Four principles guide how we see customer assistance.
For businesses to succeed up until roughly 20 years ago, businesses had to be personable.
Because of the small scale that any firm could operate on—a scale that was essentially determined by their location—it was very simple for them to forge enduring bonds with their clients. Face-to-face transactions were conducted while people shook hands, grinned, and developed deep connections. And even when it wasn’t face-to-face, it was still intimate: most often, phone calls or handwritten letters with signatures.
Then the internet arrived and permanently altered it. All of a sudden, you could sell and market to millions of individuals worldwide. An explosion in customer service demands followed the growth of the addressable market. Suddenly, maintaining such interpersonal connections while managing growing customer numbers became more and more challenging.
Although these technologies may have helped businesses grow, they also brought client connections with firms “back to the dark ages.”
A new generation of technology businesses evolved to deal with this magnitude, introducing ticketing systems and ideas like “do not reply” emails. They assisted businesses in managing the volume of assistance requests they were getting but at a price. These systems operate by avoiding people, eliminating the interpersonal component of commerce.
Therefore, even though these technologies may have aided in corporate expansion, they also brought client connections with companies back into the stone age.
the difficulties in today’s customer service
We still have a long way to go in the support industry before we can repair these client connections. The support available now is time-consuming and frustrating for many clients. According to HubSpot research, 33% of consumers believe sitting on hold to be the most frustrating part of seeking assistance, while another 33% say repeating your information to various support agents is the biggest annoyance.
It’s obvious that many businesses have a long way to go before developing the close-knit client relationships we know we need. But why is assistance so challenging specifically?
1. Expectations from customers are higher than before
Customer expectations are now extremely high, as we all know. Customers desire personal service as well as immediate access to quick, efficient support. Many of the outdated methods that support teams have used in the past to provide support, like utilizing “do not reply” emails and keeping clients on hold for hours, are simply ineffective today.
2. Teams are being held back by subpar support tools and tech stacks
The equipment that support teams employ is frequently clumsy and out-of-date. Legacy support software simply hasn’t kept up with the rapid advancements in consumer software during the past few years.
“Siloed efforts with no collaboration, according to 44% of businesses, are one of the biggest barriers to successful customer engagement.”
3. Information silos lead to subpar client experiences
Legacy support tools that are outdated make it challenging for support staff to locate the necessary data quickly. This results in impersonal, disjointed customer care interactions as clients are handed from one team member to another, repeatedly having to (re)provide crucial context, and becoming increasingly irritated. In fact, compartmentalized initiatives with no coordination are one of the largest barriers to effective client interaction, according to 44% of firms.
4. Support teams continue to be reactive rather than proactive
Due to the aforementioned factors and the constant barrage of concerns, support teams frequently struggle to do more than react. They lack the time to be more proactive or to impart to the rest of the company their priceless consumer insights.
There’s a better approach.
Numerous support teams have successfully turned things around and solved these issues in the past. They have reached a point where every support discussion is an opportunity to promote loyalty and commercial expansion, and as a result, they have unlocked significant advantages for their company. There is a domino effect at work here, as many of us know from personal experience, because:
Excellent assistance fosters relationships.
which fosters loyalty…
This raises income and increases retention…
Additionally, it’s a fantastic way to stand out from your competitors.
4 opinions on the direction of customer service
There are four areas that support leaders, as well as business leaders in general, need to concentrate on as we consider the future of support. These four tenets are guiding next-generation customer service, resulting in more contented clients, lower turnover, and enduring loyalty.
1. In-context support will dominate customer care in the future.
In-context help is the future when it comes to providing speedy, effective customer service. Businesses must switch to predominantly providing assistance through in-context messaging, which entails resolving customer issues right away, whether they arise in a product, app, or website.
The businesses that provide highly personalized and contextualized service are the ones that are actually flourishing. Using a business messenger is a crucial method for accomplishing this. Messengers have rapidly gained in use, surpassing both phone and in-person help to become the second most common support channel.
“With a messenger, you can gather essential qualification data to create rich customer profiles, target various content to various customer types, and tailor the messenger to suit your brand.”
This is so that both customers and businesses can greatly benefit from them. Because messengers are personalized, quick, convenient, and highly effective, customers adore them, and as a result, they consistently receive industry-leading customer satisfaction ratings. For instance, Smartly.io was able to attain a CSAT score of an astounding 97%.
Additionally, messengers provide unmatched flexibility for support teams. You can gather vital qualification data to create detailed client profiles, target various types of customers with varied content, and tailor the messenger to your brand. Additionally, messengers give you access to the widest range of tools for immediate assistance, including bots, product tours, and integrations, enabling you to support your clients wherever they are at any time.
We just released Switch, a tool that aims to assist organizations in shifting support query traffic from phone to messenger, in order to help them capitalize on the power of messenger-based support. Switch consumers can transition effortlessly from a phone call to a chat conversation, which saves them money and makes phone assistance more scalable and expensive. This improves customer satisfaction by decreasing aggravation from waiting on hold and delivering quicker (but still individualized) responses while allowing support teams to cut expenses by increasing efficiency.
2. To enable self-serve help, support personnel should be augmented with the appropriate equipment.
Numerous studies have revealed that customers would prefer to self-serve rather than speak with a support representative. As a result, the majority of businesses today use knowledge bases and chatbots to respond to client inquiries without involving their personnel.
These tools are now used to find answers to simple, repetitive problems. However, as AI develops, it will be able to tackle more complicated problems, and consumers will choose bots more frequently as the most practical and time-saving response to a wider range of requests. As a result, we’ll see more businesses employ proactive messaging that uses dynamic, tailored content to foresee problems before they arise.
“Clients who adopt this next-generation approach to support receive everything: greater efficiency, more satisfied clients, and a happier team.”
Service teams will need to employ a platform with strong automation and outbound capabilities to manage and streamline high-volume workloads in order to deliver this service. The appropriate tool will let support teams:
Before clients ever begin requesting assistance, take proactive steps to stay ahead of recognized problems. For instance, before inbound discussions begin to pour in, you may alert consumers proactively with a banner message if you have scheduled maintenance coming up or are currently experiencing an outage. You may also provide clients with a product tour or contextual tooltips when you introduce a new feature, so they can learn more about it without having to ask you.
When and where your clients need assistance, on your website or app, assist them in helping themselves. Alternately, have bots work for your team to answer routine, straightforward questions, freeing up your human support team to handle more difficult problems.
Give individualized, human support when and where it is most useful to have a stronger impact. Powerful workflows that automate procedures like routing, assignment, and SLAs are necessary for this to function well and take the manual labor off the plates of support representatives.
The support funnel is the name of this model. Customers who adopt this cutting-edge approach to customer service benefit from increased productivity, happier team members, and more delighted clients.
3. Customer experience and employee experience are related.
We think that teams using next-generation support software are happier teams, and happier teams provide better support, which leads to happier, more devoted customers.
However, although consumer software has advanced significantly, support software just hasn’t kept up. This is incomprehensible: support teams frequently have to use some of the world’s most difficult and cumbersome tools while spending their entire day dealing with email. We think that support teams will demand and need consumer-grade, low-code software with powerful automation and a ton of built-in configuration options that make it simple to provide individualized, joyful help at scale.
“Efficiency gains are transferred from support teams to their customers, assisting them in finding the solutions they require even faster and enhancing their interaction with your company.”
The employee experience was our top priority when we just introduced a next-generation inbox. We’re pleased to inform you that it has a stunning, contemporary design that teams will look forward to using every day. It is made specifically for the 2020s using the most advanced, cutting-edge technology, unlike many other instruments used today that appear to be from the 1990s.
Because everything is done via the keyboard, coworkers can finish tasks and discover any information quickly, increasing productivity.
Because of its high degree of configuration, agents, teams, and managers can customize how the Inbox is set up. They are now free to work however they choose, including in dark mode, in their native language, with their chosen view, and more.
It is lightning-fast and designed for internet scalability, so there are no loading screens, spinners, or waiting periods. Every action is taken instantly, allowing your team to respond to clients more quickly and raise customer satisfaction.
These efficiency improvements are transferred from support staff to their clients, making it easier for them to find the solutions they require even more quickly and enhancing their interaction with your company.
4. Excellent client support Data serves as fuel for experiences.
Our fourth tenet is that teams must leverage the power of data in order to provide first-rate customer service. By combining real-time first-party data with the proper insights, you can give every customer tailored, individualized help.
When appropriately utilized, the rich customer data gathered by the support team can help the sales, marketing, and support teams engage with customers more proactively.
This benefits your company in more ways than merely improving customer service. When appropriately utilized, the rich customer data gathered by the support team can help the sales, marketing, and support teams engage with customers more proactively.
Because SimpSocial is a single tool that covers the whole customer journey, Qonto, an all-in-one finance management system, was able to do this by integrating its product, marketing, technology, and support teams. This has made it possible for them to collaborate more closely in order to provide their clients with a seamless, all-encompassing communication experience. In order to achieve best-in-class results, they onboard and engage customers with personalized product walkthroughs, provide excellent proactive and self-serve support with targeted messages and bots, and drive enhanced staff efficiency with a strong Inbox.
A modern customer support tool is required for next-generation customer service.
You can unleash the benefits of next-generation support—higher customer happiness, enhanced efficiency, deeper engagement, and happier support teams—by designing customer support experiences around these four tenets.
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