Love Your Customers? Use Technology To Provide Outstanding Support

Updated October 6, 2023
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In today’s digitalized era, can you afford to fail to offer your customers the support they deserve? Not really, because this is how you make them turn to your competitors.

Customer experience is king these days. It is, in fact, one of the elements that have become a competitive differentiator between businesses from all industries. Why? Because, when it comes to how customers react to bad customer support, according to data, 91% of customers leave a brand without warning, 47% of them switch brands, while 40% of them would also recommend their peers to not support that business. Moreover, for 27% of customers, bad customer service is also their top frustration about the brands they engage with.

So, like it or not, your customers are one of the core functionalities of your business. And, without them purchasing your products and services, your business wouldn’t survive in today’s highly competitive market. So, how do you pay them back and keep them loyal to your business? With the best quality of your customer service and support.

Now, here’s the good news: today’s consumers are tech-savvy individuals. So, if there is something that they surely expect you to do is to provide them with outstanding customer service through digital channels, be it email, live chats, or through mobile apps. And, there is no better time than today to turn to technology to offer your customers the assistance they expect you to.

Technology To Provide Outstanding Support

Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/fMntI8HAAB8

Email

You might be expecting that in today’s fast communication era, email communication is dead, right? Well, not exactly, in fact, 62% of customers still use email as a top customer service channel.

Compared to all modern communication channels, email is often seen as one of the slowest ones when it comes to response time. So, you would think that as long as there is such a lack of responsiveness, you should forget about engagement at all, right? Well, not quite as email as a customer service channel can still be very effective as long as you learn how to write better emails to your customers.

There is good and bad news here. The good news is that by sending you emails, your customers want to communicate with you. Whereas, the bad news is that they all think that their problem is the most important one.

But how can you still use email to offer outstanding customer service? First of all, it all comes to personalizing your emails. Not only by using the first name of the customer but also by making them feel like they are communicating with a human, not a company. Secondly, it obviously comes down to solving your customer’s problem without them having to send a follow-up email.

As long as you show to your client that their feedback is important to you, they couldn’t care less whether they talk to you through an email or on the phone.

CRM software

Customer relationship management systems are gaining momentum among businesses these days. Why? Because today, there is increasingly customer data that businesses must handle. And, managing all customer information to provide excellent customer service can be really challenging. However, CRM software systems have been designed for this purpose, to help businesses store and manage customer information better and much more.

How can CRM software help businesses improve communication with customers? In so many ways from sending automated emails to customers to using email templates, gathering data and create reports on customer’s journey with a brand, and helping customer service agents to view in-depth client information and use it for the best solutions.

A CRM software is also a great solution to provide your customers with customer service on the phone. CRM software allows phone integration meaning that you will be able to provide your customers with support over the phone while also managing their information more efficiently.

Also, CRM and phone integration provide you with the opportunity to offer customer service while also showing your customers that you care about them. For example, one great way is to purchase royalty free hold music to integrate it as a background music while the customers are waiting for the customer service agent to find and analyze the data of their queries. The music will act as the bridge between the agent and the customer showing that they are still connected over the phone. Plus, it ensures that even the wait is enjoyable with good music playing on the background.

Chatbots and AI

Together with the rise of virtually run businesses, technology has also drastically changed the way businesses offer customer service. So, from the brick-and-mortar store locations to the desk office customer service agent, everything is now taking place in the online world.

If you have recently entered a website, you most likely interacted with a chatbot. What are chatbots? They are the AI or computer programs that interact with website visitors through text or audio and provide them with assistance for their most basic questions and problems.

As the experts explain “Live chat support has a huge advantage over all other customer service channels and that is the fact that it provides customers with answers very fast. So, since they don’t have to wait for responses through social media or email, customers prefer using chatbots for their simplest questions.”

In fact, 60% of consumers claim that they hate to wait for more than a minute to get support for their questions. So, you can see how AI and chatbots are a popular choice among modern businesses.

Social media networks

Like it or not, social media is the place where you are going to find most of your customers. Moreover, 48% of customers even expect brands to respond to their social media queries in less than 24 hours. And, this can be either a very powerful tool or a negative one for businesses.

Today’s consumers can share their opinions about a brand with their peers on social media. And, make no mistake, 83% of them are likely to trust these opinions, no matter if they are positive or negative. So, this puts great pressure on customer service teams to have a consistent and effective response plan.

Over the last few years, social media networks have proven themselves not only as very effective marketing tools but also proved its worth when it comes to providing outstanding customer service. Being rated a top channel for communicating customer service requests and responding to them incredibly fast, social media should be one of the top priorities of any business when it comes to offering assistance to customers.

Tools and technologies like those above can help brands raise the quality of their customer service by helping them handle data more efficiently and by improving responsiveness to customers’ queries.

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