Five best practices to rock your customer service with omnichannel marketing
Regardless of your business activity, if your company deals with customers and has a customer care department, then you already know that nowadays, clients are more demanding and powerful than ever before. Most of the consumers possess more knowledge than they did previously. Consumers’ voice has power. Customer reviews can make or break your brand’s image. Providing flawless customer service is sometimes even more critical for a company’s reputation than the quality of the product or service itself.
It all comes down to how a business can use the available technological advances and modern communication channels to provide seamless and consistent support.
This post contains some of the best-performing customer service practices using omnichannel marketing that your business can use to meet and surpass customers’ expectations and make a mark.
Provide live chat customer support
The more technology advances, the more impatient consumers become. Most customers request quick resolutions to their issues. Not all customer support issues are routine or can be resolved with the use of an automated workflow. In many cases, customers need human interaction to better express their service inquiries, and the same may stand for the customer support departments. Artificial intelligence, although advanced in many sectors, still cannot 100% replace the human factor. In fact, live chat enjoys a 73% satisfaction level for any customer service channel.
Whether you decide to prioritize your customers based on different customer service levels (e.g., standard, premium, VIP, and so on), or you select to provide all your customers with the exact same level of customer service communication, consider including live chat customer support. Do not get overwhelmed by what you might have heard about implementing live customer support until now. You do not need to have expensive equipment and infrastructure to go live with your customers. Luckily, currently, there are plenty of modern and user-friendly online live chat tools that require no coding skills or on-premises installation but are fully online and subscription-based.
Render proactive responses based on customer interactions
A most engaging way to provide exceptional customer service is to be present and proactive in the multiple communication and messaging platforms that your customers prefer. Combine your sales and presales efforts by allowing your customer service team to view data of every click, swipe, and tap that occurs on a browser or an app to track customer interactions across channels. This tactic will enable you to get an in-depth understanding of your customers’ struggles, needs, and preferences so that you can be there for them before they even submit a customer support inquiry. For example, if one of your customers starts a discussion in one of the online communities that your customers engage in to exchange information and reviews, you can pop-in and proactively offer your assistance or insight to resolve any issue or answer any future inquiry that may arise from that discussion. Proactiveness will help you improve your customer retention rate. According to Aberdeen Group’s report, companies that provide consistent service across platforms retain 89% of their customers.
Harness the power of customer behavior data
Providing effective customer service comes down to understanding customer needs and behavior. Identifying the basic customer needs and addressing them with the proper customer service leads to customer satisfaction and, consequently, increased customer retention and more conversions. Monitor your customers’ journeys using tracking software to get insights that will help you understand at which phase they are and decide on the optimum course of action to offer them excellent customer service. Customer data can help you anticipate customer needs even before you communicate with customers about a support issue. For example, if your customer data show that customers who purchase product X also tend to buy product Y as well, you can set a customer support flow presenting these customers with the proper way to use these two products together.
Besides, you can use customer data to fine-tune your indirect customer service procedure. Run customer feedback surveys and combine them with website analytics to optimize your FAQs and product documentation.
Build an intelligent email automation workflow
As previously noted in our blog, the email communication channel is most widely used today than ever before. Integrate email with your customer service communication system to easily and effectively manage and resolve many of your customers’ inquiries.
Invest in an email marketing automation platform to effortlessly create email automation workflows and save your customer service representatives a ton of time and effort.
Keep in mind that the customer service email automation flow is not a one-off task that you build, activate, and leave to be. As with any email automation flow, you should steadily return to it, track and measure its health, optimize the email drafts and automation schedule. We strongly advise you to use an actual email for your customer replies that one of your customer service representatives attends daily. This way, your customers can interact with the automated messages that you deliver to them, but also engage in real-time communications for solving their issues as promptly as possible. Focus on using a completely automated email flow for resolving routine issues and interrupt the automated customer support only when dealing with uncommon, complex, or ultra-urgent inquiries.
Enable self-service resolution
A significant number of customers prefer to resolve their support issues by themselves, without having to involve your customer support team. According to a Forrester report, customers prefer to use most frequently knowledge bases of all self-service channels. Besides, an American Express customer service study states that more than 6 out of 10 U.S. consumers say that their go-to channel for simple inquiries is a digital self-serve tool.
Pay extra attention to such statistics, as catering to these types of customers will save you money from heavily investing in your customer service team and will enable you to balance your cost-to-profit ratio. Consider using a frequently asked questions (FAQs) section, a knowledge base documentation, or even a library of knowledge base videos to facilitate customer self-service resolution. Make sure that your knowledge base sections are comprehensive, organized in topics, and easy for your customers to navigate to provide them with an excellent self-service experience.
What’s next for your business?
Less than just ten years ago, the main ways that companies had available for customers to contact them were by phone or email. The customer service landscape has dramatically evolved ever since and mainly in recent years, with the introduction of innovative communication channels and the transition to a customer-centric business philosophy.
Your business has now available not only a plethora of channels to communicate with its audiences -ranging from text messages, voice, email, live chat, to messaging apps, chatbots- but also pioneering online platforms that integrate and combine all of these channels for an elevated customer experience and an unparalleled high-quality customer service. Remember that a consistent omnichannel customer service quality can significantly reshape your business revenue!