Category: customerservice

Customer Feedback is Critical to Success

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform

Does the word “customer” even make you cringe? If you say it a lot, you know that even though it feels nice to praise your customers, the “thank you” can feel empty. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that what mattered the most to a customer is providing something of utmost value. In customer experience management, feedback matters.

We conducted research with the relevant sources, such as customers, analysts, and researchers; and designed a dozen customer surveys, with content that combined detailed questions, applications of observable behaviors, and social media.

These surveys, along with every piece of content created for customer communication, were then developed to reflect the following customer-centric metrics and insights:

Retention: Is the experience your customers have with your organization consistent with their feelings of a strong relationship?

Customer Satisfaction: How will your organization’s actions enhance your customer’s lifetime value, and will it be worth it for a business with only 100 customers to pay for the lifetime value of one customer?

Sales Opportunities: Do customers leave your business in large numbers because they encounter their best opportunities elsewhere?

Vision: Does your organization have enough leadership clarity, resources, and vision?

Innovation: Are your customers adopting new systems and processes when they realize you don’t offer this feature?

Data-Driven Approach: Is your organization committed to providing the best outcomes for customers with the right data, facts, analysis, and outcomes?

Connections: Do your organization’s customers feel heard, understood, and believed in?

Visionary Leaders: Are your organization’s leaders courageous enough to trust the customer and to think long-term about the future of your brand?

Providers: Do customers perceive your business’s providers as allies or competitors? If you’re new to the concept of customer experience management, or if you’re new to online customer engagement, we have some suggested ways to get started.

We also give you a glimpse of what we’re doing to help other businesses succeed, alongside our customer-centric approach for every page of a blog post.

What if you could create exceptional customer experiences with less effort?

Not possible? Better use existing customer data to offer customer actions that seem more convincing and have better chances of customer satisfaction.

We’ve all had those customer experiences – that annoying, ill-informed person who just won’t make a change despite the experience being horrendous. Or let’s say there are many issues and the issue with each person is different, so to say that there isn’t one right solution is to do a disservice to the customer.

It’s a problem that all businesses face when trying to think of valuable customer insights that can enable better business decisions. Reality check

Research analyst IDC stated that the potential value of a customer experience is $117 for each dollar spent, and a new report by Forrester found that companies with an exceptional customer experience win 73% of their customers back, while losing only 8% of their customers.

They found that in order to create better customer experiences, businesses need to have customer data available to them from the very beginning. More than three quarters of companies surveyed said they had some kind of customer intelligence product and software to collect and analyze customer data.

Different businesses need different solutions in place to drive better customer experiences. Plus, they are not simple to implement and could be expensive, which most businesses simply do not have time for.

Fortunately, there is technology out there to help business understand their customers better.

Supportbench has a growing ecosystem of solutions that businesses can use to enhance their customer experiences, taking customer feedback even further. Supportbench works by building and connecting experiences with businesses across multiple channels and to various companies in real-time.

We are confident that if you are currently using a customer intelligence solution, you are missing out on the benefits of this technology in order to drive better customer experiences. Make the most of customer intelligence

The answer to creating exceptional customer experiences is giving customer insights a chance to shine. Whether that means identifying marketing shortcomings or finding more relevant ways to connect a customer with the right employee when a customer has specific issues.

We work with the top brands in the world to create great customer experiences, from 3M to Budget and these companies are setting great business goals by creating insights that can help them do just that.

Here are some of the top ways in which companies are using customer intelligence software:

When it comes to implementing new features, Supportbench creates customer success solutions that embrace the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things to understand how people are actually using the app. By helping a team understand what a new feature needs to do to ensure success, businesses are able to take steps to protect their customers and drive improved functionality. Intercom users are able to put customer insights into action through real-time action actions. Identifying and improving applications with customer insights can help increase work efficiency and reduce time spent on manual tasks. Transform a customer experience by continually learning from user feedback.

As a result, you can solve multiple critical business problems, making it possible to turn failures into successes and failures into discoveries.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Revamp Your Consumer Experience

Posted on by Supportbench

As our world becomes increasingly digitalized, reshaping customer experience in almost every sector changing how we interact with them. If you haven’t done it yet, why not evaluate your customer journey, and if needed, your business should revamp its consumer strategy if you want to stay in the game in 2020. Here are some ideas for your customer experience revamp.

Connect with Your Customers

It used to be that driving out a visit to a store or even a trip to the home office had the best chance of reaching our customers. Now, with the majority of purchases conducted on the internet, the number of retail and business owners who have established customer experience strategies has increased significantly. However, all it takes is one bad experience to sway our buying audience and skew our wallet.

Having a physical store is good but if you don’t sell online, you are missing on great selling opportunities. We’re seeing a huge shift from brick-and-mortar retail in favor of online purchasing. Consumers purchase items from anywhere especially now that purchases are becoming more convenient with smartphones. Incorporating mobile capabilities with your existing products or services will win your organization a loyalty boost from millennial and Generation Z consumers in particular.

If you don’t have to means to create your own website, why not sell your items on Amazon? This move could propel the businesses into bigger monthly sales and will likely bring in more customers who have never heard of you before.

Streamline Your Branding and Make Sure Your Website’s Design is User-friendly

You could spend a lot of time curating funny and educational content however none of them matter if no one can read them on your site. Light text on a light background, a slow loading website and ugly images — these can put off users from staying on your site and reading your content. There are more than a million websites in the world. They won’t bother with yours if they have an unpleasant browsing experience.

Pick your colors for specific reasons. Colors have a psychological impact and can greatly influence your brand’s image. Yes, you can create a website on your own but ask for a lot of feedback from your friends and relatives on how you can improve your site. Your website can market for you 24/7. Make sure that it is up to par with the message that your company wants to impart.

Open Your Product for User Reviews (Beta Test)

Most people research product reviews before purchasing a product. So why not allow customers to evaluate your product before purchasing it? Tell them you are available for a free review experience, and invite them to help you test how your new product holds up to the usability tests of their buyers. Ask your customers whether they are satisfied with the overall experience, listen to their feedback and give it extra consideration.

Your company’s customer service culture will matter a lot in determining how valuable that segment becomes, whether it is individually engaged marketing or an ensemble full of brand evangelists, customer service is constantly evolving. As an organization, your culture can serve as a measuring stick to understand how involved you are with customer needs and expectations.

SEO
Images and design are not the only important factors of a website, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is also a vital aspect of a website. You need this if you want Google search engine users to find you. SEO specialists used to hack the system and use tricks to appear on Google’s first page. Google, however, is constantly updating their policies to make sure that people find relevant information that they are actually searching for.

Knowing how SEO works is great but as long as you produce well-written, plagiarism-free content, use proper categorization and tags, your audience will notice and Google will notice too.

An Omnichannel Customer Engagement Strategy

The average internet user goes online on multiple gadgets in a day. Imagine if someone goes to his laptop, visits your site, adds an item to the cart but for some reason does not complete buying the item but leaves it in the cart.

Later, he remembers and tries to continue the purchase, however, he no longer has his laptop. If he can’t access your site using his smartphone, or maybe he can, but if he visits the cart and can no longer find the item there, he might just abandon the purchase altogether and move on to a different site.
It is very important to provide your customers with a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints.

Understanding your customer’s journey better will provide you with tons of insight on how you can serve them better. If you want to please your customers and meet their demands, you should consider a revamp to your customer experience.
Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Effects of Good vs Bad Customer Service

Posted on by Supportbench

Do you want your customer service team to take your customer service to the next level? All businesses know it is important, but not everyone can do it well.

First, you have to define what good customer service is, then convince the sales team and the other departments of your company to apply good customer service practices for it to have a major impact on your company’s bottom line.

If this is something that you want, you should ask your colleagues these questions:

What is good customer service?
What is bad customer service?
How will providing one or the other affect your company?

Their answers will reflect how well your company has oriented its employees about the significance of customer service. If there are members of your team who could not give a satisfactory answer, then help them realize how valuable providing excellent customer service could be.

What makes customer service GOOD?

One of the most important factors in providing a positive customer experience for your customers is for them to achieve their desired outcome.

They feel that this happens when their issues are resolved quickly and the customer service rep who assisted them had a “nice attitude.” Customers don’t necessarily have to always get their way, especially if their perceived solution would not help resolve their problems. Don’t look at customers who come to you with concerns as villains. Most of them are reasonable and can handle not always getting their way all the time.

The solution you give them might be contrary to what they believe but when they are explained clearly and with patience, customers tend to acknowledge that the reps are the ones with the expertise and they listen to the suggestions.

Avoid sounding condescending and make sure that you do not disregard their ideas. Make them feel that they are being listened to before you inform them of the right way to do things.

At the end of the day what they truly want is fast and convenient support, from customer service reps who treat them with respect. In response, they will show thanks and become loyal to your brand and your company.

87% share great customer service stories with others
45% post about their experiences on social media
35% will leave a review on sites like Yelp
52% will become repeat customers and continue to do business with your company
24% will choose you over your competitors

What makes customer service bad?

Knowing the benefits of providing good customer service, we strive to deliver the best service that we can. However, there are instances when our team members fail at their responsibilities and this can result in negative consequences for the business.

Knowing what constitutes bad customer service will help you and your team evaluate your standing and even reverse any negative effects that your faulty practices may have caused.

One of the most common examples of bad customer service is placing the customer on hold for several minutes. If your company is getting a large number of calls that makes your queue time too long, you might have to employ new reps to accommodate all your incoming calls. If you think you have sufficient reps but still get long queue times, it could be because your knowledge base is insufficient and your reps spend a long time looking for answers to queries.

Place a supervisor who can monitor your KPI’s (key performance indicators) so you can pinpoint the problem and come up with a solution. If you want your solutions to be most effective, include your team in brainstorming for ways to improve their performance.

As mentioned previously, customers expect a certain level of respect when they contact your customer support. If a rep comes as rude and disrespectful your company’s customer support will already be tagged as bad and ineffective.

It is also important for your reps to sound confident and cheerful, even when they are uncertain about their answer. The best way to approach this situation is to ask for a minute while the rep looks for the right solution. Saying “I don’t know” is simply not acceptable.

Proper training is needed for your customer support reps to become efficient in their role. Training shouldn’t be just focused on product mastery; it should also include skills like staying positive and approaching issues with a can-do attitude.

Customer service can have good days and bad days. Some customers become too aggressive because of frustration however your support team should handle situations like these professionally. If a customer comes in too hot, reps should keep a cool head so as not to aggravate the situation. Being impolite is never acceptable for a customer service rep especially when a customer calls with regards to a complaint. It is the customer service rep’s responsibility to try and pacify the situation.
Customers who feel that they have been wronged expect the customer service rep to offer some kind of solace for their trouble. A customer support rep should be able to show empathy and acknowledge the inconvenience. If it is indeed the product which is at fault, the rep should apologize and offer a solution. If the problem is caused by the customer and not the company’s, the rep should not blame the customer, rather, he should explain why there was a problem and assist the customer and still suggest a solution.

If agents follow a script without any emotional engagement, the customer might feel as if there’s no admission of responsibility or genuine apology.

Agents without proper listening skills can cause more frustration to a customer. Having to repeat information, again and again, can be annoying especially if a customer is already calling about a matter they don’t feel happy about.

Customers who call for support also do not feel happy when they get transferred to multiple people. Your support reps lose their credibility because it will look like they don’t know how to solve a problem or that you do not have agents who specialize in that area.

In case of a call interruption, there should also be a system that allows a customer to continue with their conversation without having to repeat every detail they have already narrated during the previous one.

There may be different reasons why customers call in to ask for customer support. Your role as a part of the customer support team is to make sure that their experience dealing with you is pleasant and that they are fully satisfied with the company’s products or services. If you do the opposite, you’ll be chasing customers away and destroy the image of your brand.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

12 Tips for Improving Customer Chat Experience

Posted on by Supportbench

In today’s fast-paced world, customers prefer to chat for a faster and more convenient way to interact with businesses for customer service. It is considered superior compared to traditional methods like telephone calls for the following reasons:

Chat is less personable. Customers can convey their message easily with less emotional investment in the conversation. They have time to think and they have to build less courage to talk. It is more convenient to type a message rather than interacting in real time with another person.

They can have it in writing. If there’s a matter that needs clarification, there’s a message trail that both parties can refer to later on.

It takes less time. Customers can also resume whatever it is that they were doing while waiting for a reply from the chat representative. They can open multiple windows and do different activities, not wasting too much time waiting for a response.

In our years of dealing with businesses and customer concerns, here are our suggestions on how your website should have this tool on your website.

1. The Contact Us page

Website visitors usually look under Help or Contact Us when they want to find the chat so it would be helpful to place a “link to chat” on the Contact Us page.
When the link to chat is not clear on the Contact Us page, users see it as an indication that the company does not want their customers to contact them. Even if the Help page contains a lot of information, or if the website has an FAQ page, customers still prefer a chat option when they can’t find an answer specific to what they are experiencing.

2. Don’t Just Rely on Floating Buttons

Some websites offer chat options but only through floating buttons on a corner of their home page. Some customers who are looking for something in particular on a website tend to ignore popping up buttons. Customers appreciate seeing a big Live Chat Now button as it saves them from navigating through pages they feel they don’t need.

3. The Floating Chat Button Should Contrast with the Rest of the Page

We’re not saying that floating buttons on a website are completely useless. Actually, it is a very helpful feature but people tend to ignore them when they are placed somewhere else other than the standard one (bottom right corner of the page) or their visual design does not make them stand out enough relative to the rest of the page.

4. Use Live Chat instead of Ask a Question

Chatbots have been recently used to replace human-assisted chat and because it technically is not “live chat” they can’t label it as such and generally label it as “Ask a question.”

While chatbots and FAQ pages can be helpful tools, some customers prefer to skip them all in all and directly ask their question to a customer chat representative who will surely have a response to their dilemma.

5. On Product Pages

If you have a site that sells products or service, it would be helpful to have a chat link not just on your contact us page but also on your product us pages. Sometimes, when inspecting products, customers may require clarification regarding features and specifications that might not all be listed in your description. People don’t have to navigate elsewhere if you have a chat link on your product pages.

6. Inform Users of the Usual Response Wait Time or Specify Available Chat Hours

Not all businesses can afford a 24/7 customer care service. Informing customers when they can expect a response is essential so they don’t waste time glued on their screens to get a response when there are no reps available.

There are also times when there are too many inquiries for your chat reps to accommodate, periodic messages that inform users about the state of the agent allows them to have more patience waiting for a response.

Customers also appreciate getting messages like, “Still checking” or “I’m still working on that” if their request takes unusually long to respond to. It lets them know that the agent has not abandoned the chat entirely.

7. A Separate Chat Window

Chat is one of the few exceptions where we advocate opening up a new window or tab for a business’s website navigation. It is easier to user refer back to information (such product details or order numbers) that they may have questions about when they can switch to different tabs or windows. It also makes it easier to explore whatever links the agents will provide

8. Have Precautions for Possible Interruptions

Internet disconnection or other reasons can cause chat interruptions. It would be frustrating to have to wait on queue just to continue a conversation or get a different chat agent who is not aware of their issue. Chat reps should provide a reference number to the customers to avoid this. It could also help if they ask for their phone number or email address in case of a chat session interruption.

9. Send Customers a Transcript of the Session

Customers appreciate having a transcript of their conversation with a chat rep. They could use it as a reference to quote the agents in case there is a dispute or some type of issue.

A transcript also restrains customers from being rude as users can use it as proof to complain about their behavior.

10. A Canned Response Should Not Take Long

As a business, you should know what customers usually ask and your agents should have prepared responses to them. Users are aware when their questions are common and simple and they expect quick responses to those uncomplicated questions. Your reps should have some “copy-paste” answers in their arsenal.

11. Avoid Starting the Conversation with “How Are You”

It is important for chat agents to be polite but efficiency is a matter of importance. Users want to get their issues resolved as quickly as possible so instead of asking “Hello! How are you?” a better starter is “Hello! How can I help you today?”

12. Disclose that You Using a Bot

People tend to have a higher expectation when they are corresponding with a human rather than a bot. They also tend to be more polite when they know that it is an actual human on the other side of the chat window. 

Bots require messages to be clear and understandable and customers can better calibrate their language when they have this knowledge. Sometimes they feel they have wasted time with pleasantries when they realize that it is a bot that they were talking to so it is good to be upfront with them when you are using a chatbot.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

What is excellent customer service?

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Excellent customer service is defined as service that treats customers with a friendly attitude and tries to resolve their problem or question as efficiently as possible. – Reference.com

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Your customer service is only as good as your agents

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

I’ve been in the customer service game all of my life and in all of that time, nothing has changed. Technology evolves, concepts come and go and the only constant throughout the years is the people.

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Technical support email etiquette and flow

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Be professional but personal

Whether you are speaking to someone over the phone or over email, you are a representation of your company. Customers respond great to well spoken, professional but friendly written tones.  

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Supportbench launches new release offering businesses the most flexible and affordable customer service and helpdesk software on the market

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

 

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