Why is it impotant for businesses to improve customer support? To maintain and retain customer relations, while ensuring better experiences. For business owners, brand managers, and operations leaders, it’s vital not to overlook the aspects to increase the quality of service given to customers.
The days are long gone of extended telephonic interactions, holding for hours just to get an answer of query. Let’s face it, customers today have different expectations for what customer support should be like, which involve more personalization and better access.
It is important to address the widely recognized reasons for ineffective support, playing on the preferences of the largest groups of digital customers. Take a look at some of the issues faced by customers & how some solutions can help in resolving it.
Improve Customer Support: 3 challenges and Their Solutions
Issue: Customers don’t like to wait for too long over calls
Solution: Self-service is a key for better experience
It’s digitalized era and as every service is supposed to be online & quick; majority of people want customer service to be a part of it. Customers being busy and occupied with their daily tasks, they can’t let prolonged phone calls ruin their schedules.
According to Mckinsey, self-service tools are preferred by 86% of today’s B2B executives while reordering instead dealing with a salesperson, states that customers prefer their queries to be resolved without getting stuck in phone calls. So, with options like self-service tools, support agents can get information always ready consisting knowledgeable guidance, FAQs and step-by-step workflows.
Issue: Customers expect resolutions to be quick, easy & accessible
Solution: Interactive and AI-based guidance
Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI automation will manage 85% of companies’ customer relationships. Reason? Artificial intelligence has the capacity to initiate quicker responses while handling multiple queries.
AI-backed bots enable real-time support even when the agent is not available. It boosts customer engagement towards a brand. Moreover, if the bot is NLP ready to understand user intents, certain phrases linked to emotions and native language then it’s like a bonus in providing customer service.
Issue : Customers prefer interactions on multiple touchpoints
Solution: Omnichannel strategy supports to make it happen
No wonder, your customers can be available on their preferred mediums. They can land on your website for a query, call or text you and leave a comment for your brand on social site.
Additionally, a research states that companies which treat CX on social media platform can see a 30-50% improvement in key measures such as purchase, upsell, a recommendation of your product to others!
So, how much business takes initiative to reach maximum customers is directly dependent on businesses who adopt the omnichannel strategy for customer support; driving possibilities to achieve CX across touchpoints.
Also, your customer service agents or team is often the face of your company and customers’ experiences will be defined by the skills of agents & quality of the support they provide. So, support staff training is also a necessity to nurture their skills throughout the CX journey. Customer support software that can assist in clarifying communications & managing knowledge; enhance the potential of support agents and improvise the overall process.
