You already know how important it is to provide great customer service. Great customer experiences lead to brand loyalty. Loyal customers spend more and spend more often. They refer other customers. Customer retention reduces your overall cost of acquisition.
Research demonstrates clearly how important this is. Seventy percent of the customer journey is based on how customers feel they are being treated. At the same time, 90% say customer service is a key factor in whether customers will do business with you. There’s simply no excuse for not providing a great customer experience.
In order to create lasting relationships with customers, it is important that your team truly takes the time to connect on a personal level, understands what’s going on with each customer, and builds a relationship based on trust. It’s a lot of work, to be perfectly honest, especially when so many other tasks eat away the hours in a work day.
Automation improves customer experience
Your customer service agents are busy. In addition to taking care of your customers, they’ve got a lot of other tasks. Everything that takes time away from working with customers increases your response times and your resolution times.
Any tasks you can automate gives your agents more time to make customers happy. It also helps keep them fresh. Routine, repetitive tasks can drain their energy. It can burn them out. It can make them frustrated. It leads to a higher error rate.
Here are five ways you can automate your process to improve the customer experience, improve customer retention, and speed up time to resolution.
Self-serve content
People are more comfortable finding the information for themselves if you can make it easy to do so. This means no waiting on hold, no lengthy back-and-forth interactions, and quicker resolutions.
Every customer who can find the information they need without having to talk to your support team is a win and means that you provided the best customer service on the front end of that interaction. Furthermore, your team should always have the best and most direct access to the most up-to-date information for all customers needing assistance.
Automated call routing
Automated call routing can quickly move calls to the right person. VIP customers can be identified and sent to the most appropriate person or put in the front of the queue. Calls can be sorted and routed based on an assortment of criteria, such as language spoken, location, or which support line they have called.
Interactive voice response (IVR)
When IVR is poorly executed, it’s a nightmare. When it can save customers’ time and get them to the right person (or right answer) quickly, it’s a huge benefit. A world-class IVR system can be relatively inexpensive but you need to compare IVR pricing along with features and functionality to find the right system for your needs and budget.
CRM integration with support software
Integrating your support platform with customer data, including products purchased, historical interactions, chat transcripts, and notes make it easier for team members to get up to speed quickly. Customers hate it when they talk to different support members and have to explain things all over again. This is especially important as customers will often connect about the same concerns through different channels, such as phone, text, chat, email or social media.
When a solid CRM integration system is invested in, it provides the tools needed for automation service as quickly as possible. It’s a good idea to make sure that incoming customer questions are:
● Transmitted to the proper agents in a timely manner● Immediately linked to the correct customer account● Tracked correctly in the correct history
At least 77% recently reported that they feel they have waited too long to get in touch with a proper customer service representative. It is their right as the bread and butter of any operation to find the correct contact information and be connected with the appropriate agents to their situation as quickly as possible.
Automated email, text, chat, or social replies
Your agents get the same questions over and over. Giving your team access to pre-written replies for common questions speeds up the process and cuts down on boredom by team members. This allows them to spend more time with more complex issues.
As your team sets up automated replies, there is no need to spend the time writing out the same reply over and over again to each individual customer. An interesting tool for a task like this is TextExpander, which can shorten and simplify this process as well by giving everyone on your team access to a bank of prewritten replies to frequently asked questions.
More data informs your decisions
Access to a solid wealth of customer information allows for a better understanding of how to properly facilitate the customer’s needs in the future. It’s vital to make sure that your current support system can automate the collection of this data to save for future support situations. Photos, interaction history, recent orders, texts, and other data should be collected and stored automatically as it gives the team an ample opportunity every time to find important information quickly and reliably.
Automation: A more seamless experience
Keap can help you automate repetitive tasks and allows your team to spend more time focusing on meeting your customers’ needs, creating a better experience for your customers and your support team.
A customer’s experience with a company is about much more than their encounter with a seasoned representative. It’s also about the feeling they get when they reach out for help, and how quickly they feel like they get the assistance they are looking for.
Your automation should also remove friction, and not create it within your team and their daily tasks. Follow up with them to make sure everything is running smoothly and that you’re setting them up for success. Every single interaction with an existing or potential customer can build or destroy the pathway to success; don’t let your internal processes get in the way of reaching new limits within your business.
