Keep Customers Onboard with These 6 Customer Support Best Practices

Customer loyalty can be here one day and gone the next and that can be incredibly expensive. And now, with looming economic uncertainty, customers are even more careful about where they’re spending their money. On top of that, your business faces an ocean full of competitors who are ready to steal away your customers and, to be honest, it’s not hard to do. 80% of consumers have jumped ship to another brand following a single instance of poor customer service. While it’s tempting to think you can just find more customers, investing in better customer experiences to keep your existing customers can be up to 25 times less expensive than finding new ones since they’re more likely to buy from you again. If you want to keep growing your business, use these 6 best practices to keep your customers on board.

Be On Deck

Being more available for your customers doesn’t necessarily mean having everyone on deck 24/7. It means making information readily available when customers expect it. Customers may have different standards about availability when visiting your website for information versus calling you at 1 AM. With that in mind, be sure to:

• Update your website to answer common questions your customers have.
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
• Provide contact information on your site where it’s easy to find (e.g., at the top of the page, the footer, or a dedicated Contact Us page)
• Use automated messages and replies for calls and emails outside of business hours or for holidays.
• Implement self-service tools like webchat to allow customers to resolve their own inquiries.

Lower Your Barrier… Reefs

Accessibility is not the same as availability. Businesses may claim they’re available but if it requires too much effort on the customer’s part to contact them, they might as well be oceans apart. Being accessible is all about understanding the way your customer wants to communicate and removing the effort to do so as much as possible. Here’s how to get started:

• Set up your call routing so customers quickly get to the right person the first time.
• Fastrack customer verification by integrating your system of record to your customer communications platform.
• Ask customers or search call transcriptions to find out your customers’ communications channel preference and offer more ways to connect like email, SMS, webchat, and voice.

Send Them A Lifeline

Proactive outreach sends a clear message that you value your customers by not leaving them adrift. Being proactive also means anticipating your customers’ needs and responding immediately. Many businesses feel they can’t be proactive because they’re too busy as it is. The cost-friendly solution is to automate your outreach. Here’s how:

• Send automated, two-way notifications for appointment reminders, announcements, or promotions and allow customers to respond without needing a frontline user.
• Ensure your outbound messages are clear to avoid customer confusion and an influx of calls.
• Prompt customers to engage with webchat to resolve questions on your website.
• Identify frequently asked questions or tasks and let customers use self-service tools to resolve them.
• Automatically send surveys after interactions to get immediate customer feedback.

Don’t Leave Them Stranded

Customers hate waiting on hold. It can feel like being stuck on a desert island with no end in sight. Most businesses think the only solution to managing their call volumes is to hire more people. But that can be difficult with it being harder than every to find talent and budgets shrinking due to economic uncertainty. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce your hold
times without adding headcount:

• Deflect calls to other communications channels like email or SMS texts that allow frontline users to answer multiple messages simultaneously.
• Let customers opt for a callback rather than wait on hold.
• Use canned messages to expedite responses to common questions or requests.

Consolidate Your Fleet Of Tools

Solving customer requests takes every member of your crew. Frontline users need to know who’s available at any time to help them with a customer and they need a way to collaborate with them. More than half of businesses who’ve consolidated their applications reported an improved ability to keep up with customer expectations. Here’s how to get started:

• Look for a single platform that supports employee collaboration (e.g., phone, chat, file sharing, and video conferencing) and customer communications.
• Ensure employee’s presence status accurately reflects whether they’re busy or available.
• Look for technology that allows you to bring someone into the call.
• Integrate your CRM to quickly see who’s calling, automatically document calls, and view recent notes about the customer.
• Incorporate file sharing to streamline collaboration.

Fine Tune Your Navigation Instruments

You can do every best practice on this list, but unless you can track your employees’ performance, you’ll be as lost as a boat without a ship wheel or rudder. Make sure you’re doing these things to keep your pulse on you customer experience:

• Be clear on the customer experience outcomes you want and make sure you can tie trackable metrics to them.
• Give employees frequent feedback on their performance to keep them engaged and improving.
• Use artificial intelligence for sentiment analysis to focus on conversations with the biggest impact.
• Record inbound and outbound calls to keep a record of customer interactions for quality management, compliance, and to resolve misunderstandings.
• Monitor live customer interactions and coach the frontline user when needed.

Set Sail For Better Customer Experiences

Now is the perfect time to improve your customer communications. If 80% of customers are willing to switch brands after a bad customer service experience, you have a tremendous opportunity to be the business those customers will run to if you establish a reputation for outstanding customer experiences. Having the right tools to manage customer interactions will be the key to your success. Our Contact Center solution has everything you need to manage and track all your customer interactions via voice, chat, SMS text messages, and email so that your business. Let’s talk today.