Great customer care can give you a competitive edge over other brands. The more effort you put into engaging and resolving your clients’ concerns, the more likely they are to stay loyal to your company. That said, it takes reliable strategies, equipment, and staff to make your customer care stand out. This often translates to a bigger budget, and that’s not always something businesses can give liberally.
If you find yourself needing to improve your customer care without straining your business’ finances, there are alternatives you can go for. Most of these are inexpensive, practical, and highly efficient in helping you achieve your goals. The trick is to find the ones that work best for your business, and continually invest in them as you grow.
Improve Your FAQs
A lot of businesses assume that their clients prefer talking to an agent over any other method whenever they have questions or concerns. The fact is, the majority of the people who visit your website, app, or social media platforms would rather access solutions on your website that don’t involve queuing or talking to anybody. This is because it saves time, and it’s much easier to read answers on an FAQ page rather than to detail the problem in a chatbox or email.
Improving your FAQs, therefore, is of utmost importance. Not only does this speed up resolutions. It also keeps your clients engaged on your website longer and allows you to cut back on agents. This only works, however, when you’ve created a truly helpful FAQ page. Make sure that you perform the research necessary to gather the important questions and to make them readily accessible.
Use AI
AI chatbot solutions are worthwhile investments in today’s business scene. Unlike the typical chatbox that a lot of people have grown accustomed to, AI chatbox has the capacity to increase lead generation, enable you to provide 24-hour support, and speed up resolution time. More importantly, its enhanced attributes can reduce customer care costs in two significant ways.
One is to minimize the number of agents you need, and the second is to redirect your agents’ attention to more pressing concerns. They will no longer be preoccupied trying to answer every single message that comes their way. Instead, they can let the AI chatbox handle the simple ones, while they take over the complicated conversations. It’s a great way to increase their productivity and lower the stress levels in your customer care department, too.
Hire the Right People
It’s worth assessing how many of your existing agents actually add value to your business. Even just one or two agents who waste time and achieve only substandard results are detrimental to your team, to your customer care, and to your company. This further highlights the importance of making your hiring process as streamlined as possible. When you hire qualified individuals, all the training and equipping that follows won’t be in vain.
You’ll want your agents to have impressive cognitive skills, listening skills, high EQ, and a friendly disposition. It also helps if their personality matches that of your brand. The more efficient your current team is, the less likely you are to waste money and opportunities.
Use Your Ticketing System Well
A ticketing system doesn’t only serve as a notice that you have unsatisfied, confused or even irate customers. It’s also a good way to stay informed about the issues that arise with your products and services so that you can address them at once.
If there is a sudden increase in tickets for a specific product, for example, don’t wait for the rest of the people who bought it to come to you. Publish a solution on your social media page or contact these people. Getting ahead of the problem will prevent a sudden influx of messages for your agents to handle. Whenever this happens and the issue isn’t addressed quickly or efficiently enough, the damage might worsen, and you stand to lose your patrons.
Have someone monitor the tickets and anticipate problems. In case your current ticketing system does not give you detailed information or automated results, then invest first in a better system.
Continually Hone Your Customer Care
Excellent customer care as a competitive edge will significantly improve your brand. That said, it’s something that usually takes a lot of trial and error to get right. There are times when the right FAQ is not enough. You have to put them on the right page, with the right design and font.
Perhaps your revised hiring process needs to be revised again to make up for loopholes. Whatever it is, take the time to address them, and build on one improvement after another. You’ll undoubtedly reach your goal soon enough.
