It’s been a few decades since the business started being a “thing”. Modern life is challenging us to have a full social, family, personal and healthy life while fulfilling ourselves professionally. People do everything they can to multitask, including online shopping from the bathroom, reports the Washington Post. As a result, consumers have no desire to work hard in interactions with companies. They want fast, easy solutions that simplify their lives. Here are three strategies to help you become their hero.
Be Available and Ready to Help on All Platforms
Almost every customer uses more than one communication channel, and you need to be present in all of them. Get active on social media, provide customers click-to-call and text message options, offer to call them back yourself, and enable live chat.
Just as importantly, give anyone who interacts with customers as much access to cross-organization information about customer history as you can. This way, you’ll provide a personalized service that saves customers time and shows you care enough to pay attention.
Give Your Customers Visual Options
Texting, chatting, and talking on the phone aren’t always the best options. Almost half of our brains’ activity is focused on visual processing, and we understand symbols much faster than we do short textual paragraphs. That’s probably why people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they see and do.
It’s not surprising, then, that visual IVRs often lead to shorter handling times and fewer calls to contact centers than regular IVRs. Even in calls, letting customers and agents send rich media, like videos, to one another can resolve many misunderstandings before they escalate. Better yet, offer video chats to make customers feel like they’re creating emotional connections with real people instead of a faceless company.
Make Sure Your Agents are On Top of Their Game
What matters most to customers is the quality of service they receive. Consider unifying agent desktop applications and automating workflows to simplify processes. Otherwise, agents will continue spending 14% of their time trying to find data from multiple applications, according to an Aberdeen Group research, instead of focusing on customers’ needs.
Agents that do that cost contact centers with 200 agents $840,000 extra a year, reports Aberdeen. Use that money for better training: Make sure anyone who interacts with customers has a deep understanding of your product’s features and benefits, plus the people skills needed to give customers an engaging experience.
Treat your team members like you’d like them to treat customers, and you’ll see them working hard to create company-customer success stories.
[About the author]
Dylon Mills is the Director of Marketing Content Strategy & Development at Uniphore. As such, Dylon’s main responsibilities are to strategize, create and deliver content for Uniphore’s product portfolio that aligns with the global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing campaigns. Dylon’s prior work experience includes Product Management at one of the top Fortune 500 Technology companies, Symantec Corporation. Outside of work, Dylon enjoys problem-solving and any project that includes building/tinkering with tools. Dylon holds a BS Consumer Economics from the University of Georgia.