customer success Archives

Why is Multi Channel Customer Service Important?

Posted on August 7, 2021August 8, 2021 by David Dinh

We live in a time of plentiful choices. Making the most of it, many organisations or start-ups in globally are creating their impact, in the shortest possible time, by means of integrating multiple channels of customer service in their businesses. These channels include phone support, email and chat support, social media support, or even text support.

Nowadays, integration of multi-channel customer services is one of the most important factors for a business to consider, due to many reasons. By providing a range of options to the customer, businesses in globally are attracting and growing their loyal customer base significantly. They build high value by affecting the way in which people are making purchase decisions nowadays.

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In addition, offering abundant choices to your customers is a forerunner for a business to maintain its presence, meet the customer needs round the clock irrespective of their location, and empower customers to take the right decision. To assist you further, let’s have a detailed look at the concept of multi-channel customer service.

Business Efficiency through Multi Channel Integration

Multi channel customer service holds huge potential in delivering business efficiency and excellent customer experiences. The customer experience offered by integrating a multi channel strategy creates a more personalised, optimised and responsive outlook of a business in competitive and transforming industries.

As per the Fifth Quadrant’s research;

The primary channels that attract the maximum investment of various small or big organisations are 83% online or self-service – digital, 62% mobile apps, 34% email and surprisingly, 57% of investment is focused on the phone or voice channel while 18% towards face to face channels.

This clearly emphasises on the potential that opens up for a business with the integration of multi channel customer service. Along with that, the level of exposure of the customer base to your business improves, as you cater to the needs of your customers by all means, and without falling short of their expectations.

Are you increasing the investment in multi channel customer service this year, to attain higher business value in your particular industry?

If you too, plan to join the forces of digital transformation and differentiate your business from the existing competitors, then you must make the most of these consumer channel preferences, and make only the right decisions, most importantly in the right direction, to optimise your customer service experience.

The top most channels utilised by Australian consumers, to avail customer service, are through phone conversation – 62%, via self-service website – 41% and in person – 45%.

The Prospective Channels of Customer Service and their Importance

Organisations that believe in delivering exceptional customer support, reach out to their consumers through all of those channels where their customers are present. Thus:

If your existing customer base includes avid user of emails, opt for an instant email support.
If they like to reach your business on Twitter, make this platform as your potential channel of customer support to access your customers efficiently.

In continuation of the above stated Fifth Quadrant research, keeping a strong grip on all the available channels of customer support will be the only key factor in differentiating your business and moving it along to a true market leader.

Email: This is undoubtedly the most non negotiable channel for all types of businesses. Almost 91% of consumers utilise an email service, everyday. This is the easiest means of building instant rapport with your customer base.

Social Media: Social networks are now the most excellent means of accessing your customer and to grow your business. Companies who use social networks as customer support channels have 15% lower churn rates than the ones who don’t.

Self-service Knowledge Base: As the name depicts, the self-service knowledge base is extremely useful to help your customers get to know you better, without being present for their assistance, through a live channel of customer support. You can deliver exceptional assistance 24/7 with just a small team.

Voice or live Chat:Phone support is old-fashioned but considered as the fastest means of communication between your business and the customer base. In fact, phone assistance accounts for almost 68% of the speediest interactions. Similarly, 44% of customers say that having a live chat support during an online purchase creates a trustworthy relationship with the service providers and is accounted for, as the top feature a website could offer.

Multi Channel Customer Service – A mean of seamless consumer experience

Your customer wants to be able to contact you with whatever device they hold in their hands and that is what your business needs to do – make itself accessible, by all possible means, for your customer’s satisfaction.

Integrate many digital platforms and provide seamless consumer experience through different channels. If you manage to reach out to your consumer base through numerous channels, your business will be providing fantastic experience to its customers, which is hard to give up.

Gain more loyalty and trust with your instant customer service. Stay responsive to your customers and effectively provide them with updated information and flawless support.

In today’s fast paced and transforming world, a business that shows itself invested in providing exceptional support to its customers, by making the most of the multi channel customer service, will go a long way in building long lasting relationships with its customers and successfully make its mark.

Let Your Humans Be Human

Posted on July 9, 2021July 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Guest blog by Colin Priest

There’s an industrial revolution under way in businesses across the world, and it is all about automation. Businesses are embracing machine learning and artificial intelligence to make better decisions automatically. And the reason for this revolution is the comparative strengths of humans and computers.

Computers are strongest at repetitive tasks, mathematics, data manipulation and parallel processing. So long as a task can be defined as a procedure, a computer can do that task over and over again, without getting tired, giving the same results each time. Computers can manipulate numbers and data in volume much faster than any human.

digital-transformation-how-to

Several years ago I went back to university to do a masters degree, and after a 25 year break from university I was out of practice at mathematics. Imagine my excitement and relief when I discovered that now there is software that will do algebra and calculus for me! And computers can do more than one thing at a time. Have you ever tried to rub your belly and tap your head at the same time? I can’t do both actions simultaneously. But modern computer networks are powerful, able to routinely do dozens of different processes at once.

This does not mean that humans are obsolete. What humans are much more skilled than machines at are communication and engagement, context and general knowledge, creativity and empathy. When I have a frustrating problem, I want to talk to a human. Someone who will understand my exasperation, listen to my experience and make me feel valued as a customer, whilst also solving my problem for me. Humans are much better at common sense than computers, instantly recognizing when a decision doesn’t make sense. And humans can be creative. I recently heard music composed by a computer, and I’m sure that song won’t make it into the Top 40!

Customer Service communication -cmo-marketing-customer service skills-conversation management

Customer Service

Recently I had a conversation with the manager of a call centre that dealt with hundreds of customer service issues each day. In order to ensure the quality of the service and advice, the call centre operators were given scripts and were commanded to follow those scripts without changing a word. The problem was that both staff and customers became frustrated. Staff felt bored and unchallenged, and customers with non-standard problems felt like they weren’t being heard. Staff turnover increased, and customer satisfaction levels dropped.

Customer Satisfaction

The manager then tested using chatbots to answer simpler questions from customers, freeing up the human operators to deal with non-standard enquiries. This was a situation where computers had a comparative advantage over humans. The call center processes were fully defined, operating at scale, and the scripted answers were correct. The results spoke for themselves. Computers were much better at helping with the repetitive enquiries, and humans were better at dealing with the unusual enquiries. Staff engagement increased, as did customer satisfaction.

This has implications for human resources and process innovation. Processes that require humans to do repetitive, well defined tasks can be replaced by artificial intelligence. This frees up staff to do what humans are best at:

asking the right questions,
applying common sense,
creating new solutions,
evangelising new ideas, and
generating sales and profit.

Let your humans be human. Free them from repetitive tasks. Change job descriptions to focus on human strengths, and hire people who best embody the comparative advantages of humans. Look for human processes that are well defined and repetitive, and enhance the process by introducing artificial intelligence. Some ways company have started to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their processes include:

Intelligently linking relevant articles to solve customer enquiries before they even reach an agent
Supporting agents with suggested responses to enquiries
Automatically sorting and routing conversations to the right department or agent
Providing agents real-time behavioural guidance during phone calls to improve customer experience
Providing 24 hour customer service instead of outsourcing customer service

There are even some companies out there that have started automating the automation, like DataRobot. Instead of hiring and training up a data scientists, the arcane process of building predictive models, once the sole domain of data scientists, can all be automated. The system automatically builds predictive models based on your data, freeing up your humans to be human, to be better conversational AI specialists.

Based in Singapore, Colin is the Director, Customer Success and Lead Data Scientist, APAC for DataRobot, where he advises businesses on how to build business cases and successfully manage data science projects. Over his career, Colin has held a number of CEO and general management roles, where he has championed data science initiatives in financial services, healthcare, security, oil and gas, government and marketing. He frequently speaks at various global conferences. Colin is a firm believer in data-based decision making and applying AI. He is passionate about the science of healthcare and does pro-bono work to support cancer research.

Customer Experience, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – Thoughts from Oovvuu, Canva & The Minerva Collective

Posted on April 29, 2021July 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is all the buzz right now, and rightfully so with the significant contributions it has made to redefining many aspects of business. However, many people are still skeptical about the application of AI and ML to enhancing customer experience.

Some would argue that machines cannot possibly take over customer service, something that has a heavy focus on human interaction. Machines lack the empathy and emotional intelligence core to providing a great customer experience. On the other hand, many also see the benefit of applying AI and ML to automate repetitive tasks, allowing humans to dedicate more time to, well, being human.

We reached out to some experts from Oovvuu, Canva and The Minerva Collective to pick their brains about the issue.

What is the current state of customer experience, and how do you see it evolve with AI & ML technology?

Present customer experience is “all over the place, with wildly varying results. Two customers using the same service can have completely different impressions of their experience, and in many cases the service is clunky and poorly structured” says Anthony Tockar, Data Scientist and Co-founder of The Minerva Collective. The unfortunate reality is that 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of poor service experience. In fact, companies only hear from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. With so much choice available to consumers, it’s much easier to find another company with similar offerings than spending time complaining or calling about a problem. Which is why there is a very real need to focus on customer experience, a factor that is becoming increasingly important to retain the modern customer.

Paul Tune, Machine Learning Engineer at Canva, believes “there are two trends in improving customer experience:

A trend towards tailoring for the individual, as more data is gathered about each customer at a large scale, and;
A trend towards providing a smooth experience for customers across multiple touchpoints by anticipating their needs. “

To demonstrate how customer experience has evolved, Paul continues with an example. “Early recommendation systems, such as the recommendation engines developed at Amazon and NetFlix in the early 2000s, provided recommendations at a much coarser level, chiefly for specific groups of customers. The granularity of recommendations in the near future is going to be much finer. For instance, an engineer from NetFlix I spoke to recently, mentioned that a subscriber’s favourite character for a TV series would appear in the menu when the TV series is selected. This means having to learn more about each customer and predicting their habits. We also see this in the form of smart personal assistants, such as Alexa and Siri” he says.

Ricky Sutton, Founder and CEO of Oovvuu, adds on that whilst AI and ML “certainly has an element to play [in customer experience], it also lacks a key element…empathy. So my thought is that it will evolve. The more AI is used, the more it learns and the better it gets, but human-level empathy remains a pipe dream for now.”

What is the biggest lesson you have learned from applying smart technology to customer experience?

For Anthony, the lesson has been the need for people using smart technology to properly understand it – “My experience is that people often don’t trust what they don’t understand. The latest technologies have been great for grabbing headlines, but only the most forward-thinking businesses are serious about applying them to derive value. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – domain knowledge is essential for good data science, and blindly relying on new approaches has many inherent risks. There is a lot that has been learned about customer experience over time and there is a need to explain smart technology to business people using the right language to allow them to fully realise its value.”

To Paul, what matters most, is the customer’s end-to-end experience. Meaning that all the touchpoints with the customer should be seamless. For him, “the challenge with integrating smart technology to improve user experience is similar to managing any other complex system: with more moving parts, there is a higher chance of failure in the system. Naively applying machine learning to improve customer experience is misguided. Machine learning works best if it is complementary to the customer experience, serving to enhance the experience of a great product.”

“At Canva, our goal is simple: we want to give the customer the best experience in empowering them to create and design. To that end, there are two aspects that we focus on. Firstly, how do we make the content that they need for their designs easily accessible. Secondly, how do we anticipate what resources might be helpful for them in the future. We achieve these goals by improving our search and recommendation services to enhance customer experience.”

The biggest lesson for Ricky is that “AI turns humans into super-humans, but only for certain tasks.” – “When we started Oovvuu, we hired editors to read articles and find relevant videos, and they were able to read one publication each and find 40 relevant videos per day. That same person using the AI tools that we created, can now read 100,000 publishers, and 300,000 stories a day, covering 26 million topics and find relevant videos from more than 40 global broadcasters. AI is mind-blowingly powerful for automating manual human tasks, but humans remain better at all the things that, well, make us human.”

What are some challenges for businesses who try to integrate AI & ML technology and customer experience?

Anthony, Paul and Ricky all agreed that a huge challenge for businesses is not having a solid data infrastructure, or a deep understanding of what exactly should be measured to achieve business goals and customer satisfaction.

“Many companies approach us seeking to use conversational AI as a ready-made silver bullet for a business problem. Others come to ask to play with AI, so they can find a business opportunity. Neither really works.” Ricky said. “For us, the solution was to know what business problem we were trying to solve: namely, to put a relevant video into every article being published worldwide. We then used AI to solve it, but what we started with was very basic and not up to the job. We have had a team nurturing the teaching for almost 1,000 days to get it where it is.”

Anthony went on to add that “there is no silver bullet – good data scientists are required to translate these algorithms into business value. Having a solid data science strategy is essential, and through good leadership, increased data literacy and an understanding of how to build a high-performance data science team, businesses can harness these technologies to forge a competitive advantage.”

Paul concludes with another common challenge many businesses face when adopting AI & ML into their processes – the volume of data. “Present machine learning techniques rely on a relatively large amount of data to provide good predictions” he says. “While there is fundamental research being carried out presently to (hopefully) reduce the amount of data required to train these machine learning models, the current main technological limitation of requiring a huge amount of data is here to stay for the foreseeable future.” But “fortunately, this effect can be mitigated if the data collected is of sufficiently high quality.”

Are you implementing AI and ML technology in your business? Share your story with us in the comments below!

About the Contributors

Anthony Tockar

Anthony is a leader in the data science space, and has worked on problems across insurance, loyalty, technology, telecommunications, the social sector and even neuroscience. A formally-trained actuary, Anthony completed an MS in Analytics at the prestigious Northwestern University. After hitting the headlines with his posts on data privacy at Neustar, he returned to Sydney to practice as a data scientist while co-founding the Minerva Collective and the Data Science Breakfast Meetup. He also helps organise several other meetups and programs for data scientists, in line with his mission to extend the reach and impact of data to help people.

Paul Tune

Paul Tune is a Machine Learning Engineer at Canva, responsible for developing solutions for tailoring and personalising content for Canva’s customers. He has several publications in prestigious computer science conferences and journals, including the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 2015. His interests include deep learning, statistics and information theory.

Ricky Sutton

Ricky is founder and CEO of Oovvuu, an IBM and Amazon-backed start up that uses artificial intelligence to match videos from global broadcasters with publishers worldwide. It’s mission is to use AI to insert a relevant short form and long form video in every article. In doing so, it aims to tell the news in a new and more compelling way, end fake news, and in doing so, repatriate billions from Facebook and Google back to the journalists and broadcasters who make the content.

AI Technology and Customer Service

Posted on January 5, 2021July 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Recently I wrote an article for LinkedIn titled “Can we maintain the human touch with customer service?” I couldn’t help think about how fast we are moving with Artificial Intelligence that the question still remains, I am not worried about 5 years from now or what new customer interactions will be digital, but how will businesses maintain the reality check with their customers? Surely digital chat bots and automated ticketing systems will ask random customers surveys about what they thought about their service response and the level of happiness to refer another customer. To implement is very easy but to keep the human connection with your customers will be the challenge.

Deliver Smarter Customer Service Solutions

At Woveon, we watch and analyse through thousands of conversations all uniquely handled by diligent customer service agents who, assisted with technology, work tirelessly around the clock to acknowledge, understand, listen to and resolve the incoming customer conversation. Clearly customer service has the human touch here! Even with today’s conversational AI technology surpassing standards in reliability, accuracy and now business intelligence the human touch in AI must not be far away? This is an important consideration looking at the technology landscape today, companies are working on delivering smarter customer service solutions, from chat bots that understand your sentiment and can adapt to your tone and writing style to automated enquiry systems that can help recommend products while you shop online. Yet still, customer service and particularly conversation management is still a human “touch”, something that is defined intrinsically in the term “customer experience”.

Create an Outstanding Customer Service Experience

Let’s take the example of creating an outstanding customer service experience. Data tells us that outstanding customer service increases brand loyalty. Examples include begin a conversation with a podcast, send personal messages, create a lifestyle and get back to your customers. We’re not talking about getting back to your customers via a bot or automated reply email, but rather using an actual person who understands your customers and can understand the fine details and semantics of human feelings. Remember, customer service is all about listening to your customers and putting yourself in their shoes. Great customer service professionals can quickly adapt and understand the customer’s frustrations and calm their emotions. Being present and responding quickly in human is very different to doing this via a scripted automated response. However, in the enterprise world, a study by Oracle put it at 8 out of every 10 businesses who are already implementing or about to implement AI as a customer service solution by 2020. Nearly 40% of all enterprises are already using some form of AI technology with Forrester predicting a 300% increase in AI investments, the disruptive power of AI will impact every part of the business from customer service to sales and support. So are businesses going ahead at this the wrong way?

Having interviewed several CTOs and CMOs working with the technology, there is no rushing into the game looking for the holy grail. For most, the best step moving forward is in assistive and adaptive technology or to assist with data collection and analysis. AI technology is encapsulating more and more human qualities as technology advances. Bots are often deployed to collect data based off human input and use it to optimise the customer’s experience. This is particularly applicable to personalisation. Human teams then need to help filter, sift through and make sense of all the personalisations so the system can make better judgements in the future. Artificial intelligence predicts and prioritises the user’s interests according to their searches and similar inputs given by other users. This, when compared to the pros of human service, has similar benefits to empathy and experience. For example the human touch can continue on more serious, complicated customer challenges whereas standard, mundane everyday enquiries can be handled by AI bots. An example is AI assistance to lessen waiting periods for customer inquiries. KLM, the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands, used DigitalGenius’ AI system to answer customer’s questions faster. The AI units interpreted the questions and answered them with a quick edit of the preformed answer to relate directly to the language used by the customer. It was also able to adapt to the platform for the inquiries, pumping out longer responses to emails but limiting Twitter responses to 140 characters. Digital customer service seems to be directed towards matching human interaction but with the removal of prominent flaws.

So can we maintain the human touch in customer service? Having been a product manager and worked in technology since the first dot com (no I am not that old, I was just young when I first got into technology), we can expect to see customer service significantly enhanced with AI bringing the human touch to a new level. The amount of data that AI and ML will help sift through to help “advise” and “suggest” to a customer service team will break new boundaries. Customer service teams can then be deployed to work on escalated or prioritised items that result in a big sale or help close the deal. Customer service, intuitively is tied closely with the human touch, a computer cannot learn years of successful customer interactions without first being taught and guided by humans. This is a realistic fact.

Navigating Your Way Past The “Trough Of Disillusionment” For Artificial Intelligence In Customer Experience

Posted on October 26, 2020July 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Guest blog by Steve Nuttall

The hype around Artificial Intelligence technologies is at its peak. According to the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and virtual assistants are at the “peak of inflated expectation”. Cognitive expert advisors have passed this peak and are now descending towards the “trough of disillusionment”. This occurs when interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.

The benefits of AI for customer experience management are potentially game changing. AI has the capability to analyse vast amounts of data in real time from various sources, including human behaviours and emotions. Expectations are high because this capability can then be used to create seamless and personalised customer experiences that are optimised to the device and channel of choice.

Pragmatists and battle hardened cynics will recall that when automation was first introduced into customer service channels, the results were often spectacularly underwhelming. So, is the application of AI to customer experiences destined to fall into the trough of disillusionment before climbing the slope of enlightenment? Or is there a path to follow to avoid the pitfalls of unmet expectations?

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Intelligently using Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience

In order to find out whether the application of AI to your business’ customer experience will take a downturn, it is necessary to first ask yourself: What is driving your organisation’s AI strategy? Is it because:

AI is all the rage in your industry and your organisation is fearful of being left behind?
If you take the lead in implementing AI, it will make you look smarter/cooler than your colleagues?
It sounds like a cool and fun toy to experiment with?
Your organisation needs to catch up with your competitors who have been early adopters of AI?
AI is a great opportunity to reduce the cost to serve our customers?

If the answer to any of the above is Yes, then the trough of disillusionment beckons.

Alternatively, if you are deploying or considering AI because…

AI can enable your people and optimise your processes to operate more intelligently and efficiently, in order to provide individualised and predictive experiences for your customers at scale

…..then a brighter future awaits.

For these technologies to have any chance of success you should have a clear sense of purpose of how to you intend to deploy AI to drive CX in your business. Here are three ways you can use AI in a purposeful way to create meaningful customer experiences.

1. Use AI to Enhance your Knowledge of the Customer

An example would be using data analytics to anticipate the needs of individual customers at each moment of truth and key stage of their journey. Some specific examples oh how businesses are using AI to enhance customer knowledge:

2. Use AI to create stronger emotional connections with your customers

Using AI to recognise a customer’s emotional state helps agents better respond to the customer during an interaction, thereby creating stronger emotional connections.

3. Use AI to empower your service agents

Not only can AI empower agents with emotional intelligence to reply appropriately to customers, it can be used as a tool to connect service agents with the right information in the organisation’s knowledge base in real time. Examples of why this can be powerful to a business:

A recent study Fifth Quadrant CX undertook for Oracle showed that CX leaders acknowledge the potential of AI and are more advanced in trialling and implementing these emerging technologies to enable better customer experiences. AI is being used to combine data from multiple sources to create individual profiles for each customer, enabling agents to take immediate action on what customers want. Consequently, CX Leaders are outperforming their counterparts by creating emotional connections with their customers through more predictive and personalised customer experiences.

As a result, nearly two thirds of CX leaders say their organisation’s revenue growth outperforms their industry counterparts, compared with only a quarter of CX laggards. The proof is therefore clearly in the pudding: when applied in a purposeful and meaningful way, AI technology can enable organisations to increase agility and overcome competitive threats and leverage this advantage to drive acquisition.

Written by Dr Steve Nuttall – Head Of CX Research, Fifth Quadrant. Steve has worked in various leadership roles as a market research insights professional for over twenty years in Europe, Asia and Australia. He leads Fifth Quadrant’s program of CX strategy research and is an international speaker and presenter on best practice customer experience. Steve assists organisations to deliver their customer-centric strategies and business performance goals including designing and implementing programs to help optimise the customer experience.

Know Your Customer, Like You Know Your Friends

Posted on September 6, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Guest Post by Parker Hathaway

customer service friend

I was in a conversation with friend this week. He’s an avid murder mystery and investigative reporting fan. He loves shows like Making of a Murderer, 60 Minutes, 20/20, and True Detective. I asked him if he was a podcast fan. He said he wasn’t. With a grin, I leaned in and said, “I’m about to change your month. Have you heard of Serial?”

We need to know our customers like we know our friends.

Serial revolutionized podcasting, coming in with over 40 million downloads in its first season as it followed a murder mystery story week by week. My buddy devoured all 12 episodes and spent countless hours reading on the web about possible theories.

And I had no doubt he would.

We need to know our customers like we know our friends. The question is, how?

Peter McCarthy, founder of The Logical Marketing Agency, has laid the groundwork for us. He describes three buckets that help you identify your customer: (1) Demographics, (2) Psychographics, and (3) Behaviors. You can read more of his work here. For the exercise, take your customer and create the below three buckets and then start asking questions. Here’s a start:

Demographics:

Where do your customers live? What’s their age? occupation? income? political affiliation? urban or rural? gender? ethnicity? These are general questions that you might find on a census. However, you must dig deep. It’s laborious, but it will serve you in the long run. At the end of this exercise you should be able to picture your customer when he/she walks through the door, and that’s huge.

Psychographics:

How do your customers think? What do they believe in? What are their attitudes towards this or that? What are their preferences? What do they love? hate? crave? What are their emotions towards a given topic? What do they value? What gets them excited?! Make a list of emotions and attach a description of your customer to each. Use what you learn to write better copy or apply it to the design of your website or, better yet, your product! When we say “we feel,” we attribute a cognitive value. Learn what your customer feels.

Behaviors:

This is where things get exciting, especially if you have access to a large data depository. What does your customer do? What do they purchase? read? use? crave? search? How do they engage with social media? Instagram more than Facebook? Twitter more than Snapchat? What are patterns that you find with your customers? Why do they drop out at point of purchase? Use A/B testing as a tool to discover behaviors.

Next time: Identifying your customer can be laborious, but it’s crucial for risk mitigation and customer growth. I’m going to introduce you to tools that will help you to identify your customer in 30 minutes. These tools are free and fun to use!

Customer Service: Its Importance and Value

Posted on July 12, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Customer service is often overlooked by many companies because it’s hard to measure the direct value of providing great customer experience.

In today’s highly competitive market, businesses have to make tough calls on what to focus on next to survive, and unfortunately, providing customer satisfaction is usually on the lower end of the list.

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Without being able to properly quantify the direct value of great service, many businesses can’t justify spending time and resources on providing it. Other businesses just see customer service more as a pain, and choose to be reactive, rather than proactive to customer expectations. However, the truth is, great customer service is absolutely crucial to the long-term survival of the business.

Customer Service Importance and its Value

You can argue that price is the main reason your customers choose you, so you focus your energy and resources on being the most affordable. I’m telling you, there will come a day when a competitor comes in with a better product for a cheaper price.

In the the same way, you can also argue that you focus on innovative developments and that’s why your customers buy from you. Again, there will come a day a competitor swoops in and take your customers from you because they made better innovative progress. Do you know what you can invest in that your competitors can’t take away from you? Loyalty. Good old customer loyalty.

The best way to gain customers’ loyalty? You charm them with your service.

By continuously engaging with them through customer service and marketing efforts, you are fostering a relationship with them. It’s hard for people to walk away from someone or something they have formed an attachment to.

A study conducted by Forrester Research found that strong emotional connections with a brand is a stronger driver than other factors like ‘ease’ and ‘effectiveness’ across 17 different industries.

So now you know why it’s important, what’s the value of providing great customer experience and service to create highly engaged customers?

The Value of Customer Service

1. Retaining customers is much less expensive than acquiring new ones

It’s true. Acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from 5-25 times more expensive than keeping a current one. You don’t have to spend so much time and resources finding a new customer and converting them. Instead, you just have to make sure they’re satisfied and will repurchase from you.

Customer support contributes a large portion to the retention and satisfaction of customers. Many companies put a lot of time and resources in their sales and marketing teams, when just as much emphasis should be put in support or success teams. When done right, they can have a bigger impact on your bottomline than new acquisition activities.

2. Repeat customers generally spend more than new ones

A study by McKinsey found that eCommerce spending for new customers on average is $24.50, compared to $54.50 for repeat customers. Even better, highly-engaged customers buy 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction.Making a customer happy shouldn’t be a one time thing at the beginning of the relationship. Most relationships are more valuable the longer they are. Businesses should be putting more emphasis on their customer service, success and support teams because the financial growth potential is much larger than in newly acquired customers. Plus, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, whereas the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%.

2. Great service reduces the severity of overall problems.

We’ve all had problems with companies before. In the moment, you might be upset, angry, annoyed or all of the above. If you had to talk to a rude customer service rep on top of all that…I’d imagine you wouldn’t be too happy. What originally may have been a small problem would go from 0 – 100.

In the same way bad service can escalate problems, good customer service can reduce them. When delivered well, customer service can diffuse negative emotions from the customer and the situation. Excellent customer service can turn the situation around into a positive. Small things like apologizing, empathizing and being genuine can go a long way to reduce a customer’s negative emotions and the severity of the overall problem.

82% of satisfied customers will “likely” or “very likely” keep shopping with a company and give it another chance if something goes wrong.

3. Builds brand awareness with minimal effort.

Customers are being more and more vocal about how a company treats them and how a company makes them feel. Considering your customer service team are likely to be the only people in contact with a customer, they play a crucial role in shaping their customer experience, and by extension, whether they have good or bad things to say about the company.

It is therefore important that every interaction with a customer should make them feel valued, listened to and supported. Extra points for going beyond expectations like Paul from Zappos. It was a simple response to a customer whose shoes were falling apart, but he made it so much more. This ended up being shared on Reddit, Hubspot and Helpscout and championed as customer service at its best.

Source: Reddit

4. People remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price.

Think back to a purchase you made a couple of years back. Heck, think back a couple of months even. I can’t even remember the price of something I bought in the last few months!

What I do remember though, is the service, the delivery and the effort I had to put in to make the purchase. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. And in this case, the price you paid is the destination, and all that leading up to the purchase, is the journey. People will talk. If they liked the journey, they will recommend it to others.

5. It’s a competitive advantage no one can take away

With rapid innovation reducing differentiation between one product and another, and competitors just a click away, customer service is one of the last frontiers of sustainable competitive advantage for businesses.

Many businesses will pay lip service to the value of customer service, all the while cutting costs and resources to provide it. This will only ensure they provide the bare minimum to support customers, it doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near good enough to be a advantage. When normal customer service standard means going above and beyond for a customer, that is when customers will choose your business over someone else’s.

Customer Service Takeaway: Customer service is becoming more important than ever as competitors increase and are closer than ever. A customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service related than price or product related. No one wants to do business with someone they don’t like. The product or service doesn’t matter anymore. They can easily substitute with other products or services that function similarly. Customers would rather deal with the slight inconvenience that the competitor’s product or service doesn’t function the same way, than to deal with the huge inconvenience of not being supported by your business.

Customer service, when delivered to the satisfaction of customers, not only creates a powerful marketing opportunity for the business, but also helps with the bottomline. Not only are return customers easier to sell to, they will spend more per transaction and would pay extra to guarantee better service.

8 Signs You Might Want to Switch Up Your Online B2B Campaigns

Posted on June 21, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

One of the worst things from a marketing perspective with B2B campaigns is when you look at big companies that have great products or services, but are unable to capitalize due to poor marketing campaigns. The name of your brand and your reputation, will only get your business so far. If you want to strike while the iron is still hot, then you need to focus on switching up your online B2B campaign.

Businesses no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the latest strategies and tactics for B2B campaigns, because there is no shortage of accessible information online. However, there are many businesses that have marketing professionals who refuse to conform to the latest trends, and prefer to do things the old-fashioned way.

Learn more efficient ways to help your B2B campaigns, request a FREE conversational software demo today!

This is a foolish position to take because the strategies that initially brought them success are outdated, and the target audience has also changed and matured. By failing to adopt cutting edge digital strategies they are refusing to adapt and improve their online B2B campaigns. When put under the spotlight for lack of results, the common excuse used is poor execution by the teams.

However, if any business wants to remain competitive, they need to adopt new marketing strategies. All businesses need to adapt to their environment, and that can only be done when you decide to switch up your online B2B campaigns.

8 Signs that show your B2B Marketing Strategy is Outdated

1. You can’t seem to engage clients

If you’re failing to engage your clients, you’re failing to reach your potential as a business, which is why it is important that you offer them with a comprehensive contact page. This is important for capturing leads and customer satisfaction.

51% of people will not do business with a company that doesn’t provide them with thorough contact information.

You will lose more business if you’re not providing your clients with contact information, which is why it might be time to redesign your website and switch up your online B2B campaign.

2. You’re not capturing leads

You may not have any problems in attracting traffic on to your website, but you also need to convert that traffic into sales. Lead capturing is important for a business, otherwise they won’t make any money, and to do that you need to include landing pages, forms, and call-to-action buttons on your website. You won’t be able to convert leads without them.

3. Your website is cluttered

Having lots of content on your B2B website is a good strategy, but you can easily overdo it as well. A cluttered website is going to be an eyesore, and visitors to your website will run away, which is why it is important to balance things out. You should know about the value of whitespace, since it helps visitors focus on the important things on your website. It helps to improve readability, and also helps lead capturing as well.

4. Your website design doesn’t match your brand

Businesses must focus on their brand positioning as well, which means clearly outlining what the brand and the B2B website represent. The design scheme of your website needs to be in sync with your industry, and should include strong brand messaging. You should be clear about your goals as a business with your clients and customers, which will only help serve your B2B campaign.

5. Your website hasn’t been updated

When the digital revolution came about, and computers became mainstream, basic website designs were the norm. However, technology has grown rapidly over time, and that has also influenced website designs. If you want your B2B campaign to be successful, you need to update the website design as well. If you’re not sold on that, these statistics might change your perception:

66% of web users want websites with visually appealing designs

38% of web visitors won’t engage with a website with poor content or layout

79% of web users prefer going to websites that are mobile friendly

If you want your B2B campaign to be a success you will need to work on upgrading your website design.

6. You don’t upload fresh content

You need to frequently upload fresh content on your B2B blog, which is important for SEO, more visitors, driving organic traffic, and converting leads. If you don’t have any new content on your website, your website traffic will fall off a cliff. If you don’t have a blog on your website, you can add a ‘news section’, which will help provide visitors with helpful, informative, and relevant information.

7. The website is unresponsive and slow

One of the main reasons to switch up your online B2B campaign is if you have a website that is slow and unresponsive.

71% of mobile users stop going to websites that take too long to load or crash frequently.

The average web user only waits about 5 seconds for a website to load. If your website is slower than that, you are going to lose traffic and customers. So, make sure that your website is as fast and responsive as possible on desktop and mobile to keep visitors happy and conversion rates soaring.

8. You can’t update anything

Websites that are inaccessible or haven’t been updated in a long time will not attract visitors, which is why it is important to freshen things up. You can either upgrade your web design or design a brand new one from scratch to ensure that your website manages to attract more traffic.

How to Do Customer Service The Right Way

Posted on April 30, 2018March 21, 2019 by David Dinh

Customer service is an extremely important part of a business. Your product is what catches your customers attention, and your service is what keeps them loyal. A strong company will already have great customer relationships. But a smart company will always be asking “What is good customer service?” If you are not constantly on the lookout for opportunities to improve your customer service, then your relationships will stagnate. Here are a few customer service tips for identifying ways to better serve customers.

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Customer Service Done Right

1. Get Personal

Your customers want to feel like they have access to real people, not bots and FAQs. Offer more than just automated email responses, and do not let your telephone prompts or website send them down a rabbit hole. Take full advantage of social media (such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp) and write responses when your customers post on your page. Post photos and bios on your website. This shows your customers that you are real people working on their behalf.

2. Be Available

Part of the personal touch is making sure your customers can reach you. For example if your business is primarily online, meet in person occasionally with local customers and offer video calls (such as Skype) for those farther away. Work early and late when needed, especially if your customers are in different time zones. Even providing customers with your physical address helps build their trust and reminds them that your company exists off the internet as well.

3. Cater to Your Customers

Make sure you are fully meeting your customers needs. Consider assigning reps to specific customers so they can build a relationship. Offer VIP treatment for your best customers to let them know they are appreciated. What special services might your customers like? Set up focus groups, interview customers, or run a survey to get ideas.

4. Create Communities

Your customers will feel even more valued if you treat them as important members of a community. You can bring various customers together in numerous ways, including webinars, interactive websites, social media, trade shows and conventions. And don’t forget that while your customers come to these forums to learn from you, you can learn as much, if not more, from them.

5. Specials Services / VIP

Are there special discounts or services you can offer that your competitors don’t? Can you offer something special for existing customers only? Could your services be considered luxury? Offering special treatment to your customers will help them to feel taken care of, and it’s also something they might be willing to pay more for. There are so many “bait and switch” offers and promotions for new customers only– reward the customers that have been with you the longest.

6. Offer Knowledge

Building strong relationships with our customers is great, but we also get to offer and trade knowledge with them. In our trade, a customer can compare several competing copies of a book online, but they won’t get a conversation about the title’s complicated printing history. When we’re speaking with customers, we spend the majority of time talking about the merchandise itself, trends in the market, and the customer’s own collecting habits. Afterward, we negotiate a deal. A customer can even know more than you do on a particular topic! Take advantage of this opportunity to learn more.

7. Let Customers Get to Know You

If you’re running your business from an unknown (or internet-only) location, it makes you more anonymous. This is common nowadays, but adding a face or an address to your business could help assure customers that you won’t disappear overnight. You don’t have to rent office space if you don’t really need it; just be upfront about where you operate from and consider ways of contacting customers aside from email. A little personal information can go a long way, and could minimize concerns of accessibility, trust, or safety.

Customer service is an extremely important aspect of your business that is often overlooked. Following these simple steps can boost your customer’s loyalty to your company and also increase sales! I suggest you start by creating some customer service goals for your support team. Be sure to align these goals to your business goals so you’re on track! This Customer Service Goal Template will help you get started!

How Do You Know If The Customer Service Representative You’re Hiring Will Boost Customer Loyalty?

Posted on April 30, 2018March 15, 2023 by David Dinh

Customer service, the faces behind the business. When hiring customer service representatives, it is important to look for people that will represent your company well. They are one of a few direct contacts that your customers will get. Because of this, it is extremely important to leave a good impression. Having friendly and helpful service agents at the front line is important to the longevity of any business.

Tabatha Naylor writes, “Customers don’t buy from businesses they don’t trust, end of story. Luckily, building trust in a customer/business relationship doesn’t have to be difficult. While it does take effort, the steps to get there are easy if you are willing to be open, honest, and efficient when communicating with customers.” Finding people to hire for your customer service team is extremely important and these are some of the traits you should be looking for:

The Art Behind Hiring The Best Customer Service Representatives

1. Self control

You are sure to come across customers who will be difficult to deal with. For this reason, you must have self control. You must be able to handle both the easy and hard times that comes with serving the public.

2. Superior communication skills

If you aren’t a good communicator, then customer service may not be the field for you. Customer service jobs require that you deal heavily with the public. Do you know how to handle the many problems that come with customers? Communication skills are essential to get a good customer service job.

Communicating to tough customers can be hard, but they don’t have to be! Here’s 5 email templates to get you out of a sticky situation with an angry customer.

3. They are Loyal

Author Alexander Kjerulf says, “Happy employees make the customers happy”. It might sound rather straightforward, but happiness and satisfaction within a company will inevitably lead to loyalty.

When interviewing a candidate, pay attention to what they say about the previous companies they’ve worked for. There might be some underlying unhappiness, but a potential employee that speaks highly of their previous company despite having left is one that is both respectful and loyal. A loyal customer care representative will put the company’s interest first when dealing with difficult customers. They are likely try their best to protect the company’s image even in the presence of the most difficult customers.

4. Natural Problem Solvers

Companies that excel at customer service don’t wait for a problem to arise before addressing it. One of the great customer service skills is the ability to take a preemptive approach in managing possible risks and being prepared when a problem does arise.

Similarly, customer service employees must be able to provide a solution even before the customer poses the question (within reason, of course). In combination with a problem-solving nature, the candidate should also be a great listener in order to gather “clues” and read between the lines during communication.

In customer service, nothing is perfect and things will go wrong. This is not a failure. The best businesses show how they fix their mistakes.

5. Willing to go the extra mile to please customers

The customer always comes first and is ALWAYS right. You must be willing to go the extra mile to please each and every customer. Sometime, this can be at the expense of your pride. You must be willing to swallow your pride and move on.

6. They are highly conscientious

Look for candidates who are highly conscientious. The candidate that arrives late for the interview, looking completely flustered and confused is probably not the ideal choice.

Conscientious individuals are reliable, disciplined, methodical, organized, and goal driven. The Journal of Applied Social Psychology noted that individuals who are identified through tests as highly conscientious are more likely to be aware of how good interpersonal interactions positively affect customer service and are more likely to behave this way.

To a degree, conscientious individuals are pleasers in the sense that they are aware of what works for certain people and what doesn’t. They have a strong intuition about what is morally right and wrong as well as how to treat others.

When customers call a company they’re actively seeking help in resolving a problem. A conscientious customer service agent will be better equipped to pick up the clues interlaced in the customer’s words, which will allow them to resolve pain points.

7. Customer appreciation

A good job in customer service will require that you have a general appreciation to customers. After all, they are the ones who will be providing you with a job. Without them, your job would not be necessary.

8. They are Persuasive

A great customer service employee will also have some amazing marketing and sales skills. It’s not always about being a manipulator, but being able to steer the customer into a direction that is beneficial for both the company and the client.

If you want to know if your candidates have this trait, ask a simple question in the interview such as, “Why should we hire you?.” This way they have to sell themselves in a persuasive manner while listing qualities, traits and reasons–a perfect, practical test of their customer service skills.

Get Out and Hire!

When interviewing candidates to become your next customer service hero, look for for these qualities, traits and skills. Look for someone who is communicative, persuasive, is polite, patient, conscientious, and loyal. Remember these are the people who will be serving your customers directly and you want a positive impact so your customers return again and again!