Tag: customer messaging

4 Tips for Communicating Effectively With Customers Over Live Chat

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

Consumers want answers, and they want them right away. Slow customer service can result in lost opportunities for businesses across all industries. That’s why live chat is more popular among businesses and corporations than ever before. This fast, efficient communication method is a great way to address the questions and concerns of both new and long-standing customers. With the help of a few customer service live chat tips, it’s easy to improve consumer relationships and stay competitive in the industry.

Tips for Effective Live Chat Customer Service Messages

For consumers who have questions while deciding whether to buy a product or service, live chat is a quick and simple solution. With live chat customer service messages, consumers have their questions answered and decide on a course of action within minutes. Like any other part of a customer support strategy, it takes planning and precision to develop a successful live chat program. Here are a few live chat customer service tips that can help you communicate more quickly and effectively.

1. Keep a Conversational Tone

While the tone of a conversation may vary depending on the situation or customer, it’s important to be friendly and conversational. Excessive formal language can translate as boring, while a message filled with errors and too much slang may read as unprofessional. Although the occasional slang or emoji is acceptable in the right context, it’s best to communicate professionally during live messaging.

2. Write Short Messages

Consumers like quick, easy answers. They prefer replies that are short, sweet, and to the point. It’s easy to lose potential leads by offering answers that are too long and complex. Short messages are more digestible and easier to read, which makes them ideal for consumers who are in a hurry to find solutions.

3. Point to Relevant Materials

Additional resources and materials play an important role in allowing businesses to communicate with new customers. These materials can help answer questions, point consumers to other offerings, and even encourage them to buy more products. During live chat, it’s important to find ways to keep the conversation going so the consumer receives the support they need and walks away satisfied with their service. Pointing to relevant materials is a smart way to keep people engaged and asking questions.

4. Focus on Speed

Live chat is different from other types of messaging and communication because it all happens in one sitting. If a representative is too slow to respond, they could lose a lead within minutes. That’s why focusing on speed without sacrificing accuracy and quality is so important. Live chat features such as Quiq Replies offer standardized messages the agent can use with a simple keystroke to respond both quickly and consistently.

Greater speed during live chat can result in more leads, happier customers, and better profits. In some cases, chat bots also keep the conversation going by helping potential leads while representatives are unavailable.

Contact Quiq for More Live Chat Customer Service Tips

Live chat is a powerful strategy that can help any business attract more customers and build better customer loyalty. The key is to keep replies quick, short, and to the point while maintaining a positive tone. For more information about customer service live chat, contact us online today.

How to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

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

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

4 Steps to Improve Your CSAT Score

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

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

1. Create a Customer-Focused Work Environment

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

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

2. Conduct Customer Surveys

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

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

3. Make Changes in Response to Customer Feedback

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

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

4. Create Personalized Conversations With Customer Messaging

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

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

Get Started by Requesting a Quote

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

Text Messaging: The New Era of Customer Engagement

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

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

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

Old Ways of Customer Engagement Are Gone

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

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

Capabilities of Digital Customer Service

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

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

Why This Matters

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

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

Request a Demo From Quiq Today

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

See a Demo Today

Rich Messaging: Make Online Shopping A Conversation

Posted on luisa@webfx.com

The term doesn’t refer to communication reserved solely for the elite, but rich messaging does rank highly among the most effective ways to engage customers today. Rich messaging (or Rich Communication Services or RCS) adds personalization, branding, and interactivity to 2-way messaging conversations , which even in its current SMS form, has very high open rates. Let’s cover the uses and benefits of rich messaging and how this service can enhance the customer experience as a whole.

What Is RCS Messaging?

Rich Communication Services messaging is a new way to exchange a text with added functionality. Consider RCS an upgrade to the simple plain-text format that SMS consisted of during the early years of mobile messaging when 160 characters was the limit.

With RCS, it’s possible to:

  • Attach large files and interactive media such as images, videos, digital promotions, and sign-ups
  • Shop and place orders 
  • Schedule appointments
  • Complete secure transactions 
  • Include option menus, response suggestions, or next steps
  • Leverage device components like a mobile camera to capture augmented reality, or GPS to display store location on a map

It’s expected that RCS will likely surpass SMS in time as the main protocol for messaging services. Right now, the use of rich messaging has risen dramatically in the digital marketplace, particularly in retail, consumer goods, and consumer services. 

The two primary providers of these rich communication services are Apple and Google with Apple Business Chat and Google Messages. Businesses getting started will need to work with a Customer Service Platform like Quiq to enable using these communication services with their customers.

How Rich Messaging Drives Conversions

The biggest benefit of RCS for businesses is the ability to send more sophisticated texts for better branding and customer service. The numerous features of RCS give the digital customer experience a personal touch. The organization or the platform itself provides the methods to fine-tune the message for each recipient, and even account for customer data like the customers location or 

Additional benefits of rich messaging services include:

  • Convenient product displays: Send carousel galleries or expandable pages for customers to scroll through
  • Direct assistance: Convert questions or complaints into actionable solutions in one conversation
  • Fast, personalized answers: Whether through a chatbot or live agent, customer requests are fulfilled without navigating out of the messaging window
  • Skip directly to the bottom of the buyer funnel: Provide sufficient information to make a sale without customers dialing a number or visiting a store

Improved Satisfaction With Faster Service and Richer Communication

Today, customer satisfaction hinges on timely, accurate, and useful information. RCS is beneficial for times when the full picture matters in the final purchasing decision — like the appearance of home decor — or when busy customer schedules make speedy applications or appointments a necessity.

Altogether, implementing rich messaging makes it more convenient for both businesses and consumers to exchange information. With the ability for businesses to respond in these more modern ways, they are then able to be faster and more tailored in their communications, and these richer experiences make it easy for customers to complete transactions and want to come back for more.

Deploy Rich Messaging in Your B2C Engagement With Quiq

Quiq makes enabling rich messaging as easy as sending a text message as it recognizes and sends the richest form of message possible, whether RCS or SMS, based upon device capabilities. To see the potential for yourself, schedule a live demo today.

See a Demo Today

How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing eCommerce

Posted on Lauren Winder

In recent years, chatbots have made their way into the mainstream, becoming an integral part of the way modern businesses interact with consumers. In this post, we’ll take a look at chatbots and how they are playing an increasingly important role in eCommerce. We’ll then dive into the ways that businesses can use bots across all channels.

What are chatbots?

Chatbots are software applications that simulate human conversation.  Customers can interact with chatbots much like they would with a human via SMS/text, web chat, social media or in a company’s app. Chatbots can be written to follow simple instructions such as to greet the customer with “Hi, how can I help you?” and ask for the customer’s name. Bots can also execute more complex processes based off of rules or keywords such as gathering order information, routing the customer to a different department, and displaying the customer’s order history to the agent.

The earliest chatbots were simple systems that picked up keywords from a user’s message which triggered certain scripts. Responses may have come across as canned, but the mere fact that a user was chatting with a robot was novel in itself. In the 1960s, computer scientists at MIT developed ELIZA, which emulated a psychotherapist. Many individuals who used Eliza were convinced they were talking to a real person at the time. Though it was initially developed to show the superficiality of human communication, the developers were surprised by the large amount of feedback they received attributing human-like emotion to the machine. Chatbots have come a long way since then. Modern artificial intelligence has made it so chatbots are more helpful than ever, and natural language processing has seen major developments in recent years. Now, chatbots are instrumental to the way that many businesses connect with customers. Through Facebook, SMS, and web chat, chatbots can guide customers through every step of their path to purchase as well as provide intelligent customer support.

How contacting customer service has evolved

Calling and emailing a company for pre-sales questions or post-sales support has gone the way of the VCR. Sure, there are some people out there that still use those channels, but for the vast majority, it’s not the first way people think of when they need to reach a business. Today’s connected consumers demand engagement that’s flexible, convenient, and fast. That’s why consumers are gravitating towards mobile means of engagement, where they can have more control over when and where conversations take place. The availability of smartphones and tablets mean that browsing, buying, and requesting support can happen anywhere there’s a mobile device available and consumers haven’t hesitated to use this freedom to engage businesses whenever and however is most convenient for them. Live chat for business, for example, is frequently used for customers to connect while they are browsing a company’s site.  Further efforts to connect with customers on their own terms has led many companies to enable their landlines to send and receive SMS/text messages since many consumers prefer texting over phone calls. The mere thought of managing conversations over multiple channels would normally keep contact center managers up at night fretting about operations and agents worrying about efficiency metrics.

Quiq’s messaging platform bring conversations from SMS/text, web chat, social, and in-app into one streamlined UI so that agents and managers have one place to manage every conversation. Unlike phone calls and emails that can only be handled on a 1:1 basis, messaging platforms, like Quiq, allow company employees to handle multiple conversations at once. We see employees handle 6 to 8 concurrent conversations at one time. Even with all the efficiency modern messaging platforms provide, human-only messaging systems are limited by things such as hours of operation and the amount of staff available. Enter the chatbot. Businesses are adopting chatbots for every messaging channel, including web chat, SMS/texting, and social channels as a way to route customers to the right department, or to an agent that can help them. Today, advanced chatbots, like those powered by Quiq, are predicted to handle 85% of customer service interactions by 2020, using artificial intelligence to meet the unique needs of customers in increasingly efficient and satisfactory ways, such as greeting the customer and gathering data to better understand the nature of their inquiry.

What chatbots offer to eCommerce

eCommerce is perfectly suited for the features that chatbots offer since the entire customer journey — right up until delivery — primarily happens on mobile devices. Chatbots are available around the clock to engage customers with a welcome message, suggest products or promotional offers based on their browsing history, and help answer any questions that arise. Consider some of these interactions where a chatbot can help augment interactions with human agents:

  • Determining the type of question, whether pre-sales or post-sales, in order to route the inquiry to the correct team.
  • Collecting information on what the customer is shopping for to narrow down a selection or suggest pages that customers should check out.
  • Checking on order and shipping status.
  • Helping customers troubleshoot a technical issue by asking questions to eliminate possible causes.
  • Providing returning customers automated help with a password reset.

If the consumer makes an inquiry or gives feedback which is beyond the chatbot’s capabilities, it can seamlessly and immediately connect the consumer to an appropriate agent. The approach of having chatbots as the first point of contact, to gather data for human agents, maximizes efficiency and frees up resources while still maintaining the human element. In fact, chatbots can be used throughout the conversation, not just as the first contact. Human agents and bots can seamlessly transfer messages back and forth without disrupting the customer’s experience.

Perfecting messaging for business

In fact, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and Google Rich Business Messaging are all popular avenues for connecting with customers. The more your eCommerce enterprise branches out into these engagement channels, the tighter your connection will be in the daily lives of consumers. Modern customer service is all about providing solutions to customers on their own terms. That means that consumers should be able to reach you whenever they want to, via the channels that they prefer. Quiq enables companies to engage with customers over multiple channels while using live agents, chatbots, or a combination of both. As chatbots become increasingly capable of complex tasks, the expectations that customers have when interacting with chatbots will only grow. Your customer service interface reflects the quality of your eCommerce brand as a whole, which is why it’s critical to use a platform that continues to advance along with the times. Quiq helps your brand stay ahead of the curve with advanced features such as agent performance optimization and real-time reports.

Get Quiq and get chatting

Chatbots will continue to transform the way customers interact with businesses. By connecting with your customers via their preferred modes of text communication, you can ensure that you’re speaking their language and getting your message across. This means increased connections, higher sales, and improved customer satisfaction. If your brand is ready to explore the potential of a perfected chatbot platform, request a demo with Quiq today.