In the past two decades, technology has made a huge positive impact on most day-to-day business activities and overall operations, from recruitment to marketing.
Customer service is no different. Long wait times and tardy responses are no longer tolerable and essentially kill customer satisfaction. Instant gratification is the name of the game.
Technology is why your customers now feel this way, and it’s also the answer to providing them the best service possible. Here are three ways technology can improve your customer service and bottom line.
Speed Up Customer Service Communication
One of the biggest ways in which technology contributes to a better customer experience is how it helps to boost the speed of customer service.
Not so long ago, customer service communication involved customers having to use a contact form and wait for a reply over email, submit multiple tickets to the help desk, or wait for the next available customer service rep on the phone.
But the modern customer doesn’t have the patience (wears out at just 10 minutes) to wait for getting in touch with you. In fact, around 90% of consumers rate immediate assistance when reaching out to a company’s online support staff as “important” or “very important”.
In the form of live chat, technology allows customers to have quicker interactions with businesses. For 41% of consumers, live chat is the preferred channel for contacting support teams.
Live chat builds trust with your company and makes customers feel someone is always on your side ready to help. Of course, that’s not possible as you can’t have a customer support team sitting 24/7.
That’s where chatbots help. An AI-powered chatbot is an amazing customer service tool that provides instant answers to your customers’ commonly asked questions, so they don’t have to wait for a reply over email, call you, fill out a form, or submit help desk tickets.
A chatbot is available around the clock and immune to frustration that can be caused by unruly customers. It minimizes delays and blunders in customer service, and can also guide your customers to different parts of your website based on what they’re looking for. A chatbot helps automate tedious aspects of customer service so your team can focus efforts on resolving tricky customer issues and leaving them happy.
Enable Customer Self-Service
Along the same lines, technology allows you to empower your customers to answer their questions on their own terms and thus, render near-instant customer service.
In particular, we’re talking about a knowledge base — a simple yet elegant piece of software tech.
A self-service company knowledge base is basically a centralized repository of easily retrievable information (FAQs, how-to guides, tutorials, etc.) about your company, products/services, policies, or your niche-relevant topics.
It enables customers to easily and instantly dig up information, get answers, and can essentially be their go-to resource to learn anything and everything they want about your products and services.
What’s more, a knowledge base also improves your customer support efficiency and saves costs.
How? A well-designed knowledge base — with comprehensive FAQs, product documentation, feature updates, getting started guides, return policies, and step-by-step tutorials — reduces the number of support tickets your team has to tackle, which means you can have a smaller support team and save costs on hiring.
Plus, by enabling customers to find solutions themselves, you give your support team the bandwidth to take care of more complex customer issues, and consequently, get the most ROI from your support team.
Using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like SuperOffice, not only can you build a self-service knowledge base to answer all FAQs, but also capture and organize all customer data and inquiries in a central location so everyone in your company has instant access to the information and will be able to check into the status of a customer prior to any contact.
Gather Customer Feedback
The only way to continually grow your business and improve your offerings is to get feedback from your customers.
Customer feedback allows you to continually learn about and exceed customer expectations. But unless the experience is remarkably poor, most customers won’t bother to share feedback about your company.
Again, technology helps facilitate the feedback process for both customers and your business. You can use a tool like SurveyMonkey to create an elegant survey, and share it with your customers using the email addresses they provided at the time of purchase.