It is clear that the most important trends in customer service this year include personalization and process automation. The customer's expectations should be met when we provide contact. Clients keep expecting more in terms of quality of service, so we need to surpass those expectations!
In the digital era, users want things done remotely, quickly, and efficiently. A key part of 2021's activities is to facilitate contact between your company and customers. Process automation is the way to go about this. It saves consultants time and effort.
However, we must ensure that the customer does not feel impersonal when contacting our company. For them, personalization of services is indispensable, it affects their assessments of service quality.
A bit of balancing will be required this year, so read our tips on how to do it.
So here comes automation...
Obviously, the number of calls and attempts to contact our contact center department will continue to increase as the business grows. Call center department agents may find it necessary to automate operations in order to ensure their comfort in the workplace.
How can you make a difference to it?
Ensure the comfort of your agents
Increased call volume may result in decreased efficiency and, as a result, professional burnout.
If you have this problem, you’re apt to lose agents and time introducing new employees all the time. In order to avoid such a scenario, make sure the agents are comfortable with their work. It is important to provide them with tools and solutions that will enable them to build client relations.
So you have quite a few options for delivering convenience and efficiency, and therefore employee satisfaction.
“The more you know (about your client), the better you sleep.”
As a result of the history of contact with the client, your agents have full access to all data as they get in touch with that client again.
Systems such as CRMs can store client data and information about the contacts made. Agents can help clients solve problems more quickly and easily while meeting their expectations. The customer card can be customized according to the company's needs by using special fields. This means that each company can store the data it wants.
The relationship between the interlocutors is enhanced as a result of this feature, as it is a perfect example of combining process automation with personalization of service.
Thanks to this feature, the customer will feel that their problem is of great importance to the company and will be dealt with in a personalized manner, e.g. by addressing them by name or refering to their previous purchase.
Essentially, these improvements are small changes that have a substantial impact on the way customer service is provided and perceived. Even better, nowadays, there are numerous tools available to simplify the process.
The use of IVR can boost your customer service as well as employee satisfaction levels, which leads to business success on both sides.
In short, IVR is a voice menu service that allows you to be able to play a prepared recording whenever clients reach your company over the phone.
A customer selects individual options on the menu using the telephone keypad. They may be redirected to an agent, use self-service help, or request other solutions. IVR gives them choice – and gives your agents some breath.
A well-designed interactive voice response (IVR) tree can definitely benefit your call center department! Thanks to this solution, you’ll be able to direct clients to the right consultants who are specialized in a particular problem and can solve it directly.
There are certain areas that your agents can acquire specialized knowledge, such as complaints and technical problems. The client will be correctly directed and will be able to solve their problem more quickly. Your employees will feel more comfortable while interacting with the client, too.
Chatbot is similar to our agents' assistant except that it works 24/7, does not feel tired and bears no emotions. Neither chatbots goes on a sick leave as it does not face the danger of burnout and it also does not undergo medical examinations.
Further, the mistakes of their language are probably forgotten. If speaking different languages are part of your customer base, this is a great solution. It helps you eliminate the need for additional staff members to serve foreign clients.
All services are provided by a chatbot who answers every question as soon as the client sends them. There is no need to wait for a staff member to examine the problem as it will happen without a consultant present.
Customers are expecting quick service and prompt responses from the consultants; however, not all consultants are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
A chatbot may be the perfect solution to providing customers with more channels of communication, something that is inevitable as the trend of conducting conversations via instant messaging and omnichannel continues. Businesses need to provide customers with flawless customer experience and here’s where a chatbot comes in handy.
Chatbots are mainly meant to help you to work and implement help options more effectively since there is no need to go through the difficulty of onboarding and recruiting new employees every time. Instead you could use this time to make your existing assistant more useful to your organization.
Year by year, customers will be more and more willing to use chatbots. As we speak, millions of messages are exchanged on live chat… somewhere.
It is imperative that you implement live chat widgets with Engati if you wish to join the club of businesses providing outstanding customer service.
The dashboards in Engati’s platform provide an in-depth understanding of the behavior of your customers whilst engaging with you, helping you determine what most of them expect from you.
Chatbots and live chat help you provide an astonishing CX. Your customers will get instant replies to their emails, while other companies, even in 2021, will take up to a day to reply. And you can be sure they’ll spread a word or two about your customer service here and there…
There are quite a few benefits behind automation. A simplified service process and a better customer experience are some of them. Automation allows you to handle more inquiries with less cost and better feedback. Additionally, it enables 24/7 support.
So, is there a place for personalizing customer service here?
There is.
And here comes personalization
Throughout 2021, a personalized approach to customers will become the basis for all activities. Businesses will move away from treating customers and potential clients as an impersonal problem to be solved because clients feel comfortable discussing their ideas with consultants, and that their opinions are a great guide for the business.
Many customers have stated that they have resigned from the services of a particular corporation because of the lack of a personalized approach to their problem. Therefore, it is imperative that you invest in team training and choose solutions that facilitate a friendly and open communication with the customer.
Ensure the comfort of your clients
Customer satisfaction always comes first when it comes to the most important marketing objectives, and personalization is the main factor in the growth of the business. How can customer service family address it effectively?
In order to offer the best possible experience, the client should be given the opportunity to get content tailored to their needs.
It is not unusual nowadays for E-commerce sites to show individualized offers or recommendations based on previous behavior, especially in the e-commerce industry. Recommendations allow the customer to show potential subpages that may be of their interest or can assist in solving his issue.
The personalized information will also help customers find answers to their questions more effectively. Customers are eager to find answers to their questions themselves, so personalizing information for the website should be of great benefit to them.
It may be worthwhile in similar circumstances to display messages regarding contact methods or the possibility of speaking with a chatbot. Thanks to well-chosen content, the client will be able to contact the customer support department in a time and manner that is convenient to them.
There is no question that businesses all over the world benefit by personalizing content they display to potential clients at every stage of their customer journey – and this motivates them to invest in revolutionary new solutions year after year.
All agents have equal access to customer information due to the introduction of a common inbox. This eliminates data silos within departments since everyone has the same information. This enables not only efficient work and making sure that clients are served right, but also gives time for personalization. Since all messages are accessible in a single platform, agents don’t need to switch between tabs and channels and can dedicate that time towards building relations with clients.
It is also crucial for the agents to collaborate with each other, so a common inbox enhances that collaboration. The atmosphere and the flow of information in the company greatly affect the customer satisfaction and ability for personalization.
The choice of how to contact a company should clearly belong to the client. It is the customer service departments' job to provide a variety of channels of communication and bring all of them together in one panel.
It allows the client to have full freedom while at the same time ensuring that the consultant will be comfortable in their work. Despite multiple channels, the agents will have constant access to the client contact history and data.
The key benefit of omnichannel is reducing the need for clients to repeat their problems throughout the company. A client sends an e-mail and then decides to call two days later. Data is saved, so no matter the agent, they have a complete view of the situation.
It is now expected of companies to be available through multiple channels and to allow customers to transition freely between them while still receiving one-stop service. Bu automating this area, they have more
It’s a draw
Combining automation of your customers' contact process with personalization of your services leads to the creation of a great combination, a "golden mean".
It can be achieved thanks to the tools developed for customer service departments, such as CloudTalk and Engati. These tools offer useful functions that allow businesses to both shorten the service times and offer customers a better service while retaining a personalized approach.
In the present environment, the main trend is the use of omnichannel, which offers both automation of contact and a seamless connection between channels of communication as well as substantial freedom of choice for the customer. Creating customer cards in the CRM system also proves to be significant. Permanent access to the history of previous contact makes it easy for consultants to approach conversations in a more confident manner by simply referring to the previous communication, and also makes the consultants feel more competent.
Automation and personalization should definitely go hand in hand. We all should be constantly searching for a solution that strikes a balance between customer satisfaction and the comfort of consultants' work. The above solutions can help you out with this.
