Quiq Archives

Customer Spotlight: Warners’ Stellian

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

Warners’ Stellian has been providing families in the St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota areas quality appliances with exceptional service and value since 1954. As a family-owned business, they take pride in their knowledgeable staff and expert technicians because they know those factors contribute to excellent customer service like no other.

Warners’ Stellian wanted to extend that exceptional service by providing more ways for their customers to engage with them. The appliance retailer partnered with Quiq to add SMS/text messaging and web chat to their mobile and desktop sites.

Q: What prompted Warners’ Stellian to deploy a messaging solution?

A: We have such high call volume, so enabling customers to have more touch points was the goal.

Warners’ Stellian contact center, which normally receives a high volume of calls, uses messaging to deflect some of the inbound calls for customer support. This capability proved itself to be valuable after a particularly busy summer where they experienced an increase in calls and wait times. The contact center was able to redirect some of the pent-up call demand to text and chat, allowing them to address customer issues much faster.

Getting Started With Messaging

Prior to offering customers SMS/text messaging and web chat for customer support, the company’s call center agents supported phone, online forms, and email. By partnering with Quiq to open the messaging channel, the company has increased efficiency by converting inbound calls to text messages for both sales and service.

Warners’ Stellian promotes messaging on the website’s “contact us” page and during the message the customer hears while on hold. The company has been surprised at how much customers, who initiate conversations via messaging, want and like these new options.

The customer service team has found that customers waiting on hold to talk to a customer service agent would often just hang up to text. When customers were given the option to chat for assistance versus waiting on hold, the company saw a spike in the number of chats created.

Quiq allows the company’s 45 users, which includes 20 call center agents, 20 sales associates in 2 store locations, and select administrative and sales associates to handle all the active messages Warners’ Stellian receives at any given time. When things get really busy, agents will easily handle 4-5 conversations at a time.

Messaging Adoption

The majority of the inbound conversations are related to repairs. “When a customer reaches out, they’re really looking for help on a very specific problem, it could be functional or cosmetic,” states Kurt Duhn, Customer Service Manager for Warners’ Stellian. Either way, the customer support team is able to respond in a faster, easier way.

Internally, the customer support team is learning how to most effectively communicate using this new channel. The support team has learned that there needs to be a focus on written communication skills, such as succinctly responding and engaging without the use of slang or abbreviations, as well as determining when to transition from text or chat to speaking directly with the customer.

The ability to easily share photos and videos, which customers can use to explain their situation, has improved conversations. The customers can take a photo and quickly send it within the conversation to reduce some of the back and forth.

“It’s much more convenient to get photos and we get photos immediately. Now, we can make images more conversational”

Kurt Duhn, Customer Service Manager, Warners’ Stellian

What’s Next

Since many of the conversations are about repair issues, contact center agents spend a lot of time reviewing warranty information. The company wants to explore whether a simple bot can be used to help pre-qualify or at least collect the information needed to determine if the customer is still within their warranty.

Warners’ Stellian would also like to use Quiq Messaging to push more “how-to” links and more routing options. If a customer initiates a conversation referencing “Whirlpool” and “microwave”, the customer can be directed to a website resource, like a knowledge article, to look up that information before continuing on to engage an agent.

2019: This Is Your Year to Improve Customer Experience

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Cristina Bravo-Olmo

We’ve all been there. February 15th rolls around on the calendar and all of those great intentions for the new year begin to slowly fade into memories. This year will be different. This year hasto be different, especially if you’re one of the many business leaders who are determined to create a better experience for your customers in 2019.

Now, we’re not saying you should ignore those aspirations to organize your closets, meditate every day, or strive for more balance. Those things are really important too, but if you have plans to create a better customer experience (CX) in 2019, there is no better time to become laser-focused on this goal.

There is one sure-fire way to improve the customer experience that is actually fairly painless. Add the ability for your customers to have conversations with you via messaging – text messaging, rich messaging, and live chat. We are here to tell you that this is the latest holy grail in customer experience – save money by shifting phone calls to messaging, increase your customer satisfaction scores with the loved messaging channel, and close more business faster.

In this post, we’ve pulled together the most popular resources and advice to transform the way your customers can engage with your company.

Messaging conversations have grown over 450%

Over the past few years, we have been working really hard here at Quiq to make interactions between customers and companies just plain easier. We’ve seen first-hand, with clients like Brinks Home Security, Overstock, and Pier 1, the amazing impact of adopting technology that allows customers to have a more convenient and effortless experience with a brand.

Although we beat the effortless customer experience drum all year long, we’re putting a little extra weight on it in 2019. Why?

Because customers are demanding it. Did you know that top brands who added messaging channels to their business have seen customers naturally adopt and clamor to the channel? In our client base alone, the number of conversations our clients have had with their customers grew over 450% over 2017.
Not only are customers expecting the ability to message brands, but the introduction of Apple Business Chat and Google Rich Business Messaging has also put the biggest names behind the growth in the messaging channel.
There is no doubt that mobile usage and the desire to communicate with companies over mobile devices continues to increase.

Messaging is quickly becoming the standard method to communicate with companies and the companies who don’t adopt this channel will simply lose customers.

But, you don’t have to take our word for it. We’ve gathered advice from some authorities in the customer experience space to save you the time of hunting and gathering the information yourself. Let’s start with the general outlook for customer experience and then look at what the industry experts have to say about improving customer experience in 2019.

There’s going to be a dust-up over customer experience

According to Forrester, 2019 is a pivotal time for customer experience. Less than impressive gains in CX quality, coupled with rising customer expectations, will drive some significant watershed events this year.

Stagnant CX quality levels will cause short, destructive price wars as some companies decide not to differentiate on CX and start a “race to the bottom” fueled by slashed prices.
The need to present more sophisticated business plans to leadership will be critical for CX pros who want to maintain support for their CX transformations.
Hot job markets may see more movement for CX pros who look for firms willing to invest in CX.

In order for companies to improve CX quality, Customer Experience leaders will have to put themselves in their customer’s shoes and understand them on a deeper level. According to Shep Hyken, customer service/CX expert, keynote speaker, and NYT bestselling author, one of the ways to do this is by making it easier to do business with your company. Providing customers with ways that are convenient for them to contact you such as webchat, social channels like Facebook and SMS/text messaging.

“A large portion of your customers want – and expect – a quick answer or resolution to a question or problem, and unlike an older generation (as in Baby Boomers), they don’t want to make a phone call to get it.”
~Shep Hyken

In Shep’s recent Forbes article, “Ten Customer Service/Customer Experience Predictions for 2019”, he predicts customers will continue to get smarter and compare companies against their competitors, as well as the best service they’ve ever received. He encourages customer experience leaders to identify who they personally enjoy doing business with and use that as a benchmark to bring their own organization to the same level.

What about Bots?

There were a few recurring themes that popped up while researching this article. One of the biggest themes woven into all of the trends and predictions for 2019 is the increased use of technology. With so many companies focused on creating a more customer-centric organization, it makes sense that leadership will look for ways to provide speed and efficiency with uncompromising attention to delivering a great customer’s experience.

Adopting technology, such as Quiq Messaging and our bot approach, enables companies to do just that. According to customer experience speaker, futurist, and author Blake Morgan, the increased use ofRobotic Process Automation or RPA(think chatbots) will allow humans more time to dedicate themselves to tasks such as innovation, problem-solving and giving customers the human interaction they crave.

“Most of those changes are driven by consumer demand. Customers crave personalized, frictionless experiences, and companies are sprinting to deliver them.”
~Blake Morgan

International market intelligence company,Aberdeen Group, recently surveyed top CX leaders to understand what technology they plan to adopt in 2019. The top 10 technologies include a few classic tools that have been utilized by customer service and experienced leaders for a long time such as live chat, knowledge management, and customer self-service tools. Although these tools have been around for some time, more than a quarter of the respondents stated that they plan to employ them in 2019.

Other tools such as artificial intelligence, real-time decision assist and guidance, and workflow automation come to the forefront. At Quiq, we’ve seen how the automation trend has developed over the years and created our platform to provide many of these features and providing tools to increase productivity.

Take the Quiq Bot API, for example, which allows clients to create their own custom bot to help augment interactions with human agents. Bots can be used to collect information to help inform the agent/customer interaction, determine the nature of the customer’s inquiry and route to the appropriate department or agent. Depending on the nature of the customer inquiry a bot can even handle a customer conversation from beginning to end.

We’ve also included workflow automation features, such as the ability to route conversations based on pre-set rules and our Adaptive Response Timer, which automatically prioritizes conversations based on how quick or slow customer’s responds to agents. These features greatly improve the overall customer experience by increasing the speed companies can respond to customer needs.

A look ahead at 2019

Synthesizing all of the information above, we can see there are three really strong forces that are acting on the customer experience in 2019:

The market demands more convenient, frictionless interactions that rival the best customer experiences they’ve received.
Companies are searching for ways to deliver those experiences as a way to differentiate themselves in hyper-competitive markets.
Technology, such as Quiq Messaging, provide the tools that increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction and reduce service costs. These outcomes add up to a very compelling business case that can immediately impact a company’s bottom line.

We predict that more companies will join the likes of Brinks Home Security, Pier 1, Tailored Brands, Overstock.com, and Tile to provide their customers with the convenience of the messaging channel. If you’re ready to join other high-performing CX brands, request a demo.

Author:

Marciela Ross

Marciela is the Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Quiqwhere she gets to use her love of writing to share how messaging is changing the face of customer service. When she’s not writing, Marciela spends time with family, crafting and looking at dog photos on Pinterest.

Improve Average Handle Time Using This Key Metric

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

The way customers can contact companies has multiplied over the years, which has changed the way contact center agents do their work. Previously, Average Handle Time (AHT) was the metric that indicated how long it took to complete an interaction with a customer, which in turn decided staffing levels.

Back in the day, when contact was made primarily via the phone or email, handle time was more straightforward. Now, customers can engage with a company via web chat, sms/text messaging, in their app, or on social media. This kind of asynchronous communication means that a conversation with a customer can span 2 minutes, 2 hours, or 2 days.

Improve Average Handle Time with ‘Work Time’

At Quiq, we’ve developed a metric dubbed “Work Time” that captures the intent of traditional handle time metrics, while accounting for the nuances of the messaging channel. In this article, we’ll dive into the Work Time metric and show you how it’s calculated.

How much time are agents spending on customer interactions?

That is a fundamental question of the contact center. The messaging channel poses new challenges when answering this question owing to its asynchronous nature and a high degree of concurrency.

Agents using Quiq Messaging can typically handle 5 or 6 conversations at one time. Add to this the ability for customers to step away from a conversation at any point and resume the conversation with the agent at a more convenient time, and you can see how calculating agents handle time gets a bit complicated. Quiq Messaging simplifies the calculation and does the work for you through the Work Time metric.

Why is Work Time important?

The way customers can contact companies have changed but the way we measure the success of that contact hasn’t changed much. Regardless of the channel, successful conversations end with a resolved issue and a satisfied customer.

Part of the customer’s satisfaction can be attributed to how long they wait to engage with a representative and how long it takes to resolve their issue. The Work Time Metric helps contact centers track and evaluate these activities to improve the performance of your team and identify what can be modified to make things even more efficient.

How Work Time is measured

When an agent is engaged in a messaging support conversation, he or she might look up an order or do an inventory check. In either case, the work is ultimately represented by a message sent back to the customer. When an agent sends a message, we measure backwards from the time of the message to the most recent of the following events:

The oldest unsatisfied¹ customer message on this conversation
The most recent message sent by this agent on any conversation
The assignment of this conversation to this agent
The last reactivation of the conversation (from inactive to active status)

The interval between the most recent of these events and the time of the current message represents a work segment that is associated with the current conversation and agent. These segments will always exclude periods when the conversation is inactive. The diagram below depicts how work segments are calculated with awareness of simultaneous customer interactions by a single agent.

¹An unsatisfied customer message is a customer message with no subsequent agent messages

In some cases, the work segments extend back from an agent message to the unsatisfied customer message. In other cases, the segments are cut short due to activity on another conversation, or an event such as assignment.

The sum of all work segments on a given conversation is the total work time and is computed progressively as a conversation proceeds. Quiq exposes this information at several integration points and visualizes it in the Quiq Reports tab.

How to use the Work Time Metric

Work Time is a key productivity metric that can help you manage your workforce in an age of omni-channel engagement. Here are the three main use cases you’ll want to keep an eye on this metric:

Staffing Forecasts

Understanding the average work time requirement of customer interactions will allow you to staff appropriately as you direct more interactions to the messaging channel or in anticipation of busy periods.

Workforce Assessment

Work time can be used to evaluate individual agents or entire teams. Agents with the same responsibilities but disparate average work time metrics are indicative of under or over-performing agents.

Agent Workload Tuning

Quiq allows you to configure how many simultaneous conversations an agent may be assigned through a configuration known as the agent ‘soft limit’. The ideal number of simultaneous conversations varies by use case. Watching the average work time of your interactions while adjusting the soft limit will allow you to identify the optimal configuration. If the work time increases significantly after an increase to the soft limit, you know that agent context switching is taking a toll on your customer interactions.

Measure the productivity of your digital engagement

Messaging is a workforce management game-changer. With messaging, you can do a lot more with your existing staff. That includes decreasing Work Time, while actually increasing customer satisfaction scores. Customers prefer messaging because it puts them in control of the conversation and allows them to engage with a company on their time.

Just because the customer is in control of the conversation, doesn’t mean your contact center productivity is out of control. Agents will have the efficiency of asynchronous messaging and managers have Quiq’s Work Time metric for the data and insights to manage their workforce.

Customer Texting – 23 Reasons Everyone Loves Texting for Customer Service

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Love is a pretty strong word. For those who think that it might be too strong of a word to describe the way consumers feel about text messaging, take a look at these stats:

Over 6 billion text messages are sent in the U.S. each day.
90% of text messages are read in 3 minutes or less
Texts have an astounding 96% open rate
Texting is the most widely-used feature on a smartphone – even more than making calls

Considering these stats, maybe obsession is a better word.

Regardless of what you call it, the attachment to texting is real. But it’s not just customers who love texting. Companies, from retail to credit unions to consumer services, and everything in between, have increased engagement, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction by using business to customer text messaging.

Effortless, Connected, and Proactive Customer Experiences

Messaging enables companies to deliver exceptional customer support by providing what has become fundamental tenets of customer-centric companies:

Effortless
Connected
Proactive

We feel so strongly about messaging and how it can transform customer experiences, we wanted to dive into those three points a little deeper. We’ve pulled together a list of 23 reasons everyone, and we mean everyone, from customers to agents to company leadership, loves business to customer texting.

Some customer service leaders may be hesitant to disrupt the status quo. We wanted to make it clear that there’s already a disruption underway. If you’ve been looking for a reason to implement messaging for your customers or a reason to disrupt the status quo, here are 23 of them.

23 Reasons Everyone Loves Customer Texting

1. Just Human EnoughIt’s not that your customers hate human interaction, it’s just that they’d rather interact with their family and friends instead of waiting on hold to talk to one of your customer service representatives. Messaging delivers interactions that are just human enough. Customers know that there is someone on the other end who cannot only sympathize with their situation but serve as their advocate.
2. On-demand
  Customers expect to get the support they need, however, and whenever they want it. It can be frustrating for customers to have to work around your business hours. Messaging provides customers an outlet to engage with a company on their terms.
3. Asynchronous
  We get it — sometimes customers have to step away from the computer in the middle of a chat session. That’s why our chat platform is asynchronous, meaning conversations can be picked up at a later time, right where they left off. There’s no need to restart the conversation — just keep it going!
4. Convenient
  Waiting on hold to talk to customer support is no one’s favorite pastime. Cut out the holding music and let your customers get in touch through their preferred messaging channel. Customer texting doesn’t require a huge time investment or just the right conditions. The asynchronous nature of text messaging allows the customer to send a text message while they go about their day. Your customer can be on a noisy train, in a room full of people, or just on the go and too busy to make a call.
5. Intuitive for Agents
  Nearly everyone, including your agents, uses text messaging on a daily basis. That includes your agents. That makes training agents for text support a breeze — often taking less than a day.
6. Natural for Customers
  There’s no need for customers to download an app or follow any complex instructions. All they do is shoot you a text. In fact, your customers are probably trying to text you already. When Quiq clients get started with business text messaging, they are usually surprised to find that their customers are already trying to message them on their 1-800 number.
7. Easy
  Finding the right number to call for help, taking a break from your day to call customer support, waiting on hold, and navigating a confusing IVR presents hurdles for your customers. Messaging removes those hurdles by making it easy for your customers to contact you.
8. Succinct
  People who use customer texting are conditioned to be succinct and to the point. Agents don’t necessarily have to sacrifice the personable, “get-to-know-you” messages with customers but those conversations won’t go too long on messaging.
9. Fun
  Emoji’s and gifs are a fun way to interact with customers. Agents can set a more casual tone to a conversation with these fun features. Rich text messaging can even allow exciting augmented reality experiences.
10. Fast
  Quiq clients have discovered that many of the conversations received on messaging are relatively quick questions, like order status. These conversations can usually be resolved in just a couple of short exchanges and take a lot less time than making a phone call.

More Benefits of Texting for Customer Service

1. Affordable
  Via text, customer service agents can handle multiple conversations at a time — often up to 8. Add in the convenience of AI-powered chatbots, and you have a customer support system that is affordable, efficient, and easy to implement.
2. Accessible
  We may not all check Facebook regularly or use web chat when it’s available, but everyone has their mobile phone for the majority of the day and will consistently check SMS messages.
3. Flexible
  Messaging provides multiple ways to share information. PDFs, links, videos, and images can be easily exchanged within a conversation.
4. Enhanced Interactions
  The rich media offered from Apple Business Chat and Google Rich Business Messaging extends the interaction to include rich cards and list pickers that help customers choose open appointment times or browse a catalog. They can even complete transactions via Apple Pay or Google Pay.
5. Interactive
  Customer texting provides a way for customers to interact with your company. There’s a natural back and forth, just like a phone call. Messaging gives your customers a way to converse and interact in a way that an FAQ page cannot.
6. Discreet
  There’s just some information that people are more prudent about discussing, especially when they are in a public place. Instead of sharing their home address or phone number with a company while waiting in line, where anyone can overhear, messaging allows private information to stay private.
7. Responsive
  In today’s always-on world, you’re either instantaneous or you’re out. Your customers can get a response from a chatbot immediately after they send you a text, and they can then be routed to an appropriate agent if necessary. Quiq messaging helps agents prioritize conversations based on how fast the customer expects a reply.
8. Unobtrusive
  Making a phone call means a customer has to take time out of their day, to do business on your terms. Customer texting is an easy, convenient, and unobtrusive way to engage with a company where the customer is in control of the conversation.
9. Efficient
  Agents who use Quiq Messaging have powerful tools that increase efficiency at their fingertips. Tools like pre-written snippets can help agents avoid retyping the same answers to frequently asked questions. This feature really helps customers by ensuring they receive consistent, up-to-date responses.
10. Effective
  The nature of customer texting requires messages that are brief and clearly expressed. When customers need a quick reply on a simple question, messaging helps the customer and agents get to resolution fast.
11. Personal
  Quiq clients and the customers they serve have told us that they love the outbound message feature available in the Quiq Messaging platform. Clients who use Quiq messaging are able to send targeted and personal messages that are more relevant to their customers, like appointment confirmation and order status.
12. Easy to reference
  Customers are able to reference previous messages sent and received by simply scrolling through their conversation history. Agents have the same advantage of having conversation history so there’s no need to ask customers to repeat themselves. Also, a transcript of the conversation is available after the interaction has ended that agents can send via email.
13. Insightful
  Managers who use Quiq messaging love the insight available to them from the reporting dashboard. Data on customer wait time, the amount of customers in the queue, and information on agent activity helps managers make more informed decisions for their contact center.

Customer Texting: The Way Forward

As you can see, customer texting is rife with benefits to businesses of all kinds. When you’re ready to explore the potential of texting for customer service, click the button below to see it in action!

Credit Union Messaging Guidelines to Build Trust With Members

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

There is an undercurrent of distrust around promotional emails and robo-calls. Consumers are beyond annoyed with these invasive methods and have turned to text messaging as the preferred way to communicate with businesses. Messaging has earned consumer’s trust. For your credit union to maintain that trust and encourage engagement with your members, we’ve put together some simple credit union messaging guidelines.

The popularity of messaging has spurred a growing number of credit unions like Southern Chautauqua Federal Credit Unionand Community First Credit Union in Floridato turn to SMS/text messaging to reach their members. In this article, we’ll explore why the adoption of text messaging has increased so rapidly among credit union members and how to protect your members and the trust they’ve placed in this communication channel.

Reach Members Easier With Messaging

If it feels like it’s getting harder to get in touch with your members, you’re probably right, and you’re not alone. Phone calls from unknown numbers are ignored and emails hitting the “spam” box are growing, so even if your members have requested information, it is likely you won’t get through to them. Add to that, the sheer volume of incoming emails and phone calls, and it’s possible that your members may just miss you.

Most of the 20+ credit unions that have implemented Quiq Messaging have done so to deflect expensive calls. According to creditunions.com, a growing number of credit unions are “modernizing existing systems by introducing new mobile and text-based services…”which has resulted in the filtering of simple tasks and questions to the less expensive messaging channel. These institutions, as well as many others in retail, travel, hospitality, and others, are not only realizing a lower inbound call volume, but are experiencing higher engagement rates with their customers through messaging.

Messaging has made it easier for credit unions to engage with their members since most consumers keep their phones nearby and will check their phone an average of every 12 minutes, according to The New York Post. In addition, text messages have a 98% open rate compared to email open rates, which are often south of 20%.

While consumers and credit unions are rapidly adopting text messaging to engage on everything from expediting loans to discussing options to bring collection accounts current, there are still scammers out there that are phishing consumers.

What Is Phishing?

The scamming epidemic continues as consumers are bombarded with calls from the IRS and emails filled with promises of unclaimed assets fill their inboxes. Consumers have grown weary of overstuffed inboxes and calls from unknown numbers. Scammers know this and try to leverage consumers love affair with their phone, sending text messages to elicit personal information, known as phishing. To be clear, phishing also applies to emails, but we’ll focus on text messaging for now.

Phishing is when fraudsters attempt to impersonate a legitimate business in order to trick consumers to disclose sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details. These details can then be used for nefarious reasons that can wreak financial havoc. According to the FTC, 1 in 5 people lost money in 2017 due to imposter scams.

While this situation seems daunting, there is hope. Credit unions that institutionalize messaging can help educate their members on phishing scams by creating messaging norms to help members recognize legitimate requests from their credit union. Here are 5 credit union messaging norms to adopt to avoid looking phishy.

4 Credit Union Messaging Guidelines To Follow

Educate your customer

When it comes to scammers, the best offense is a good defense. The first line of defense should be education. As a credit union, advancing the financial education of your members is a top priority.

Make them aware of common phishing scams and what kind of messages they can expect to receive from you. Promote the numbers that your members can use to text by placing them on your website, social, and written collateral so that members can become familiar with them. Encourage members to save these numbers within their contact list so they can have them handy whenever they have a question. Whether it’s a question, as simple as hours of operations to something more complex regarding their first mortgage, your members always have your number handy as a trusted, reliable source.

Systematize messaging

Text messaging is the easy, convenient way that your members are used to communicating with family and friends. The ease, acceptance, and accessibility of the messaging channel make it the prime vehicle to interact. While it might be tempting for a loan officer to use their personal cell phone to contact a member to remind them to submit required documents for their loan, that type of one-off outreach can be hard to manage and may be confusing to a member.

Quiq Messaging can help you systematize messaging. Instead of messages coming from a personal number, you can provision your existing credit union landline or create new ones, to send and receive text messages. Your members will be more trusting of a message that comes from a local number or one that they may already be familiar with and have stored in their contacts.

Don’t use a shortcode

Shortcodes are the short sequence of numbers, usually 5 or 6, that many businesses use for SMS marketing. Since shortcodes are used mostly to send bulk SMS marketing messages, some consumers are annoyed as soon as they see them since so many unsolicited messages are sent via shortcode.

We recommend using a phone number. Not only will using your credit union’s phone number present a send ID the member can quickly look up to associate with the credit union, but also allows for two-way communication. If the member receives a reminder to submit documentation for their loan but has questions about what they should send, they can respond to the reminder to ask their question and even attach the documentation right in the messaging conversation.

Provision specific numbers

Some Quiq clients have designated or provisioned specific phone numbers by department. This can add another level of trust to your communication. If, for example, your credit union assigns a particular number for loan processing your members can save the number in their contacts and know precisely which department is trying to reach them.

Members will also have the full history of their conversations with each department available for review. If a scammer tries to send your member a message claiming to be from your institution from a different number or a shortcode, this should be an immediate red flag from your consumer.

Set High Standards For Your Credit Union Messaging

Texts from banks and credit cards are commonplace nowadays. A growing number of consumers have become comfortable with the messaging channel as a place they can receive instantaneous updates from a financial institution.

Quiq Messaging can help you set a high standard for your credit union messaging that scammers will find hard to replicate. If you’re new to messaging and would like to understand how you can offer this feature to your members, let’s set up some time to talk.

See a Demo Today

Quiq Announces Three Brands on Apple Business Chat

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Lauren Winder

BOZEMAN, MT, October 17, 2018 — Today Quiq, a leading provider of business messaging software for customer communications announces that three of its retail clients, Overstock.com, Jos A. Bank, and Men’s Wearhouse are live on Apple Business Chat. Quiq is one of the early Customer Service Platforms (CSP) to support Business Chat, a new way for customers to communicate directly with businesses using the Messages app on iPhones and iPads.

A Customer-Centric Partnership

Quiq is excited to recognize Overstock, Jos A. Bank, and Men’s Wearhouse for leading the retail industry by using Apple Business Chat as a customer experience differentiator. Apple Business Chat makes it easy for consumers to initiate a conversation with a company when searching for a business on their mobile device. Business Chat allows users to ask a question about a product or service, schedule deliveries or appointments, or make a purchase using Apple Pay.

“Overstock is continually looking for ways to use technology to help our customers have the most convenient shopping experience,” Jimmy Budnik, Vice President of Customer Care at Overstock.com. “Utilizing Apple Business Chat via Quiq helps us deliver a unique benefit to the customer journey, providing more ways for our customers to contact us and resolve any problem they may have.”

“Our top priority is to provide an amazing customer experience to shoppers. We are excited to support Apple Business Chat through the Quiq Messaging platform. Our agents easily handle multiple messaging channels, including Business Chat in Quiq’s cross channel UI,” said Melissa Porter, Vice President, Customer Relations. “Apple Business Chat enhances conversations with customers and we expect it to become the preferred customer service channel.”

The Quiq Messaging platform enables brands to connect with customers via Apple Business Chat and other popular messaging services, as well as live chat. When consumers message a business using Apple Business Chat, the Quiq Messaging platform routes their inquiries to agents to quickly answer questions, schedule an appointment, or help them make a purchase with Apple Pay. Agents are presented with unified, multi-channel workspace to easily handle consumer conversations.

“The things that make text messaging the most popular communication channel with family and friends also make it the preferred medium for customers to engage with companies,” said Mike Myer, CEO and Founder of Quiq. “Adding support for Apple Business Chat allows connected customers to engage with businesses in a way that is personal, secure, and easy. Apple Business Chat is a new channel in Quiq’s multi-channel business messaging platform, allowing agents to seamlessly interact with customers across many messaging channels.”

Quiq’s multi-channel messaging platform provides organizations a robust set of features including routing and queuing rules, service level prioritization to ensure that conversations are responded to within their expectations, and a rich management interface that includes observation, collaboration, and performance metrics. Quiq seamlessly integrates into Oracle, Salesforce, and Zendesk, as well as other internal systems through easy-to-use API’s so that agents have access to customer data during messaging conversations.

For more information on how Quiq Messaging is helping Apple Business Chat work for top brands, please visit https://quiq.com/apple-business-chat/.

About Quiq

Quiq makes it easy and convenient for customers to contact a business via messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family. In return, companies get a unified, multi-channel platform to communicate with customers. Quiq integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, and other internal systems. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

How to Measure Customer Success KPI’s

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Customer success is vital to your product or service achieving the desired goals you or your company has set. Customer success is the methodology you take to ensure that your customer’s needs are met in a manner that aligns customer, vendor, and company goals. If you are implementing your customer success correctly then you will see your pipeline activity increase and your customer metrics improve. So, the question is, how can you be sure your customer success initiatives are performing? The way you can be absolutely sure how well your company is performing and what areas are performing well is by tracking the correct metrics, gathering them, and then analyzing them. You cannot properly gather, organize, or analyze your data if you do not know which metrics to look for. That is why we wrote this article.

This article looks at which metrics are most important to track the health and vitality of your customer success initiatives. Customer success key performance indicators (KPIs) will not only speak to the health of your customer success strategy, but they will also speak to the health of your relationship with your customers.

Background

Traditionally, the disciplines that were used to measure customer success KPIs were customer service and customer support. Customer service and support have been previously been labeled as ‘cost drivers’ but now, due to advances in customer success technology, service and support are seen as potential sources of revenue generation. The shift in perspective on customer service and support is also due to the paradigm shift in the customer journey. Previously, customers have only had interactions with businesses at certain points in the funnel, but now businesses are finding it extremely valuable to interact with every stage of the customer journey.

This increased focus on the granular aspects of the customer journey has led to an increased focus on the metrics associated with customer perceived value; this is a technical way of saying businesses are now more focused on their customers and their customers’ desired outcome. Companies are making customer pain-points a higher priority than ever before, pouring company assets, time, and capital into strategies and solutions that look to address the concerns of their clients. All of this effort, focus, and investment requires an awareness of the measurements that indicate success or failure. Leaders want to know if their customer success efforts are working. In order to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns, they are analyzing key performance metrics associated with customer success.

Top 5 Customer Success KPIs

Identifying key performance indicators (KPI) for your customer success programs will allow you to track, measure, and properly analyze your customer success initiatives. Being able to properly assess your customer success campaigns is vital to ensuring their effectiveness. So, let’s jump right in.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is the metric that indicates how likely customers would be to recommend your product or service to their friends and family. A good net promoter score means that your customers are more likely to promote your brand via word-of-mouth. You generally want a score that is in the 50 or higher, with 75 being a great score (keep in mind that no company scores 100).

While there are many different ways to gather this information, the most popular way is through a survey of customers. The survey is comprised of one question. Yep, you guessed it: “How likely would you be to recommend this product or service to your friends and family?” The respondents would be asked to rate their willingness on a scale of 0 to 100, the NPS is then calculated by taking your “promoters” (those who give higher scores) and subtracting your “detractors” (those who give lower scores).

Net promoter score is important because it indicates the health of your pipeline and your brand. Just as it is cheaper to retain employees, it is also cheaper to retain customers. Your NPS is THE metric for showing how well you are treating your customers and how likely they are to promote your product or service.

2. Upselling and Cross-Selling Rate

These metrics speak to the number of sales you have made through an alternate offer. Amazon attributes over 35%of its revenue from upselling, and JetBlue used its upselling program to generate an additional $190M. Shoot for a 1-2 percent additional increase in revenuethrough upselling and cross-selling. Upselling your customers is a great way to generate more revenue, but it cannot be accomplished effectively without your customers feeling valued. Customers want to be in a relationship with companies who will meet their needs, both from a product or service fulfillment standpoint and a customer success standpoint. A customer’s willingness to pay for additional or alternative products is very indicative of how well you are doing in the customer success department.

3. Revenue Per Customer (RPC)

This straightforward, but important metric looks at the average revenue a customer brings the business over a certain period of time. In order to calculate this important data, we need to gather the total amount of revenue generated in our period of interest and divide it by the total number of customers in the same time period. Knowing your RPC is a great way to benchmark your revenue objectives and analyze your strategy. Facebookand Apple both use this metric as key portions of its investor reports, these giants both know the importance of knowing your revenue per customer metrics. Customer success initiatives can be judged on the amount of revenue per customer; whether it increases or not is a great indicator of how your customer success program is actually impacting your bottom line.

4. Rate of Returning Visitors (RVR)

RVR is a very meaningful metric for retail, travel, gaming, consumer services, or other consumer-oriented B2C industries. The rate of returning visitors calculates the number of returning visitors to your site. In order to calculate RVR, look at the number of repeat visitors to your site and divide that number by unique visitors. This metric can provide additional insight into your customer success strategies, especially as they relate to your content and user experience. Customers that like the onsite experience and can easily navigate to resources will return again and again. If your RVR is low, you may want to consider options to increase the overall experience of your site.

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

There is perhaps no other metric more important for customer service accountability than customer effort score. CES refers to the amount of work a customer had to go through in order to accomplish a certain task, like return an item, upgrade their subscription, or any other task that can be accomplished on the client side of your business model. This metric is measured through surveys, where customers are asked “How much effort did you have to put in to make a purchase?” The answers are then scored on a scale of 1 to 7, or 1 to 5, with one being low effort and higher scores indicating higher effort. CES is a great way of examining any barriers or pain points in the customer journey. Once pain points have been identified by CES, it is up to you and your team to fix them.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, there are many different metrics that can be tracked and analyzed in order to gain a more granular perspective on different aspects of your customer success strategy and execution. The above KPIs should be viewed as a foundational starting point for gauging the health of your customer success program and for a way to gain insights into areas of your business that can be augmented with additional customer success solutions. If you should want more information on how to gain an even deeper, more impactful look at your customer success programs, you can reach us here.

What is Digital Customer Service and How to Improve It

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

In today’s climate, customer service is an essential part of any business. With so many choices and resources at a buyer’s fingertips, companies must continue to invest in their customer service infrastructure in order to get ahead of the competition. That’s where digital customer service comes in. If you’re asking, “what is digital customer service?” then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will define digital customer service, provide some examples, and discuss ways you can improve your own customer service across the digital channels your customers care about. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Definition

The most basic definition of digital customer service is the practice of meeting customers’ needs across digital channels and platforms. Customer service can take place across multiple digital channels, such as live chat, SMS/text, or Apple Business Chat. The popularity of direct messaging with brands on social channels like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Twitter have also opened up new ways for consumers to engage with companies.

The channels that are best for your business will depend on your customer’s preferences. For some businesses, offering live chat on the company’s website may be the best way to serve your customer, while others may find consumers reaching out to them on social media. The biggest benefit of digital customer service is deflecting phone calls to lower cost digital channels. Reducing customer wait times and automating part or all of a conversation resulting in higher agent productivity are huge benefits that Quiq’s clients have realized in addition to higher customer satisfaction scores

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at a few examples of digital customer service channels and dig a little deeper into the benefits they provide.

Digital Customer Service Channels

Business Text Messaging

One of the most popular channels for digital customer service is business text messaging. SMS text messaging has grown exponentially in terms of popularity and use due to the fact that 66% of consumers prefer text messages over calls.

Consumers use their cell phones for everything from banking to shopping. Business text messaging gives customers resolution in 25% less time than a phone call or an email. From an operational standpoint, messaging is a real boost to agent productivity, With asynchronous messaging, agents can handle multiple simultaneous conversations.

This is accomplished largely through the automation of routine tasks that were once handled with expensive manual labor. Make sure you are automating every routine task in your customer service pipeline. This will free up labor hours to work for you in another, more profitable area. When digital customer service is done right, it saves you and your customer both time and money.

The ability to engage with a brand over social media has become a foregone conclusion for most consumers. It shouldn’t come as a shock that people expect to see the brands they trust on these apps since they spend so much time interacting with others. For example, Facebook Messenger has over 1.3 billion monthly users and Twitter has 145 million daily users

It’s also not a shock that companies have responded by meeting their customers where they already are.There are 60 million active business pages on Facebook and 92% of companies tweet more than once a day. That’s a lot of activity and companies have seized the opportunity to engage with their consumers.

Live Chat

Using your website as a portal for customer service issues is a great way to make use of the digital infrastructure you already have in place. You can efficiently meet customers’ needs by being exactly where they expect you to be, waiting to talk with them about their needs or concerns. While this feature used to be a high-priced upgrade, it is now considered an essential part of a web presence by 44% of online consumers.

If a customer is browsing your site and has a question, it is much easier for them to click on a chat bubble than to call your contact center With messaging you can offer customer service without having to interrupt their experienceAs with SMS or social chat, customer service agents can handle multiple conversations.

Now that we’ve looked at a few examples of digital customer service, let’s talk about what you can do to improve customer service channels. Since everyone’s business, market conditions, goals, and budget are different, the best way to approach the improvement of your digital customer service channels is to ask yourself a few questions:

Are you accessible…enough?

When you look across the channels that are available to your customers do you see lengthy queues or spikes in abandonment rates in any channel or during certain times of the day? These are definitely signs that your customers aren’t reaching you on their terms. There may be others you should keep an eye out for but Quiq clients have found long wait times and abandonment rates are the tell tale signs that they aren’t being accessible enough.

Many of Quiq’s clients have implemented messaging to reduce wait times and help customers after normal business hours. Messaging, along with features like routing rules, suggested replies, and bots have helped Quiq’s clients manage conversations with the efficiency their customers need.

Do you know what options are available to you?

Have you done your research on the latest digital channels? Offering SMS/Text, live chat, and social media channels are the basic channels that your customers expect. Are you familiar with verified SMS, Apple Business Chat, and Google’s Business Messages?

These messaging channels are some of the latest developments that help brands present customers with trusted, secure channels to get pre-sales support or post sales service. For example, Apple Business Chat and Google’s Business Messages are rich communication services (RCS) that can expedite appointment scheduling and shopping. These messaging channels even enables customers to complete transactions without ever leaving their conversation.

Are you keeping it simple?

By encouraging you to keep things simple, we’re not advocating for you to rely on traditional channels like email and phone calls. Quite the opposite actually. We’ve seen companies simplify engagement by adding digital channels. Adding digital channels or implementing more advanced features like chat bots are not as complex as you may think and makes initiating and managing conversations simple for both your agents and your customers.

Quiq’s messaging platform has an intuitive agent desktop that makes it easy for agents to manage multiple, simultaneous conversations across all of our supported channels. Your customers get the freedom to choose their preferred channel to engage with your company while agents have the technology they need to deliver great service.

Final Thoughts

As you begin to investigate your digital customer service strategies and methodologies, remember that the fundamentals of customer service have not changed. People still want to be treated fairly, with respect, and in a professional manner — they just want to get that treatment when and where they want it. As you look to vendors to help you accomplish your customer service goals, look for those can provide all of the things your customers are looking for in a manner that is seamless, fast, and integrated.

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10 Omni-channel Customer Service Best Practices You Can Count On

Posted on February 4, 2019November 15, 2024 The Quiq Team

Today’s purchaser has evolved to a savvy, well-researched shopper who is quite comfortable online. With the prevalence of personalized options and experiences across the wide range e-commerce sites, your buyers are not only used to a personalized experience — they expect it. Therefore, it stands to reason that your website must be able to live up to the expectations of your customers. That means you need to offer up a seamless customer service experience that is both customer-centric and intuitive. You must create a customer service infrastructure that can take into every channel because you never know which channel your sales will come from.

This means developing an omni-channel customer service experience that you can count on. That’s why we made this list of 10 omni-channel customer service best practices. Use these best practices to increase the performance of your customer service platforms and continue to meet the expectations of your customers.

10 Omni-channel Customer Service Best Practices

1. Make the Digital Experience More Appealing

Shoppers today expect their experience on your website to be just as appealing, if not more appealing, than their experience in-store. That means your website needs to be simple, easy to navigate, and overall pleasant to look at. It has also has to be able to handle a wide array of support capabilities that the customer cannot see. In order to pull this off, you really need to understand who your target customers are and then create product descriptions and visualizations that appeal to your target customer’s point of view. Among other things, you will also need to enhance your onsite navigation with features like site search and an automated chat feature that assist your visitors in real-time. Providing a great user experience will alleviate many customer service pain points, freeing up time, resources, and energy that can be directed at more complex issues.

2. Provide a Self-Service Section

Another way to augment your customer service strategy is to let your customers find the information they need, without using your customer service agents. Empowering your customers is a great way to save time and resources, while also serving the customers needs. Set up a self-service section that your customers can access. This area will include a multitude of digital assets that your customers can reference including product images, PDFs, white papers, operator manuals, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and answers, instructional videos, or anything that is specific to your business you feel would be a great resource for your customers.

3. Share Information Across Departments

One of the hallmarks of a great customer service program is the ability to enable your sales team to perform better. The best way to create an organization where the customer service department is an asset to the sales department is by installing a framework that allows for the timely transfer of information across departments. Customer service portals, agents and chat windows, are filled with customer insights that you or your sales team can use to better plan and message your value proposition to potential customers. All of that purchase history, search terms, and website analytics needs to be shared across departments so that it can support the omni-channel experience.

4. Have a Responsive Web Design

This is a fundamental and extremely critical aspect of customer service. Responsive design allows your customers to access your website in any format, whether it be a tablet, cell phone, or desktop computer. Mobile usage surpassed desktop usage over 2 years ago and shoppers are researching and making purchases on their phones more than ever.

Allowing for responsive design will not only make it easier for customers to get in contact with you, as well as allow customers to do whatever they need to on their mobile device. This is more convenient for your customers and will result in a great experience that keeps them returning.

5. Know Your Buyer

Just like your product or service catalog is set up with messaging that is directed at your target buyer, so too must your customer service strategy be positioned in a way that speaks to your target buyer. Millennials are now the largest generation in the US workforce and are handy with every type of digital resource. Not only that, the new generations have the power of customer reviews at their fingertips. Before the dawn of review sites, businesses were solely in control of their brand image. In the modern market, new buyers have the power of social media and review networks.
Millennials have high expectations. They demand great mobile experiences and expect to be able to access the information they need whenever they want. If their expectations are not met, they will let the world know about it. This should underline the importance of providing a stellar omni-channel customer service experience that speaks directly to these influencers.

6. Centralize Internal Information

This best practice goes hand-in-hand with number 3 (share information across departments). No matter what business model you operate under, maintaining and organizing every single source of information related to your business in a single location allows customer service employees to know where they can find the “truth” their customers are after. No matter which channel your customers choose to reach you through, your customer service representatives will be able to access the central hub of information for any of the resources they need to resolve the issue. A centralized hub for your internal information will ensure the consistency of the answers and information that is being put out to customers, whether from a person, automated chatbot, or another messaging system.

7. Create a Highly Adaptive Environment

The nature of the modern technological environment all but guarantees that there will be advances in technology, shifts in customer perception, and market factors that demand flexibility. When you are designing your customer service infrastructure, make sure that you create it in a way that allows for additional adaptability and flexibility. If you make your structure to rigid, you will find it difficult to adapt to future trends, technology, or market conditions. Make sure you use technology that is easy to implement and can be configured easily to ensure a smooth transition into the future.

8. Facilitate a Real-Time Environment

Customers are trying to get their problems solved quickly. In fact, per CCW Digital’s recent customer experience study, 70% of customers demand resolutions on the first contact. Making your customer service an omni-channel environment that supports real-time conversations is, without a doubt, one of the best features you can incorporate.

When a customer wants help, its imperative you interact and solve their issues before they find another company who will. With technology like text messaging, web chat, and social messaging, you can have your customer service agents solving your customers’ problems as soon as you become aware of them, increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in the process.

9. Prepare for the Next Generation

Preparing for the next wave of customers is paramount to your business’ future success. A streamlined self-service capability is a great way to do just that. Setting up your customer service strategy to let customers handle any account specific issues like updating permissions, address changes, and other administrative duties themselves is a great way to ensure that the next generation can solve their problems quickly and easily.

10. Use a Data-Driven Approach

Off all the best practices, this is perhaps the hardest yet most valuable best practice you can implement. Think about it from a strategic perspective for a second: data should be influencing your decisions across the wide spectrum of your business. Data is what supports your decision to market towards a certain customer segment, its what directs your attention to growth opportunities — it should be no different for your customer service strategy. Allowing data to guide your approach means that you prioritize the gathering, storing, and analysis of data. Throughout your customer service platform channels, make sure you that you are using the appropriate solutions. Are you using the right solution? You are if it meets customer needs AND provides quantitative feedback.

How do you know if your customers are abandoning the customer service pipeline if you are not tracking the abandonment rate? That is challenge businesses face: how do we collect data from multiple channels and organize it in a manner that we can act on? The first step is to make sure your solutions are able to provide you the data you need to take actionable steps on reporting metrics.

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Increase Conversion Rates With These 7 Business Messaging Tips

Posted on October 22, 2018November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

While conversion rates are more traditionally tied to eCommerce sites, it’s a metric that every company cares about. A conversion can mean different things for different companies. Websites can measure conversions by the number of visits, form fills, subscriptions or, more commonly the number of sales made. The goal you’re measuring can be a macro goal, like requesting a demo or it could be a micro-conversion such as watching a video. No matter what the conversion is, there’s always one universal thread that binds them all together. Everyone wants more of them.

Your conversion rate is a direct reflection of the number of visitors that find value when they visit your website. For the purpose of this article, we’ll think about a conversion as any action that leads to revenue generation such as a cart checkout or an appointment confirmed. In this article, we’ll share a few customer messaging tips to help you increase your online conversion rate.

Text Messaging Increases Conversions

Driving traffic to your site is only part of the conversion equation. Once you get traffic there, that user will either bounce from your site or engage in some way. Messaging may not be an obvious way to get more conversions, but it’s proven to be an effective one. Again, we’re seeking to move a site visitor to complete a transaction. There may be some barriers you have to remove for that visitor before they complete the transaction, such as finding the right solution on your site or answering questions about security. Messaging is the vehicle to help you do that.

The average conversion rate across for online retailer is just about 2%. While that may seem shockingly low to some, achieving that number takes some serious effort. Optimizing your site with compelling copy, clear call to actions and easy, logical navigation are critical to hit even the average number of conversions. It’s not unrealistic to achieve conversion rates higher than 2%, but you need to employ ways to get your site visitors engaged with your brand.

Quiq clients have realized an increase in conversions when they’ve implemented messaging. Retail clients, like The Laundress for example, use messaging to provide customers with personalized help to find and purchase the right products. Messaging has allowed their agents to provide the same kind of white-glove service to online customers that visitors to the retailer’s trendy SoHo location have come to expect.

At Quiq, we believe any customer should be able to reach any business via messaging. Why? Because interacting via messaging is the fastest and most convenient way to do business. We’ve also found that messaging encourages customers to re-engage with your brand.

Whether you already have messaging available on your site or are considering opening this up as a channel for your customers, there are a few critical things to keep in mind to make the experience truly beneficial for you and your website visitor. Follow these 7 customer messaging tips to increase conversion rates.

7 Customer Messaging Tips to Increase Conversions

1. Make live chat available right on the homepage

On a sales floor, you don’t let customers suffer in silence. At a trade show, you wouldn’t let prospects just wander aimlessly around the booth. It shouldn’t be hard for customers to reach you on your website. Put out the welcome mat and let customers know that you’re available to answer questions right away.

There are a few asynchronous ways your customers can contact you that sit under the Messaging umbrella. Live chat, SMS, MMS, rich messaging, and social platforms like Twitter and Facebook all present opportunities for you to connect, engage, and convert. All of these channels can be easily managed with the Quiq platform.

2. Make text messaging just as easy

If you’ve ever tried live chat on a mobile phone you know that the experience is less than ideal. Considering the number of purchase decisions that begin with and end with search on a mobile phone, it would be wise to make sure your mobile experience rival that of your desktop experience.

While chat may be the answer for desktop customer messaging, it can be clumsy and cumbersome on a mobile device. Instead, enable a “Text Us” option on your mobile optimized site so that your customer can communicate via their native messaging app. Most traditional chat experiences require both agent and customer to maintain a constant presence on chat, otherwise the chat “times out” and closes itself automatically. Because Quiq’s chat and messaging channels are all asynchronous, the conversation is never closed and it never ends. This allows your customer to send and respond to messages when it’s convenient for them.

3. Use inviting imagery

Since we’re visual creatures by nature, the use of well lit, clear images will keep customers engaged in the conversation and provide more context around the conversation. For retailers, this could be just the right enticement for customers to explore more product lines.

Modern messaging apps allow sharing of hi-res images, videos, links, PDFs, and gifs. Include attractive images of products, videos of client testimonies, or even fun emojis depending on the conversation to add that personal touch.

4. Add an element of interactivity

No one likes a one-sided conversation where one side is talking and the other side may, or may not, be listening. People and your customers want to be heard. It is critical to ensure there are open, two-way channels to support this requirement. Some communication channels, like email may feel like you were “talking at” your customers, modern messaging apps, like Apple Business Chat and Google RCS helps you “talk with” your customers.

These messaging platforms, allow consumers to easily interact with rich cards. Now consumers can choose from a list of available times to schedule an appointment or select the color of an item from a list products – all within a messaging conversation with just a few taps.

5. Give an approximate time for a reply

Every channel has certain expectations that come with it. The same goes with messaging. Customers expect ease, convenience and timeliness. If a successful promo or other event spikes your wait times on the messaging channel, let your customers know how long they can expect to wait.

Couple their approximate wait time with a message such as “Our wait times are longer than expected due to our successful winter sale”. This seemingly small tweak not only notifies your customers how long they may wait, but also provides some social proof that affirms your brand. As we’ve come to understand, social proof, like referrals or online reviews can help online conversions.

6. Provide multiple options for communication

Contact center leadership may cringe at the thought of having to manage multiple contact points simultaneously. Omni-channel communications can sound daunting but Quiq Messaging makes it manageable.

You never know where a prospective buyer may see you. An intriguing Tweet, an irresistible photo on Facebook, or a search on Siri could prompt a prospect to reach out to you. With Quiq, you can easily manage every conversation that comes in via text, live chat, app, social profiles, or searches on Google and Apple.

7. Have a real person available to assist with questions

Consumers are turning to messaging because they’ve exhausted their patience on FAQ pages and with email, and they simply don’t want to call for help just to wade through a confusing IVR system to talk to a live agent. They want answers, and they want them now.

Quiq clients have found success in using technology such as chatbots to gather information prior to handing the conversation over to a live agent. The main objective is supporting the agent with enough information to help your customer faster. Use automation to enhance the human touch, not replace it.

Increasing conversion rates, no matter what that may mean for your site is about getting visitors engaged. While messaging have proven over and over again to be the friction-free way for customers to get post-sales service, we’re seeing more evidence everyday that proves it is also providing the pre-sales support that increases conversions. Ready to join the growing list of Quiq clients who are realizing a boost in their conversion rates? Request to see a short demo today.

Creditunions.com: 7 Strategies to Support Self-Service

Posted on September 24, 2018November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

Loan processing velocity, abandonment reduction and expired application rescues; collection prompts including repayment and delinquency; and contact center enhancement are areas text messaging helps credit unions spur member activity and interaction.

Think Quiq!

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Pier 1 Cozies Up To Effortless Customer Engagement

Posted on August 29, 2018November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

Retailer Pier 1 Imports, has been around for 56 years and knows a thing or two about evolving within a competitive retail market. The importer of home goods and seasonal products also knows about catering to the changing and diverse tastes of their customers.

Shifting Buyer Behavior

Pier 1, as well as all other retailers, are experiencing growth in mobile shopping and purchasing as customers continue to look for ways to buy that are more convenient for them. The company made it a top priority to make their customer experience “easy and effortless”, so that she could shop when, where, and however she liked. The retailer launched its eCommerce channel in July of 2012 and has seen rapid growth in the online sales.

“As the business model became more complex, we realized that a lot of our systems were outdated legacy systems and we needed to upgrade our technology to make our associates more efficient.”

Laurie Simpter, Senior Manager, Customer Relations, Pier 1 Imports

During the first three years after implementing their eCommerce site, their contact center struggled to keep up with the new volume.

Pier 1 decided to implement Quiq’s messaging software as consumer traffic to the pier1.com site continued to grow. The shift to more digital channels proved to be, once again, an evolution to serve their customers better that allowed the company to have a more efficient conversation with their customer.

Motivated by Mobile

The leadership team recognized that email and phone weren’t the most effective or preferred ways for customers to ask questions. It was also suspected that the inability to quickly answer these simple questions in-line negatively impacted website conversions and sales.

Many retailers are experiencing similar issues with email and phone as consumers’ contact preferences have changed. Research shows that 66% of consumers rank mobile messaging as their first or second choice to contact a company.

The company started with chat as a contact channel. The channel was readily accepted, and volume grew rapidly while positively impacting website conversion.

With the effectiveness of chat and an increase in mobile traffic to the website, Pier 1 looked at SMS/text messaging for their mobile site as the next obvious channel. While the retailer normally targets the 35 – 55 age group, they realized that their customer could be any age and that a younger buyer generally uses SMS and text messaging as their preferred channel over phone and email.

Q: What made you look at SMS as a contact channel?

A: SMS combines the efficiency of chat with the convenience of email – which is not an immediate response channel.

The ability to easily share pictures was another customer-driven requirement. Whether it’s a space they are trying to decorate, an item they are trying to match, or a damaged product they received, the ability for customers to easily share photos and videos from their mobile device directly supports the “effortless experience” Pier 1 seeks to deliver.

Implementing with Efficiency

Prior to launching the eCommerce channel, the contact center had about 25 agents and supported 2 contact channels – phone and email. Contacts were heavily skewed towards supporting stores. The company used a legacy CRM and had over 25 siloed systems & applications that contact center agents accessed for data.

The company has integrated many of their siloed systems into just a handful, and grown its contact center to over 150 agents with over 85% of

the contact center conversations driven by website and eCommerce purchases. The company also invested in a new CRM solution. Streamlining and efficiency have been top priority over the past few years. The addition of the messaging channel had to complement the company’s efforts.

Quiq Messaging did not disappoint. Once Pier 1 decided to add SMS as a channel, implementation took about 2 weeks and went live in December 2017. In fact, Chris Thompson, CX Manager at Pier 1 feels it was “one of the easiest implementations we have ever done.” Quiq’s messaging platform also seamlessly integrates into Pier 1’s new CRM system, right inside the agent UI, both ensuring the messaging channel wasn’t siloed and that the agents could easily handle inquiries from multiple channels from one interface.

“Every company wants efficiency. For us, chat and SMS interactions take about half of the total time of a phone call. We are gaining payroll efficiency by shifting contacts away from phone and email to chat and SMS.”

Chris Thompson, Pier 1 Imports

Lessons Learned

Pier 1 learned 2 really important lessons about the SMS channel, right from the start:

1. Phone and email decreased; chat and SMS increased

2. Customers LOVED the convenience of directly messaging Pier 1

The retailer saw a measurable channel shift. Customers shifted away from phone and email to chat and SMS.

Q: How have customers responded to the SMS channel?

A: Our customers loved the convenience of SMS. Within the first 30 minutes of going live, one of our customers said, “Wow, I had no idea that Pier 1 had a texting option and it was so easy. I am using this from now on. Thank You!”

What’s Next

Pier 1 feels that they’ve reached a state of proficiency with SMS, and seeks to expand its presence in their short and long-term roadmap. For the short term, Pier 1 will add a ‘Text Us’ option within the phone channel (IVR) for when hold times reach a pre-determined threshold. They will also be limiting phone hours with an IVR message encouraging customers to reach out to the company through text messaging.

With the continued focus to create an effortless experience for their customer, Pier 1 plans to add a messaging option to social media channels, while expanding messaging options to the desktop and tablet website instances.

Customer Spotlight: Aura Building Trust with Lines of Credit and Communication

Posted on August 7, 2018November 15, 2024 Mike Zinne

To Aura, being customer-obsessed means placing trust at the center of the relationship between its customers and its services. The company was founded in 2014 with a mission to provide economic justice for Americans who have little to no credit history but need access to capital for both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances.

Now its white label lending platform, Lendify, which was recently distinguished by the U.S. Treasury Department as one of the few for-profits with CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) certification, can be found at seven hundred locations across four states. If not for Aura, hundreds of thousands of borrowers would not be able to access affordable and responsibly underwritten capital. Many of Lendify’s borrowers do not qualify for credit cards and are forced to resort to predatory and costly payday or auto title loans.

Trust as a Two-way Street

Aura views trust as a two-way street. Borrowers prove their trustworthiness by providing evidence of their ability to repay their loans while Aura demonstrates trust by opening up free, ubiquitous access to loan repayment locations, offering transparency of its loan terms in easy-to-understand language, providing credit education together with a free credit score, honoring consumer protections at the core of its policies – like reporting on-time repayment to the credit bureaus – so that each and every borrower is set-up for success at repayment. That’s why Aura looked to Quiq to open the text messaging channel – the trusted, preferred, and convenient way to engage with their target audience.

Aura’s retail network business model is strategically designed to meet customers where they already engage in financial services – at the grocery store, money transfer businesses, and now, on their mobile devices. When the company implemented text messaging in 2017, it had a vision of reaching and engaging prospects and customers more effectively. The text messaging channel has allowed Aura to provide personalized communication through a channel that customers feel comfortable using, and on their own time. In addition to opening up a new channel to drive growth and deepen relationships, Quiq Messaging has helped Aura’s borrowers stay on track with on-time payments by providing an easy solution to payment reminders.

“We want to provide our customers with a seamless application and borrowing experience on the channel that is most preferred to them.”

David Schwartz – Senior Manager, Operations Strategy and Workforce Management, Aura

Before implementing Quiq Messaging, Aura engaged mainly by voice, verifying applications over the phone, so they knew their customer base used their mobile device. Outreach efforts were not as effective over the phone and many voicemails left by agents weren’t being returned. Using SMS messaging was a new concept, but it gave customers a way to engage without feeling invaded, especially if expecting a tough conversation.

Aura viewed engagement with customers as key to helping borrowers improve their financial health by making sure their loans remained in good standing. Aura used collections as their pilot program with Quiq, using outbound text messaging to help customers get their loan payments back on track. Collection agents love using the SMS messaging channel because they are connecting more than ever before and the more people they reach, the more effective they are.

The company has been happy to see that borrowers like to engage via SMS/text messaging even if it is for collections. In fact, Aura has seen more engagements than anticipated. Aura is also happy that many customers are proactive and come to them to look for guidance by texting questions like “When’s my next payment?” or “What do I need to do to get my loan into good standing?”.

What’s Next

The company plans to continue growing and using text messaging to support its commitment to make life better for their customers. Aura will soon be launching a financial health platform to help prospects, borrowers and those who are declined deepen their knowledge of personal finance in support of a more financially healthy future.

Aura is also looking for new ways to bring the messaging channel into their customers’ journey, with an eye towards the loan application process. The company anticipates the application process will be similar to collections in that an Aura agent will walk through loan applications via text messaging to make sure potential borrowers know what the qualifications are and what paperwork is required.

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family. With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Try it out yourself today with a free demo!

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Apple Business Chat for customer service will be a lot easier with the latest addition of Quiq as a Customer Service Platform.

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Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, keynote speaker and New York Times and Wall Street Journal, bestselling author. Recently, Shep shared why he thinks some brands have decoded how to connect with their customers. Read the Forbes article to hear Shep Hyken’s recommendation on using messaging to increase customer satisfaction.

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3 Ways Outbound Text Message Marketing Can Generate New Revenue

Posted on June 27, 2018November 15, 2024 Max Fortis

Looking for ways your business can bring in more revenue? The answer may be right under your nose, or at least under your thumbs. The messaging channel, and specifically SMS or text messaging is the hot new communication channel for many companies, and it is one of the most important channels businesses should be focused on. We talk a lot about how companies can use messaging to provide better and more convenient customer service, but what about how messaging can generate new revenue?

Sure, a company could always decide to raise prices to generate new revenue, but there are other ways to skin that top-line cat. At the heart of any new revenue generating strategy is acquiring new customers, or having existing customers spend more and/or more frequently. In this article, we’ll take a look at how text message marketing can generate new revenue by influencing these three levers.

What are the Advantages of SMS Marketing?

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about outbound messaging these days. That’s because outbound SMS messaging is different than other channels for several reasons. By far, the most obvious reason is that smartphones have become ubiquitous. Everyone has a mobile device within reach, almost 24/7, and people primarily use their smartphones for texting. The pervasiveness of mobile technology makes it easy to see why text messaging would be the ideal means to engage with customers.

The second reason is consumers still view the messaging channel as a pure, noise-free way of communicating with friends, family, and even the brands they know and trust. This is evidenced by the incredibly high open rates for SMS (96%) and subsequent response rates (35%) of text messages.

The third reason, and this is probably the most important of them all, is that text messaging fits into the digital-first lifestyle of connected customers. Consumers have to be pulled away from their busy lives to engage with companies via phone or email. With text messaging, the consumer is in control of the pace of the conversation.

Turns out, giving that control back to consumers isn’t a bad thing. In fact, here are three instances when giving control of the conversation back to the consumer encourages them to let their guard down and can even build trust.

Getting New Customers

Conversations about mobile marketing will usually conjure images of mass text messages sent to unsuspecting recipients. When we say get new customers, we don’t recommend sending bulk text messages to people who haven’t opted-in to your brand’s communications. There are many examples of Text-2-Join, Text-4-Info, Text-2-Win campaigns, and the like, that have gone sideways. Some consumers actually consider this type of outbound messaging too invasive and will not hesitate to respond with a “STOP” command, severing mobile messaging ties with the company.

When we talk about using business sms messaging to expand the customer base, we’re talking about using messaging as a way to be accessible to your prospective customers, who have opted-in to receive your communications. Influence their decision to buy by being a convenient, timely and trustworthy source of information. A text message to a consumer who may still be in the research phase of their purchase can serve as a welcome mat to ask the questions or receive the information that will get them to a “ready to buy” phase.

At Quiq, we believe companies that are present at the consumers’ moment of need, are the ones that are invited into a deeper relationship with those consumers. One of those critical moments may be right before they actually purchase and when they need guidance on your products or services. Take the pressure off of consumers to engage with you on your timeframe by leveraging the messaging channel. Invite your prospective buyers to engage with you during the pre-sales process to set your brand up as a helpful, accessible advisor.

Encouraging Customers to Spend More

You’ve earned the right to call them customers, well, Bob’s your uncle. If they are happy with you, then it should be easy to get them to buy more, right? The problem is, you have to cut through so much noise and clutter to get their attention time and time again. Until now. With today’s technology and Quiq, companies can actually engage with customers on the channel that is most preferred to them.

Remember when we said text messaging is a noise free channel and that text messages have a 96% open rate? Well, we should add that most text messages are read within 3 minutes of receipt with a response rate anywhere from 32% to 45%. Now, you can send a call to action where people actually take action.

With messaging, you can take advantage of cross-selling and encourage customers to purchase complementary products or services. You could make larger sales by bundling products or services or encourage customers to buy a new product or service you offer. The real magic lies in the fact that now, these messages aren’t lost in their inbox, like email.

Influence Customers to Spend More Frequently

Given everything that was stated above, the ability to increase repeat business may be an obvious outcome of using outbound SMS to get in front of your customers. But it deserves repeating in this context.

Even if you entice a customer to make a larger purchase once, it doesn’t mean they’ll be back. Mobilizing existing customers to come back may be the key to generating new revenue since returning customers spend 67% more than new customers.

Many a promotion has fallen on deaf ears because it was lost in a stream of emailed offers or thrown away with a stack of direct mail and weekly flyers. Consumers trust that the messages they opted-in to receive from brands are filled with information that can add some value to their busy lives. With Quiq’s outbound SMS, you can create timely and targeted offers and promotions that are viewed as valued communications, and thus, get attention.

Implementing Effective Text Message Marketing Campaigns

Text message marketing is most effective when it’s utilized as part of a greater cross-channel messaging approach. When you give customers the choice to interact with your brand through their preferred messaging channel, they’re more likely to stay engaged with you. Although SMS has the greatest potential reach of any messaging channel (practically everyone can receive and send a text), some customers may prefer to chat over Facebook Messenger or a similar channel. How do you determine which channel is a customer’s favorite? Give them a choice to reach out to you from a range of channels and see which one they pick.

One of the most effective messaging campaign strategies that has emerged recently is the use of questions and polls. Asking for consumer feedback empowers those that want to have their voice heard and shows customers that you care about what they have to say. The brilliance of this strategy lies in the fact that it is not salesy at all, and yet it can build loyalty and drive conversions. Once a consumer has shared some feedback, your business is free to make suggestions of goods and services that could fit their needs.

Realize the Advantages of SMS Marketing

As you can see, the advantages of SMS marketing are very real. Messaging makes it easy for customers to get in touch whenever they need you and you can help them, all in one conversation. Messaging makes it easy to have real interactions with your customers while answering their questions. Helping them at their time of need, learn more about your products and link them straight to the information they’re looking for. Quiq clients use messaging for meaningful engagement with customers across their entire journey. Our clients seamlessly and consistently communicate with customers across mobile, social and web to improve customer relationships.

Discover the true potential of cross-channel messaging for your business by trying out a Quiq Demo today.

Featured Resource

Forrester Report

Featured Resource

Forrester Report

Getting Started With Messaging

Messaging Adoption

What’s Next

Improve Average Handle Time with ‘Work Time’

How much time are agents spending on customer interactions?

Why is Work Time important?

How Work Time is measured

How to use the Work Time Metric

Measure the productivity of your digital engagement

Effortless, Connected, and Proactive Customer Experiences

23 Reasons Everyone Loves Customer Texting

More Benefits of Texting for Customer Service

Customer Texting: The Way Forward

Reach Members Easier With Messaging

What Is Phishing?

4 Credit Union Messaging Guidelines To Follow

Set High Standards For Your Credit Union Messaging

A Customer-Centric Partnership

About Quiq

Background

Top 5 Customer Success KPIs

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

2. Upselling and Cross-Selling Rate

3. Revenue Per Customer (RPC)

4. Rate of Returning Visitors (RVR)

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Final Thoughts

Definition

Digital Customer Service Channels

Business Text Messaging

Live Chat

Are you accessible…enough?

Do you know what options are available to you?

Are you keeping it simple?

Final Thoughts

10 Omni-channel Customer Service Best Practices

Text Messaging Increases Conversions

7 Customer Messaging Tips to Increase Conversions

Shifting Buyer Behavior

Motivated by Mobile

Implementing with Efficiency

Lessons Learned

What’s Next

Trust as a Two-way Street

What’s Next

What are the Advantages of SMS Marketing?

Implementing Effective Text Message Marketing Campaigns

Realize the Advantages of SMS Marketing