resolve their issue. It’s often a crapshoot.

But messaging gives agents the ability to serve six to eight requests, compared to one phone call. They can prioritize messages based on urgency, dollar amount, VIP and more. Plus, agents can chat with other customers while waiting for one to respond, maximizing their time.

3. Messaging is asynchronous.

Except for live chat, messaging doesn’t require an immediate response. It lands somewhere between phone conversations and email. Customers often send a message but rarely wait for a response. This gives customers a chance to go about their day while having their issues resolved or their questions answered.

Your customer service agents then have more flexibility in their responses. You can afford to slow down communications without upsetting the customer.

Yes, it’s good to answer customers as quickly as possible. But when it’s busy and your agents are overwhelmed, taking longer to respond to a text message is better than leaving them on hold for the same amount of time.

4. Integrate chatbots to alleviate urgency.

The biggest advantage messaging has over phone calls? Chatbots.

Online customer service chatbot conversations with a customerSalesforce reported that 66% of service professionals credit self-service for reducing call volumes—and that includes chatbots. There are many ways to integrate bots and AI into the customer support experience to reduce the burden on your agents.

Chatbots can act as your first line of defense, greeting customers and collecting information on their issues. During busy times, you can triage support issues. Customers with urgent problems can be helped first, while those with simpler problems can wait a little longer. For frequently asked questions, you can even write a script for your chatbots to respond and complete the ticket without involving your team at all.

Chatbots and agents can also work in tandem, tag-teaming a conversation when agents get overwhelmed. Chatbots can ask questions or provide scripted responses, and agents can jump in with the solution. Plus, agents can see the entire conversation with the chatbot, so the transition is seamless, and there are no redundant questions.

5. It’s just better customer service.

If you’re a Friends enthusiast, do you remember the episode “The One with the Screamer”? Stay with us. In short, Phoebe misses Joey’s play because she’s on hold for hours trying to claim a warranty that’s about to expire.

While that’s poor customer service taken to the extreme, it’s still very relatable. A Zendesk survey found that  56% of customers say that long hold/wait times are one of the most frustrating customer service experiences. No one wants to wait on hold for hours. And when your support agents are busy, that’s a possibility. Sending a message allows your customers to go on with their day while waiting for a response.

What doesn’t work with messaging

While integrating messaging into your customer service is a great strategy, it’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your support problems without some help.

Here are some ways messaging can go seriously wrong.

1. You only use live messaging.

Live chat is a great way to engage with customers, but it’s not the most forgiving during busy times. Synchronous messaging (instant communication between you and your customer) requires both parties to be available and provide instant responses. It doesn’t adequately replace a phone call. When you’re busy, synchronous messaging can take up more of your agents’ time.

2. You’re using chatbots ineffectively.

Pairing chatbots with synchronous messaging lends to a lackluster customer service experience. Using simplistic chatbots in your web messaging often turns into hold messages (i.e., “Someone will be with you in 20 minutes”) or a glorified search bar (i.e., “What can I help you with?”).

Chatbot scripts and messaging trees are also vital to their success. Filling it with copy that lacks empathy, is too formal for your audience, or confuses them further will also create a bad experience.

3. You’re not adequately preparing your team.

According to Salesforce, 55% of agents say they need better training in order to do their job well. Messaging customers and handling issues over the phone are two different skill sets. There are many cues you can pick up on through someone’s voice to determine their state of mind. Your customer service team was likely trained to listen for these cues and respond accordingly.

But messaging is different. There are fewer ways to pick up on a customer’s mood and fewer ways to build a rapport. If your team isn’t prepped to respond quickly while expressing empathy, it can come off as detached or fake.

How to ensure messaging success

Don’t panic. When you see a busy season on the horizon, there are a few things you can do to set your customer support team up for messaging success.

1. It’s all about the prep work.

It’s not a good idea to plug your current customer service strategies into a messaging platform as is. You need a strategy that works across voice calls and messaging, so you can transition customers between them seamlessly.

2. Set up triage ahead of time.

Messaging Chat Bots Help Customer ServiceBefore the avalanche hits, decide how you’ll handle customer support questions. Who gets to go first when you can’t get to everyone right away? Will it be the most urgent problem? The VIP customers? Whoever has a problem that can be solved the quickest?

Then determine how you’ll assign issues to different service agents or even different departments. Lean into conversational AI and chatbots to help automate those decisions.

3. Reduce call volume with call-to-text.

Integrate call-to-text with your interactive voice response (IVR) system to give customers the option of transitioning to text instead of waiting on hold.

4. Ensure seamless integration across platforms.

It’s easy for customer communications to become fragmented. Silos can form between different messaging platforms, phone calls, and web chat. Find a communications platform that keeps track of customers across multiple channels so your agents have a complete history of the conversation before they jump in.

5. Create an escape plan.

Okay. Not an actual escape plan. But you should have a strategy in place to help get your customer service agents out of the hole—that doesn’t involve turning off your messaging entirely. Have some remote agents on call to take the overflow. Or try enlisting other team members to help out when your team is overwhelmed. Maybe even try turning off your phones and relying on messaging services until you catch up.

Whatever you do, set yourself up for success with better options than shutting down your customer service messaging and weathering the storm.

Master your messaging with Quiq

Don’t hit the panic button. Even if your team is under fire, resist the urge to go full phone. Instead of solving the problem, you may be creating several more.

What does it really take to reach customer service messaging success? A conversational platform that enhances your agents’ ability to deliver exceptional customer service. Prepare for the busy days ahead with Quiq.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the amount of messaging channels out there. Regardless of how your customers or prospects engage, Quiq manages it all within our multi-channel conversational engagement platform.

Get a Quiq demo today.

3 Key Customer Success Metrics to Go After in 2022

Posted on The Quiq Team

With jingle bells ringing and cash registers chiming, it’s clear we’re still smack dab in the middle of the holiday rush. But off in the distance, you can hear an orchestra play the first few familiar notes of Auld Lang Syne.

2022 is quickly approaching, and you’re likely gearing up for new initiatives, process changes, and everything else that comes with the beginning of a new year.

Have you figured out how to measure it yet?

The beginning of the year is a great time to start tracking your customer success metrics. Measuring how happy your customers are with your service and how likely they are to return is a great predictor of overall business success.

Use success metrics to:

  • Gauge the success of new initiatives
  • Identify weak points in the customer journey
  • Measure the success of your customer service team
  • Track the growth of individual team members
  • Predict customer loyalty

But the world of customer data is massive. Where do you start?

There are many ways to gauge and improve your customer service, but we’ve identified three customer success metrics that will give you the best, well-rounded view of how you’re performing in your customers’ eyes.

Keep reading to see what they are and how to use them.

Why should you measure customer success?

To put it simply, you can’t make customer-centric decisions without any input from the customer. While we always have our customers’ best interests at heart, what we think customers want and what they actually want can be vastly different.

But more than identifying needs, giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback makes them feel valued. Customers with service issues often just want to be heard, which also applies to the feedback they offer. They want to know their complaint has been taken and addressed.

Plus, 1 in 3 customers share their contact center experiences with others, and half of those do so on social media, according to a 2020 report from the CFI Group. Hearing about customer issues from social media has the potential to damage your brand.

That’s where customer surveys come in.

Success metric #1: Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, often asks customers one question: How satisfied are you with your experience?

Customers respond using a numerical scale to rate their experience from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. Numerical scales are typically 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, but they can vary based on your business’s preference.

How do you calculate CSAT scores?

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

On a 1 to 5 scale, 4s and 5s are typically the highest predictors of customer retention.

This short survey works best when asked immediately after a specific experience. You can offer the survey after a purchase, an interaction with your customer service team, or a return.

What can you do to improve your CSAT scores?

  • Improve response times
  • Resolve issues quickly
  • Ask follow-up questions to discern the context behind customer dissatisfaction

While CSAT is an excellent monitoring tool, it has its limitations. It works best when measuring specific interactions but doesn’t give you an overall picture of the customer experience. While it can indicate customer satisfaction, it isn’t the best at identifying whether a customer is likely to return or recommend your business to someone else.

You’re also more likely to hear from customers at either extreme: either terrible experiences or outstanding experiences. Customers in the middle are less likely to take the time and fill out the survey.

Success metric #2: Customer effort score

Customer effort score, or CES, measures how easy it is to do business with your company. For this survey, you ask customers to rate the ease of interaction with your customer service team, typically from 1 to 7, with low numbers corresponding to very difficult and high numbers very easy.

How do you calculate CES?

Sum of all scores ÷ total number of responses = CES average

This more recent measurement originates from a Harvard Business Review study that found “little relationship between satisfaction and loyalty.”

Their main conclusion?

“When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.”

So while customer delight and satisfaction are vital goals, HBR concluded that the level of effort required is a greater predictor of disloyalty. The more effort customers have to expend, the less likely they are to continue patronizing your business.

What can you do to improve your CES?

  • Simplify the checkout process with message-based payments
  • Solve customer issues with fewer interactions
  • Give customers self-service options on your website

The main issue that pops up with CES is that it’s ambiguous. Customers don’t always interpret “effort” in a manner that is useful to your business. It also doesn’t translate well across cultures.

Success metric #3: Net Promoter Score®

A Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a proprietary customer success metric that asks the question: How likely are you to recommend [business/product/service] to someone you know?

Customers answer based on a 10-point scale, and answers are categorized as follows:

  • Detractors: 0 to 6
  • Passives: 7 and 8
  • Promoters: 9 and 10

Detractors are customers who were completely dissatisfied with your service and have the potential to damage your business. It’s best to follow up with these customers to ask them why they feel the way they do and to solve any persistent problems they might have.

Passives are typically customers who were satisfied with your business but overall unenthusiastic about it. They’re more likely to switch to competitors depending on their needs.

Promoters are the ultimate goal. They’re enthusiastic about your brand. Promoters are most likely to purchase frequently and share your business with people they know. According to Bain & Company, a promoter has a lifetime value 6 to 14 times that of a detractor.

How do you calculate NPS?

% of promoters — % of detractors = NPS

While NPS is designed to gauge the overall performance of your business, you can also use it transactionally to measure the success of products or services. If your goal is overall company reputation, it’s best to send out the survey at regular intervals, like quarterly or yearly. If you’re measuring a specific product or service, send the survey shortly after the purchase is complete.

What can you do to improve your NPS?

Since NPS is measuring your customers’ perception of your brand, there aren’t one or two things that can drastically improve it. Everything matters.

NPS brings a different dynamic to survey results, but the answers without any context aren’t constructive. Since you’re more likely looking at the overall impression of your brand instead of specific interactions or customer emotions, it can be pretty hard to decipher the results in a meaningful way.

That’s why it’s essential to ask for reasonings either within your survey or as a follow-up. Give your customers the opportunity to explain their decisions, and then use that information to improve your score.

Customer success survey best practices

What do all of these customer success metrics have in common? They require surveying your customers.

Here are some best practices to help increase your response rates.

  • Send surveys using the method customers prefer. If they reached out to you via web chat, Facebook Messenger, or Google’s Business Messages, send a survey immediately after their interaction.
  • Combine communications. If you send an email thanking customers for their patronage, add the survey to that message. If you send a text with their order details, include it with the message. They’re less likely to ignore it when it’s paired with important information.
  • Use chatbots. Set up your chatbot to trigger a survey message immediately after a ticket is closed, so you can ensure you’re serving every customer.
  • Offer incentives. Low response rates can skew your data. Encourage customer participation with discounts, free shipping, or an entry into larger giveaways.

While there are some tricks to encourage customer participation, there’s no silver bullet. Regularly engaging with your customers will get them used to frequent conversations with your brand and make them more likely to get involved.

Capture customer success metrics with Quiq

Measuring customer success metrics is an essential part of your customer experience. But you need a reliable way to capture feedback, no matter which platform your customers prefer.

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Dreading Customer Experience Snags Over the Holidays? You’re Not Alone.

Posted on Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Your dread of poor customer experience is justified: The holidays are going to be tough on retailers this year. It’s already proving to be a mess of a season. Between supply shortages, delivery delays, and a smaller labor pool, holiday shopping can prove difficult this year.

And customers know it.

68% of shoppers are either very or somewhat concerned about poor service due to a lack of employees, according to the Salesforce Holiday Insights report. 78% are concerned about shipping delays and product availability, respectively.

Overall, there’s a lot to worry about this year. But you’re not alone.

On a positive note, holiday shopping has started earlier. Sales were up 18% year-over-year for the first two weeks of November, according to Salesforce. Black Friday sales aren’t breaking any records and actually suffered a small decline over last year. Adobe Analytics is reporting $8.9 billion in sales, which actually makes sense. It tracks with earlier spending as shoppers try to avoid stockouts and shipping delays.

Now to your big question: How do you ensure a stellar customer experience amidst these challenges? Let’s discuss that.

Customer loyalty matters more than ever

It seems like we say that a lot, doesn’t it?

Customer loyalty is a constant focus, but it becomes even more critical during times of change. As shoppers move toward e-commerce, they forge new loyalties. The brand interactions they have are with your customer support team instead of with sales team members. This poses both challenges and opportunities.

But the real problem this holiday season is that shoppers know what they want, and they don’t care who they get it from.

“39% of consumers who couldn’t get an out-of-stock item switched brands or products, and 32% switched retailers.”

According to a McKinsey study, 39% of consumers who couldn’t get an out-of-stock item switched brands or products, and 32% switched retailers. They’re not waiting for items to come back in stock.

Whether trying to keep the customers you have or attempting to capture new customers as they jump ship from other retailers, you have a short window to capture their loyalty.

How do you do that? Listen to your customers, communicate effectively, and empower your agents to go above and beyond whenever possible.

Infuse CX into every step of the customer journey

Since customers are more willing to switch retailers to get the items they want, your customer experience needs to be your number one priority.

We know you’re already slammed with holiday queries, but bringing your support team into every step of the customer journey is the best way to ensure a stellar customer experience.

Consider how to get ahead of customer problems before they get to your support team. Include holiday questions on your FAQ page and send out notifications when inventory or shipping snags occur.

When problems do arise, remember these short customer experience tips to solve problems quickly and earn back the trust of your customers.

Quick customer experience tips:

  1. Be warm
  2. Be prepared with quick answers
  3. Ensure your customer feels listened to
  4. Don’t come off as rote
  5. Be transparent about problems
  6. Solve issues in one support request

Get creative with staffing

According to Forbes, 68% of organizations saw a greater increase in customer service inquiries during the 2020 holiday season versus the 2019 holiday season. It would be no surprise to see even higher numbers this season.

And in customer service, immediacy is the name of the game. Customers want quick service and often expect some kind of reply 24/7. Yet many retailers are short-staffed.

While the labor pool is shallow, long wait times are the quickest way to frustrate your customers. To ensure your team isn’t completely overwhelmed, get creative with your staffing:

Top holiday staffing strategies

  1. Lean into short-term staffing
  2. Extend hours for employees who want them
  3. Stagger shifts based on peak shopping hours
  4. Pull in employees from other departments
  5. Extend your labor pool with remote hires

The right infrastructure can make hiring short-term and remote employees a breeze. Messaging software makes it possible to onboard new hires quickly—even when they’re across the country. No need to ship desk phones or physical products. Just log in and go.

Embrace chatbots for improved customer service

We know it’s crunch time, but adding chatbots to your customer experience arsenal will do a lot to smooth out the snags. There’s a lot you can do with chatbots and AI to speed up your customer response time. Live-Chat-Software-Chatbot-Messaging-Window

The first is to use chatbots as a routing method. Ask simple questions to gauge the type of customer issue. If you can direct the customer to another department or another self-service option, that’s a best-case scenario.

You can also get more advanced and prepare scripts for commonly asked questions. Consider it an FAQ page on steroids. You can answer slightly more complex queries, and customers get the feeling of personal service.

Here are some common holiday questions you can program a chatbot to answer:

Common questions for your chatbot

  1. What’s the status of my order?
  2. When’s the last day to order to ensure my package gets delivered by Christmas Eve?
  3. What’s your return policy?
  4. How much is shipping?
  5. When will this item be back in stock?
  6. How often do you get new products in?
  7. I ordered the wrong size, what do I do?

Preparing scripts for simple answers like these once can save your team from handling hundreds of interactions—give them more time and you one less thing to worry about.

Streamline backend technology

The holidays are the worst time of year to fight against your technology. Customer service teams are handling loads of messages and calls from all different platforms, and switching between them is inefficient. And frankly annoying.

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.

Do away with dread and upgrade your customer experience

The holidays are a make-or-break moment for retailers. While you may be dreading the rush just as much as the customer, they’re looking to your customer support team to shine amidst the struggles.

Let your last major technology purchase of the year be one that can help you get through the holiday season with fewer customer experience snags and more sales

Power your customer service team with Quiq

Ensure your team communicates effectively over any messaging channel with Quiq. Our AI-enhanced conversational platform supports your customer service team with multiple messaging channels, chatbots, CRM integrations, and more.