Customer service is more than a business goal for modern enterprises today. When done right, it can become the vista through which brands attain their goals. These goals are a motivated workforce, a healthy return on investment (ROI), patronage of repeat subscribers, and positive brand recognition.
Speed and service quality are critical factors shaping consumers’ overall brand experiences. A study lists three reasons businesses invest in customer service, underscoring the importance of quality in client support. These reasons are:
- Improved cross-selling and upselling lead to better revenue generation.
- Matchless customer service turns consumers into brand fans.
- Excellent customer service increases customer retention.
The rationale is sound: Cultivate such a strong connection with customers that they never consider churning.
Since the implications of customer service and experience are so great, new ways of working and empowering talent alone won’t cure what is lacking in customer support. Right technology can help companies create phenomenal customer experiences (CX) and reap benefits.
In this article, we will discuss two ways to improve customer experiences. The first section details various ways an organization upholds its standards to deliver remarkable CX. The remainder of the article deals with the necessity of AI-powered software that helps deliver superb CX.
Also read: Maximize Service Agents' Efficiency With Intelligent Suggestions
What Do Customers Want When They Contact Your Organization?
When customers contact businesses, they typically have a mix of needs and expectations they want fulfilled.
Here are some of the top things they want.
1) Map the customer's journey
Customer journey mapping visualizes or maps your customers’ transformation from visitors to prospects, subscribers, initial purchasers, and ultimately your brand loyalists. With a customer journey map, you can visualize the experience of interacting with your brand from your customer's point of view. Align your business goals with your customers' objectives. Ensure your brand fulfills needs and provides clients with additional value.
2) Make it easy for customers to contact you
Your brand must maintain a solid presence across all communication channels. That’s because customers can connect with your brand on their preferred channels. Whether your clients contact your business through custom channels, phone, email, chat, or social media, their queries must be addressed.
3) Respond quickly to customer inquiries
Don't take your time responding to tickets and customer messages. Harness the potential of your omnichannel customer communication and automated support system, stay alert, and respond to your clients anytime.
4) Personalize your customers' experiences
Your customer data can give you a rich harvest of information that can be utilized to offer highly personalized experiences to your clients/visitors. Maintaining a golden record can help your support reps with data from your customers' past interactions with the company and help them tailor responses to clients' unique needs.
5) Listen to the Voice of the Customer
Stellar customer experiences become a reality when the voice of the customer (VoC) is heard across multiple channels and actioned upon. VoC helps eliminate risks in the harsh competitive market and gives excellent insights into customer expectations.
6) Continuous improvement
Innovate strategically and implement the “evolved method of working” so that your business and customers benefit from continuous R&D. Improving and optimizing your business processes and customer care functions helps brands deliver a frictionless experience to customers while keeping your enterprise future-proof.
7) Create a customer-centric culture
Your organization must exhibit a customer-centric mindset. That means all business processes and decisions should be made with the end customer in mind. To build a customer-centric mindset, enterprises must understand client needs, communication preferences and expectations, and their perception of the brand and create working strategies.
So far, we have seen the core values necessary for every organization to uphold customer service and support quality. Now, the question is, how will you create an environment that enables your customer support teams to deliver the best customer service?
Also read: Implementing ThinkOwl’s AI-powered Chat Tool For Conversational CX
Empowering Support Teams To Deliver The Best Customer Support
With nearly 86% of customers saying that they won’t hesitate to leave a brand if they receive poor service, the stakes are higher than ever for customer support teams. Agents must meet customers' needs through every interaction while building trust and loyalty as brand ambassadors.
Delivering outstanding customer service can be even more difficult when your service and support teams are forced to work in silos through manual and lengthy processes.
Let’s look at a few ways that help support teams deliver stellar experiences to customers with the help of customer support/service desk software. A conversational customer care solution will have many helpful and intuitive features that empower your support teams to create personalized, solution-oriented, unforgettable customer experiences.
8) Ticket management system streamlines support requests
A ticket management system streamlines communication, enabling agents to collaborate and exchange information, resulting in quicker issue resolution. It efficiently sorts and prioritizes customer inquiries, directing them to the right agents for resolution. This ensures that no customer concerns are left unaddressed.
Moreover, it offers valuable data-driven insights to identify trends and enhance service processes, ultimately improving the customer experience. An AI-powered ticket management system guarantees superior service by providing omnichannel multilingual support, timely case tracking, contextual conversations, and a self-service portal.
9) Process automation enables effortless, automated service experiences
Process automation streamlines repetitive tasks, reducing manual errors and improving efficiency in customer service workflows. It improves customer service by speeding up response times and reducing human error in handling inquiries. It also helps provide 24/7 support, ensuring customers can avail themselves of support whenever needed. Automation can free up human agents, letting them focus on more complex issues.
Process automation helps brands adhere to compliance and is key to vastly improving an organization’s image as reliable. Improving a company’s efficiency and agility helps increase customer satisfaction rates, positively impacting client sentiments.
10) Artificial Intelligence — the smart assistant for customer servicing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve customer experience through personalization, real-time insights, sentiment analysis, and conversational assistance 24/7. With AI, you can personalize customers’ brand experiences, provide dynamic and conversational support, and solve consumer issues more efficiently.
AI-powered bots can handle many inquiries simultaneously, providing instant responses and reducing wait times. Additionally, AI can predict customer behavior and trends, allowing businesses to address issues and improve service offerings proactively. AI only needs proper training and valuable data to train, and then it goes on its own accord, learning from agents and performing accordingly.
11) 24/7 support, no waiting. Courtesy, conversation bot
The conversation bot is your customers’ and business teams’ new virtual assistant. Conversational AI ensures the bot interacts with users in a human-like manner. It’s an intelligent companion that elevates the quality of service and support interactions transforming customer service into something more than mere transactional interactions.
Easy to train and deploy, the bot understands users' intentions and sentiments and assists them towards faster resolution through self-service channels, remaining with them until the end. Conversation bots give users a refreshing support experience and improve CX by leveraging AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP).
12) Omnichannel support — puts the customer in control of communication
Omnichannel service desk software integrates various communication channels such as email, chat, social media, messenger apps, or custom channels. It ensures that customers can reach out through their preferred channels, increasing accessibility and convenience. Additionally, omnichannel support enables agents to view a customer's interaction history across channels, enabling them to provide more informed and efficient assistance.
13) Knowledge base and self-service tool give resolution at customers’ fingertips
A consolidated knowledge base is an authorized source of information for your customers. When paired with self-service tools, knowledge bases become information repositories, eliminating unnecessary digging for data and application hopping. Important information related to products, services, SLAs, etc., is available at your customers’ fingertips. When customers use self-service channels to fulfill their requirements, it saves time and enables faster resolutions.
14) Stay ahead of the curve with analytics and reports
Analytics and reports provide valuable insights into customer behavior and trends, enabling businesses to anticipate and address customer needs more effectively. Companies can identify areas for improvement in their customer service processes and make informed decisions through data analysis of case topics, performance metrics, customer satisfaction scores, etc. Businesses can utilize customer insight data to improve overall CX.
Tools like customer satisfaction surveys and sentiment analytics further enhance an organization’s understanding of what clients want. Armed with the data, enterprises are better equipped to provide more personalized support experiences that improve loyalty and lead to positive brand perception.
Also Read: Third-Party Software Integration With ThinkOwl
Your business's best friend is a service desk software solution that empowers your support team to communicate across multiple channels and make informed decisions with data-driven insights. Omnichannel customer service software encourages you to fulfill your organization’s business objectives while focusing on creating memorable customer experiences and lasting interactions.
ThinkOwl is an AI-powered cloud customer support solution with everything organizations need to deliver extraordinary experiences across the end-to-end customer journey. Whatever industry you may belong to, if you wish to foster a customer-centric culture and deliver the best service and support, do not hesitate to try ThinkOwl.
Seize the opportunity to improve every customer interaction. Sign up now for a 30-day free trial.