Continuously Improve Our Service for You
Building a customer service experience that inspires joy, loyalty, and word of mouth buzz is not easy.
In this article, we'll take a look at some project ideas you can take on if you'd like to move your department towards best-in-class excellence.
Each of the ideas discussed aim to:
- Improve the strategic value of the contact centre
- Boost agent experience
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Contribute to business growth
We dive into the detail behind why and how these eight ideas can help your department:
- Automated ticket tagging
- Channel expansion
- Drive revenue from support
- Implement a chatbot system
- Train in empathy
- Train in emotional intelligence tactics
- Implement self-serve
- Tackle data silos
Before we dive in, let's talk through why customer service is so important to the business—and is certainly worthy of investment in projects like this.
Customer service is the #1 contributor to business growth
And I'm not exaggerating.
Excellent customer service drives retention, repeat purchase, basket size, and referrals.
Not only is customer retention cheaper than customer acquisition, but existing customers spend more and refer more.
Existing customers are 60-70% more likely to buy more of what you sell.
Furthermore, research by Fred Reichheld shows that a low 5% increase in customer retention leads to an increase of 25-95% in profits.
Isn't it starting to sound absurd that companies focus so heavily on acquisition?
Here's why we should focus on customer service retention:
- If your customer trusts you and has a great experience with your product, they'll end up buying more products/services from you. It's easier for them to buy more of your products and services due to switching costs—rebuilding trust, taking a risk on quality, etc.
- If they are already in love with your business, they will refer their friends and acquaintances to you (more customers for your business).
As a marketer, I notice this reality every day.
For example, imagine that I hire an agency to develop a new website for us.
Their output (the product) is ultimately extremely important to me.
But, equally important is that the work is on time, the communication is clear, and my expectations are set well.
Those elements are the quality of their customer service and are where the trust is built.
Hit both points and I'll purchase from the agency again. Perhaps even purchase some of their other products.
And, when asked, guess who I'll refer from friends?
The cycle continues and this agency can run an efficient, low acquisition-cost business that runs on referrals.
Indeed, word of mouth is the most valuable customer acquisition channel.
Fred Reichheld also conducted an extensive eCommerce study and found that:
- Every eCommerce customer referred a minimum of three new customers after their first purchase
- After 10 purchases, the same person referred an average of 10 customers to the retailer
To clarify: customers refer other customers. Returning (i.e. happy) customers refer even more customers. The longer they return the better this virtuous cycle becomes.
Because customer service is a direct influence on a customer's experience, it deserves much more attention.
It's important that customer service teams know their importance to a business. You deserve more investment, authority and acknowledgement.
Team's that know their strategic importance are also less likely to experience customer service burnout.
I could even give you 100 examples about how a great customer service can skyrocket your business (we also wrote an eBook that explains how to sell the value of customer service internally).
But, you're likely here to get customer service improvement ideas. So, here are nine that will help you improve customer satisfaction, agent experience, and business growth.
Related read: Support ticket insights: Why support tickets are your most valuable insight channel.
8 unique value-driving customer service improvement ideas
1. Implement support ticket tagging automation using AI
Every customer service department must have a grip on the problems facing their customers.
However, we live in a dynamic world and the problems faced by your customers yesterday are likely different from the one's they've been facing today.
When you see a spike in a new issue, you'll know what's driving it perhaps intuitively and anecdotally.
However, to make other departments take action against the new issue you'll likely face the objection, "show me the numbers".
They want evidence so they know whether to prioritise your issue or not.
To get support ticket insights, you can manually analyze all your customer service channels and consolidate them under one roof.
But it's frustratingly time-consuming and manual ticket tagging leaves room for human error and discrepancies.
If you use multiple people on your team to tag tickets, it becomes ever harder to train agents to understand tickets and tag them in a uniform way.
This is where support ticket analytics swaggers into the room.
SentiSum users can login to the platform and digest the largest drivers of customer contact (like in the below image).
You can filter for which day, week or month you want to look at. Even filter for today to get quick insights to help prevent current issues from troubling future customers.
British Airways, initially used manual tagging to collect and manage customer queries across all their conversation channels. They created separate categories for each type of complaint and directed their analysts to list it under those categories.
But each analyst had a different thought process. Complaints, queries and surveys were tagged under different segments by each analyst, and it took them months sometimes to do reporting.
Using SentiSum's AI-powered ticket tagging platform, British Airways consolidated and tracked the topic and sentiment of every email, chat, review and survey in real-time.
Our AI automatically tagged all qualitative text under different segments and subsegments, the 'rising topics' are then distributed every day to other department leads.
For those looking for a customer service improvement project, bringing clarity on customer pain points to the customer service team (and, therefore, every other team) is the highest impact one possible.
It gives you absolute clarity on your customer which is important for tackling churn, improving customer experience, and training your team on the latest issues. Your customer will thank you for getting ahead of their issues, and your team will be more than happy to have less manual tagging work.
Related read: How to buy an AI platform for CX analytics
2. Expand your customer service channels
The internet has increased the number made of channels your customer can contact you on.
In recent months we've even seen an explosion in the adoption of WhatsApp (800% increase in customer support through WhatsApp according to Zendesk), causing everyone to ponder whether WhatsApp will be the future of customer service.
As Facebook Inc expands their growth further in the customer service arena, will increasingly see Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp grow in use by customers.
Luckily, help desks like Zendesk centralise every channel. However, there's still a nuance to each channel that shouldn't be ignored.
Ask yourself where your customers are and where they most want to contact you.
If you're extremely active on Instagram, it may be worth integrating Instagram into your helpdesk to receive messages.
If your customers leave lots of Trustpilot reviews, it might be sensible to create a closed-loop feedback strategy. In which, negative reviews are turned into helpdesk tickets which can be addressed by your team—never leaving unhappy customer's unmanaged.
It can become complex to make sense of customer contact channels, which is why centralisation is essential. This goes for analytics, too.
We've recently launched a new feature that automatically notes negative reviews and social media comments left in social media comments and on review websites. The sentiment analysis detects the negative review and triggers it to become a support ticket that your team can pick up.
3. Kick off revenue driving projects
Support-driven growth is easily the future of customer service.
We've seen a number of companies use customer service to:
- Train agents for roles like sales and product management (the deep customer understanding lends itself well)
- Nurture those mid buying an item into a sale (even increasing basket size)
- Increasing profits by prioritising customers on the precipice of churn (AI tools understand which customers are most frustrated, or have a challenge that historically led to churn, and push them to the front of the queue)
Pick one of these, or the numerous other ways to drive growth from the contact centre, and have a go at implementing them!
Here's a Screenshot of a recent post made by the SentiSum Founder & CEO, Sharad Khandelwal, on this subject.
Related content: Read our customer journey mapping guide here.
4. Implement a website-based chatbot system
Okay, we aren't bring something totally innovative to the conversation here...but if you don't have a live chat with a degree of automation, you need to experiment with it.
If you are browsing a business website, you are likely there for one of three reasons:
- To learn more about the business and how they can help you
- To learn from their blog posts and resources
- To contact someone from their team
If you are on a website for the first and the third reason, a live chat would be a great aggregator in helping you solve your problems.
Here's an example.
Let's say that I want to invest in chatbot marketing for SentiSum. So I visit Drift's website to learn more about their product.
As soon as I visit their website, this chatbot pops up. As my sole aim is to learn more about Drift and their offerings, I click on " yes, please!".
As soon as I hit that button I get a message explaining how Drift's chatbot can be used to improve my business. Now I am hooked to it and I click on "Definitely! "
Now Drift's chatbot automatically starts collecting data about me and my organization. This takes me down a ladder of 'yeses' until they finally have all the data about me.
Drift is set up for businesses talking to businesses—where the primary goal tends to be 'lead generation'.
However, I want you to imagine a situation where you develop a chatbot specifically for your 'help' and 'FAQs' pages.
You can customize the chatbots to ask your visitors what they need help with. You can then guide them towards self-service resources you have put together on your website.
If needed you can also enable an option to directly connect them to a customer service agent.
Domino's does a brilliant job of offering a useful customer service chat automation.
Maybe you can take inspiration from this food retailer and create your own chatbot that automatically talks with your website visitors.
Apart from providing a great customer service, a chatbot can improve the overall user experience on your website.
All the key providers (e.g. Intercom, Zendesk, FreshDesk) allow you to set up intelligent chat automation.
Although we recommend only automating the very basics. Over automation is often a pain for customers who just want to talk to their customers.
Get a feel for what makes good automation by browsing your favourite providers. It becomes quite easy to see what's a pain for customers.
The presence of a chatbot is typically expected by customers and increases their trust and pushes them to complete the transaction. Pre-purchase, a chatbot offers your customer a quick way to clear any doubts they might have about your products and services. When all their objections and queries are cleared, they are ready to buy instantaneously.
5. Train your customer service representatives to be more empathetic
Empathy is a game changer for customer service improvement.
It's a skill every agent needs to develop and as their leader, you can significantly improve customer satisfaction by coaching your team how to develop empathy.
As more and more automation technology is brought into the contact centre software stack, agents will spend more time building relationships with customers and less on repetitive admin.
In the future of customer service, empathy skills will dramatically increase in importance and investing in empathy skills is a customer service improvement idea that will also help your agents for the rest of their life.
We won't dive into the 'how to' behind building team empathy here, but subscribe to our newsletter to know when we write that article in the coming weeks.
Source: https://www.sentisum.com/library/customer-service-improvement-ideas
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