Customer care is a key part of any business, whatever ‘customer’ means to you. And increasingly in this modern world, it’s hard to avoid technology in the workplace – but why would you want to when there’s so much customer care technology that can help you to improve the way you do things? Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can harness the power of software and systems to improve the customer experience.
Improve the speed of communications
When a customer gets in touch with a brand, they want a response fast. Com100 found that 71% of consumers aged between 16 and 24 think that a fast response from a customer support team drastically improves the customer experience. Similarly, HubSpot found that 90% of customers think that an immediate response is either important or very important when they have a question – and 60% of customers believe “immediate” to be 10 minutes or less.
The message is clear: to provide excellent customer care, you need to answer customer questions quickly. Technology like social media and live chat can provide this almost instant response that customers are looking for.
Offer self-serve options
Many customers don’t want to have to speak to an agent in a call centre, and would rather solve issues themselves where possible. Zendesk research found that 63% of users with an issue start by searching a company’s website for the answer. The use of a knowledge base can support this – and indeed, a knowledge base is the preferred self-service option for customers, according to Forrester.
Analysis data that you’ve collected through your CRM can help you to create knowledge base articles that are genuinely useful for your customers. If users are frequently getting in touch with your customer service team with the same issue, then you might be able to eliminate these queries with content that answers their questions.
Improve productivity of contact centre staff
Customer service software ensures that your agents have everything they need, when they need it, as well as improving internal collaboration, both between the service team and other departments such as sales and marketing. By ensuring employees have access to the customer information they need with desk software, they’ll be faster at responding to customer complaints and questions.
Prioritise responses
One of the most crucial pieces of customer support software is an efficient ticketing system. Traditionally, especially in small businesses with a limited number of agents, tickets will just be worked through in the order they come in. However, this could lead to potential issues if a major complaint is left for hours, days, or even weeks. A ticketing system enables agents to quickly and easily see what the most pressing issues are, allowing them to resolve them before they escalate to a bigger issue.
Offer a personalised service
When you use customer service technology to gather data about your customers, you can offer a personalised service to increase customer loyalty. If you know what products and services a customer has bought in the past, you can offer discounts and personalised marketing to increase the chances of them purchasing from you again. And since 52% of customers go out of their way to buy from brands they’re loyal to, more loyalty usually means more sales.
Provide 24/7 support
Your customer care representatives can’t provide round-the-clock support for customers – but technology can. With bots, you can ensure your customer queries are addressed as quickly as possible – something that’s particularly important to consider when you have a global customer base.
Automate your activities
Customer service technology, with templated responses that are tailored to your customers, means you can automatically send updates to customers at key touchpoints in their journey, freeing up your customer service agents’ time for other activities.
What is customer support software?
Clearly, technology can help you improve customer care across the board – and the best piece of technology for any customer support team is customer service software. That is any program that enables a business to offer assistance or advice to their customers.
The most basic function of any customer care technology is to offer a centralised ticketing system, allowing support agents to track, prioritise, manage, respond to and resolve customer queries or complaints.
It can also refer to any tool that improves the delivery of customer service, such as a knowledge base, automated software, analytics or messaging apps – and often this type of technology will be integrated with a CRM. This allows agents to have more background information, giving context to their customer data, such as their purchase history.
All of this data, when combined, is powerful, allowing support agents to offer the best possible customer care.
