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How to Text Message Your Customers

Posted on The Quiq Team

We know consumers are shopping online more often than ever before and using mobile phones to do it. When Americans were surveyed in 2019, it was estimated that approximately all of them (96%) own a cell phone, and three-quarters (76%) use it to make purchases.

Though we’ve come to take this state of affairs for granted, the adoption and growth of cell phones in such a short time is astonishing. Smartphones followed soon after, and with that, consumers began communicating more than ever through text messaging and via social channels like Facebook. It wasn’t long before businesses started taking advantage of those communication preferences.

If your company isn’t seizing the opportunity represented by texting customers, you’re missing out. When you send a text message to customers, it can be personalized, easy, and fast, making this method the way consumers expect to be able to find answers and ask questions.

In what follows, we’ll flesh out and defend this claim, providing tips for texting customers effectively along the way. Let’s get going!

What is Business Texting for Customer Service?

Not so long ago, phone support, email, and web chat were the norm in how businesses and customers communicated. But these channels have largely given way to text messaging, which is why more and more businesses have made texting customers one of the pillars of their customer outreach strategy.

The reason behind this shift is straightforward: messaging is already the preferred method of communication for customers and most employees. Both parties are already comfortable with the channel because they frequently use it themselves, and unlike emails, text messages are almost always read and replied to.

There are, in other words, plenty of reasons why customers want to text you. Texting provides options, fits more seamlessly into our increasingly busy lives, is naturally less formal than a phone call or email, and can be handled asynchronously. What’s more, with today’s new large language models, personalization can now be done at scale, and an AI assistant is always available, day or night.

Is SMS or Rich Messaging Better for Texting Customers?

One small nuance that’s worth addressing is the differences between old-fashioned short message service (SMS) and rich messaging. When text messaging was first introduced, it was done with SMS. As its name implies, this approach was limited to sending relatively short messages consisting only of text.

As the ubiquity of smartphones grew, so did the range of messages customers wanted to send, leading to the far more expansive ‘rich’ messaging. Rich messaging supports emojis, buttons, video and audio, product cards, and more.
Rich messaging has become the de facto standard, so if you think you should be texting customers more often, you’ll probably have to do it with rich messaging.

4 Best Practices for Texting Customers

Now that we’ve explained a bit about why sending text messages to customers makes good business sense, let’s make sure you know how to do it effectively. In the next few sections, we’ll discuss some of the general best practices for texting customers.

1. Be Conversational (and Professional)

First, strive to strike a balance between being professional and being conversational. People expect texting a business to be more professional than texting a friend, of course. But we live in a relatively informal age, and text messaging gives businesses more interesting, less stuffy ways to engage with customers. Emojis, for example, add personality and make conversations livelier.

All of this is made possible through rich messaging, which we briefly discussed above. Rich messaging is what powers the interactive buttons, images, carousels, and other elements that make Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp so delightful. This fosters a superior customer experience in part because it’s just more enjoyable to consume and respond to these rich messages, but also because it helps customers get what they want faster and more easily.

As a matter of policy, it’s probably wise to identify and approve a set of emojis your contact center agents or AI assistants are allowed to use. This is a policy that must be set in the context of a brand’s voice and tone, which is critical to delivering a consistent customer experience.

Then, text messages are uniquely well-suited for two-way conversations, so make sure your text messages are set up for that. When texting, customers expect to be able to reply back. After all, a conversation is not very useful if it’s only one-sided.

2. Be Timely and Consistent

Customers will text your contact center for help with a variety of issues, so make sure you have policies and procedures in place to answer promptly. Text messaging enjoys the advantage of being asynchronous–meaning conversations can be paused and restarted by either party at will–but customers will still expect you to get back to them quickly.

To expand on this point a bit, text messaging is very convenient for customers and (in a different way) for agents. A customer can fire off a text asking about returning an item (or something similar), then drop their kids off at school, then reply to your agent, then pick up their dry-cleaning, and so on.

On your end, however, you should treat these incoming messages with the urgency you would show for any other communication channel.

Now, having said that, text messaging offers benefits to agents as well. They may need to reply quickly, but they can also juggle a number of conversations at the same time in a manner not possible with a phone call. This means more issues shipped, a reduced average handling time, and improved customer satisfaction.

3. Personalize Your Replies with Generative AI

Alright, now we turn to the big opportunity in customer experience: generative AI. If you’re like us, it was pretty much immediately obvious that LLMs like ChatGPT were going to have a profound impact on our industry, and this intuition has been borne out by the evidence. LLMs can automatically resolve many issues, especially fairly routine ones, without the need for a human agent to intervene at all.

They also excel at personalizing content to individual customers at a scale inconceivable just two years ago. Machine-based personalization isn’t new; you’ve surely noticed how Spotify and Netflix both learn what you like and offer uniquely tailored recommendations, for example.

Until generative AI, however, personalizing a text message to customers could only be done by a human being. But now, models can leverage retrieval-augmented generation to reply in customer-specific ways–by pulling content from a knowledge base or answering a question about returns by looking at purchase dates stored in a database, for instance.

4. Make It Easy to Opt-In or Out of Texts

Finally, you should make it as easy as possible for clients to choose whether they want to continue receiving text messages from you. Customers may get a lot of value from texts about promotions, order status, and appointment reminders, but they’ll get fatigued if you bombard them with excessive or unwanted messages.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to be more explicit about the differences between inbound and outbound messages here.

For outbound messages (to customers), brands need to collect explicit customer permission for each of their use cases. If a customer grants permission to receive outbound messages for order updates, that permission can’t then be used for promotions or other use cases as well.

For inbound messages (from customers), the most important thing is that customers be able to easily send a message when they’ve got a question. These will often be related to an initial outbound message, such as when an order was delivered and the customer messages to ask how to initiate a return or assemble the item. There’s no opt-in requirement in this scenario, but, as with outbound messages, you shouldn’t take that as carte blanche to send endless text messages to customers.

Ensure your messages are relevant, not spammy, and let customers control the quantity.

Final Thoughts on How to Text Message Customers

​​Conversational AI platforms for CX, like Quiq, make it easy to build better connections by texting customers. Learn more about how Quiq enables SMS here, and get started today with this powerful communication channel!

7 Reasons Why Customers Want to Text You

Posted on The Quiq Team

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

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

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

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

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

1. Customers Want Options

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

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

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

2. Your Customers are Busy. Texting is Asynchronous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Customers Want Better Experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. They Just Prefer Texting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Encourage More Customers To Use your Live Chat Service

Posted on The Quiq Team

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

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

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

Why is Live Chat Important for Contact Centers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Tips for Encouraging Customers to Use Live Chat

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

1. Make Sure People Know You have Live Chat Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodi-Customer

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

2. Minimize the Hassle of Using Live Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Personalize Your Chat

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

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

Brand-specific personalization

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

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

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

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

Customer-specific personalization

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

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

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

4. Include Privacy and Data Usage Messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Use Rich Messages

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

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

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

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

6. Separating Chat and Agent Availability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Rich Messaging? – A Guide for CX Leaders Weighing the Benefits

Posted on The Quiq Team

If by chance you haven’t heard of this new frontier in text-based customer communication, your first question is probably, “what is rich messaging?”

Well, you’re in luck! We wrote this piece specifically to get to the bottom of this subject. Here, we offer a deep dive into rich messaging, the capabilities it unlocks, and its implications for CX. By the time they’re done, CX directors will better understand why rich messaging should be central to their customer outreach strategy, and the many ways in which it can make their job easier.

What Is Rich Messaging?

Rich messaging aims to support person-to-person or business-to-person communication with upgraded, interactive messages. Senders can attach high-resolution photos, videos, audio messages, GIFs, and an array of other media to enhance the receiver’s experience while conveying a lot more information with each message.

Before going any further, we should specify that “rich messaging” refers to an umbrella of modern messaging applications, but it’s not the same as rich messaging protocols on offer. Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS), for example, is one approach to rich messaging, but it is not the same thing as rich messaging in general.

That said, you might still be wondering what is a rich communication service message, exactly? As you can guess, a rich communication service message is just a rich message sent over some appropriate protocol with all the advantages that it offers.

For a number of reasons, rich messaging applications have supplanted SMS in both personal and professional outreach. SMS messages simply do not support many staples of modern communication, such as group chats or “read” receipts. What’s more, the reach of SMS will remain limited because it requires a cellular connection, whereas rich messages can be sent over the internet.

Though SMS will probably be around for a while, rich messaging is becoming increasingly popular as companies have been trending toward greater use of applications like WhatsApp. Armed with these and similar channels, CX directors can now:

  • More easily capture new customers with compelling outreach;
  • Resolve customer issues directly via text, chat, or social media messaging (a huge advantage given how obsessed we’ve all become with our phones);
  • Interact with customers in real-time, which is a capability more and more people are looking for when seeking help;
  • Gather and act on analytics;
  • Scale their communications while simultaneously reducing the burden on contact center agents;

Given these facts, it’s no surprise that more and more CX leaders are making texting a key component of building lasting customer relationships.

Why is Expanding Communication Channels Important?

Expanding communication channels is important for the same reason the Internet and the fax machine were important; businesses must work to stay relevant, which is why they are constantly looking for the next technology to improve and expand interactions with customers and provide an edge over the competition. Let’s drill into this a little more.

As you must know, customer expectations change over time. It is startling to think that the first text message was sent nearly 30 years ago, but in that time, texting has become the default way of carrying on many different kinds of interactions. This is why it is crucial to develop communication channels that meet your customers where they are.

Modern consumers are incredibly busy, tech-savvy, and have a massive amount of information at their fingertips. They are not interested in calling a company for help unless there is absolutely no other choice, which is why they’ve been gravitating more toward text messaging for a while.

In the ongoing battle for limited customer attention, therefore, the forward-thinking CX director would be wise to put resources into this channel – along with any platforms that make that channel more fertile.

What is Rich Messaging on Different Platforms?

Now that you have more perspective on what rich messaging is and what it offers, let’s spend some time talking about which platforms you should focus on.

There are a few major providers of rich messaging, but we’ll focus on Apple and WhatsApp. Apple has long been a communication giant, but with billions of users worldwide, Facebook’s WhatsApp has certainly earned its spot at the table.

The sections below provide more details about how rich messaging works on each.

What is Rich Messaging on Apple?

Through Apple Messages for Business, contact centers can offer their customers a direct line of communication. This allows for far greater speed and convenience, to say nothing of the personalization opportunities opened up by artificial intelligence (more on this shortly).

For more information, check out our dedicated article on rich communication with Apple messages for Business.

What is Rich Messaging on WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is a widely-used application that uses rich messaging for texts, voice messages, and video calling for over two billion users worldwide. Utilizing a simple internet connection for its services, WhatsApp allows users to bypass the traditional costs associated with global communication, making it a cost-effective choice.

Given its vast user base, many international brands are adopting WhatsApp to connect with their customers. WhatsApp Business is an extension of WhatsApp, and it offers enhanced features tailored for business use.

It supports integration with tools like the Quiq conversational AI platform, which can automatically transcribe voice messages and allows for the export of these conversations for analysis using technologies like natural language processing.

For more information, check out our dedicated article on WhatsApp Business.

The Benefits of Rich Messages for Businesses

Engaging with consumers in more meaningful ways is one of the keys to driving sales and repeat purchases. Whether on Apple, WhatsApp, or another channel, rich messaging is one of the best ways of interacting with customers; it’s convenient and powerful enough to help a CX leader rise above their competition.

Below, we will get into more specifics about the advantages to be had from using rich messaging.

1. Cost-Effectiveness

It may be called “the bottom line,” but let’s face it, your budget probably ranks pretty highly on your list of priorities. Because it works over the internet, rich messaging is a great way for CX directions to connect with customers without breaking the bank.

But it can also help your organization save money by reducing customer support costs. When consumers need to talk to someone at your business, they can speak to knowledgeable agents (or a large language model trained on those agents’ output) through your rich messaging platform. You will reduce the need to provide the hardware and staffing required to run a full contact center, and you will be able to use those savings to invest in other areas of your business.

In this same vein, rich messaging makes it far easier to engage in asynchronous communications. This means agents are able to handle multiple conversations at the same time, resulting in further savings.

Finally, rich messaging is far more scalable than almost any other approach to customer outreach, especially when you effectively leverage AI. Once you’ve figured out what you want your message to be, communicating it to ten times as many people is relatively straightforward with rich messaging.

2. Real-Time Insights

When they integrate rich messaging with a platform offering excellent support for real-time analytics, companies gain access to conversation analytics that provide the insights they need to improve contact center performance.

They can generate reports on click rates and other helpful interaction metrics, for instance, giving CX leaders a feedback loop they can use to test changes and see what improves customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value.

3. Rich Messaging is Native to the Devices Customers are Already Using

You could pay for the most compelling billboard in the history of marketing, but if it’s on the moon where no one will see it, it’s not going to do you much good. For this reason, we’ve long pointed out that it’s important to meet your customers where they are – and these days, they’re on their phones.

When combined with the statistics in the following section, we think that the case for rich messaging as a central pillar in the CX director’s communications strategy is very strong.

4. Increased Engagement

When developing a customer communication strategy, it’s important to evaluate the potential engagement level of various channels. As it turns out, text messaging consistently achieves higher open and response rates compared to other methods.

The data supporting this is quite strong: in a 2018 survey, fully three-quarters of respondents indicated that they’d prefer to interact with brands through rich messages.

This high level of engagement demonstrates the significant potential of text messaging as a communication strategy. Considering that only about 25% of emails are opened and read, it becomes clear that investing in text messaging as a primary communication channel is a wise decision for effectively reaching and engaging customers.

5. The Human Touch (but with AI!)

Customers expect more personalization these days, and rich messaging gives businesses a way to customize communication with unprecedented scale and sophistication.

This customization is facilitated by machine learning, a technology at the cutting edge of automated content customization. A familiar example is Netflix, which uses algorithms to detect viewer preferences and recommend corresponding shows. Now, thanks to advancements in generative AI, this same technology is being integrated into text messaging.

Previously, language models lacked the necessary flexibility for personalized customer interactions, often sounding mechanical and inauthentic. However, today’s models have greatly enhanced agents’ abilities to adapt their conversations to fit specific contexts. While these models haven’t replaced the unique qualities of human interaction, they mark a significant improvement for CX directors aiming to improve the customer experience, keep customers loyal, and boost their lifetime value. What’s more, when used over time, these innovations will help a CX leader stand out in a crowded marketplace while making better decisions.

To make use of this, though, it helps to partner with a platform that offers this functionality out of the box.

6. Security

In addition to streamlining connections between your organization and its consumers, rich messaging may offer dependable security and peace of mind.

Trust and transparency have always been important, but with deep fakes and data breaches on the rise, they’re more crucial than ever. Some rich messaging applications, like WhatsApp, support end-to-end encryption, meaning your customers can interact with you knowing full well that their information is safe.

But, to reiterate, this is not the case for all rich messaging services, so be sure to do your own research first.

What is Rich Messaging? It’s the Future!

Businesses across every industry need to update their approach to messaging to remain relevant with consumers, but that’s especially true for CX leaders. Significant data shows that traditional customer communication channels, like phone, email, and web chat, have already fallen to the bottom of the preference list, and you need a plan in place that allows you to react to changes in customer desires.

Rich messaging is the technology that makes this possible, and it’s even more impactful when you partner with a platform like Quiq that enables personalization, analytics, and better engagement with your customers. Read more here to learn about the communication channels we support!

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9 Top Customer Service Challenges — and How to Overcome Them

Posted on The Quiq Team

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

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

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

What are The Top Customer Service Challenges?

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

  1. Understanding Customer Expectations
  2. Next Step: Exceeding Customer Expectations
  3. Dealing with Unreasonable Customer Demands
  4. Improving Your Internal Operations
  5. Not Offering a Preferred Communication Channel
  6. Not Offering Real-Time Options
  7. Handling Angry Customers
  8. Dealing With a Service Outage Crisis
  9. Retaining, Hiring, and Training Service Professionals

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

1. Understanding Customer Expectations

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

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

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

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

2. Next Step: Exceed Customer Expectations

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

Consider a few examples, such as:

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

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

3. Dealing with Unreasonable Demands

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

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

4. Improving Your Internal Operations

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

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

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

What might this look like?

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

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

5. Not Offering a Preferred Communication Channel

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

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

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

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

6. Not Offering Real-Time Options

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

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

7. Handling Angry Customers

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

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

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

  1. Empathize with them
  2. Do not lose your cool

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

8. Dealing With a Service Outage Crisis

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

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

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

9. Retaining, Hiring, and Training Service Professionals

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts on the Top Customer Service Challenges

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

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

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Building Better Customer Relationships with Text Messaging

Posted on The Quiq Team

Customer engagement is constantly evolving and the trend towards more customer-centric experiences hasn’t slowed. Businesses are increasingly having to provide faster, easier, and more friendly ways of initiating and responding to customer’s inquiries.

Businesses that adapt to this continually changing environment will ensure they deliver superior service along with desirable products, thus boosting engagement rates.

This is where customer engagement strategies based on text messaging enter the picture. This mode of communication has overtaken traditional methods, like phone and email, as consumers prefer the ease, convenience, and hassle-free nature of text messaging.

Texting isn’t just for friends and family anymore and consumers are choosing this channel more often as it fits their on-the-go lifestyle.

The move to text messaging is a part of this new era of building customer relationships, and both businesses and consumers can benefit.

The old customer engagement marketing strategies are fading

As recently as two decades ago, the world of business and customer service was a completely different place. Company agents and representatives used forms of customer engagement like trade shows, promotional emails, letters, and phone calls to promote their products and services.

While these methods are still used in a wide range of industries, many companies today are turning to new ways of maintaining customer loyalty.

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

The advantages of digital customer engagement strategies

While sending text messages to customers may be a new frontier for many companies, businesses are finding the personal, casual nature of this medium is part of what makes it so effective.

Some of the benefits that come with text-based customer service include:

Hassle-free customer service access

Consumers love instant messaging because it’s easy and allows them to engage, ask questions, and get information without having to make a phone call or meet face-to-face.

One of the hallmarks of our increasingly digital world is how hard businesses work to make things easy – think of 1-click shopping on Amazon (you don’t have to click two buttons), how smartphones enable contactless payment (you don’t have to pull your card out), the way Alexa responds to voice commands (you don’t have to click anything), and the way Netflix automatically plays the next episode of a show you’re binging (you don’t even have to move).

These expectations are becoming more ingrained in the minds of consumers, especially young ones, and they are unlikely to be enthusiastic about needing to call an agent or go into the store to resolve any problems they have.

Timely responses and service

Few things turn a customer off faster than sending an email or making a phone call, then having to wait days for a response. With text message customer service, you can stay connected 24/7 and provide timely responses and solutions. Artificial intelligence is one customer engagement technology that will make this even easier in the years ahead (more on this below).

The personal touch

Customers are more likely to stick around if they believe you care about their personal needs. Texting will allow you to take a more individualized approach, communicating with customers in the same way they might communicate with friends. This stands in contrast to the stiffer, more formal sorts of interactions that tend to happen over the phone or in person.

A dynamic variety of solutions

Text messaging provides unique opportunities for marketing, sales, and customer support. For example, you might use texting to help troubleshoot a product, promote new sales, send coupons, and more.

None of these things are impossible to do with older approaches to customer service but think of how pain-free it would be for a busy single mom to ask a question, check the reply when she stops to pick up her daughter from school, ask another question, check the new reply when she gets home, etc. This is vastly easier than finding a way to carve three hours out of the day to go into the store to speak to an agent directly.

To make these ideas easier to digest, here is a table summarizing the ground we’ve just covered:

The Old Way The New Way
Method of Delivery Phone calls, pamphlets, trade shows, face-to-face conversations Text messaging
Difficulty Requires spending time on the phone, driving to a physical location, or making an appointment. Only requires a phone and the ability to text on it.
Timeliness Can take hours or days to get a reply. Replies should be almost instantaneous.
Personalization Good agents might be able to personalize the interaction, but it’s more difficult.  Personalizing messages and meeting a customer on their own terms because natural and easy.
Variety Does offer ways of solving problems or upselling customers, but only at the cost of more effort from the agent.  Sales and customer support can be embedded seamlessly in existing conversations, and those conversations fit better into a busy modern lifestyle.

​​Why this all matters

These benefits matter because 64% of Americans would rather receive a text than a phone call. It’s clear what the consumers want, and it’s the business’s job to deliver.

Because text messaging can help you engage with customers on a more personal level, it can increase customer loyalty, lead to more conversions, and in general boost engagement rates.

What’s more, text-based customer relationships will likely be transformed by the advent of generative artificial intelligence, especially large language models (LLMs). This technology will make it so easy to offer 24/7 availability that everyone will take it for granted, to say nothing of how it can personalize replies based on customer-specific data, translate between languages, answer questions in different levels of detail, etc.

Texting already provides agents with the ability to manage multiple customers at a time, but they’ll be able to accommodate far higher volumes when they’re working alongside machines, boosting efficiency and saving huge amounts of time.

Some day soon, businesses will look back on the days when human beings had to do all of this with a sense of gratitude for how technology has streamlined the process of delivering a top-shelf customer experience.

And it is exactly this customer satisfaction that’ll allow those businesses to increase profits and make room for business growth over time.

Request a demo from Quiq today

In the future, as in the past, customer service will change with the rise of new technologies and strategies. If you don’t want to be left behind, contact Quiq today for a demo.

We not only make it easy to integrate text messaging into your broader approach to building customer relationships, we also have bleeding-edge language models that will allow you to automate substantial parts of your workflow.

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

Posted on Lauren Winder

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

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

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

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

Why do companies build apps?

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

A place for loyal customers.

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

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

Mobile device real estate.

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

Push notifications.

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

Beating out or keeping up with competitors.

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

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What are the drawbacks of using building an app?

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

Phones are overcrowded.

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

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

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

There’s a big upfront investment.

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

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

You’ll double your marketing efforts.

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

Can you deliver rich customer experiences without an app?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn More About the End of Google Business Messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should you consider business messaging over an app?

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

If you’re on the fence, consider this:

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

Engage customers with or without an app.

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

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

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

7 Ways AI Chatbots Improve Customer Service

Posted on Lauren Winder

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

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

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

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

1. Collect customer information upfront.

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

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

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

2. Decrease customer abandonment.

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

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

3. Get faster, more accurate customer responses.

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

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

4. Prioritize customer conversations.

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

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

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

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5. Get customers to the right place.

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

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

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

6. Reschedule appointments.

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

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

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

7. Collect feedback for even more improvement.

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

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

Take the Leap with Quiq.

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

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

Business Text Messaging Statistics You Need to Know

Posted on Lauren Winder

It’s 1995. A new company named eBay just launched, along with a new media format called a DVD. The average American user sends about 0.4 texts per month. Times sure have changed.

Fast forward to today.

There are a plethora of online retailers with broad product assortments to fulfill even the most specific buyer searches. DVDs are outdated and replaced with streaming and on-demand content. The average American smartphone user sends around 20 text messages a day.*

Not only do people text more frequently with family and friends, but they’re also texting with companies. SMS marketing is growing in popularity, and customers are eager for more two-way text messaging with businesses.

So is SMS marketing effective? With so much information out there, we’ve compiled the most important text message marketing statistics for you. Keep reading for a deep dive into the top stats for business text messaging.

Business text messaging is growing.

Text messaging isn’t new. We’ve been doing it for almost 30 years now. But with our emails full of junk and people more attached to their phones than ever, text messaging is emerging as a high ROI marketing tool.

Notably, smartphone use continues to rise. The number of smartphone users in the United States alone is expected to reach 301.65 million in 2022, according to Statista, and the Pew Research Center reports that 81% of the U.S. owns a smartphone. There’s no denying that people live digital-first lives.

Mobile devices have given consumers the ability to search, shop, and discover 24/7, forcing companies to reimagine the customer journey. And companies that fail to provide high-touch and high-tech experiences get left behind.

Messaging offers just that: A customer experience that fits with modern lifestyles. Customers get effortless and convenient interactions with businesses, and businesses get a cost-efficient and more meaningful way to connect with customers.

Americans are attached to their phones.

Phones are how we stay connected to the world around us. The majority of Americans spend their waking (and sleeping) hours next to their phones. It’s our go-to for everything. Phone calls, sure, but phones also provide social and emotional connections, entertainment, networking tools, healthcare advice, and access to an endless amount of information.

A Reviews.org survey identified some staggering statistics about our phone usage:

  • Americans check their phones roughly every 4 minutes. That’s 344 times per day, on average, and a 31% increase from 2021.
  • 71% of Americans say they check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up.
  • 70% of Americans check their phones within five minutes of receiving a notification.
  • 61% have texted someone in the same room as them before.
  • 41% of people even admitted to checking their phone on a date.

And our phone dependence is only growing. The U.S. reached a new app-usage high of 4.2 hours, up from 3.9 in Q2 2021, according to a report from data.ai.

What do these stats tell us about your marketing efforts? Anything mobile-friendly or mobile-first is going to get the attention of your customers. It’s easy to ignore emails but harder to miss a text notification.

You can’t sleep on text messaging.

Texting has become part of our daily lives. It’s a casual, fast, and efficient way to connect with people. (You can work and have a text conversation, but you can’t chat on the phone.)

The numbers are truly staggering. 2.2 trillion MMS and SMS text messages were sent in the U.S. in 2020, reports Statista. There’s no denying that text messaging is a popular form of communication that’s here to stay.

What about business text messaging?

Business text messaging is also on the rise. In 2020, business messaging traffic hit 3.5 trillion. That’s up from 3.2 trillion in 2019, a 9.4% year over year increase, reports Juniper Research.

Even though we’ve been using it for years, this shows how widespread the adoption and growth of text messaging have become.

 

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How effective is SMS marketing?

Do people really read text messages from businesses? Yes!

Business text messaging still far outperforms the average email open rate. In 2022 the average email open rate across industries is 29.55%, and click-through rates are 1.27%, reports Smart Insights.

Key SMS marketing statistics to know.

Customers are eager for more options to interact with businesses over text messaging.

Here are some enlightening statistics from Forbes:

  • It takes the average person 90 minutes to respond to an email but only 90 seconds to respond to a text message.
  • 64% of consumers believe that businesses should use SMS messages to interact with customers more often than they currently do.
  • 74% of customers report an improved overall impression of businesses that interact with them via text messaging.
  • 70% of customers agree that using SMS text messaging is a good way for an organization to get their attention.

And why are customers opting into text messaging?

  • 77% of customers opt into a brand’s text messages for coupons or deals.
  • 50% said personal alerts.
  • 48% said they wanted to be in the loop.
  • 33% wanted more meaningful content.

The impact of SMS text messaging on customer service.

Messaging enables customers to get the service they desire in a fast, convenient way that puts them in control of the conversation. The ability to text message businesses has become more than a nice to have—it’s a customer experience must.

Quiq commissioned Market Strategies International to conduct an independent research study into mobile messaging and its growing value as a customer service channel—and we found some convincing results:

  • 70% of respondents want to use mobile messaging to troubleshoot an issue, and 64% to make a purchase or booking.
  • 66% of consumers rank mobile messaging as their first or second choice to contact a company.
  • 66% of respondents rank messaging as their preferred channel for contacting a company.
  • 66% of respondents would pay more for a product/service supported by messaging—an average of 17% more.

When it comes to sales, experience is everything. Salesforce emphasized the importance of the customer experience in their 2020 report:

  • 79% of consumers say a business’s experience is as important as their goods or services.
  • 71% of customers say they have made purchase decisions based on the quality of customer service.

Top brands see tangible results from messaging.

Companies have increased sales, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction by using text messaging. These results span companies of all sizes and industries such as financial services, retail, consumer services, and many more.

We know customers like texting, but what do businesses think? The benefits are clear. eMarketer reports:

  • 62% of businesses say customers like it.
  • 58% said it reduced their costs compared to voice-only.
  • 48% said it improved customer satisfaction.
  • 35% said it improved their Net-Promoter Score®.

Quiq clients have also seen tremendous results using SMS text messaging to reach out to their customers. Here are just a few of the success stories:

  • Overstock.com achieved higher engagement rates with text messaging’s 98% open rates.
  • Jackson Hole Mountain Resort experienced a 75% reduction in phone calls because of its focus on text messaging.
  • Brinks Home Security converted 10% of their phone calls to text messages while realizing a 14 ppt uptick in CSAT.

Text messaging: Good for your bottom line.

The statistics tell us that text messaging is a highly effective way to communicate with your customers while also saving your customer center time and money.

One thing remains clear: Customers need and expect companies to provide products, services, and support in the most convenient way to them. Join other companies that have enthusiastically embraced text messaging and start seeing real results.

How Messaging Delivers a Modern Customer Experience

Posted on Lauren Winder

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

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

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

What customer service looks like at the end of 2022.

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

The consumer mindset.

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

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

Digital expectations remain high.

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

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

More conversations.

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

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

Messaging has revolutionized the customer experience.

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

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

1. Deliver personalization with data.

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

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

2. Enhance conversations with AI.

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

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

3. Uplevel conversations with rich messages.

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

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

Optimize customer interactions with Quiq.

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

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

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

Posted on Michael Hartsog

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

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

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

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

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

9 ways to improve call center efficiency

Download as a PDF instead

The 9 effective call center strategies recap

Check out these call center strategies below:

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

1. Streamline your current system.

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

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

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

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

2. Boost agent productivity and efficiency.

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

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

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

3. Drive down costs.

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

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

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

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

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

4. Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.

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

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

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

5. Remove friction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Engage more qualified leads.

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

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

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

8. Increase conversions.

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

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

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

9. Increase customer satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Do You Know Your Customer Churn Rate?

Posted on Lauren Winder

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

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

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

What is customer churn?

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

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

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

How to calculate churn:

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

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

  • Customers lost ÷ customers at the start of the month x 100 = customer churn
  • 10 ÷ 100 x 100 = 10%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find the problem areas.

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

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

1. After their first purchase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 ways to reduce customer churn.

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

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

1. Revamp new customer onboarding.

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

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

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

2. Revisit brand and product messaging.

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

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

3. Make customer service fast and accessible.

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

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

4. Be proactive with at-risk customers.

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

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

Embrace messaging to lower customer churn.

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

How to Anticipate Customer Needs (With Examples)

Posted on Lauren Winder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will you gain by anticipating customer needs?

In a word: loyalty.

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

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

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

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

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

Start by identifying customer expectations.

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

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

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

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

Simplicity.

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

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

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

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

Give customers convenient service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stop communication inefficiencies before they start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower CSAs to make the right decisions for customers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equip your team with the tools to meet future needs.

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

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

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

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How Messaging Helps Hospitality Get Personal

Posted on Michael Hartsog

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

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

SMS hospitality messaging connects you to guests on their terms.

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

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

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

High tech and high touch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And customer service has only increased in importance.

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

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

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

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

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

Tap into the power of SMS hospitality messaging.

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

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

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

Easy ways to start using SMS/texting in hospitality.

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

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

SMS for hotels.

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

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

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

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

SMS for restaurants.

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

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

SMS for recreational activities.

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

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

Disrupt with SMS hospitality messaging or be disrupted.

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

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

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

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

How to Rewire Omnichannel Service with Messaging

Posted on Lauren Winder

Omnichannel customer service is changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The customer service stakes are higher than ever.

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

And omnichannel is an expectation—not a benefit.

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

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

How is messaging changing the omnichannel strategy?

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

1. Customers are eager for help.

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

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

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

The benefits of omnichannel customer service.

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

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

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

Meet your customers everywhere.

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

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

Deliver a flawless customer experience.

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

Increase selling opportunities.

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

Collect more relevant customer information.

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

How to improve your omnichannel strategy.

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

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

Be omnichannel, not just multi-channel.

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

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

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

Don’t pick channels over service.

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

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

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

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

Pick the right channels for your customers.

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

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

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

Ensure customer service agents have information at their fingertips.

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

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

Include self-service in your omnichannel strategy.

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

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

Lean into omnichannel marketing.

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

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

Quiq: Your omnichannel solution.

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

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

Your Guide to Developing a Crisis Management Plan

Posted on Lauren Winder

Unfortunately, crises can happen.

We’ve seen it in our lifetime. Pandemics, wars, severe events… But it’s not just worldwide events that impact businesses—even smaller-scale problems can have harrowing effects.

Disruptive events like data breaches, product recalls, and workplace issues (and the related PR nightmare) can devastate an unprepared organization.

It’s a matter of if, not when.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that businesses need to be proactively prepared with crisis management messaging. When things go sideways (because they will), you need a crisis management plan to keep your people safe and your business moving forward.

The pandemic caught people off guard.

We can’t ignore the most recent crisis example. The COVID-19 pandemic affected all kinds of businesses around the world. Few organizations were prepared to address problems at that scale.

However, that’s not to say businesses weren’t facing smaller-scale crises on a daily basis before the pandemic. In 2019, 95% of PwC’s 2021 Global Crisis Survey respondents said they expected to experience a crisis in the next two years. Yet only 23% of US organizations had a dedicated crisis response team in place at the start of the pandemic. They were caught off guard and unprepared.

Now, business leaders are doing what they can to prepare their businesses for future disruptions. In fact, 75% of US organizations say they’re planning to increase their investment in building resilience.

Let’s dig into crisis management plans and how to build your own.

What is a crisis management plan?

A crisis management plan is a document that outlines how to respond to a situation that could negatively affect your organization’s profitability, reputation, or ability to operate.

So, what kind of crises are we talking about? Generally, you define what constitutes a crisis in your written plan.

It can be anything from a natural disaster to a security breach to a significant product defect. Here are some examples:

  • Natural disasters like hurricanes, and earthquakes
  • Serious climatic events like floods and snowstorms
  • Biologic risks like foodborne illnesses and pandemics
  • Accidental events like fires or hazardous spills
  • Intentional events like violence or robberies
  • Technological events, like cyberattacks

People under stress tend to make poor decisions that could unintentionally worsen a crisis. While it’s impossible to predict every outcome, having a basic plan to prevent safety issues, protect your brand reputation, and resume business is vital.

What makes a crisis response successful?

A successful crisis response plan:

  • Outlines a quick and appropriate response
  • Prepares crisis management messaging
  • Prioritizes the safety of employees and the public
  • Prevents further problems after the initial crisis
  • Minimizes operational disruptions
  • Facilitates a fast recovery back to reasonable work conditions

How to create your crisis response plan.

Follow these steps to build your own crisis response plan.

1. Gather a crisis team.

Creating these types of plans usually involves a few people from a crisis management team, but it’s best to have representatives from all affected departments.

Here are some departments to consider:

  • Business continuity team
  • Emergency management
  • Crisis management
  • Public relations
  • Customer-facing departments

2. Define what constitutes a crisis.

What kind of crisis will your plan cover? It’s not unusual to create multiple types of crisis management plans for different situations.

For example, tackling an intentional event like a fire will require a very different response than a viral video of someone on your team behaving badly.

Layout what your plan does and does not cover and what will trigger your crisis management plan of action.

3. Conduct a risk assessment.

Identify the risks your business is likely to face. If you work with a mostly remote workforce, you’re much more likely to deal with data breaches and cyberattacks than physical accidents. Only once you figure out your business’s weaknesses can you plan to address them.

4. Predict the business impacts.

Once you know the risks, you address how they will affect your business. Always put physical safety as your top priority, but also consider other problems, such as a damaged reputation, lost sales, and customer attrition.

5. Put together your contingency plans.

The bulk of your document is likely filled with your contingency planning. This is where you lay out what to do when business is disrupted, you lose power, there’s an accident, etc. Keep it simple with “If X, then Y” statements so that it’s clear and easy to follow.

6. Develop a communications strategy.

It’s important to protect your brand during a crisis to prevent long-term damage. You need both internal and public-facing communications strategies for times of crisis.

For internal communications, ensure there’s an easy way to connect with everyone instantly. SMS/text messaging is a great way to send out bulk messages without relying on internet services (which could be down in a crisis). Assign a point person to ensure there’s no miscommunication or misinformation.

For external communications, always set the record straight. Be upfront and honest, and correct misinformation immediately to temper rumors.

Remember: The key is to be excessively accessible.

One of our most important tips? Don’t turn off messaging. The last thing you want to do in the event of a public-facing crisis is cut-off communications. It’s as good as hiding from the problem. (Also, don’t deny a problem when there is one.)

In addition, if your team is flooded with more calls and messages than they can handle, bring in short-term hires, expand your team with temporary outsourcing, and add additional channels—like Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp just to name a couple—for customers to contact customer service.

It’s also the time to lean into customer service automation. Program customer service chatbots with your business crisis messaging to help relieve the burden on your customer service agents.

Don’t forget to temper expectations.

While it may be the last thing on your mind, your teams may still worry about their metrics.

Will they be measured against their old numbers? Will they be penalized for not hitting their goals during a period of crisis?

From your sales team to your customer support center, performance will be on your employees’ minds.

While your answer may be obvious to you, ease their fears by making it clear that you expect performance to be down.

You’re giving employees permission to take care of themselves and their families first, knowing that their job won’t be in danger.

Lastly, in the event of a company-focused crisis like a social media blunder or viral PR nightmare, expect your customer service teams to bear the brunt of the criticism. Don’t forget to consider their mental health as part of your plan.

7. Put it all together.

Compile everything into a readily accessible document so that everyone knows their role and can react accordingly.

Here’s what you should include:

  • A list of your crises team members
  • The assessment process for what constitutes a crisis
  • Systems for monitoring a crisis
  • Spokesperson and their contact information
  • Emergency contacts
  • Emergency response process
    • Evacuation plan
    • Specific responses to different types of crises
  • Crisis management messaging
  • Customer messaging strategy
    • Social media, customer service, etc.

Even after completing your crisis management plan, treat it like a living document. Update it annually, or when team roles change, new technology is implemented, or you open a new location.

What makes a crisis management plan effective?

  1.  It’s concise. People in a crisis won’t have time to swipe through hundreds of pages to find what they need. They’re more likely to throw out the whole book. Instead, keep it short, scannable, and easy to follow.
  2. Action-oriented. Your crisis plan isn’t the place to go over the company goals and why you thought the technology you purchased was better in line with your values. It needs easy-to-decipher statements about which actions to take. The simpler, the better.
  3. Mobile-enabled. There’s no excuse for having a physical book for a crisis response plan. No one’s going back for a 10-pound binder when the office is no longer safe. And for that matter, spreadsheets and word documents aren’t great either. At the very least, have a PDF that’s mobile-enabled and searchable. The best option? Find a crisis management plan solution with the latest features for the best accessibility.

Work on long-term resilience solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic taught the business world many things, chief among them the power of agility. Businesses that succeeded with limited impact on their bottom lines, reputations, and public safety were able to embrace technology and pivot their businesses accordingly.

Now, 69% of businesses are planning to increase their resilience in the near future as a result of the pandemic.

Here are some of the things you can do to ensure resiliency during any crisis:

  • Make adaptability/resiliency a core competency.
  • Adopt technology built for resilience (think cloud-based, future-forward organizations with impressive roadmaps and heavy R&D investments).
  • Involve the top leaders or your organization in the crisis planning process. That’ll ensure it gets the resources and attention it deserves.

Don’t fail to plan.

While one crisis is passing, the possibility of another is always on the horizon. Now that we know what to expect when the worst happens, we’ll all be better equipped to handle smaller problems as they arise.

The best way to prepare for the worst is to have a plan that your team knows inside and out and to use technologies that help get you through anything.

Omni-Channel Customer Service

Posted on Lauren Winder

Omni-Channel Service: The Customer-Driven Path Forward

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

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

Focus on What You Can Control

Tip 1: Present a Unified Front

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

Tip 2: Quality First, More Channels Second

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

Tip 3: Pick the Right Channels

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

Tip 4: Quality Service Over Quantity

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

Tip 5: Try New Channels

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

Summary

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

6 Ways to Improve Online Retail Customer Satisfaction with Messaging

Posted on Lauren Winder

Retailers have had a tough few years. The pandemic threw businesses into a tailspin. If you’re like the rest of the industry, you either had to build an online shopping experience from scratch or seriously ramp up your web-store capabilities.

This meant your customer satisfaction took a hit.

E-tailers were still struggling in 2021. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, customer satisfaction with online retailers dropped 1.3% in 2021—more than double the 0.5% decrease across the retail industry.

At the same time, customer expectations increased. And online retailers have a harder time building brand loyalty. If customer expectations aren’t met, Microsoft reports that 58% of customers show little hesitation in severing the relationship.

So what’s an e-tailer to do to improve online retail customer satisfaction?

Embrace messaging.

Even if you’ve adopted various forms of business messaging, there are many ways to elevate your strategy and improve your customer satisfaction in retail.

Read on to see why messaging has become a vital part of online retail, along with 6 ways to use it to improve customer satisfaction.

Why messaging is essential in online retail.

Messaging is changing the way online retailers do business, but it’s more than a box that needs checking. You shouldn’t just roll out an SMS/text messaging or WhatsApp program and staff it with customer service reps from your contact center. To make the most of it, you need a well-developed strategy.

Text messaging especially has the potential to improve the online shopping experience. Four out of 5 customers send a text message on a daily basis, and nearly half of consumers prefer messaging as a means to connect with businesses. Your customers are telling you that they want to interact via messaging—why not listen?

Here at Quiq, we’ve seen rapid adoption of messaging by online retailers. Brands like Overstock, Pier 1, and Tailor Brands have experienced tangible benefits, including more natural customer engagement, lower service costs, and a reduced workload.

6 ways to improve online retail customer satisfaction with messaging.

E-tailers struggle with customer satisfaction. There are some aspects out of your control (ahem: shipping and manufacturing anytime after March 2020), but there are things you can do to alleviate your customers’ struggles.

Messaging is a big part of that. Having reliable communications—and using them strategically—helps promote customer satisfaction. Here are 6 ways you can use messaging to improve your online shopping experience.

1. Help shoppers find the perfect product.

The biggest argument against online shopping for years has been the lack of personalized customer service. Shoppers can’t ask for recommendations (and algorithms hardly make up for it), sizing help, or general advice.

Messaging helps your team close that gap (along with the support of chatbots and AI). Yes, it’s great for post-purchase interactions. But customers also want help before they checkout. In fact, nearly two-thirds (64%) of customers use messaging when they want to make a purchase or a booking/reservation, according to our Customer Preference for Messaging report.

Quiq lets you help customers when they need it most. You can provide the on-demand service they need while shopping your site, viewing your products on social media, or browsing your app. You’re giving them that in-store, personalized experience while they’re going about their day. And it doesn’t hurt that helping them before they make a purchase can boost sales.

2. Provide transparent interactions.

When customers call your support line, are they greeted with a “This call may be recorded” message? That’s a great tool for your business, but what about the customer? Once they end the conversation, they have no record of the interaction. They can’t refer back to it later, check to make sure they heard everything correctly, or prove that the conversation even existed. Yes, some companies offer a confirmation number, but that does little to help your customer access the information.

Even popular web chat solutions can be session-based—meaning when the session is over, the conversation disappears. Customers can’t refer back or naturally start the conversation back up when a related question pops up.

We know the importance of asynchronous communication. Customers aren’t always available to respond instantly, and sometimes new questions appear once their first ones have been answered. That’s why Quiq’s web chat conversations are persistent—they start right where they left off. Plus, customers can request to have their web chat transcripts emailed to them.

You get an even longer messaging history on channels like SMS/text and Facebook Messenger.

Mobile messaging adds an additional layer of transparency. Message history can stretch back even further than the last conversation on SMS and Facebook Messenger, giving the customer access to older messages and more conversation details.

3. Staff for multiple messaging channels.

An omnichannel messaging strategy can greatly enhance your online customer experience—when it’s done right. Customers frequently ping-pong across platforms. Zendesk’s 2022 CX Trends report found that 73% of customers want the ability to start a conversation on one channel and pick it back up on another.

Yet, it’s all too easy to add messaging channels and hand them over to your call center agents. While it’s feasible to cross-train your customer support team on both phones and messaging, there’s a little more to it than that.

First, you need to ensure you have available staff to cover multiple messaging channels. Asynchronous messaging does save time over traditional phone calls. But if your team is already stretched thin, adding additional channels will just feel like a burden. Plus, we all know that customers hate to wait.

Try assigning staff members to your messaging channels. While Quiq clients can serve customers on the platform the customers prefer, it takes a trained and available support team for a great omnichannel experience.

4. Reduce wait times.

Speaking of waiting—customers hate it. While you might think the pandemic has made customers more patient and understanding, the opposite is true. Frustrated customers want things to return to “normal” and have higher expectations of all business—e-tailers included. According to Zendesk, 60% report that they now have higher customer service standards after the pandemic.

And with 61% of customers willing to switch brands after just one bad experience, all it takes is one surge in call traffic to create call center chaos and cause you to lose business.

Messaging helps smooth the peaks of inbound support requests when you need it most. Since agents can respond to messages at different speeds, they can handle multiple inquiries at once. A message doesn’t require their full attention for a fixed amount of time. As a result, Quiq clients report work time is often reduced by 25–50%.

5. Delight your visually-driven audience.

Why spend 5 minutes describing a problem when you can take a picture of it in 5 seconds? Phone calls only give you one way to interact with your customer, and emails are too slow for problems that need immediate attention.

Rich messaging is the next step to improving your customer service experience. Found in Apple Messages for Business, Google’s Business Messaging, and more, rich messaging amplifies your customer conversations. From GIFs to images to videos, there are plenty of features to engage your audience visually.

You can even take it to the next level and build an entire customer experience with rich messaging. Process secure transitions, schedule appointments, and send reminders, all through messaging.

See how TechStyleOS integrated rich messaging with Quiq >

Improve your customer satisfaction and boost engagement with these advanced features that are sure to delight shoppers.

6. Entice customers to come back.

Remember those high customer expectations? Unfortunately, customers are quick to switch brands—which means you need to consistently give them the best online shopping experience.

It doesn’t stop at the sale. A good messaging strategy includes post-purchase engagement to encourage customers to come back. While email is currently the preferred method for online retail, it comes with low open rates and even lower click-through rates.

Instead, lean into outbound text messaging for post-purchase communications. Here are a few easy examples to get started:

  • Send an order confirmation
  • Share a shipment tracking link
  • Ask for a product review
  • Send a special discount code
  • Notify them when similar products go on sale
  • Ask them to join your rewards program

With nearly a 100% read rate, outbound text messaging is a more engaging way to connect with customers.

Messaging is the way to customer satisfaction.

Online retailers face many challenges, but engaging with customers shouldn’t be one. Messaging is already helping many online retailers establish a stronger relationship with their customers by tackling common shopper struggles. For many retailers, adopting a messaging platform gave them a customer-centric way to chat with their shoppers.

Messaging has become a vital part of the online shopping experience, and implementing these smart strategies will help skyrocket customer satisfaction. And Quiq is there to help.