With all the uncertainty around COVID-19, we’re contingency planning, and we know you’re probably doing the same. We’ve compiled a list of our product features and ideas to help your team continue to work effectively. Best of all, most of these utilize tools that are already included in your subscription.
With so many new customer communication channels opening for business, the classic contact center can seem kind of old school. Nobody wants to phone a business anymore, right? Wrong. In fact, 66% of customers still typically resolve their issues with a company via telephone, according to our latest Customer Experience Trends Report. While many support issues can be resolved via messaging, email, or self-service, sometimes it’s just easier and more efficient to pick up the phone.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be a great resource for you and your team. If you take a deep look into your customer data, you can get better forecasting capabilities. In other words, you can more effectively serve your customers and understand your prospects. Yet this adage is only true if: Around 65 percent of CRM projects fail due to low user adoption. Why?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool for any sales team; it saves them time and provides invaluable data insights for nurturing prospects until they become customers. But, surprisingly, it’s more common for sales reps to use Excel and email to store and manage prospect data than it is to use a CRM system. And for the teams that do use a CRM, few take full advantage of the tool.
Here’s something support leaders in the trenches know all too well: customer interactions are on the rise, which goes hand-in-hand with consumers’ expectations that the service they’ll receive will be stellar. That’s challenging enough for any business, but for companies in growth mode, those trends can lead to serious strain on support operations.
Have you ever heard someone say the price of growth is change? An old boss of mine used to say this regularly, and there’s a lot of truth to it. As your organization grows, it’s guaranteed to cause a lot of change. One place where this growth-fueled change often manifests itself is in how you support your customers. The last thing you want is to see your customer count skyrocket while your customer experience and customer satisfaction suffer.
Want a great way to tank your customer satisfaction? Ignore your customer service team. Customer expectations have never been higher, and they want answers faster, on the channel of their choice. Your team is made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge and experience—someone who’s new could unknowingly say the wrong thing and end up making an irate customer even more upset.
If you’ve ever watched The Office, you might remember the episode when Dwight and Jim discover that their customers have been giving them terrible reviews. They’re in total and utter denial — “The reason that I got bad customer reviews is because I didn’t! There is a massive conspiracy going on here!” Dwight protests.
When Birchbox, a personalized beauty subscription service, was founded in 2010, they had just a few people answering customer emails. Eight years later, they had a team of 54 support agents managing a monthly volume of nearly 38,000 tickets across multiple channels. With the efficiencies gained from implementing a robust customer support software, they actually reduced their cost per contact and achieved their fastest resolution time ever, despite the company’s rapid growth.
Businesses tend to primarily associate customer acquisition with marketing and sales. They often leave customer service out of the equation because they forget that customer acquisition includes the ability to convert prospects that are already in contact with your business. Prospects often subscribe to email newsletters, follow your business on social media, or read your blog, demonstrating a level of interest and familiarity that hasn’t turned into monthly recurring revenue—yet.
