Customer support: 4 tips for combining performance and personalization
Your customer support is a key contact point for the customer experience, and plays an essential role in customer satisfaction. In terms of content, your advisors must provide fast, satisfactory answers, while delivering a memorable customer experience in terms of form. Beyond the strategic choice of the communication channels you make available to your customers, it's imperative to understand the drivers that will positively influence their perception following contact with your team.
So how do you strike the right balance between productive customer service and personalized, satisfying exchanges?
Discover 4 tips, illustrated using the easiware tool, for a customer relationship in tune with consumer expectations in 2021!
1- Be there where consumers need you
When you consider that 53% of French people have already abandoned a brand because of unreachable customer service (Baromètre Qualiweb 2021), the availability of your support team is a must. But how do you choose the right communication channels?
The objective is not necessarily to multiply the number of channels, but to offer those that correspond to your brand's ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). For example, young people prefer the immediacy and autonomy of self-care tools such as dynamic FAQs or chatbots. While others prefer human contact by telephone.
On average, the French use 3.7 channels to contact a customer service department (Observatoires des Services Clients 2020). So it's important to find the ideal combination of channels, depending on your customer profile and their journey. With a mix of assistance and selfcare solutions!
For example, the French brand Oxybul éveil et jeux offers its customers the possibility of contacting it via a variety of channels: an FAQ, a chatbot, online chat, contact by email, telephone and even Facebook Messenger!
To avoid silo management of its channels, it uses the easiware all-in-one platform. All channels are connected: every customer request is processed from the platform, regardless of the contact channel. This saves valuable time for agents, who can process all flows more efficiently!
Thanks to the interoperability of solutions, the brand has developed "intelligent triage" paths to empower customers before directing them to a relevant and available contact. For example, the chatbot will only switch to live chat if the customer has not found an answer.
In this way, the brand is able to offer all the channels favored by its customers, thanks to centralized and optimized management of its incoming flows.
2- Control and manage your customer service activity
If your communication channels are siloed, your customer service operations are bound to be complex. Without structured data and a history of interactions, it's hard to create reliable reports and organize your activities properly!
Moreover, as you may have noticed, the multiplication of customer relations tools compromises customer (re)knowledge: it's difficult to reconstruct the customer journey, and doesn't encourage personalized exchanges. And of course, this impacts on agent productivity and processing times.
Choosing a single customer relationship management tool is therefore a key decision for your company. It must be in phase with your business needs.
By centralizing all your contact channels in a single "omnichannel" management platform like easiware, you can easily :
- allocate your teams according to volumes of requests (by channel, by reason, by day, etc.) ;
- monitor agent productivity (DMT tracking, process improvement) and customer satisfaction (resolution time, NPS score, first contact resolution, etc.).
What's more, this type of solution contains historical data and reports. Thanks to the latter, you can easily build forecasts to size your teams, and never again let yourself be overwhelmed by sales or black Friday! Your lead times and processing times are reduced, and your customers will thank you for it.
In fact, the 2021 Customer Relationship KPI Barometer showed that 30% of companies introduced new KPIs or improved their reporting during the COVID-19 crisis! In fact, precise monitoring of operational KPIs makes it easier to model business, anticipate variations in activity and adjust organization with agility.
3- Provide quality answers and personalize your customer relations
If a customer contacts your support team, it's because they're experiencing a problem they could have done without! Once they've managed to reach you (see tip 1), and if they're dealt with quickly (see tip 2), their satisfaction at the end of the exchange with your team will depend on two factors:
- Has the problem been solved? The substance.
- Was the customer experience positive? The form.
So how can you positively influence these two factors?
Substance, of course, involves your customer service processes and the training of your teams. Your agents' skills need to be solid and up to date! Shared and enriched knowledge bases within your customer relationship management platform will enable you to ensure a consistent level of skills for your teams, and to transmit the information needed to take care of the customer in real time. All the more so in a telecommuting context, where active listening cannot be used to support teams. These knowledge bases are also proving extremely useful for onboarding new employees!
💡 Tip: you can also make some of these internal knowledge bases public in the form of a Help Center or FAQ available to your customers to relieve your support bottleneck and focus on higher value-added requests.
Whatever the case, the aim is always to provide agents with the context they need to provide accurate answers: in 2021, consumers can no longer stand impersonal response models.
And this phenomenon has been amplified by the COVID-19 crisis and the increased digitalization of interactions: today, 70% of consumers are looking for more human touch and personalization in their exchanges with brands (Baromètre Qualiweb 2021). An opportunity for your team to stand out from the crowd!
But you still need to know your customers inside out. There's nothing more unpleasant for a customer than repeating a problem: once should be enough! To avoid these setbacks, key service software such as easiware enables you to (re)get to know each customer. Whether the customer contacts you by email, telephone or chat, a native 360° record appears if he or she has already interacted with your company. In just 1 click, your team will have access to the history of conversations across all channels, contact details, loyalty profile, latest orders... for ultra-personalized treatment! A definite competitive advantage when you consider that 69% of customers consider that personalized customer service has an influence on their loyalty (Bilan 2017 de l'Expérience client, Smart Tribune).
4- Harmonize the customer experience across all channels
A successful customer experience lies in the customer's positive perception after every interaction before, during and after their purchasing process. However, the majority of consumers regret that exchanges do not embody the brand's image across all channels, whether physical or digital. This is one of the findings of the 2021 Customer Relationship KPI Barometer: two-thirds of companies offering multiple channels are not yet able to synchronize them to deliver a consistent experience. Omnichannel remains a challenge for most companies!
In e-commerce, for example, customer support should be seen as a major player in the online experience. The Printemps.com website has recruited personal shoppers who are available on easiware live chat to advise customers before the sale, just as they would in-store!
Thanks to the centralization of data in the omnichannel customer relationship management platform, the customer is recognized both online and in-store: the gap between online and offline is reduced to deliver a global, consistent experience!
Indeed, customers also behave in an "omnichannel" way, using both digital and physical media, which in some cases become complementary, as in the case of click&collect. The company must therefore centralize its customer data and harmonize its processes with all stakeholders (Marketing, Customer Service, CRM, Communications, IT) to respond to these new behaviors.
This is where the role of the customer service department becomes central! It carries the consumer's voice internally, and provides input for discussions with the various departments. The Andros food brand relies on easiware's reporting solution to convey the voice of the consumer to management. These reports draw up a precise inventory of consumer requests and motives, an indicator of the brand's alert points and success in relation to corporate objectives. Consumer suggestions also feed into the Marketing department and help with product development. Last but not least, the platform is connected to the factories, so that any complaints about quality can be reported in real time, enabling production lines to be modified.
Creating synergies between your customer support and other company departments is the key to a truly customer-centric approach!
In conclusion
As you can see, customer support is not simply there to solve a problem: it is an essential lever for your brand image. It must embody your brand's values, and create a strong bond with your customers to build long-term loyalty. Through active listening, specialized technological tools and efficient processes, he or she possesses precious data concerning your customers' expectations and needs, which must be fed into all departments. Your customer relations will become a lever for your company's long-term success!
Article translated from French