We want help, and we want it now. Today’s customers are living in a fast-paced world, and speed during customer service is a major part of the customer experience.
The rise of mobile digital channels, including messenger apps, and the ever-increasing availability of brands on social media and online make consumers hungrier for instant satisfaction than ever before. Meeting these demands requires a combination of customer service expertise, intuition, and anticipation.
The increasingly limited patience of today’s customers clash with the typical brand’s need to provide excellent service and maintain reasonable business hours. When a customer wants to review their account at 2am, who will be there to take the call?
You can commit to the incredibly expensive task of creating an around the clock customer service team – or you can turn to automation, technology, and cleverness to create services that support your customer’s needs without destroying your budget. Well-designed, seamless self-service portals can help your customers and clients get the information and services they need on demand, right when they are thinking about it.
Equipping your customers with a way to proactively find the answers they need can eliminate frustration and enhance their overall perception of your brand.
Regularly Updated Knowledge Base
Have an extensive knowledge base. If your customer needs to see a manual, watch a video how-to or even see diagrams and infographics, they can find help on your site whether you have a live agent online or not. This documentation is worth creating and sharing – in most cases it not only helps your existing customers but can show prospects just how much data you have available to assist them as well.
From a customer retention standpoint, this is an essential contact center feature that will go a long way in maintaining the loyalty and level of satisfaction for your current clients.
FAQs in a Convenient Location
Your customers have questions, but they are not always unique. Creating an easy to access, easy-to-find list of your most commonly asked questions (and their answers) can help you serve the needs of your customers even at the break of dawn or the middle of the night. This does more than just solidifying your customer support system, it creates additional SEO and keyword use on your page, resulting in better search engine placement for your brand.
Deploy a Mobile App
You have a responsive website and likely know just how many of your customers visit via mobile device. Offering your own mobile app that customers can use on their smartphone can make it easier than ever to provide self service opportunities for your visitors and clients. When you combine a robust mobile app with your existing database and information about your customer (their location, preferences and behavior), you can create customized experiences for the customer without needing assistance from a live agent.
Image-centric Tutorials
Creating image-heavy tutorials that are easy to access and detail every aspect of your product can show prospects and customers exactly what to do with your items, and can answer many frequent questions. While written FAQs are certainly helpful, not all customers embrace them. Some need visual guidance in the form of infographics or videos instead.
Employ a Virtual Agent
Not a bland chatbot that makes inane commentary, but a thinking and responsive virtual agent that can interpret a customer’s needs and supply them with assistance, whether your team is in the office or not. A virtual agent can be set to deploy upon certain behavioral triggers or when a customer takes specific action and may be able to offer enhanced services to satisfy that customer’s needs.
AI-powered chatbots and sentiment analysis are fueling self-service in the modern age, allowing your contact center to anticipate customer’s needs and then fulfill them, all without needing a live agent. If an agent is needed, a chatbot can seamlessly hand off the interaction to a live agent through any channel, creating an omnichannel customer experience.
Bright Pattern Self-Service Tools
As an innovator in the contact center industry, Bright Pattern provides AI-powered self-service options that can help your contact center serve customers, even when agents aren’t available. Features like conversational IVR, AI-powered voice chat, and more can help streamline workflow, make the customer experience seamless, and empower your agents. Check out Bright Pattern’s self-service web page for more details.
