Customer support: 4 tips for combining performance and personalisation
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 advisers need to provide quick and satisfactory answers, while delivering a memorable customer experience in terms of form. Beyond the strategic choice of communication channels you make available to your customers, it is 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 personalised, 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 self-care 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 to it, so every customer request is processed from the platform, regardless of the contact channel. This saves invaluable time for the agents, who can process all the flows more efficiently!
Thanks to the interoperability of its solutions, the brand has developed "intelligent triage" processes 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 that its customers prefer, thanks to centralised and optimised management of its incoming flows.
2- Control and manage your customer service activity
If your communication channels are siloed, your customer service operation is bound to be complex. Without structured data or a history of interactions, it's hard to create reliable reports and organise your activities properly!
What's more, as you will have noticed, the proliferation of customer relations tools compromises customer (re)knowledge: it's difficult to reconstruct the customer journey and doesn't encourage personalised exchanges. And, of course, this has an impact 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 line with your business needs.
By centralising 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 the productivity of your agents (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 let yourself be overtaken by sales or Black Friday! Your handling and processing times are reduced, and your customers will thank you for it.
What's more, the 2021 Customer Relations KPI Barometer showed that 30% of companies monitored new KPIs or did more in-depth reporting during the COVID-19 crisis! Precise monitoring of operational KPIs makes it easier to model activity, anticipate variations in activity and adjust organisation with agility.
3- Provide high-quality answers and personalise 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 contact you (see tip 1) and if they're dealt with quickly (see tip 2), their satisfaction at the end of the discussion with your team will depend on two factors:
- Has their problem been resolved? The substance.
- Was the customer experience positive? The form.
So how can you positively influence these two factors?
The substance obviously involves your customer service processes and the training of your teams. The skills of your agents 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 teleworking environment, where active listening cannot be used to support teams. These knowledge bases are also proving very useful for onboarding new employees!
💡 Tip: you can also make some of these internal knowledge bases public in the form of a Help Centre or FAQ available to your customers to relieve the pressure on your support and focus on higher value-added requests.
Whatever the case, the aim is always to provide agents with context so that they can provide precise 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 digitalisation of interactions: today, 70% of consumers are looking for more human contact and personalisation in their dealings with brands (Qualiweb 2021 Barometer). 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 allows you to (re)get to know each customer. Whether the customer contacts you by email, telephone or chat, a native 360° record appears if they have already had dealings with your company. In just 1 click, your team will have access to the history of conversations across all channels, their contact details, their loyalty profile, their latest orders... for ultra-personalised treatment! A definite competitive advantage when you consider that 69% of customers believe that a personalised customer service has an influence on their loyalty (Bilan 2017 de l'Expérience client, Smart Tribune).
4- Harmonise the customer experience across all channels
A successful customer experience is one in which the customer is positively perceived after every interaction before, during and after the purchasing process. However, the majority of consumers regret that exchanges do not embody the brand 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 that offer several channels are not yet able to synchronise them to deliver a consistent experience. So 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 site has recruited personal shoppers who are available on easiware live chat to advise customers before the sale, just as they would in shop!
Thanks to the centralisation of data in the omnichannel customer relationship management platform, the customer is recognised both online and in shop: the gap between online and offline is narrowed to deliver a global and 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. Companies therefore need to centralise their customer data and harmonise their processes with all stakeholders (Marketing, Customer Services, CRM, Communications, IT) in order to respond to these new behaviours.
This is where the role of customer service becomes central! It carries the consumer's voice internally and provides input for discussions with the various departments. The Andros food brand relies on reporting from the easiware solution to convey the voice of the consumer to management. These reports provide a precise overview of consumer requests and motives, an indicator of the brand's alert points and success in relation to the company's objectives. Consumer suggestions also feed into the Marketing department and help with product development. Finally, the platform is connected to the factories so that any complaints about quality can be reported in real time and production lines can 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 will have realised, customer support is not simply there to solve a problem: it is an essential lever for your brand image. It must embody your values and create a strong bond with your customers, so as to build long-term loyalty. Through active listening, specialised technological tools and efficient processes, they have access to invaluable data on your customers' expectations and needs, which must be fed back to all departments. Your customer relations will then become a lever for your company's long-term success!
Article translated from French