The Power of Conversations and How to Empower Your Customer Support With it
This is an era of personalization. Since the advent of new age technology and intelligent tools, businesses have shifted the strategy from mass-appealing to granular.
Sales and marketing have been heavily influenced by personalization, catering each customer personally. It is time customer support and service industry to tread the same path.
Businesses see a lot of churn and lower customer satisfaction due to poor customer service. And let me tell you, this is not a technical or resource problem. There is high-end tech available to help businesses. And there is no lack of resources to tackle any number of queries coming in.
Conversations, not tickets. People, not agent and visitors.
The root of the problem is more human rather than technical. In the customer support industry, agents, customers and tickets are very familiar terms. We tend to overlook a very trivial thing in customer service that, essentially, agents and customers/visitors are people and a ticket is a conversation between them. We need to move over these age-old terms and move to real conversations.
Tickets are about resolving a task. Conversations are for understanding people and helping them get a solution to their problem or achieve a certain goal. Rather than putting customers in a queue and giving them a support ticket to wait for their query to be resolved, companies can leverage pro-active chat system to have conversations with the customers.
Chat is more affordable, fast and reliable way to address customer conversations. With the arrival of AI, bots can assist humans in providing a pleasing support experience for customers. Bots can handle generic queries and are available 24X7. At Kommunicate, we are helping businesses handle customer queries swiftly by creating an efficient amalgamation of Bots and Humans. Let us consider two scenarios:
1. A customer comes to your website, takes a look and immediately plans to try your product out. But he has certain queries beforehand. He raised a ticket from your Contact Us/Support section and waits for a reply. Your support team receives the queries and queue it on the basis of other queries. In a matter of some hours/days, your team replied and there is a strong chance that customer has forgotten about you or has moved on to see other similar products. What a loss!
2. A customer comes to your website, takes a look and immediately plans to try your product out. He sees a chat widget on your site and submits a few queries there. Your customer support bot can handle the generic queries and direct the customer to a resource which solves his problem. Further, your support agent can access the chat from any device and anywhere to respond to the queries pro-actively. The customer is happy and has more chances to try out and purchase your product thereafter.
As mentioned earlier, conversations between people (customers and agents) are a more human way to help a customer. And this is not a mere hypothesis, according to reports by AMA and many other firms, chat has highest customer satisfaction among all other support channels (such as phone and email).
From a different point of view: Agents based strategy is unscalable
Customer support is a highly invested side of a business. Tools, agents (a lot of agents if you are a large enterprise), phone bills et cetera ads up to a huge amount of sum. Most of the companies which provide tools for customer support charge you on the basis of the number of agents your workforce have.
The pricing doesn’t make sense as it is highly cost inefficient. More the number of agents you use, more the pricing.
Per Agent → $ X
More Agents → $$$ XXX
Your business wants to get more customers and more revenue and so are the ‘customer communication’ service companies. If pricing is based on agents, it means they will get more revenue when you have more agents.
It is true that more agents → more customers and more conversations. But at the same time, more agents can amount to inefficient work, slow response time and is effectively not scalable for high volume. In today’s world where things are getting automated using machine learning and advanced technologies, we should thrive for:
- More Conversations
- Automated Replies
- Scalable solution with fewer agents
- Efficiency
- Self-help
- 24x7 Fast Response Time
Every growing business should excel at customer service and having a meaningful conversation with customers is the best way to do that. We should resort to a highly efficient support system which aims to reduce the workload on agents by leveraging AI and chatbots. We, at Kommuicate, provide an intelligent support platform which helps you have conversations with users at ease. Lastly, I will leave you to dwell on this thought (and I am emphasizing on the fact again), customers and agents are people and we, as businesses, should thrive to solve problems by having conversations and not creating mere support tickets.
At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you onboard to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.
