Tag: products

Customer Service Automation: Why Is It the Future

Posted on by Supportbench

Customer service automation to keep delivering continuous quality customer service is always an ambitious task, but if up to the challenge, you can thrive, with some automation. Our team of professionals at Supportbench, experienced in helping organizations and teams deliver high quality customer support through the Supportbench platform, can help you with your journey ahead.

From defining service terms to dealing with the sales process, even just up front, big changes happen as soon as a service agent is onboarded and starts working. Data management, document sharing, processing transaction information, and coding processes come into focus, contributing to an enhanced level of performance and efficiency. These changes often help simplify the customer experience and drive increased sales of your products and services.

To assist you as you turn customer experience into profit, we’ve put together a list of benefits and features that help your customer service operations go from bad to best. Check it out below.

One of Supportbench’s core market benefits is the power of unification. Using our extensive experience, our dedicated service team designs and builds customer service applications to suit our clients’ unique needs. These solutions can and often do take a few months to complete, but you’ll be able to turn on the tools to perform routine tasks and scale up your expertise as needed.

Attention to Content Retention

The value of the ability to gather your customers’ content right away during an interaction creates a tremendous leverage point with a potential new client. They’ll start a project with minimal knowledge about your offering, but it will develop over time, eventually leading to a long-term relationship where they understand how your business operates and how to use it in order to meet their needs with customer service automation.

Simplified Workflows & Processes

Being a team of realists, we’re tempted to think that customers aren’t going to grasp how tedious and time-consuming it is to do customer service. By implementing workflows and strategically thinking through the onboarding process, you can help drive adoption, retention, as well as the added bonus of decreased influx of new customer inquiries on how to use specific features.

Timeline Automation

Timeline automation makes operations easier at all times. It saves time and helps with analytics, both in terms of identifying risks and gaining insights as you head into a new conversation. One key grievance that customers will often express when dealing with customer service is how they feel like they’re being tossed around and dealing with so many different people or repeating the same information over and over.

By taking advantage of Supportbench’s synchronized and unified Customer Support platform, any agent who is working with a new customer inquiry, or even an existing one, can easily get insights immediately into the case history and how to pick things up where they were left off.

However, it’s important to note that the process of training customer support agents to be diligent about reviewing previous information prior to engagement is up to the policies and guidelines set by your company. Make sure that your agents take advantage of the tools available to them.

An automation-driven customer experience increases productivity and consistency, which brings increased likelihood of winning new customers. This is true regardless of whether your solution is fully automated or you use onboarding activation.

Whether you’re providing an on-premise software like DocuSign or providing a hosted solution like Sendler, you can improve the customer experience by strategically building out processes that are supported by automation.

This allows you to bypass expensive personnel by using proactive tools to help the agents get into the mindset of their customers. It’s also scalable, helping you with low or remote locations while not compromising the quality of the experience.

DocuSign Case Study: Optimized Onboarding

When we launched a product, we wanted it to be incredibly easy to use, and to be easy to use. Once we were able to achieve this through automation, we saw a real lift in customer satisfaction. “We used DocuSign to sign our SaaS, and it was so much easier than other ways. We’re now going to use the system more,” shared Georgia, an early adopter.

What’s more, DocuSign has solid compliance policies in place that clients are able to implement to complement them. There are simple things that we like to d on for GDPR compliance, such as credit reporting and certifications. While some of this can be done manually, there’s value in automation so you can carry out these tasks entirely online or even at an offline location, like a service center.

Notifications and tracking

Checking the status of your new customer is critical to the customer service process, but it’s also a challenge, since it can vary greatly across a variety of companies. In addition to hardware, everything from good and bad CRM integration to documentation must be considered. Our consulting team performs custom deep dives to see how well a firm’s platform-based offering compares with other providers, but we also run a competitive analysis and download data from multiple vendors and proprietary tools, such as Hubspot, to help with training and scheduling and the ability to notifies your customers. We also work with companies on how they can manage the assets that customers have digitally and automate this process.

Right at the start of the journey we develop a comprehensive call center workflow plan, such as a Sales Stage Plan, an onboarding stage plan, a service recovery plan, and an activation stage plan, which lets us start configuring a strategy that enables our first responders to carry out the audit promptly.

Software-as-a-Service

The beauty of web-based CRM is that it’s easy to get the engine to run. In addition to the onboarding stage, we use the sales platform or platform to sign new customers. By doing so we can come up with a more personalized onboarding process, such as adding the customer’s relationship on their social channels, using their identity on the platform, and tracking their assets and contacts. It’s also a great way to introduce the customer to your tech stack and welcome them with a customer service automation.

Overnight response times and expertise

With DocuSign, we get to measure improvements very quickly in terms of the time between activation and the first calls to our site, including:

  • Time between the activation and the first call to the call center
  • Time to the first call to the first rep
  • Response time
  • Simplification

Service teams are busy and while there are sometimes difficulties, we see a clear lift in customer satisfaction when they’re able to serve our customers all night long with data, documents and signage—just in the time it would take them to craft it with pen and paper.

Industry best practices

A little-known fact is that DocuSign’s goal is to drive all of the various service worksite processes on line, while simultaneously making it easier to focus on re-training and repairs. New employees benefit, as well, as it helps them understand the what, why and how, for making any system-based services better. These systems include comprehensive onboarding, which is much easier to run than manual processes.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience

Ultimately, delivering an exemplary customer experience means providing exceptional service to your customers—as a human should. The customer service team is the emotional catalyst of an organization, but without what we call the “customer experience continuum,” it cannot deliver an exceptional service. Meaning, if the experience from the very beginning is a cultural and non-verbal power trip, then your great customer service team is likely falling short. If a customer service rep is universally ignored when they ask for a technician, then you’re serving your customer poorly and the relationship is likely to suffer. Doing a good job of training, mentoring and improving in numbers can certainly give your customer service team the ability to improve the customer experience, but doing it right requires the right tools, too.

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 and build great customer service automation? Contact us today!

Mastering your customer’s journey

Posted on by rpsstudios

When you’re just getting started building a business, customer service is often the first and smallest thing you need to do. You need to understand how your customers receive their messages and what works best for your businesses and solutions. So, before diving headfirst into customer service, let’s take a moment to understand the different aspects of your customer’s journey, what you should be doing, and what not to do in this space.

What’s the secret to great customer service?

To build customer service into a strong foundation, you need to understand it in a certain way, and then act on the results of those insights. At Support Bench, we believe that great customer service means great customer insights.

While many CMOs may not know this, customer insight starts with a customer analytics study. That customer analytics study should offer valuable insights, including your most valuable customers. That said, very little of your customer’s data is out there.

Making sense of customer data

At a basic level, customer service insights are pretty easy. For example, if your company is looking to collect and analyze data from a single channel, a customer portal can play a role in getting you started. For small or relatively new businesses, listening to how customers interact with your product and services can provide valuable insight.

Another step is building good content around customers — whether it’s on their website, social media, email, or other channels. If you have a solid content strategy that focuses on what the different channels communicate, and the types of content that are most effective for them, it’s possible that you can access customer information to gain insights into your content’s impact.

Customers will tell you what they want

As part of your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, you want to provide everything your customers want: more information, more options, and more things to do. So, the biggest piece of the puzzle is determining what they need and providing it to them.

A great example of this is by analyzing the overall brand experience. When customers download your app or website, they usually want to know when it’s a good time to come back, what “power metrics” they should track, and how to access content that aligns with their needs.

The customer experience is a highly personal one — and you shouldn’t ignore that message. Don’t make your customer feel like they’re yelling at you, or like you’re directing them to bad information.

Choose the right channel

One of the best ways to create a perfect customer experience is to choose the correct channel. When you choose the right channel to serve customers, you create a very important understanding of who they are and what part of your customer’s journey your customers are. If they’re not in your database, you’re giving them a very incomplete picture of what type of customer they are. The right channel allows you to pinpoint how your customers are doing, and what, if anything, could help them do better.

The right channel is the one that help them do more. When your channel offers something that helps them do something, it’s likely that this will be among the things that lead to positive outcomes for them. For example, if you provide a tool that helps an employee better use their time, that should be something you implement in your channel. That means you make a strong connection with the information on your channel, based on what you’ve gathered.

Utilize the tools you already have

If your brand is not exactly known for customer service, even the most basic resource can be used to grow the number of your customers you get. This means you make an effort to understand your existing customer’s profile and create a relationship with them, or better yet, find out what helps them do better.

As part of your marketing automation (MaaS) platform, you can share analytics about all your customers on the platform. Make sure they’re aware of these, too. You can then learn more about them, and your customer’s journey and as a result, provide them with useful insights into what can improve their customer experience.

Don’t waste time on service matters

Conventional customer service will be extremely frustrating. When you need to do something, you’ll find your customer waiting for someone to help you, and they’ll either take a deep breath or will get very frustrated. At Support Bench, we’ve all experienced poor customer service experience in our own lifetimes. As the owner of a successful business, there’s something you should never do. It’s never simple to solve a customer’s problem. Good customer service doesn’t just happen automatically. It’s always worth the time.

Support Bench 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!