How to Reduce Customer Service Costs Without Sacrificing Customer Experience

Does your enterprise want to improve the customer experience but struggles with high costs to serve?

If this sounds familiar, your company certainly wouldn’t be the first to suffer this dilemma.

We all know the importance of great customer experiences. Some might argue that the cost of delivering great CX is actually cheaper than the cost of delivering bad CX.

The common perception is that great customer service requires huge customer service teams and intensive human handling of cases. While that sure is one option to deliver better customer experiences, we attempt to provide some more creative, efficient ways of delivering good customer service while actually cutting the cost to serve.

Here are the best ways to reduce customer service costs without sacrificing customer experience.

Fully utilise social media & messaging apps

Many companies under utilise social media and messaging platforms.

With over 5 billion monthly users worldwide on messaging apps, companies that don’t utilise these platforms are missing an opportunity to reach potential customers and existing customers where they already are.

To fully utilise social media and messaging apps for customer engagement, companies need to do more than just post, reply to comments, run paid ads and assign a staff member to monitor Facebook Messenger.

Today’s customers expect instant responses and a level of self-service. New technology, like artificially intelligent automated conversion, can integrate with social media and messaging apps and makes this the perfect platform for delivering customers what they want.

Not only does fully utilising social media and messaging apps deliver better customer experiences, but you can reduce the cost to serve by 30%!

Listen to your customer, know their problems

By listening to your customers, your company can save on the time and cost to serve them. With the latest conversational software, it’s possible to track conversations and profile leads so that you understand more about who your customers are and what their problems are.

This knowledge is gold — it enables your company to better solve those problems, and faster. And by knowing your customers better and solving their problems faster, you’re delivering more efficient customer service and likely increasing your Net Promoter Score.

Promote self-service & offer a knowledge base

It’s no secret that the majority of customers prefer self service. It reduces the volume of frustrated customers which increases Net Promoter Score and reduces churn rates, leading to an increase revenue for companies. This is a win win for enterprises as self-service is also the most efficient means of providing customer support.

Technology today that enables self-service, particularly platforms that provide instant self-service with artificial intelligence, are cheaper than increasing the number of personnel or physical shop fronts. Self-service done right reduces overheads and keeps your customers smiling.

One means of offering self-service includes detailed FAQ sections or a knowledge base from which customers can quickly find what they need to know without trolling and reading through masses of content.

A simple FAQ page with a search bar doesn’t really cut the mustard these days. With automated conversation, people can type in their query in natural language and receive an instant response back, also in natural language…all with the fluidity of regular conversation, but efficiency of a machine. Such automated conversation can also provide rich content like training videos, infographics and be accessed directly from a company’s website, Facebook page or messenger apps.

This leads on to my next point about increasing agent productivity…

Increase agent productivity

This might seem like a bit of a no-brainer. It’s true that having more efficient, more productive agents will decrease the cost to serve. Traditional methods to do this include hiring the right people and staff training.

But what if staff only received enquiries from qualified leads or complex cases? They would have far more time on their hands to productively deal with a smaller volume of cases, without having to deal with weak leads or frequently asked questions.

A less traditional means of increasing productivity is to implement artificial intelligence in your customer engagement and service strategies. The right conversational AI tool will seamlessly handover to agents detailed tickets, lead qualification and lead profiling to further save agent’s time and increase productivity. Cool ay?

Hopefully the above has given you some inspiration on how to reduce customer service costs while actually improving the customer experience.

If you’re interested in learning more about how artificially intelligent, automated conversation can achieve this for your company, you can book in a quick phone call with one of our team HERE — we’d love to chat!