Improving customer experience has always been a challenge for businesses, but it has taken a notch higher since the lockdown.
A Retail Gazette report reveals that customer satisfaction levels have been declining in the past five years and will only continue to go downhill, with customers stuck at home due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. A significant reason contributing to this projected downturn is the increasing demands of customers for businesses to provide a seamless experience.
As many businesses fight to survive, connecting with customers during COVID is essential in cultivating relationships and being remembered in a post-pandemic world. An excellent way to remain connected with online customers is to use powerful software solutions that help businesses deliver exceptional customer experiences. The advantage of online software solutions is that they can automate tedious tasks to focus on improving their customer service.
This way, organizations can allocate their workforce efficiently to respond to customer issues quickly and prevent downtimes. Digital customer service solutions can also centralize data and unlock key insights which businesses can use to eliminate bottlenecks and optimize the customer experience. This article will take an in-depth look at solutions businesses can implement to improve customer service during COVID.
CRM Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions are gaining worldwide recognition with a 74% usage rate, and for a good reason. Data reveals that adopting a CRM can help businesses achieve a whopping average return on investment (ROI) of $8.71 for every dollar spent. This is because a CRM can provide them with immediate access to every customer interaction to customize their products to increase sales.
This allows your support staff to know who exactly they are talking to before taking a call since the CRM already saved their contact details into your details. This way, your staff can greet the customer by their name and have a complete overview of their recent purchases to address concerns and recommend related products. A CRM can also send automated emails, relevant content, coupons, and promotions to ensure that you are maintaining customer relationships during pandemics.
It can also unlock key insights from business data to help you anticipate evolving customer needs better. A CRM software solution can break down data by criteria and categories to create focused customer lists. This allows you to improve customer satisfaction by personalizing offers, tactics, and sales pitches to a specific audience and ensure that your customer marketing campaigns will yield desired results.
Social Media Management Tool
Roughly 3.6 billion people used social media in 2020, and this number is expected to grow to 4.1 billion due to strict pandemic measures. Therefore, businesses must learn to implement social media management tools to their customer service strategy to build relationships and remain connected with customers. A social media management solution empowers you to manage multiple social accounts and organize customer conversations to ensure that you never miss something important.
It also allows you to search for conversations by keywords or names. This ensures that you never miss something important and prevents customers from growing frustrated and eventually lashing out due to increased waiting times. A Forbes report adds that a negative review can steer 22% of prospects away, while four negative reviews can lose 70% of online customers.
Using a social media management tool, you can prevent negative reviews by responding to customer queries immediately. A social media management software solution can also gather in-depth information about your demographics and target market. This lets you personalize marketing efforts by crafting and sending prospects relevant messaging to improve customer experience.
Customer Service Software
Responding quickly to issues is one of the most effective ways on how to engage with customers during pandemic. Multiple surveys show that 88% of customers expect businesses to respond to them within 60 minutes, while another 30% anticipate a response within 15 minutes or less.
A separate report also reveals that 75% shift to competitors to fulfill their needs after long wait times.
Therefore, businesses must take advantage of customer service software solutions to handle, sort, and respond to incoming customer requests. A customer service software helps maintain engagement by acknowledging every customer request with an automated response. This allows you to build long-term relationships with customers without spending additional labor costs.
With a customer service software solution, you can automate manual processes to ensure accuracy and allocate resources to other business areas. It also allows you to route customer requests to the right person at the right time to prevent needless forwarding and reduce customer waiting times. Customer service software platforms can also monitor customer interactions in real-time so that you can gain a comprehensive view of their profiles should they decide to contact you in the future.
Help Ticketing System
Taking advantage of help ticketing systems is one of the customer service tips that businesses should implement to boost engagement and customer experience. A help ticketing system speeds up customer response times by automating registering queries into your database. This also enables you to prioritize urgent queries and support customers that generate a higher income for your business.
Help ticketing systems also integrate with your knowledge base and frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages. This makes it easier for your agents to find relevant information and answer customer questions quickly. It also comes with dynamic monitoring and reporting capabilities that provide businesses with the data they need to check ticket volume and satisfaction rates.
Using these insights, you can manage your team effectively and reassign agents to pressing customer concerns to avoid subsequent complaints and ticket backlogs. It also lets you identify repeat customers, which allows you to adapt and personalize the service. Help desk ticketing systems also let customers follow the progress of their issues to ensure transparency.
Virtual Queue Management Software
As situational changes occur, organizations, which stay open need to adapt to the new normal to provide a safer environment. One way of doing that is to take advantage of virtual queue management systems. An online queue management system improves queuing processes and flow by letting visitors check into the line using their devices.
Unlike typical queuing systems, virtual queuing does not require visitors to stand in line physically. Instead, the system monitors everyone’s position in a queue and subsequently provides them with text updates regarding the progress. This also helps reduce frustration by enabling customers to use their time for something important other than standing in line.
Using virtual queue management systems is also one of the customer management strategies that can boost loyalty thanks to its ability to integrate with digital signage solutions and inform visitors of their queue status in real-time. It also streamlines communication by letting you provide service to online customers in their chosen language. Giving customers the freedom to pick their preferred language upon sign-in helps reduce confusion.
Improving Customer Experience during Pandemic
With economic activity at historic lows, businesses need to be savvy enough to use technology to improve customer experience. Using powerful technologies, businesses can automate processes and customer interactions while simultaneously optimizing their customer management strategies. One of the emerging technologies used by businesses to improve customer experience is Qwaiting.
Qwaiting is a queue management system that empowers businesses to prioritize and respond to customer queries. It allows you to schedule appointments, print tickets, and provide comprehensive queue status reports to customers. Qwaiting also offers a free trial on top of its feature-rich basic, premium, and enterprise packages.