customer support Archives

Reinventing Customer Support: How Contact Center AI Delivers Efficiency Like Never Before

Posted on December 12, 2024December 12, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Contact centers face unprecedented pressure managing sometimes hundreds of thousands of daily customer interactions across multiple channels. Traditional approaches, with their rigid legacy systems and manual processes, often buckle under these demands, leading to frustrated customers and overwhelmed agents. This was certainly the case during the past few years, when many platforms and processes collapsed under the weight of astronomical volumes due to natural disasters and other unplanned events.

So we set out to build a solution to tackle these pressures.

Our solution? Contact center AI – an agentic AI-based solution that transforms how businesses handle customer support.

In this article, I will give you a lay of the contact center AI land. I’ll explain what it is and how it’s best used, as well as ways to start implementing it.

What is contact center AI?

Contact center AI represents a sophisticated fusion of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies designed to optimize every aspect of customer service operations. It’s more than just basic automation—it’s about creating smarter, more efficient systems that enhance both customer and agent experiences.

This advanced technology incorporates tools like Large Language Models (LLMs), which allow it to understand and respond to customer queries in a conversational and human-like manner. It also leverages real-time transcription, allowing customer interactions to be recorded and analyzed instantly, providing actionable insights for improving service quality. Additionally, intelligent task automation streamlines repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on more complex customer needs.

By understanding customer intent, analyzing context, and processing natural language queries, contact center AI can even make rapid, data-driven decisions to determine the best way to handle every interaction.

Whether routing a customer to the right department or providing instant answers through AI agents, this technology ensures a more dynamic, responsive, and efficient customer service environment. It’s a game-changer for businesses looking to improve operational efficiency and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

AI-powered solutions for contact center challenges

1. Managing high volumes efficiently

During peak periods, managing high customer interaction volumes can be a significant challenge for contact centers. This is where contact center AI steps in, offering intelligent automation and advanced routing capabilities to streamline operations.

AI-powered systems can automatically deflect routine inquiries, such as negative value, redundant conversations—like ‘where’s my order?’ or account updates—to AI agents that provide quick and accurate responses. This ensures that customers get instant answers for simpler questions without wait.

Meanwhile, human agents are free to focus on more complex or sensitive cases that require their expertise. This smart delegation not only reduces wait times, but also helps maintain high customer satisfaction levels by ensuring every interaction is handled appropriately. Each human agent has all the information gathered in the interaction at the start of the conversation, eliminating repetition and frustration.

2. Real-time AI to empower your agents

Injecting generative AI into your contact center empowers human agents by significantly enhancing their efficiency and effectiveness in managing customer interactions. These AI systems provide real-time assistance during conversations, suggesting responses for agents to send, as well as taking action on their behalf when appropriate—like adding a checked bag to a customer’s flight.
This gives agents the time to focus on issues that require human judgment, reducing the effort and time needed to resolve customer concerns. The seamless collaboration between AI and human agents elevates the quality of customer service, boosts agent productivity, and enhances customer satisfaction.

3. Improving complex case routing

Advanced AI solutions now integrate into various systems to streamline customer service operations. These systems analyze multiple factors, including customer history, intent, preferences, and the unique expertise of available agents, to match each case to the most suitable representative. Then, AI can analyze call data in real time, continuously optimizing routing processes to further enhance efficiency during high-demand periods.

By ensuring the right agent handles the right query from the start, these AI-driven systems significantly enhance first-call resolution rates, reduce wait times, and improve customer satisfaction. This not only boosts operational efficiency, but also fosters stronger customer loyalty and trust in the long term.

4. Enabling 24/7 customer support

Modern consumers expect round-the-clock support, but maintaining a full staff 24/7 can be both costly and impractical for many businesses—especially if they require multilingual global support. AI-powered virtual agents step in to bridge this gap, offering reliable and consistent assistance at any time of day or night.

These tools are designed to handle a wide range of customer inquiries, all while adapting to different languages and maintaining a high standard of service. Additionally, they can manage high volumes of inquiries simultaneously, ensuring no customer is left waiting. By leveraging AI, businesses can not only meet customer expectations, but also enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs.

4 key benefits of contact center AI

Now that we’ve touched on what contact center AI is and how it can help businesses most, let’s go into the top benefits of implementing AI in your contact center.

1. Enhanced customer experience

AI is revolutionizing the customer experience through multiple transformative capabilities. By providing instant response times through always-on AI agents, customers no longer face frustrating queues or delayed support. These agentic AI agents deliver personalized interactions by analyzing customer history and preferences, offering tailored recommendations and maintaining context from previous conversations. And all this context is available to human agents, should the issues be escalated to them.

Problem resolution becomes more efficient through predictive analytics and intelligent routing, ensuring customers connect with the most qualified agents for faster first-call resolution.

The technology also maintains consistent service quality across all channels, offering standardized responses and multilingual support without additional staffing, even during peak times. AI takes customer service from reactive to proactive by identifying potential issues before they escalate, sending automated reminders, and suggesting relevant products based on customer behavior.

Perhaps most importantly, AI enables a seamless customer experience across all channels, maintaining conversation context across multiple touch points and facilitating smooth transitions between automated systems and human agents. This unified approach creates a more efficient, personalized, and satisfying customer experience that balances automated convenience with human expertise when needed.

2. Boosted agent productivity

AI automation significantly enhances agent productivity by taking over time-consuming routine tasks, such as call summarization, data entry, and follow-up scheduling.

By automating these repetitive processes, agents can save significant time, giving them more freedom to engage with customers on a deeper level. This shift allows agents to prioritize building meaningful relationships, addressing complex customer needs, and delivering a more personalized service experience, ultimately driving better outcomes for both the business and its customers.

3. Cost savings

Organizations can significantly cut operational expenses by leveraging automated interactions and improving agent processes. Automation allows businesses to handle much higher volumes of customer inquiries without the need to hire additional staff, reducing labor costs.

Optimized processes ensure that agents are deployed effectively, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity. Together, these strategies help organizations save money while maintaining high levels of service quality.

4. Increased (and improved) data insights

Analytics into AI performance offers businesses a deeper understanding of their operations by delivering actionable insights into customer interactions, agent performance, and operational efficiency.

These data-driven insights help identify trends, pinpoint areas for improvement, and make informed decisions that enhance both service quality and customer satisfaction. With continuous monitoring and analysis, businesses can adapt quickly to changing demands and maintain a competitive edge.

Implementation tips to start your contact center AI

If you want to add AI to your contact center, there are a handful of important decisions you need to make first that’ll determine your approach. Here are the most important ones to get you started.

1. Define your business objectives

Begin by assessing specific challenges and objectives, so that you can identify areas where automation could have the most significant impact later on—such as streamlining processes, reducing costs, or improving customer experiences.

Consider how AI can address these pain points and align with your long-term goals, but remember to start small. You just need one use case to get going. This allows you to test the solution in a controlled environment, gather valuable insights, and identify potential challenges.

2. Identify the best touch points in your customer journey

After you define your business objectives, you’ll want to identify the touch points within your customer journey that are best for AI. Within those touch points are End User Stories that will help you determine the data sources, escalation and automation paths, and success metrics that will lead you to significant outcomes. Our expert team of AI Engineers and Program Managers will help you map out the correct path.

3. Decide how you’ll acquire your AI: build, buy, or buy-to-build?

When choosing AI solutions, ensure they align with your organization’s size, industry, and specific requirements. Look at factors such as scalability to accommodate future growth, integration capabilities with your existing systems, and the level of vendor support offered.

It’s important to consider the solution’s ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and potential for customization to meet your unique needs. Another critical factor is observability, so you can avoid “black box AI” that’s nearly impossible to manage and improve.

You’ll also need to evaluate whether it’s best to buy an off-the-shelf solution, build a custom AI system tailored to your needs, or opt for a buy-to-build approach, which combines pre-built technology with customization options for greater flexibility.

4. Prep for human agent training at the outset

Invest in robust training programs to equip agents with the knowledge and skills needed to work effectively alongside AI tools. This includes developing expertise in areas where human input is crucial, such as managing complex emotional situations, problem-solving, and building rapport with customers.

5. Plan for integration and compatibility

Remember: Your AI will only be as good as the data and systems it can access. Verify compatibility with your existing systems, like CRM, ticketing platforms, or live chat tools. Integration to these systems is critical to the success of your contact center AI solution.
You also want to plan how AI will seamlessly integrate into human agents’ daily tasks without disrupting their workflows, and include all data within your project scope.

6. Establish monitoring and feedback loops

Before making any changes to your contact center, benchmark KPIs like first-call resolution, average handling time, and customer sentiment. Then regularly update and retrain the AI based on human agent and customer feedback to experiment and make the most critical changes for your business.

7. Plan for scalability

Implement AI solutions in phases, beginning with just one or two specific use cases. Look for solutions designed to help your business scale by accommodating different communication channels and adapting to evolving technologies.
By focusing on skills that complement AI capabilities, agents can provide a seamless, empathetic, and personalized experience that enhances customer satisfaction.

Final thoughts on contact center AI

Contact center AI represents a true organizational transformation opportunity in customer support, offering unprecedented ways to improve efficiency while enhancing customer experiences. Rather than replacing human agents, it empowers them to work more effectively, focusing on high-value interactions that require emotional intelligence and complex problem-solving skills.

The future of customer support lies in finding the right balance between automated efficiency and human touch. Organizations that successfully move from a conversational AI contact center to fully generative AI experiences will see significant lifts in key metrics and will be well-positioned to meet evolving customer expectations.

How Customer Service AI Can Change Your Business

Posted on December 4, 2024December 6, 2024 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.

7 Reasons Why Customers Want to Text You

Posted on August 30, 2024November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

If you’re old enough, you may remember a time when everyone wasn’t on their phones every waking moment of their lives. We’ve left those days long behind, and surveys indicate that many of us check our phones more than 300 times daily.

This isn’t surprising, given that we’re using our phones to buy tickets, order groceries, argue with relatives (and everyone else), talk to coworkers, and even find a date.

But one thing we’re not doing very often with phones is using them to make calls. This is where texting comes in. In 2020, mobile business messaging traffic climbed to 2.7 trillion, up a full 10% from just one year prior. More directly relevant to CX directors, text-based customer service requests increased by more than a quarter in 2021 alone.

What does this ultimately mean for your team? Simple: customers prefer texting.

The emergence of this crucial channel is one of the major recent trends in customer communication, and this article will enumerate the 7 biggest reasons why.

1. Customers Want Options

Too many options may lead to feeling overwhelmed—but that doesn’t stop customers from wanting them anyway.

There are countless ways to reach out to businesses—including phone, email, texting, and talking to AI assistants—but people generally pick the method of communication that fits their preferences.

Make sure to offer texting as one of those options; it’s become extremely popular, and may become more popular still as the years go on.

2. Your Customers are Busy. Texting is Asynchronous.

The pace of life has quickened these days. Your present and future customers will abhor the thought of wasting a single moment, and this is one of the biggest reasons customers prefer texting.

Suppose a customer starts a return or warranty flow at their office, but won’t be able to take a picture of the damaged item they bought until they got home. With text messaging, this becomes one seamless, continuous conversation that can be picked up or paused as needed, making it a great way to resolve issues that are important but can be handled in multiple independent steps. And with the right vendor, agents don’t have to close conversations while waiting for customer responses.

For its part, email support still feels like a more formal medium. People spend longer drafting messages, which means getting help will take more of their day, and no one enjoys not knowing when they’ll receive a reply.

And even though generative AI has begun to change this picture for the better, it’s still the case that a text message tends to fit better into your customers’ lives, allowing you to reach them where they are.

3. Texting Isn’t Limited to Millennials (or GenZ). It’s Generation Agnostic.

Before going further, it’s worth busting the myth that all the benefits of texting for customer service appeal to younger crowds. That may have been the case when The Matrix was released (25 years ago–ouch!), but it’s not the case any longer.

No, our parents and grandparents can text along with the best of us, and some surveys indicate that 90% of adults over 50 use their smartphones to send instant messages, texts, or emails (a number that’s likely gone up since.)

Part of what’s driving this trend in customer communication is that texting is both ubiquitous (almost everyone uses text messaging to communicate with someone), and it’s also a less technical way for people of any age to reach customer service.

Other messaging channels may require downloading an app or using unfamiliar social media. Text messaging, however, is ready to go on everyone’s device—even if they remember the Nixon administration.

4. Customers Want Better Experiences.

One of the main goals of customer service is to give patrons an experience they’ll remember, and continue to want to pay for.

And pay for it they are; research conducted by PwC found that almost three-quarters of people indicated that customer experience is one of the main things they consider when making a purchase.

Of course, text messaging is hardly the only thing that goes into creating a superlative customer experience, but when done correctly, it’ll probably get you further than you think.

Some of the benefits of texting for customer service have already been discussed (it’s quicker, it’s more convenient), but you may not realize that texting is a medium that can complete your overall customer experience strategy. Everything from sending support messages and getting order updates to checking out can all be handled right within SMS text messaging.

As we alluded to earlier, many think email is a fairly formal way of communicating, while texting is almost always more conversational. If it doesn’t feel contrived, the greater warmth and friendliness that comes through in texting can help build trust with customers, which is becoming all the more important in an age of data breaches and deepfakes.

5. Customers Want More than Words: They Want Rich Messaging, Too.

Building on this theme, one of the other major trends in customer communication is a move away from stiff, formal diction and towards talking to people more like they’re friends or acquaintances (with emojis, GIFs, the works).

When you think about business text messages, “Haha, yeah, sounds great! 😂” may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But perhaps a similar conversational tone should be, especially if using text messaging as a channel is a core part of your CX strategy.

Much of this is powered by “rich messaging,” which was developed to support emojis, in-message buttons and cards, audio messages, high-quality pictures, videos, and all the other staples of modern communication. Rich messaging can help you connect to your customers in a newly engaging way, and also helps them complete tasks quickly because they can use buttons or product cards to quickly input their information. This not only makes their lives easier, it increases the fidelity at which brands can communicate with customers.

Learn more about why your business should use rich messaging here.

6. They Just Prefer Texting.

The previous two sections discussed how texting leads to better customer experience and how rich messaging does a lot to increase the information and the conversationalism of communicating over text.

Taken together, these facts point to a broader one, which is that, well, many customers just prefer texting.

We’re all guilty of hitting ignore on a well-intentioned phone call or putting off making an appointment when we have to dial a number. More and more, people perceive a phone call as invasive and time-consuming.

This contention is backed up by data: 75% of millennials avoid phone calls as they’re time-consuming, and 81% experience anxiety before summoning up the courage to make a call. Millennials have a reputation for being phone-averse, but it doesn’t stop with them.

One of the basic issues with phone calls is that they’re unpredictable. A customer service call can take a few minutes or half an hour, so customers don’t know how to prepare.

Business texts are quick and efficient, and they can happen on the customer’s terms.

This is reflected in the fact that texts are more likely to be opened and responded to, by a large margin. The vast majority of texts (95%) receive replies within three minutes, and the average open rate is close to 100% (and just shy of five times better than similar metrics for emails).

To sum up (and reiterate): customers prefer texting, so your business should seriously consider adding it to your channel mix if you haven’t already.

7. Customers Want Texting to be Responsive and Personalized. Generative AI Makes That Easier On Businesses.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t include a section on the remarkable advances of large language models and what they mean for broader trends in customer communication—particularly the generative components.

This is a huge topic, but what they mean for customers is the availability of responses that are contextual, personalized, and always on.

The formulaic, stilted chatbots of yesteryear have been replaced by models that are dynamic, able to use techniques like retrieval-augmented generation to reply in ways that are tailored to that customer. It might generate answers from a knowledge base, for example, or provide personalized recommendations from a product catalog.

Moreover, language models don’t take holidays, breaks, or time off, and can therefore reply whenever and wherever they’re needed.

This doesn’t mean they’re a full-on replacement for human contact center agents, of course. But they’re a remarkable supplement. In addition, when you partner with a conversational AI platform for CX, you can utilize AI-driven benefits of texting for customer service with a minimum of hassle!

When It Comes Down to It: Yes, Your Customers Still Want to Text You.

Whether you’re looking at hard data or just vibes, it’s clear that more and more customers prefer texting. It’s easy, convenient, and fits better into a busy life while also affording the opportunity for personalization that drives higher levels of customer satisfaction.

If you’d like to learn more about how Quiq supports enterprise CX companies that want to make texting a centerpiece of their customer outreach strategy, learn more here about text messaging vs calling your customer.

How To Encourage More Customers To Use your Live Chat Service

Posted on August 23, 2024November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

When customer experience directors float the idea of investing more heavily in live chat for customer service, it’s not uncommon for them to get pushback. One of the biggest motivations for such reticence is uncertainty over whether anyone will actually want to use such support channels—and whether investing in them will ultimately prove worth it.

An additional headwind comes from the fact that many CX directors are laboring under the misapprehension that they need an elaborate plan to push customers into a new channel. But one thing we consistently hear from our enterprise customers is that it’s surprising how naturally customers start using a new channel when they realize it exists. To borrow a famous phrase from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Or, to paraphrase a bit, “If you build it (and make it easy for them to engage with you), they will come.” You don’t have to create a process that diverts them to the new channel.

The article below fleshes out and defends this claim. We’ll first sketch the big-picture case for why live chat with customers remains as important as ever, then finish with some tips for boosting customer engagement with your live chat service.

Why is Live Chat Important for Contact Centers?

Before we talk about how to get people to use your live chat for customer service features, let’s discuss why such channels continue to be an important factor in the success of customer experience companies.

The simplest way to do this is with data: 60% of customers indicate that they’re more likely to visit a website again if it has live chat for customer service, and a few more (63%) say that a live chat widget will increase their willingness to make a purchase.

But that still leaves the question of how live chat stacks up against other possible communication channels. Well, nearly three-quarters (73%) are more comfortable using live chat for customer service issues than email or phone—and a high fraction (61%) are especially annoyed by the prospect of being put on hold.

If this isn’t enough, there are customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to think about as well. This is perhaps the strongest data point in support of customer live chat, as 87% of customers give a positive rating to their live chat conversations.

Agents also prefer live chat over the phone because regularly dealing with angry and upset customers via phone can take an emotional toll. Live chat contributes to agent job retention—a big, expensive issue that many CX leaders are constantly trying to grapple with.

So, the data is clear and it makes sense for all the reasons we’ve discussed: Live chat for customer service shows every indication of being a worthwhile communication channel, both now and in the future.

6 Tips for Encouraging Customers to Use Live Chat

With that having been said, the next few sections will detail some of the most promising strategies for getting more of your customers to use your live chat features.

1. Make Sure People Know You have Live Chat Services

The first (and probably easiest) way to get more customers to use your live chat is to take every step possible to make sure they know it’s something you offer. Above, we argued that little special effort is required to get potential customers to use a new channel, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that there’s no use in broadcasting its existence.

You can get a lot of mileage out of promoting live chat through your normal marketing channels–a mention on your support page, on your social feeds, and at the bottom of your order confirmation emails, for example. In the rest of this section, we’ll outline a few other low-cost ways to boost engagement with live chat for customer service.

First, use your IVR to move callers from phone to messaging. You can also mention that you support live chat for customer service during the phone hold message. We noted above that people tend to hate being put on hold. You can use that to your advantage by offering them the more attractive alternative of hopping onto a digital messaging channel instead—including WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and SMS. For example, this might sound as simple as: “Press 2 to chat with an agent over SMS text messaging, or get faster support over live web chat on our website.”

From your perspective, an added benefit is that your agents can easily shuffle between several different live chat conversations, whereas that isn’t possible on the phone. This means faster resolutions, a higher volume of questions answered, and more satisfaction all the way around.

Similarly, include plenty of links to live chat when communicating with your customers. After they make a purchase, for example, you could include a message suggesting they utilize live chat to resolve any questions they have. If you’re sending them other emails, that’s a good place to highlight live chat as well. Don’t neglect hero pages and product pages; being able to answer questions while talking directly to current and future buyers is a great way to boost sales.

BODi® (formerly Beach Body) is a California-based nutrition and fitness company that pursued exactly this strategy when they ditched their older menu-based support system in favor of “Ask BODi AI.”

This eventually became a cost-effective support channel that was able to answer a variety of free-form questions from customers, leading to happier buyers and better financial performance.

2. Minimize the Hassle of Using Live Chat

One of the better ways of boosting engagement with any feature, including live chat, is to make it as pain-free as possible.

Take contact forms, for example, which can speed up time to resolution by organizing all the basic information a service agent needs. This is great when a customer has a complex issue, but if they only have a quick question, filling out even a simple contact form may be onerous enough to prevent them from asking it.

There’s a bit of a balancing act here, but, in general, the fewer fields a contact form has, the more likely someone is to fill it out.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has made it possible to use an AI assistant to collect information about customers’ specific orders or requests. When such an assistant detects that a request is complex and needs human attention, it can ask for the necessary information to pass along to an agent. This turns the traditional contact form into a conversation, placing it further along in the customer service journey so only those customers who need to fill it out will have to use it.

Or take something as prosaic as the location and prominence of your ‘live chat’ button. Is it easy to find, or is it buried so deep you’d need Indiana Jones to dig it out? Does it pop out proactively to engage potential or returning customers with contextual messaging based on what they’re browsing?

It’s also worth briefly mentioning that the main value prop of rich messaging content– like carousel cards, buttons, and quick replies–results in much less friction for the consumer. We have a dedicated section on rich messaging below that spells this out in more detail.

Though they may seem minor in isolation, there’s an important truth here: if you want to get more people to use your live chat for customer service, make it easy and pain-free for them to do so. Every additional second of searching or fiddling means another lost opportunity.

3. Personalize Your Chat

Another way to make live chat for customer service more attractive is to personalize your interactions. Personalization can be anything from including an agent’s name and picture in the chat interface displayed on your webpage to leveraging an LLM to craft a whole bespoke context for each conversation.

For our purposes, the two big categories of personalization are brand-specific personalization and customer-specific personalization. Let’s discuss each.

Brand-specific personalization

For the former, marketing and contact teams should collaborate to craft notifications, greetings, etc., to fit their brand’s personality. Chat icons often feature an introductory message such as “How can I help you?” to let browsers know their questions are welcome. This is a place for you to set the tone for the rest of a conversation, and such friendly wording can encourage people to take the next step and type out a message.

More broadly, these departments should also develop a general tone of voice for their service agents. While there may be some scripted language in customer service interactions, most customers expect human support specialists to act like humans. And, since every request or concern is a little different, agents often need to change what they say or how they say it.

This is no less true for buyers on different parts of your site. Customer questions will be different depending on whether they’re on a checkout page, a product page, or the help center because they are at very distinct points in their buying journey. It’s important to contextualize any proactive messaging and the conversational flow itself to accommodate this (i.e., “Need help checking out? We’ve got live agents standing by.” versus “Have questions about this product? Try asking me”).

Setting rules for tone of voice and word choice ensure the messaging experience is consistent no matter which agent helps a customer or what the conversation is about.

Customer-specific personalization

Then, there’s customer-specific personalization, which might involve something as simple as using their name, or extend to drawing from their purchase history to include the specifics of the order they’re asking about.

Once upon a time, this work fell almost entirely to human contact centers, but no more! Among the many things that today’s LLMs excel at is personalization. Machine learning has long been used to personalize recommendations (think: Netflix learning what kinds of shows you like), but when LLMs are turbo-charged with a technique like retrieval-augmented generation (which allows them to use validated data sources to inform their replies to questions), the results can be astonishing.

Machine-based personalization and retrieval-augmented generation are both big subjects, and you can read through the links for more context. But the high-level takeaway is that, together, they facilitate the creation of a seamless and highly personalized experience across your communication channels using the latest advances in AI. Customers will feel more comfortable using your live chat feature, and will grow to feel a connection with your brand over time.

4. Include Privacy and Data Usage Messages

As of this writing, news recently broke that a data breach may have resulted in close to three billion – billion! – people having their social security numbers compromised. You’re no doubt familiar with a bevy of similar stories, which have been pouring forth since more or less the moment people started storing their private data online.

And yet, for the savvy customer experience director, this is an opportunity; by taking privacy very seriously, you can distinguish yourself and thereby build trust.

Customers visiting your website want an assurance that you will take every precaution with their private information, and this can be provided through easy-to-understand data privacy policies and customizable cookie preferences.

Live messaging tools can add a wrinkle because they are often powered by third-party software. Customer service messaging can also require a lot of personal information, making some users hesitant to use these tools.

You can quell these concerns by elucidating how you handle private customer data. When a message like this appears at the start of a new chat, is always accessible via the header, or persists in your chat menu, customers can see how their data is safeguarded and feel secure while entering personal details.

An additional wrinkle comes from the increasing ubiquity of tools based on generative AI. Many worry that any information provided to a model might be used to “train” that model, thus increasing the chances that it’ll be leaked in the future. The best way to avoid this calamity is to partner with a conversational AI for CX platform that works tirelessly to ensure that your customers’ data is never used in this way.

That said, whatever you do, make sure your AI assistants have messages designed to handle requests about privacy and security. Someone will ask eventually, and it’s good to be prepared.

5. Use Rich Messages

Smartphones have become a central hub for browsing the internet, shopping, socializing, and managing daily activities. As text messaging gradually supplemented most of our other ways of communicating, it became obvious that an upgrade was needed.

This led to the development of rich messaging applications and protocols such as Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp, which use Rich Communication Services (RCS). RCS features enhancements like buttons, quick replies, and carousel cards—all designed to make interactions easier and faster for the customer.

For all these reasons, using rich messaging in live chat with customers will likely help boost engagement. Customers are accustomed to seeing emojis now, and you can include them as a way of humanizing and personalizing your interactions. There might be contexts in which they need to see graphics or images, which is very difficult with the old Short Messaging Service (SMS).

In the final analysis, rich messaging offers another powerful opportunity to create the kind of seamless experience that makes interacting with your support enjoyable and productive.

6. Separating Chat and Agent Availability

Once upon a time, ‘chat availability’ simply meant the same thing as ‘agent availability,’ but today’s language models are rapidly becoming capable enough to resolve a wide variety of issues on their own. In fact, one of the major selling points of AI assistants is that they provide round-the-clock service because they don’t need to eat, sleep, or take bathroom breaks.

This doesn’t mean that they can be left totally alone, of course. Humans still need to monitor their interactions to make sure they’re not being rude or hallucinating false information. But this is also something that becomes much easier when you pair with an industry-leading conversational AI for CX platform that has robust safeguards, monitoring tools, and the ability to switch between different underlying models (in case one starts to act up).

Having said that, there are still a wide variety of tasks for which a living agent is still the best choice. For this reason, many companies have specific time windows when live chat for customer service is available. When it’s not, some choose to let customers know when live chat is an option by communicating the next availability window.

In practice, users will often simply close their tabs if they can’t talk to a person, cutting the interaction off before it begins. In our view, the best course is usually to shift the conversation to an asynchronous channel where it can be handled by an AI assistant able to hand the chat off to an agent when one becomes available.

Employing these two strategies, means that your ability to service customers is decoupled from operational constraints of agent availability, and you are always ready to seize the opportunity to serve customers when they are eager to engage with your brand

Creating Greater CX Outcomes with Live Web Chat is Just the Start.

Live web chat with customers remains an excellent way to resolve issues while building trust and boosting the overall customer experience. The best strategies for increasing engagement with your live chat is to make sure people know it’s an option, make it easy to use, personalize interactions where possible—and make the most out of AI to automatically resolve routine inquiries while filling in live agent availability gaps.

If you’re interested in taking additional steps to resolve common customer service pain points, check out our ebook on the subject. It features a number of straightforward, actionable strategies to help you keep your customers as happy as possible!

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

Posted on August 7, 2024November 15, 2024 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!

Request A Demo

9 Top Customer Service Challenges — and How to Overcome Them

Posted on May 23, 2024December 6, 2024 Michael Hartsog

It’s a shame that customer service doesn’t always get the respect and attention it deserves because it’s among the most important ingredients in any business’s success. There’s no better marketing than an enthusiastic user base, so every organization should strive to excel at making customers happy.

Alas, this is easier said than done. When someone comes to you with a problem, they can be angry, stubborn, mercurial, and—let’s be honest—extremely frustrating. Some of this just comes with the territory, but some stems from the fact that many customer service professionals simply don’t have a detailed, high-level view of customer service challenges or how to overcome them.

That’s what we’re going to remedy in this post. Let’s jump right in!

What are The Top Customer Service Challenges?

After years of running a generative AI platform for contact centers and interacting with leaders in this space, we have discovered that the top customer service challenges are:

Understanding Customer Expectations
Next Step: Exceeding Customer Expectations
Dealing with Unreasonable Customer Demands
Improving Your Internal Operations
Not Offering a Preferred Communication Channel
Not Offering Real-Time Options
Handling Angry Customers
Dealing With a Service Outage Crisis
Retaining, Hiring, and Training Service Professionals

In the sections below, we’ll break each of these down and offer strategies for addressing them.

1. Understanding Customer Expectations

No matter how specialized a business is, it will inevitably cater to a wide variety of customers. Every customer has different desires, expectations, and needs regarding a product or service, which means you need to put real effort into meeting them where they are.

One of the best ways to foster this understanding is to remain in consistent contact with your customers. Deciding which communication channels to offer customers depends a great deal on the kinds of customers you’re serving. That said, in our experience, text messaging is a universally successful method of communication because it mimics how people communicate in their personal lives. The same goes for web chat and WhatsApp.

Beyond this, setting the right expectations upfront is another good way to address common customer service challenges. For example, if you are not available 24/7, only provide support via email, or don’t have dedicated account managers , you should make that clear right at the beginning.

Nothing will make a customer angrier than thinking they can text you only to realize that’s not an option in the middle of a crisis.

2. Next Step: Exceed Customer Expectations

Once you understand what your customers want and need, the next step is to go above and beyond to make them happy. Everyone wants to stand out in a fiercely competitive market, and going the extra mile is a great way to do that. One of the major customer service challenges is knowing how to do this proactively, but there are many ways you can succeed without a huge amount of effort.

Consider a few examples, such as:

Treating the customer as you would a friend in your personal life, i.e. by apologizing for any negative experiences and empathizing with how they feel;
Offering a credit or discount for a future purchase;
Sending them a card referencing their experience and thanking them for being a loyal customer;

The key is making sure they feel seen and heard. If you do this consistently, you’ll exceed your customers’ expectations, and the chances of them becoming active promoters of your company will increase dramatically.

3. Dealing with Unreasonable Demands

Of course, sometimes a customer has expectations that simply can’t be met, and this, too, counts as one of the serious customer service challenges. Customer service professionals often find themselves in situations where someone wants a discount that can’t be given, a feature that can’t be built, or a bespoke customization that can’t be done, and they wonder what they should do.

The only thing to do in this situation is to gently let the customer down, using respectful and diplomatic language. Something like, “We’re really sorry we’re not able to fulfill your request, but we’d be happy to help you choose an option that we currently have available” should do the trick.

4. Improving Your Internal Operations

Customer service teams face the constant pressure to improve efficiency, maintain high CSAT scores, drive revenue, and keep costs to service customers low. This matters a lot; slow response times and being kicked from one department to another are two of the more common complaints contact centers get from irate customers, and both are fixable with appropriate changes to your procedures.

Improving contact center performance is among the thorniest customer service challenges, but there’s no reason to give up hope!

One thing you can do is gather and utilize better data regarding your internal workflows. Data has been called “the new oil,” and with good reason—when used correctly, it’s unbelievably powerful.

What might this look like?

Well, you are probably already tracking metrics like first contact resolution (FCR) and (AHT), but this is easier when you have a unified, comprehensive dashboard that gives you quick insight into what’s happening across your organization.

You might also consider leveraging the power of generative AI, which has led to AI assistants that can boost agent performance in a variety of different tasks. You have to tread lightly here because too much bad automation will also drive customers away. But when you use technology like large language models according to best practices, you can get more done and make your customers happier while still reducing the burden on your agents.

5. Not Offering a Preferred Communication Channel

In general, contact centers often deal with customer service challenges stemming from new technologies. One way this can manifest is the need to cultivate new channels in line with changing patterns in the way we all communicate.

You can probably see where this is going – something like 96% of Americans have some kind of cell phone, and if you’ve looked up from your own phone recently, you’ve probably noticed everyone else glued to theirs.

It isn’t just that customers now want to be able to text you instead of calling or emailing; the ubiquity of cell phones has changed their basic expectations. They now take it for granted that your agents will be available round the clock, that they can chat with an agent asynchronously as they go about other tasks, etc.

We can’t tell you whether it’s worth investing in multiple communication channels for your industry. But based on our research, we can tell you that having multiple channels—and text messaging in particular—is something most people want and expect.

6. Not Offering Real-Time Options

When customers reach out asking for help, their customer service problems likely feel unique to them. But since you have so much more context, you’re aware that a very high percentage of inquiries fall into a few common buckets, like “Where is my order?”, “How do I handle a return?”, “My item arrived damaged, how can I exchange it for a new one?”, etc.

These and similar inquiries can easily be resolved instantly using AI, leaving customers and agents happier and more productive.

7. Handling Angry Customers

A common story in the customer service world involves an interaction going south and a customer getting angry.

Gracefully handling angry customers is one of those perennial customer service challenges; the very first merchants had to deal with angry customers, and our robot descendants will be dealing with angry customers long after the sun has burned out.

Whenever you find yourself dealing with a customer who has become irate, there are two main things you have to do:

Empathize with them
Do not lose your cool

It can be hard to remember, but the customer isn’t frustrated with you, they’re frustrated with the company and products. If you always keep your responses calm and rooted in the facts of the situation, you’ll always be moving toward providing a solution.

8. Dealing With a Service Outage Crisis

Sometimes, our technology fails us. The wifi isn’t working on the airplane, a cell phone tower is down following a lightning storm, or that printer from Office Space jams so often it starts to drive people insane.

As a customer service professional, you might find yourself facing the wrath of your customers if your service is down. Unfortunately, in a situation like this, there’s not much you can do except honestly convey to your customers that your team is putting all their effort into getting things back on track. You should go into these conversations expecting frustrated customers, but make sure you avoid the temptation to overpromise.

Talk with your tech team and give customers a realistic timeline, don’t assure them it’ll be back in three hours if you have no way to back that up. Though Elon Musk seems to get away with it, the worst thing the rest of us can do is repeatedly promise unrealistic timelines and miss the mark.

9. Retaining, Hiring, and Training Service Professionals

You may have seen this famous Maya Angelou quote, which succinctly captures what the customer service business is all about:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Learning how to comfort a person or reassure them is high on the list of customer service challenges, and it’s something that is certainly covered in your training for new agents.

But training is also important because it eases the strain on agents and reduces turnover. For customer service professionals, the median time to stick with one company is less than a year, and every time someone leaves, that means finding a replacement, training them, and hoping they don’t head for the exits before your investment has paid off.

Keeping your agents happy will save you more money than you imagine, so invest in a proper training program. Ensure they know what’s expected of them, how to ask for help when needed, and how to handle challenging customers.

Final Thoughts on the Top Customer Service Challenges

Customer service challenges abound, but with the right approach, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to meet them head-on!

Check out our report for a more detailed treatment of three major customer service challenges and how to resolve them. Between the report and this post, you should be armed with enough information to identify your own internal challenges, fix them, and rise to new heights.

Request A Demo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do companies build apps?

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

A place for loyal customers.

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

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

Mobile device real estate.

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

Push notifications.

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

Beating out or keeping up with competitors.

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

What are the drawbacks of using building an app?

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

Phones are overcrowded.

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

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

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

There’s a big upfront investment.

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

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

You’ll double your marketing efforts.

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

Can you deliver rich customer experiences without an app?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn More About the End of Google Business Messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should you consider business messaging over an app?

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

If you’re on the fence, consider this:

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

Engage customers with or without an app.

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

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

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

Agent Efficiency: How to Collect Better Metrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What metrics should you monitor?

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

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

1. Response time.

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

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

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

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

2. Agent occupancy.

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

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

3. Customer satisfaction.

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

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

You can calculate CSAT scores using this formula:

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

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

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

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

How to assess contact center metrics.

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

Figure out your reporting methods.

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

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

Analyze data over time.

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

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

Don’t forget about context.

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

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

Make incremental changes.

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

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

Streamline backend processes.

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

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

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

Improve agent efficiency with Quiq’s Conversational AI Platform

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

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

Customer Service in the Travel Industry: How to Do More with Less

Posted on February 3, 2023November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

Doing more with less is nothing new for the travel industry. It’s been tough out there for the last few years—and while the future is bright, travel and tourism businesses are still facing a labor shortage that’s causing customer satisfaction to plummet.

While HR leaders are facing the labor shortage head-on with recruiting tactics and budget increases, customer service teams need to search for ways to provide the service the industry is known for without the extra body count.

In other words… You need to do more with less.

The best way to do that is with a conversational AI platform. Whether a hotel, airline, car rental company or experience provider, you can provide superior service to your customers without overworking your support team.

Keep reading to take a look at the state of the travel industry’s labor shortage and how you can still provide exceptional customer service.

Travel is back, but labor is not.

In 2019, the travel and tourism industry accounted for 1 in 10 jobs around the world. Then the pandemic happened, and the industry lost 62 million jobs overnight, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

Now that most travel restrictions, capacity limits, and safety restrictions are lifted, much of the world is ready to travel again. The pent-up demand has caused the tourism and travel industry to outpace overall economic growth. In 2021, the GDP grew by 21.7%, while the overall economy only grew by 5.8%, according to the WTTC.

In 2021, travel added 18.2 million jobs globally, making it difficult to keep up with labor demands. In the U.S., 1 in 9 jobs went unfilled in 2021.

What’s causing the shortage? A combination of factors:

Flexibility: Over the last few years, there has been a mindset shift when it comes to work-life balance. Many people aren’t willing to give up weekends and holidays with their families to work in hospitality.
Safety: Many jobs in hospitality work on the frontline, interacting with the public on a regular basis. Even though the pandemic has cooled in most parts of the world, some workers are still hesitant to work face-to-face. This goes double for older workers and those with health concerns, who may have either switched industries or dropped out of the workforce altogether.
Remote work: The pandemic made remote work more feasible for many industries, and travel requires a lot of in-person work and interactions.

How is the labor shortage impacting customer service?

As much as we try to separate those shortages from affecting service, customers feel it. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, hotel guests were 2.7% less satisfied overall between 2021 and 2022. Airlines and car rental companies also dropped 1.3% each.

While there are likely multiple reasons factoring into lower customer satisfaction rates, there’s no denying that the labor shortage has an impact.

As travel ramps back up, there’s an opportunity to reshape the industry at a fundamental level. The world is ready to travel again, but demand is outpacing your ability to grow. While HR is hard at work recruiting new team members, it’s time to look at your operations and see what you can do to deliver great customer service without adding to your staff.

What a conversational AI platform can do in the travel industry.

First, what is conversational AI? Conversational AI combines multiple technologies (like machine learning and natural language processing) to enable human-like interactions between people and computers. For your customer service team, this means there’s a coworker that never sleeps, never argues, and seems to have all the answers.

A conversational AI platform like Quiq can help support your travel business’s customer service team with tools designed to speed conversations and improve your brand experience.

In short, a conversational AI platform can help businesses in the travel industry provide excellent customer service despite the current labor shortage. Here’s how.

Resolve issues faster with conversational AI support.

When you’re short-staffed, you can’t afford inefficient customer conversations. Switching from voice-based customer service to messaging comes with its own set of benefits.

Using natural language processing (NLP), a conversational AI platform can identify customer intent based on their actions or conversational cues. For example, if a customer is stuck on the booking page, maybe they have a question about the cancellation policy. By starting with some basic customer knowledge, chatbots or human agents can go into the conversation with context and get to the root of the problem faster.

Conversational AI platforms can also route conversations to the right agent, so agents spend less time gathering information and more time solving the problem. Plus, messaging’s asynchronous nature means customer service representatives can handle 6–8 conversations at once instead of working one-on-one. But conversational AI for customer service provides even more opportunities for speed.

Anytime access to your customer service team.

Many times, workers leaving the travel industry cite a lack of schedule flexibility as one of their reasons for leaving. Customer service doesn’t stop at 5 o’clock, and support agents end up working odd hours like weekends and holidays. Plus, when you’re short-staffed, it’s harder to cover shifts outside of normal business hours.

Chatbots can help provide customer service 24/7. If you don’t already provide anytime customer service support, you can use chatbots to answer simple questions and route the more complex questions to a live agent to handle the next day. Or, if you already have staff working evening shifts, you can use chatbots to support them. You’ll require fewer human agents during off times while your chatbot can pick up the slack.

Connect with customers in any language.

Five-star experiences start with understanding. You’re in the travel business, so it’s not unlikely that you’ll encounter people who speak different languages. When you’re short-staffed, it’s hard to ensure you have enough multilingual support agents to accommodate your customers.

Conversational AI platforms like Quiq offer translation capabilities. Customers can get the help they need in their native language—even if you don’t have a translator on staff.

Work-from-anywhere capabilities.

One of the labor shortage’s root causes is the move to remote work. Many customer-facing jobs require working in person. That limits your labor pool to people within the immediate area. The high cost of living in cities with increased tourism can push locals out.

Moving to a remote-capable conversational tool will expand your applicant pool outside your immediate area. You can attract a wider range of talented customer service agents to help you fill open positions.

Build automation to anticipate customer needs.

A great way to reduce the strain on a short-staffed customer service team? Prevent problems before they happen.

A lot of customer service inquiries are simple, routine questions that agents have to answer every day. Questions about cancellation policies, cleaning and safety measures, or special requests happen often—and can all be handled using automation.

Use conversational AI to set up personalized messages based on behavioral or timed triggers. Here are a few examples:

When customers book a vacation: Automatically send a confirmation text message with their booking information, cancellation policy, and check-in procedures.
The day before check-in: Send a reminder with check-in procedures, along with an option for any special requests.
During their vacation: Offer up excursion ideas, local restaurant reservations, and more. You can even book the reservation or complete the transaction right within the messaging platform.
After an excursion: Send a survey to collect feedback and give customers an outlet for their positive or negative feedback.

By anticipating these customer needs, your agents won’t have to spend as much time fielding simple questions. And the easy ones that do come in can be handled by your chatbot, leaving only more complex issues for your smaller team.

Don’t let a short staff take away from your customer service.

There are few opportunities to make something both cheaper and better. Quiq is one of them. Quiq’s conversational AI Platform isn’t just a stop-gap solution while the labor market catches up with the travel industry’s needs. It will actually improve your customer service experience while helping you do more with less.

7 Ways AI Chatbots Improve Customer Service

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

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

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

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

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

1. Collect customer information upfront.

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

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

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

2. Decrease customer abandonment.

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

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

3. Get faster, more accurate customer responses.

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

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

4. Prioritize customer conversations.

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

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

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

5. Get customers to the right place.

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

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

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

6. Reschedule appointments.

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

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

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

7. Collect feedback for even more improvement.

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

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

Take the Leap with Quiq.

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

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

How Messaging Delivers a Modern Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

What customer service looks like at the end of 2022.

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

The consumer mindset.

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

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

Digital expectations remain high.

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

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

More conversations.

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

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

Messaging has revolutionized the customer experience.

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

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

1. Deliver personalization with data.

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

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

2. Enhance conversations with AI.

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

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

3. Uplevel conversations with rich messages.

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

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

Optimize customer interactions with Quiq.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download as a PDF instead

The 9 effective call center strategies recap

Check out these call center strategies below:

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

1. Streamline your current system.

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

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

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

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

2. Boost agent productivity and efficiency.

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

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

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

3. Drive down costs.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.

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

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

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

5. Remove friction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Engage more qualified leads.

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

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

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

8. Increase conversions.

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

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

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

9. Increase customer satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do You Know Your Customer Churn Rate?

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

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

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

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

What is customer churn?

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

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

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

How to calculate churn:

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

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

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

10 ÷ 100 x 100 = 10%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find the problem areas.

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

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

1. After their first purchase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 ways to reduce customer churn.

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

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

1. Revamp new customer onboarding.

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

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

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

2. Revisit brand and product messaging.

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

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

3. Make customer service fast and accessible.

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

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

4. Be proactive with at-risk customers.

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

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

Embrace messaging to lower customer churn.

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

How to Anticipate Customer Needs (With Examples)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will you gain by anticipating customer needs?

In a word: loyalty.

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

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

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

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

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

Start by identifying customer expectations.

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

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

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

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

Simplicity.

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

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

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

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

Give customers convenient service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop communication inefficiencies before they start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower CSAs to make the right decisions for customers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equip your team with the tools to meet future needs.

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

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

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

Request A Demo

How Messaging Helps Hospitality Get Personal

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

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

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

SMS hospitality messaging connects you to guests on their terms.

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

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

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

High tech and high touch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And customer service has only increased in importance.

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

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

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

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

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

Tap into the power of SMS hospitality messaging.

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

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

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

Easy ways to start using SMS/texting in hospitality.

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

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

SMS for hotels.

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

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

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

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

SMS for restaurants.

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

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

SMS for recreational activities.

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

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

Disrupt with SMS hospitality messaging or be disrupted.

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

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

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

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

How to Rewire Omnichannel Service with Messaging

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

Omnichannel customer service is changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The customer service stakes are higher than ever.

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

And omnichannel is an expectation—not a benefit.

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

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

How is messaging changing the omnichannel strategy?

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

1. Customers are eager for help.

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

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

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

The benefits of omnichannel customer service.

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

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

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

Meet your customers everywhere.

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

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

Deliver a flawless customer experience.

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

Increase selling opportunities.

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

Collect more relevant customer information.

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

How to improve your omnichannel strategy.

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

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

Be omnichannel, not just multi-channel.

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

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

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

Don’t pick channels over service.

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

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

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

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

Pick the right channels for your customers.

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

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

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

Ensure customer service agents have information at their fingertips.

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

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

Include self-service in your omnichannel strategy.

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

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

Lean into omnichannel marketing.

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

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

Quiq: Your omnichannel solution.

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

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

Omni-Channel Customer Service

Posted on May 1, 2022November 15, 2024 Mark Kowal

Omni-Channel Service: The Customer-Driven Path Forward

The Omni-channel experience has been hailed as the Holy Grail of customer service for a great reason. It provides the highest level of seamless, personalized customer experiences.

Studies have shown that companies with an omni-channel program enjoy 24% greater annual returns in company revenue and a 55% decrease in the number of customer complaints. As stated by Aberdeen: “Omni-channel programs are not hype or a temporary best practice. When implemented properly, omni-channel serves as a key long-term differentiator.” All the evidence points to the fact that the omni-channel experience is a “must have”, not a “nice to have”. However, it is important to note that less than 1% of all organizations have deployed an omni-channel customer service strategy.

Focus on What You Can Control

Tip 1: Present a Unified Front

Customers don’t see a company as individual departments, but an overall brand. They expect consistency in their experience, whether their issue is about the latest sales promotion or dealing with a support complaint. In order to provide the best customer experience, it is imperative to eliminate silos. Make sure the lines of communication are open internally and that departments share the common systems, goals, and metrics. Providing your frontlines with the authority to do what is in the best interest of the customer and company will ensure small issues don’t blow up into social media nightmares. A unified and consistent approach to service will be a significant step forward to improving the customer experience.

Tip 2: Quality First, More Channels Second

Of course customers want you to be where they are, but it is counterproductive to be somewhere and not effectively serve your customers. A prime example of this is live chat. While a growing number of companies are offering chat, a good channel option, it must be resourced correctly. In many cases, customers have to wait for an agent to join a chat session, or they receive the dreaded “Not Available” screen, or they start a chat conversation and walk away from their computer for a moment only to come back and find the chat closed. All this showcases that companies are not efficiently managing resources and are spreading themselves too thin. Customers can forgive you for not offering a channel at all, but they won’t forgive bad service on channels you do offer. The lesson here is that customers do not care about the breadth of your “omni-ness”, but rather about the quality of the service delivered. It’s better not to be in a channel at all if you’re not able to do it well.

Tip 3: Pick the Right Channels

More channels do not necessarily equal greater success. However, being in the right channels for your customer, does. Make sure you know which channels your customers want to engage you on and focus on those first. How do you know the right ones? Do you keep phone support, cut email support, and add messaging? Study your customers. Understand not only their age demographic, but also how and when they typically try to connect with your organization. Other option is to just ask your customers! Based on that valuable insight, focus on the channels where you know your customers are most active and would benefit from direct, two-way communication with your company. Then, make sure you staff, resource, and empower your employees in those channels to best represent the brand.

Tip 4: Quality Service Over Quantity

Many companies are subscribing to the philosophy that more channels are better. Too many channels actually strain resources. A Harvard business study reveals that customers are actually very flexible; few customers care about the means they use to engage companies. Most choose to make contact through whatever channel they perceive best meets their needs for the specific task. In fact, the same Harvard study found that only 16% of customers are “means-focused” (committed to a certain channel of preference, regardless of rather it fits the task), while 84% of customers are “ends-focused” (focused on solving their issue, regardless of the channel used). So, limit your customer service channels to the ones you can support well. Once again, customers can forgive you for not being there, but they won’t forgive a bad customer service experience.

Tip 5: Try New Channels

While the phone remains the go-to communication method of choice for some difficult or urgent use cases, text messaging and Facebook Messenger channels are fast gaining acceptance, and not just with millennials. All age groups are using SMS/text messaging more than ever. In fact, the fastest growing channel is “text messaging”. A recent Forrester study highlights that “The pervasiveness and familiarity of text messaging makes it an ideal channel to win, serve, and retain customers who require assistance from a contact center agent.” Consumers agree. In one study, 66% of respondents said that one of the reasons they preferred to send a text to a company’s customer service department was because it was less time-consuming. In addition, 42% said they preferred to do so because it was more convenient than using the telephone, and nearly a third said that sending a text was less frustrating than calling the company.

Summary

While the omni-channel experience may be the holy grail of customer service, the true prize is a loyal customer. The priority should always be to provide a helpful, positive experience that will enhance the relationship with a customer. Therefore, continue striving for customer service excellence. Dedicate the resources, embrace relevant new technologies, and know your customer’s channel preference. The investment will ultimately be worth it.

9 Ways to Reduce Customer Returns with Messaging

Posted on April 27, 2022November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

Looking into reducing customer returns? You’re in the right place.

And you’ve been there as a consumer yourself, I’d venture to guess.

Maybe your nephew is between sizes. Your partner tends to overestimate their technical ability. The 100-lb model does little to show you what the clothing item looks like on the average person. You didn’t realize how big a 9-foot rug actually is. The color of the product looks nothing like the image.

So you returned it.

Returns are a problem for most retail businesses—even more so for online stores. Some larger retailers have even made a successful business out of easy, free returns.

The problem is not every e-commerce business is set up for free, easy returns. But customers expect them to be.

Between 2019 and 2020, online retail sales more than doubled (for obvious reasons).

Shoppers took to the interwebs in drove—much more frequently or for the first time. But with increased sales came a deluge of returns.

The National Retail Federation reported that approximately $102 billion of e-commerce merchandise was returned in 2020. That came from $565 billion in e-commerce sales in the United States.

And 2021 didn’t do much better. E-commerce websites saw a 15% return rate, according to an IRMG report.

It has become a problem. Reducing customer returns is (or should be) a top priority for online, product-based businesses.

While returns are undoubtedly the cost of doing business online, a little e-commerce customer service problem solving can go a long way. Continue reading for some strategies to reduce product returns with messaging.

The actual cost of returns.

Returns don’t just signify lost sales—they cost you money. The National Retail Federation survey found that for every $100 in returned merchandise accepted, retailers lose $5.90 to return fraud.

But fraud isn’t the only cost of high returns. Here are a few other costs incurred by frequent returns:

Shipping costs
Warehouse time spent verifying returns
Customer service time spent emailing customers
Operations time tracking shipping status
Warehouse time spent restocking items
Lost inventory due to damaged products

Simply ignoring returns and chalking them up to the cost of doing business online won’t work. It’s important your team learns about reducing customer returns—and even how to prevent them.

9 ways customer service can reduce returns.

When done well, customer service problem solving can help customers decide on the right product to begin with and help them post-purchase.

All it takes is thoughtful and frequent customer communication.

Here are 9 ways your support agents can use messaging to prevent frequent returns—and encourage repeat business from your customers.

1. Get ahead of problems with a few simple questions.

The first big question you should ask your customers is why. Why are they returning your products? Some returns are unavoidable, but some can be prevented with a little more information.

Is your sizing chart off? Is there a defect? Are the product photos misleading? Ask these questions with every return to identify easy changes you can make to your website or sales process to prevent them in the first place.

Have a more technical product? Collect frequently asked questions from your customer service team to post on your website or even send to customers once they’ve made a purchase.

Send an SMS/text message with common FAQs to ensure your customers see it (instead of getting buried in emails).

2. Use AI assistants to walk customers through simple troubleshooting first.

Is there an easy fix you can share with customers before they chat with your support team? Use bots and AI assistants to collect customer information, identify their support requests, and walk them through simple troubleshooting.

Make sure to keep it simple: Think “turn it off, wait ten seconds, then turn it on again” type instructions. Then loop in an agent to tackle more complex problems.

This could prevent returns from customers who think they may have purchased the wrong item, might have a defective product, or believe it’s too complicated.

3. Prioritize unhappy customers.

Customers (especially the unhappy ones) hate waiting for customer service. But during peak periods, a short wait is inevitable.

Using messaging and a conversational AI platform like Quiq can help you identify irate customers and prioritize them first with sentiment analysis. Quickly responding to angry customers gives your team the chance to turn the conversation around and troubleshoot issues before it leads to a return.

4. Get the message to the right person.

Another issue that leads to customer frustration: Call transfers. Even though they’re commonplace in call centers, customers hate them. They want you to solve their problems quickly and efficiently, but complex issues require extra help.

The last thing you want is to have frustrated customers giving up and returning their products.

Instead, lean into messaging. If you’re strategizing around reducing customer returns, messaging makes it easy to quickly identify the customer’s problem and get it to the right person (without multiple transfers, extensive hold times, repeating information, or awkward introductions).

5. Be optimistic instead of apologetic.

While empathy is a great customer service tool, you should always follow it up with optimism.

Try swapping out statements like “I’m sorry I don’t know how to fix this” for “Let’s get this solved. I’m going to bring in an expert to help us out.” Customers are more likely to respond to the second statement since it’s outcome-oriented.

Since you lose voice inflection with messaging, showing enthusiasm is even more important.

Don’t be afraid to use exclamation points (if your brand voice allows it). Find a balance between helpful eagerness and to-the-point problem-solving to fix customers’ issues and make them feel good about it.

6. Give customers a record of the conversation.

Giving customers information and directions over the phone is difficult. They could mishear things, skip steps, or forget the instructions immediately after the conversation.

Written instructions via messaging are much easier to follow.

You can walk your customers through troubleshooting at their own pace, and they can refer back to them whenever they need to. You can even email conversations to your customers so they can reference them whenever they need them.

7. Offer visual and interactive instructions.

Are instructions getting lost over the phone? Some customers respond better to visual instructions over voice and written directions.

With rich messaging, you can bring in diagrams, pictures, videos, and even augmented reality to help customers solve their product issues.

Rich messaging also works both ways. When customers have trouble describing their issues, they can send videos and pictures to show your customer service agents.

Your team will figure out the problem and how to fix it much faster than relying on imperfect customer descriptions alone.

8. Make it easy to loop in third parties.

Sometimes longer resolution times are unavoidable. Maybe there’s a system problem that needs help from a developer, or you need to reach out to a third party for replacement parts.

With messaging, customers can pick up conversations at a later date to check-in. Or they can opt to have the conversation emailed to them for quick follow-ups.

Plus, everything is documented. You can easily pass along the conversation to the third party without anything getting lost along the way.

9. Identify real problems.

Messaging makes it easy to track and document problems. This allows you to take a step back and identify opportunities to tweak other pieces of the sales puzzle.

Are shoppers surprised by what the product looks like? Maybe there’s a problem with your product images. Are customers disappointed with the results? Maybe your descriptions are overpromising. Are products arriving damaged? Are you not selling the product to the right demographic?

Use customer service messaging to identify problems that need to be addressed by your larger team, ultimately reducing customer returns.

Bonus tip: What to do when the product is actually defective.

Sometimes it’s not a user error or a problem that can be fixed from afar. Or maybe the customer is just genuinely disappointed with the product. What should you do then?

Restore their faith in your company. When you can’t prevent a return with excellent service, show your customers why they should continue doing business with you.

How companies handle returns (are they gracious and helpful, or do they make it as difficult as possible) has a big impact on customer perception. This is where you earn a repeat customer.

Reduce customer returns with messaging.

You may not be able to get rid of returns completely, but you can certainly lower them.

Messaging is a great way to engage your customers before and after a purchase to ensure they’re getting the right products and know how to use them.

Reducing customer returns starts with a good website, amazing products, and great customer service. Once you have those things in place, it just takes a little strategy.

Featured Resource

Forrester Report

Featured Resource

Forrester Report

What is contact center AI?

AI-powered solutions for contact center challenges

1. Managing high volumes efficiently

2. Real-time AI to empower your agents

3. Improving complex case routing

4. Enabling 24/7 customer support

4 key benefits of contact center AI

1. Enhanced customer experience

2. Boosted agent productivity

3. Cost savings

4. Increased (and improved) data insights

Implementation tips to start your contact center AI

1. Define your business objectives

2. Identify the best touch points in your customer journey

3. Decide how you’ll acquire your AI: build, buy, or buy-to-build?

4. Prep for human agent training at the outset

5. Plan for integration and compatibility

6. Establish monitoring and feedback loops

7. Plan for scalability

Final thoughts on contact center AI

What is AI in Customer Service?

What are the Benefits of Using AI in Customer Service?

1. AI will automate routine work.

2. Scalability and Cost Savings

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

4. Customer Support AI Supercharges Chat.

5. AI contributes to a better customer experience.

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

Where to Get Started with AI in Customer Service

Deploy AI Agents for Maximum Efficiency

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

Use Voice AI for Customer Calls

Effectively use AI in Emails

Make the Most Out of Digital Channels

AI can Transform your E-Commerce Operations

Things to Consider When Using AI in Customer Service

Augmenting Human Agents

CX Expertise

Time to Value

Channel Enablement

Security and Privacy

Observability

Risk Mitigation

AI Model Flexibility

What is the Future of AI in Customer Service?

1. Customers Want Options

2. Your Customers are Busy. Texting is Asynchronous.

3. Texting Isn’t Limited to Millennials (or GenZ). It’s Generation Agnostic.

4. Customers Want Better Experiences.

5. Customers Want More than Words: They Want Rich Messaging, Too.

6. They Just Prefer Texting.

7. Customers Want Texting to be Responsive and Personalized. Generative AI Makes That Easier On Businesses.

When It Comes Down to It: Yes, Your Customers Still Want to Text You.

Why is Live Chat Important for Contact Centers?

6 Tips for Encouraging Customers to Use Live Chat

1. Make Sure People Know You have Live Chat Services

2. Minimize the Hassle of Using Live Chat

3. Personalize Your Chat

Brand-specific personalization

Customer-specific personalization

4. Include Privacy and Data Usage Messages

5. Use Rich Messages

6. Separating Chat and Agent Availability

Creating Greater CX Outcomes with Live Web Chat is Just the Start.

How APIs Facilitate Access to AI Capabilities

How Do APIs Facilitate Customer Support AI Assistants?

Looking Beyond an API for AI Assistants

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

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

Myth 2: AI Platforms Cost Too Much

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

Is an AI Platform Right for Me?

What are The Top Customer Service Challenges?

1. Understanding Customer Expectations

2. Next Step: Exceed Customer Expectations

3. Dealing with Unreasonable Demands