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It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high.

There are many factors that might impact your average response time, including:

• the number of steps that agents have to take to find customer history and previous interactions
• the difficulty in communicating and collaborating with other teams
• absolute ticket volumes, as well as ticket volume to agent ratio
• the frequency of complex issues that routinely take longer to solve

To help you tackle these challenges in an efficient manner, we’ve put together this article where we deep dive into the average response times across channels, and also look at effective ways to improve customer responsiveness.

What is responsiveness in customer service?

Simply put, customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently a company responds to customers. From a customer support standpoint, it is the time taken by the support agents to respond to your customers. It’s important to note that customer responsiveness covers first response time, and also the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution. Customers would be delighted if they get connected to an agent immediately but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries.

Striking a balance between speed and quality is the biggest challenge faced by customer support agents. However, by clearly communicating the expected wait and query resolution time beforehand, you can help set the right expectations with customers. This will also enable customers to gain trust in your brand, and help you build customer loyalty. But the real question here is – how can you deliver timely and consistent customer support when you handle different communication channels?

The answer to this question lies in understanding the expected response times for each channel as well as knowing how to deliver better customer experience.

How crucial is the customer response time for each channel?

The average response time or average wait time differs for each support channel. Here is a breakdown of the average response time for each customer service channel.

Email

According to SuperOffice, the average wait time for an email is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Here is a representation of the percentage of different age groups expecting an email reply within 1 hour.

Phone and Live chat

People reach out to phone and live chat support to receive a fast and immediate response. Thus the average response time for the former is 3 seconds and the latter is under 1 minute.

Social Media

The average response time for social media differs across different platforms. Here is a graphical representation of the average response time of popular social media channels namely Facebook and Twitter.

How to improve customer responsiveness and create a better customer experience

1. Understand your customers

Identifying the channels your customers are more comfortable with is the first step in improving your customer responsiveness. Surveys and customer feedback forms can help you understand what customers expect in terms of wait times, and whether they were happy with the experience they had. This in turn can be fed back into your support strategy, and you can use the insights to make decisions such as hire more people, assign more resources on channels that customers expect faster service like chat. Knowing your customer better and engaging with them will help you outperform your competitors.

2. Leverage the power of technology

There are multiple ways that technology can help optimize and automate repetitive tasks in customer service, and thereby significantly improve your team’s responsiveness.

• Make use of a helpdesk software to streamline your support process. A good helpdesk software will help you prioritize the issues that need attention and bring all channels of communication onto one dashboard so agents don’t have to toggle between many tools. It offers historical context and 360 view of every customer by tracking customer journey across each channel and collaboration with other teams without losing context.
• Power your helpdesk or support software with automation to respond quickly to your customers. Automation will be hugely helpful to improve your customer responsiveness. Freshdesk Omni Route automatically assigns messages, chats, tickets, and phone calls to the right agent based on their agent loads. It also scans the customer inquiries and assigns it to the right team depending on the issue type and the channel they contacted you with. Furthermore, it will also update the progress of the issue to the customers.
• Deploying AI-driven chatbots to your support software is a boon to your business. They can handle customers and bring down your average first response time. With Freddy, the agents don’t have to spend time sorting the incoming tickets or answering the common queries that arise every day. It categorizes, prioritizes the incoming queries and also solves repetitive support processes with just a single click. The agents can bid adieu to these mundane tasks and focus on complex customer needs.

3. Provide consistent support experience

When providing support via different channels, the challenge lies in keeping it consistent without losing customer context across channels. An omnichannel support solution not only lets you manage multiple customer service channels from a single-window but will also help you provide a seamless and consistent support experience. The customers can reach out to you via any channels and receive a contextual response without having to worry about which channel is the best to reach out to you.

4. Provide resources for self-support

Implementing self-service options like a customer portal or a knowledge base is a perfect resource for the customers to solve their issues on their own, without having to wait to connect to an agent for every simple or common issue that arises. This will decrease the number of incoming queries to the customer support teams, and therefore reduce agent load and improve response times. This will free up agent time to address customers with bigger issues at hand.

5. Train your employees

A skilled workforce can perform better and build good customer relationships. Training your customer support staff on the importance of customer satisfaction and informing them about the expected response times for each channel will help them provide better support. Make sure your agents are aware of the common types of customer service questions or issues raised on your brand or business and are well-equipped to answer them. Also, ensure that your agents have access to your knowledge base so that all your employees can deliver a consistent support experience. This can be made easier with Freddy Answers, which automatically responds to the customers with the best answers from your knowledge base. It goes above and beyond by identifying intent and follows up the answer to bring conversational flow and engages with your customers.

6. Make use of canned responses and incorporate personalization

Canned responses or templates help you respond quickly to common customer issues with just a click. This saves you the time and effort of having to write the same messages or answers over and over again for different customers. With Freddy AI article and canned response suggestor, you can immediately send out a response without having to search through your list of canned responses or templates.

7. Set performance goals and monitor individual customer response time

Performance goals are essential for monitoring your customer support. Tracking metrics such as average response time, number of agent responses per ticket, and total time spent on a ticket will help you know where you stand and provide a better customer support experience. Set different benchmarks for each channel. As mentioned earlier, the average response time varies from channel to channel. So you will need to monitor the responsiveness of your support and query volumes separately for each channel. These goals motivate your agents to reach their goals and in turn, helps your business deliver a faster customer response.

Closing Thoughts

While rushing to offer faster responses to customers, try to stay as human as possible. What separates human agents from bots is the ability to understand and connect with your customers. Ensure that you listen to your customers and provide the right solution. Customer responsiveness is not only about fast responses but also the right responses and solutions. Improving your customer responsiveness indicates that you are on the fast and right track to win customers for life.

I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed on my cab ride to work this morning (yes, I know I could’ve caught up on some reading or a favourite podcast) when, in the middle of all the memes and all the quotes added to unrelated pictures, I found a shiny new piece of wisdom. A terribly tiny tale that said something along the lines of, “It wasn’t the fights that ruined it, it was the silence.”

And cheesy though that was, I thought, yeah. You get two people talking, and they’re bound to reach a point in conversation when they disagree. Interpersonal relationships and social interactions of any kind are bound to be strife with disagreements.

But do disagreements really need to mean conflict? Can disagreements not simply mean differences?

We see disagreements cross over into conflict everyday in support. My great uncle, for example, wasn’t happy at all about the way his mobile network provider’s customer care agent had spoken to him. “I contact support to get my questions answered, not to feel like an idiot for having them.” he said. The support agent who spoke to him, on the other hand, might believe that support means providing answers that are as clear as possible, even if that means using technical terms. In essence, this is a simple difference between the two parties. And yet, words were exchanged, frustrations rose, and people were left disgruntled.

What is that point at which difference crosses over into conflict? How can we stop it, and turn it around into compromise and cooperation?

I think the answer lies in what happens in the time it takes to get from difference to conflict; in communication. Uncle Bob simply wanted a solution to his problem, and wouldn’t mind a friendly voice on the other end. The agent simply wanted to resolve his customer’s issue and be better at his job. These two people had converging goals, but ended up not achieving either.

People will always have different notions of everything under the sun, but how can we take away the power of differences in interfering with our ends, especially in the world of business?

Make no assumptions

Assuming what the other party wants out of the interaction is the first mistake that sends the dominos cascading. If the support agent hadn’t assumed that the best thing for Uncle Bob was an information dump, their conversation might have gone better. If Uncle Bob hadn’t assumed that the support agent wanted to be condescending, he might have requested him to leave the technical jargon out of the conversation. Prior information about the customer can also lead to assumptions about them and what they expect for support – because everyone knows a customer who’s eighty years old would need things to be spelled out for him, right? The first step in ensuring good communication is cutting out the assumptions.

Aim to understand, not solve

With no assumptions being made about the customer or why they’re reaching out to you, you need to keep your eyes and ears open for cues. It’s not just about understanding and solving their problem, but doing it the way they want. Really listen and trust what your instincts tell you about how your customer wants to be served. If one tone doesn’t work, switch to another.

Be aware of what you can offer

When you’re on the right track to gauging customer expectations from your interactions, it’s important that you also remember how much you can actually offer your customer. How many of those expectations can you fulfill? How much hand-holding can you do today? Know your capacities and constraints in every customer interaction.

Find an expectations middle-ground

If what you’re getting from the interaction is that your customer wants to sit down and figure out how your software can help them in their 2018 plan, and you have 200 more tickets to go through before you can call it a day, you need to convey to them politely that you won’t be able to provide them exactly the service they’re looking for that day. Make the customer see that you understand what they want from you, that you want to provide them that experience, but that you have limitations that mean you may not be able to fully satisfy their expectations. Be sure to convey that you will find another way or another time to give them exactly the service that they sought.

By today’s norms, good customer service is just solving the problem. You solve every problem that comes your way and your customer base is solid. However, great customer service – the kind that wins hearts and lives on in memory – is all about communication.

If you want your business to succeed, it’s not enough to just bring in new customers over and over again. Yes, new customers are always needed, but if you’re not retaining the customers that you already have, you’ll always be working from a marked disadvantage.

That has always been true, but in 2020 it is more true than ever before.

A whopping 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. So keeping your customers happy and coming back for more is absolutely vital to your continued success.

But customer retention isn’t easy. With competitors constantly trying to outdo you and steal your customers away, you’ve got to constantly be on top of your retention efforts, or you risk a mass exodus.

In this article, we’re going to arm you with a number of tips and tricks that will help you retain your customers for years to come, creating a steady stream of reliable revenue that will keep your company in the black.

Why is Customer Retention Important?

You know that retention is important, but how important is it really?

The world economy is in shambles as the world reels from the impact of COVID-19, which means that people aren’t going out and spending money. Consumers are not taking chances when they don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from.

As such, the already arduous task of generating new business has become even harder. But if you’ve managed to retain the customers that you already have, you’ll be working at less of a disadvantage. Customer retention allows you to future proof your business.

Another hurdle is that customer acquisition in today’s climate is incredibly expensive.

Customer acquisition costs for both the B2B and B2C sectors have gone up by almost 50% in the last five years.

So if your customer base is a revolving door, and you’re constantly having to replace old customers who have abandoned you, it’s going to be harder to generate a profit. At a time in which businesses are struggling with reduced revenue, those acquisition costs are going to be even more of a financial burden, pushing you ever deeper into the red.

When dealing with a brand new prospect, you have between a 5% and 20% chance of closing a sale. But, when you’re selling to someone that has already bought from you in the past, that chance goes up to 60% to 70%.

Now for the cherry on top. Customers are actually proven to spend more on brands that they are loyal to. According to Fundera, 43% of customers will open their wallets more for a company they feel a sense of loyalty for. Loyalty and security are two of the main driving factors which could lead to people spending money during uncertain economic times.

If they know that the company they’re doing business with produces quality work with value, they’re more likely to make a purchase than someone who sees your business as an unknown gamble.

So, to review:

• It is more cost-effective to retain customers
• It is easier to sell to existing customers
• Loyal repeat customers actually spend more money and are more likely to spend money during the economic downtime we’re currently experiencing

Now that you’re seeing dollar signs around customer retention, let’s focus on how to establish customer loyalty.

Understand Your Audience

If you’re going to successfully hold onto customers, you first have to understand them.

This includes:

• Who they are
• How old they are
• What they do
• What they like
• Where they live
• How they interact with the internet

You need to make sure that you’re up to date with all of the latest internet statistics so that you can ensure that you’re appealing to the sensibilities and preferences of your specific audience.

For example, 51.5% of global internet traffic in 2019 was via mobile devices. That’s up from 2009 where only 0.7% of internet traffic came from mobile. You can leverage that information into action. Clearly more people are using the internet via mobile platforms, so you should focus at least half of your retention efforts on mobile internet users that fall within your customer profiles.

For support professionals, it’s incredibly important to understand the needs of a target audience. Most notably, you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes and understand the pain points that they have. It’s also vital that you understand how the current economic climate is impacting these demographics.

If you’re marketing to urban communities in Florida, for instance, where COVID-19 cases are exploding, you’re going to have to take that into account when trying to retain your customers.

When you intimately know the sensibilities of your demographic, you’re able to better respond to their issues in a way that isn’t going to drive them off.

If you’re selling a tech-based product and you know that your audience is not made up of tech professionals, it’s never a good idea to come at them with technical jargon or assume that they know what they’re doing.

On the other side of the coin, if you are dealing with tech professionals, giving them a walkthrough on how to turn on their computer is going to frustrate them.

By developing a series of well thought out customer profiles, you’re going to be able to better serve your existing customers and ensure their continued loyalty well into the future.

Streamline the Sales and Support Processes

Interacting with your company and making repeat purchases needs to be simple. If it’s even a little bit difficult, your customers are going to start looking elsewhere.

Optimized landing pages and product pages make reordering a snap, but you’re also going to have to communicate consistently.

When a customer makes their initial purchase, the sales department should not be done with them. It’s important to reach out to existing customers to try and gauge their satisfaction and inquire about additional purchases or upselling.

Automation tools, such as CRM or customer support helpdesk, can be quite helpful in these situations. With these tools, you will be able to segment your customer base, schedule touch emails, and calls, and ask for feedback, so you don’t miss out on crucial post-purchase engagement.

These tools will also come in handy for your support staff. Customers will abandon you in droves if your support team isn’t stellar or if there is a significant drop in customer experience after purchase. When customers contact you with support related issues, they expect those problems to be solved quickly and efficiently.

With a helpdesk, you’re able to take notes on every interaction you have with a customer and provide better service by reviewing a customer’s entire interaction history before taking their call.

If this is a repeat issue, you can see what has and has not been done in the past and provide a more complete and satisfying support experience that will keep them coming back.

Create Content That Adds Value to Your Customers’ Lives

Content creation is vital when trying to retain customers. But it has to be content that adds value¹ to your customers’ lives.

It’s also important to remember that what was once valuable to a customer might not be anymore. In the midst of a global pandemic and economic crash, the priorities of your customers might have shifted. If so, then you’re going to have to adapt in order to continue meeting their needs.

When trying to attract new customers, you might take to guest blogging² to put your content out to the masses. But when you’re trying to retain customers, it makes more sense to include high-quality content in places where they can find it.

Obviously, you should be producing high-quality blog content that adds value to a customer’s overall experience with your company.

rom a support perspective, it’s important to have a strong knowledge base that your customers can peruse without ever having to call in for help. By providing this content at no cost, you’re giving a valuable service that will keep your customers satisfied and prevent them from wandering over to a competitor.

Your knowledge base should consist of both written and visual content. You might want to create a whole page of your knowledge base section to highlight how your company is adapting in the wake of current events as a way of ensuring your existing customers that the level of service they’ve come to expect from you will remain the same.

Engage Your Audience

You have to engage your audience in order to develop a sense of brand loyalty. Make sure that you’re replying to comments on social media, taking questions, and reaching out in order to ensure that the service you’re providing is the best that it can be.

As long as you have a passion for your topic and a deep knowledge base, you can establish customer trust through regular podcast episodes, as the above quote states.

When working with a podcast, you can take questions on social media and then answer them personally on the air. Not only does this show your audience that you’re hearing and responding to their concerns, but it’s also an amazing way to direct attention and downloads to your podcast.

Never underestimate how much people like to hear their names and words read aloud on a show they enjoy.

Also, while people are stuck inside and social distancing, they’re more hungry than ever for content. Producing something like a podcast or web video series can generate more attention now than it might have eight months ago when your audience had a lot more to focus on.

If you’re not engaging your customers enough, more than half of them will consider dropping your services.

The old adage of “It’s not personal, it’s just business” doesn’t really hold true outside of The Godfather. People are influenced by their emotions when it comes to the companies that they do business with.

When you actively engage with your audience, it builds emotional bonds that keep them coming back well into the future.

Offer Giveaways, Discounts, and Loyalty Programs

It’s always a great idea to reward customer loyalty.

After all, you’re obviously grateful for your repeat customers. It’s time that you let them know in a way that positively impacts their customer experience.

Make sure that you organize special giveaways for some of your top or most profitable customers. Really put your all into these giveaways so that they seem special. Design a special limited graphic for it, promote it along social channels, you could even write about it in your blog or talk about it on your podcast.

It’s also a great idea to offer discounts regularly to some of your more frequent fliers. These can be communicated directly through email campaigns.

Medical Alert Buyer’s Guide crafted a short article that helps seniors in the AARP find the right medical alert system for their specific needs and budget. This helpful step establishes trust by imparting important information while simultaneously pushing products to new and repeat customers alike.

Send out special coupons. Let them know that this offer is just for them in gratitude for the loyalty they’ve shown as a valued customer. With the economy breaking into pieces, your audience could see special discounts and rewards for their loyalty as even more of a service. This would, in turn, inspire even more loyalty from them going forward.

Consider a loyalty program with some form of gamification built-in. People love competing and winning prizes. Gamification is also a growing trend in business, with more than 56% of loyalty programs implementing some game mechanics.

Sources have also stated that up to 70% of customers will recommend your company to a friend or colleague if they are happy with your loyalty program.

That’s because loyalty programs make customers feel special, and that in turn makes them more loyal than ever.

In Conclusion

Loyal customers who come back for more are the bread and butter of any modern business. And when the economic state of the world is in constant flux, it’s important to make good use of that existing customer pool.

As such, you have to do a lot of work to increase your customer retention rates and keep those people coming back.

Implement these vital customer retention steps, and you can take comfort in a strong customer base that is supplemented by new incoming buyers who have the potential to become loyal repeat customers themselves.

Well done, you – you’ve got great customer feedback coming in.

Your team is happy, your bosses are too.

But isn’t there more you could be doing with this positive customer feedback?

Those nuggets of information from your customers are not, and should not be purely for internal reflection.

The real power of positive customer feedback becomes evident when you market and promote the feedback.

Customers are happy to oblige, with one study1 finding that 68% of customers are willing to provide a case study when asked.

Ultimately, it’s about making your best customers your best examples.

Here are some of the top ways to promote your customer success stories, not just for brand building, but also for driving sales. Let’s go!

Share Positive Feedback on Social Media

With a plethora of social media channels around, spreading the word is only a click or two away.

Social media profiles have become the bridge between businesses and customers. Your social media profiles should be more than a place to post cool company retreat pictures.

According to a Dell research, 75% of customers’ purchasing choices are influenced by posts on social media.

With a bit of copying-and-pasting, you can take the text from your positive review and make it into a happy Facebook post.

Or if you fancy flexing your creative muscles, you could take a quote from the review, add an inspiring image and share it onInstagram. A quick @ mention on Twitter wouldn’t hurt, either.

Online reviews and social proof are the new word-of-mouth feedback. Make sure that you don’t lose out.

Social community building isn’t restricted to just B2C. Sure, B2B customers typically buy bigger ticket items and have more administrative purchasing decisions, but they still check reviews, case studies, and social feeds.

According to an article by the Harvard Business Review, reading user-generated reviews about a product can encourage 94 percent of these buyers to make a purchase.

Create and Share Compelling Case Studies

What makes a perfect case study?

A story.

Sounds simple, but writing a compelling story is harder than it seems.

But once you find the angle, or the thread to tie things together, writing an effective case study becomes easier.

People connect with case studies because it is a customer telling a story about your brand, rather than an obviously self-centered sales pitch.

Another bonus of case studies is the fact that they hone in on one or a few particular benefits your business offers. By their nature, case studies should not be too generic – they should focus on the story of one customer, and how your business solves their specific problems.

A focus on case studies doesn’t only attract new customers, it helps retain existing ones. It further validates the reasons your customer joined you in the first place.

No wonder that 73% of B2B marketers are regularly creating case studies. In fact, these marketers list case studies as their second most-effective marketing method, just behind white papers.

Display Customer Feedback on Your Website

Nothing gives more assurance that you’re worth spending money on than strategic placement of great customer feedback on your site.

The reason? Well, the average global e-commerce conversion rate is 2.86%. Of course, variations in product and brand affect this rate, but it still means there are a lot of customers out there who are not moving through your sales funnel.

Today, 93% of consumers are directly influenced by online reviews. Almost everyone is looking for reassurance when investigating your product or service.

With such a lookout for feedback – and such a need to move prospects through the sales funnel – proudly showing your latest feedback, or overall reputation, is key to a persuasive website.

Want people to know your customer service is up to scratch? Place your CSAT widget on your homepage.

Got particular products to promote? Display positive reviews about the product on the main product page, or on the checkout section for that extra bit of encouragement.

Shout About Your Reputation – Even Offline

Snippets of great customer feedback, five-star reviews, or great CSAT ratings, should not be restricted to online use.

There’s a world out there that’s offline, and these nuggets of great customer feedback are valuable there too.

The fact is 80% of people trust reviews as much as personal recommendations, so it pays to show off your reputation whenever you can to remain on the mind of your customers.

If you are running a print advertising campaign, include a customer quote in the ad to add that customer-centric perspective. If you are sending packages, be sure to stick a quote or a snippet showcasing your great reputation on the packaging itself.

The opportunities for you to show how good you are, through the voice of your customers is practically endless.

Ask for Reviews on Marketplaces

If you are providing a good service, some reviews will come organically. But do not assume this for all reviews – instead be proactive and approach your customers for feedback.

And don’t forget: when you get a review, reward and thank the person behind the review. A little kindness goes a long way.

Get out there and Share the Love!

These are just some ideas you can deploy right now to turn great customer feedback into your number one marketing asset.

And the best benefit of all this? Your new customer-centric approach will gradually become the centerpiece of your values and identity, prompting a more trustworthy, transparent culture with your customers who will be more than willing to share their feedback.

Although the terms ‘contact center’ and ‘call center’ seem synonymous, there are some key differences between the two.

A contact center is a hub for managing customer communications and customer service across multiple channels, including phone, email, live chat, and social media. Customer-facing teams use a contact center software as a single platform through which they can handle conversations coming in from all channels.

A call center, on the other hand, is a hub for customer conversations that occur exclusively via the phone channel. A call center system is used to handle all inbound and outbound phone calls.

But the differences don’t end here. Contact centers and call centers are used for varying business objectives and deliver different experiences to customers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the key differences between a contact center and a call center.

Understanding the differences between a contact center vs a call center

1. Channels of communication

Contact-center: Phone, email, live chat, social media, and more
Call-center: Phone

As previously mentioned, the most basic difference between a contact center and a call center is the channels they use to engage with customers. Call centers, as the name suggests, only use the phone channel for communication. Since phone conversations happen in real-time, a call takes up an agent’s bandwidth is entirely. So, the only way to handle peak volume hours is by staffing up for peak volume hours. However, running a large team can turn out to be quite expensive.

On the other hand, contact centers use digital channels – such as email, social media or live chat, in addition to phone – to engage with customers. In comparison to using the phone as the single channel of communication, using different channels helps in delivering faster solutions and better customer experiences. For instance, with email, you can distribute the load across the team better. Plus, since agents can handle three or more chat conversations in parallel which also reduces staffing/workloads.

Over the years, customers have become more digitally advanced. In fact, customers spend an average of six hours a day online. To keep up with the evolving expectations of customers, brands have expanded their support on different channels. This gives customers the freedom to raise their issues and seek help from any platform they prefer. With contact center software, brands can effortlessly interact with customers and deliver an omnichannel experience.

2. Omnichannel queue management

Contact center: Queue management across channels
Call center: Not applicable

A call center requires a single solution to manage conversations coming in, as all conversations happen only via the phone channel. However, in contact centers, although you’re providing support on multiple channels, you still need one tool to handle all conversations.

A contact center software uses omnichannel queue management to manage conversations coming in through all channels. This enables every incoming request to be viewed from a single platform, allowing admins to easily distribute work across the team. Similarly, agents can use a single solution to manage their workload across all channels.

3. Traditional vs. digital

Contact center: Proactive and reactive support
Call center: Reactive support

With growing customer expectations, business leaders have constantly been tweaking their customer experience strategies to keep up with consumer demands. Traditionally, customers ran into problems and then contacted support for assistance. However, today, brands look to predict problems that customers might run into and proactively offer solutions before the issue gets escalated. This way, brands are able to deliver moments of wow when customers least expect it.

Proactive customer service is highly relevant to today’s context as customers tend to stick to brands that deliver consistently good experiences. The penalty you have to pay for bad customer service can get as severe as losing one in three customers after just one bad experience.

Since contact centers operate in the digital space, they have an edge when it comes to delivering proactive support. Agents can track signals of frustration such as rage clicks or dead clicks on your website or in the product and proactively reach out to the customer to offer assistance. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Slack are a few brands that have adopted a proactive customer service approach. Since call centers only use the phone channel for communication, they might not be able to predict issues as effortlessly as contact centers do.

4. Self-service management

Contact center: Self-service portal, support chatbot, and community forums
Call center: IVR

For too long, customers could only reach a company’s support team through calls. Slowly, as the channels of communication evolved, and emails became the preferred medium – customers didn’t have to wait on hold to reach agents. They could simply send the details of their issue to the support team. However, in both cases, customers were at the mercy of the support team’s timings and workload management.

Customers today prefer finding answers to questions on their own.

In contact centers, you have the option of embedding a chatbot in a self-service portal. So when customers read a solution article and aren’t able to find an answer on their own, they can quickly raise the issue with the chatbot. In case the chatbot isn’t able to resolve the issue, an agent can follow up and offer a solution. Customers can still have a seamless experience throughout as the agent has prior knowledge about the issue which is logged as a ticket or captured as a chat in the contact center software.

Call centers, on the other hand, now offer self-service through an IVR, which is often a time-consuming process. Plus, getting in touch with an agent isn’t easy as there are still long wait hours and a customer might be put on hold for too long.

5. Automatic ticket routing and automations

Contact center: Automations on ticket creation, updates, assignment, and time-based triggers
Call center: Not applicable

Contact centers use automations to route tickets to the right agents based on keywords, previous customer history, agent skills etc. By doing this, contact centers reduce the resolution time for customers and thus deliver a streamlined experience. In contact centers, apart from routing tickets, automation are also used to categorize tickets, update ticket properties and most importantly, follow up and close the loop with customers.

Contact center solutions also have features that are designed exclusively to improve agent productivity. Features such as canned responses, canned forms, and ticketing templates, reduce repetitive tasks and give agents more time to engage with customers. This decreases the chance of burn out and thus, keeps agents on their feet.

6. Unified customer view

Contact center: 360-degree view of customers with integrations
Call center: Not applicable

The center of focus of the call center lies with the phone channel. This means any customer data collected is primarily from telephonic conversations with customers. So call center software might not paint the entire picture of the customer journey or tell you anything about the experience you are delivering.

However, contact center software has as a repository of data aggregated from across channels. You can also integrate your contact center software with your CRM software and get a unified view of your customers. Since all of your support channels are plugged into one platform, you can get a 360-degree view of your customer. Agents can also attach feedback forms at the end of every conversation to gauge if they delivered a good experience.

Plus, you can also integrate your contact center with tools like team collaboration software, marketing automation platforms that you might be using such as Slack, MailChimp, etc, to extend the capabilities of your tool.

3 reasons a contact center is the better solution

The most important difference between a contact center and a call center is related to delivering customer experiences. In today’s digital world, delivering good customer service does not suffice. Brands need to go above and beyond their ways to deliver stellar customer experiences to make a mark and retain customers.

In contact centers, you’re maximizing the chances of providing great customer experiences by

• giving customers multiple ways of reaching out to you
• adopting a proactive approach and delighting customers
• engaging in conversations with 100% context of customers and their issues.

However, in call centers, customers don’t walk away with a great experience as they

• have to wait in long queues to get through to an agent
• are often rerouted to different teams and agents

While call center solutions help you carry out your support operations, contact center solutions take it a step further and help you bring out the best in your customer support team.

Customer support is an essential part of any company. It’s how you address your customers’ issues, assist them with your product, and make sure they’re happy with their purchase.

But beyond that, it can also help you reach your other core business goals.

With the right approach, customer support can play a significant role in your ability to build customer relationships and grow your business.

With a growth-focused mindset, your team can be an integral part of your strategy for reaching your company’s acquisition and revenue goals.

5 Customer Support Hacks to Help Grow Your Business

If you’re not yet taking a growth-focused approach, these 5 customer support hacks can help you make the most of your team’s efforts.

1. Help Your Customers Help Themselves

The first idea on this list doesn’t involve interacting directly with customers. Instead, it centers on building a helpful knowledge base.

And this approach is very much in line with what most audiences want.

In one survey, 91% of people said they would gladly use a self-service knowledge base if one were available to them.

And beyond that, 75% of respondents said they consider a self-service knowledge base a convenient way to resolve a support issue.

Today, this is standard practice for most major brands. For example, Amazon provides step-by-step tutorials for troubleshooting common issues.

The primary advantage here is to customers, as it will often help them find a resolution faster than if they’d had to wait for an available agent.

But it’s helpful to your company, too.

When users are able to solve specific issues themselves, your support team can focus on inquiries that aren’t already addressed on your site — many of which could be from prospective customers.

And speaking with interested potential customers is a much better (and more cost-effective) use of their time than addressing questions that could quickly be addressed in a simple FAQ.

2. Create (and Stick to) SLAs

Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, are policies that determine what an appropriate response time is for each inquiry, depending on its priority level.

Creating SLAs is a great way to set clear expectations for your support team and ensure that each request is handled within a reasonable amount of time.

It will also help your team more efficiently prioritize each ticket that enters your system.

Without a clear prioritization system, your team could easily get bogged down with minor issues that have no real impact on your business.

But when you have a system in place, you can be confident that they’re focusing on high-priority issues.

This way, a major bug that’s rendering your product unusable (and preventing sales) won’t go unnoticed.

3. Use Automation Where You Can

Another way to maximize your team’s efficiency is to use automation wherever you can.

If you work in the customer service field, you may be a little skeptical of this suggestion. And that makes sense.

After all, customer support is mostly about engaging with customers on a personal level and making them feel heard — which an automated response is highly unlikely to do.

But when used correctly, automation can enable your team to help your customers more efficiently.

For example, setting follow-up rules is a great way to make sure agents don’t forget to follow up with customers when necessary.

This rule can help your team as a whole make sure they aren’t overlooking any tickets.

And using automated messages to give customers an estimated wait time (if applicable) isn’t a bad idea, either.

If you can’t get to a user’s inquiry immediately, this is an easy way to reassure them that an agent will speak with them soon — so that they’ll stick around and get the level of customer support you aim to deliver.

4. Express Empathy

One of the best ways to step up your team’s customer support is to focus on empathy.

Unfortunately, this is something that’s severely lacking in customer service as a whole.

As Micah Bennett of Zapier explains, “I’m constantly blown away at how appreciative people are when they get human replies. Years of uncaring or even hostile support experiences have set the bar low for their expectations that they get excited by genuine answers.”

While this is a sad commentary on the state of customer service, it means that it’s not difficult to stand out if you’re willing to spend a few extra seconds making your customers feel heard.

It can be as simple as tailoring your responses to individual users, and expressing that you understand their concern or frustration.

5. Don’t be Afraid to Go the Extra Mile

When most customers reach out to a customer service team, their expectations are fairly low.

They simply want their problem resolved — and in most cases, they don’t expect the experience to be a particularly pleasant one.

As consumers, most of us have had the experience of being put on hold for extended periods of time or waiting an insane amount of time to speak with someone in the first place.

So if you’re able to resolve a customer’s issue quickly and efficiently, you’re already ahead of the game.

But that doesn’t mean you should aim solely for adequacy.

Of course, if your team is pressed for time, with hundreds of requests in the queue, it’s understandable to focus on efficiency.

Still, if there’s an opportunity to go the extra mile, it’s almost always a good idea to take it.

Essentially, you can attribute a large portion of their success to their willingness to go the extra mile for their customers.

And your company doesn’t necessarily need to be quite as over-the-top to replicate this success.

Asking for help should be easy. And fast. Faster than typing out emails. Faster than opening chat windows and typing out the problem. And faster than opening an app and searching for the solution.

Can your customers ask for help easily? And how fast can you deliver? Till recently, it was difficult to furnish this instant voice support in a scalable, accessible way. Then voice bots came along.

Voice bots are voice-powered user interfaces that can understand natural language and use it to converse with people. Simply put, they are computers that can converse like people. For your business, these bots are a scalable way to interact with your customer and speed up resolutions. If implemented correctly and appropriately, they can help your customer support achieve its central premise. That is, to solve customer’s problems as fast as possible.

How can Voice Bots Improve Customer Support?

1. By Overhauling IVR and Routing

Do you want to connect callers to agents who are trained to resolve their problems without an annoyingly long IVR menu? Voice bots are a pleasing option. They can ask callers why they’ve called, much like a human secretary, and intelligently connect them to the right department.

2. By Improving Chats

When it comes to speed, voice beats typing hands down. Voice bots can be present on live chat windows, emails, apps, social media letting customers choose to just say what it is that is bothering them instead of typing in lengthy texts.

3. By Scaling Up Your Voice Operations

Your voice bot platform can carry out human-like conversations in superhuman ways. That is, a single voice bot platform engages with thousands of customers simultaneously while giving personalized attention to each. By giving away a large chunk of repetitive tasks to voice bots, you will be able to manage far more support issues than before.

4. By Reducing Transaction Times

Certain tasks can be performed faster by machines than by people. Your bot can complete repetitive tasks like booking, cancellations, ticket status faster than human agents.

5. By Humanizing Your Support Center.

The truth is a lot of the times, our support staff tends to sound more like machines than they should. Repetitive tasks and high pressure to wrap calls saps the humanity out of a support center. With bots taking over the repetitive tasks, and hopefully reducing workloads, customer support executives can be trained and given the time needed to deliver human connection when it is really needed.

6. By Giving a Voice to Your Self-service

Self-service can be made more scalable and customer friendly by using voice bots. Instead of sifting through FAQs online or on web communities, your customer can ask bots their frequently asked questions. For example, we have deployed voice interfaces to help callers make hotel inquiries or clarify FAQs.

How to Implement a Voice Bot?

It takes a developer between 12- 20 days to develop your voice bot. But for a genuinely effective solution, you need to do some spadework. Here are 4 suggested guidelines for implementing your bot:

1. Do I Need a Bot? Define Problems.

Being clear about what you want your voice bot to achieve is the first and most critical step in implementing a bot. Revise your customer support process to see where bot intervention will be effective. Are you failing on certain CX metrics? Find problems and explore them a bit, to define what you want your bot to do.

For example, are your callers waiting for more than 12 seconds in a queue? Split the calls you receive into categories. Identify where human intervention is necessary (for e.g placating an upset customer, attention to a high priority customer) And where bots can perform tasks faster (For example FAQ questions, booking, reservations)

2. Will Callers Like my Bot? Develop User-oriented Solutions

User acceptance and adoption is critical for your voice bot’s success. You may want to reduce call queues, but will your users be happy to hear a bot? You don’t want a high-value customer who is happy with phone support to be diverted to a voice bot.

Understand which users should interact with a bot and which should not.

Just like you split your process, you need to bucket your users. Maybe your voice could take care of the new users or casual inquiries so that important callers are diverted faster to a live agent.

Understand what conversations users would like to have with bots and which they wouldn’t. We’ve covered before that people may prefer bots for quick transactions. But dissecting typical conversations might also help you discover clever ways to reduce talk times. Your user may be ok with answering 1-2 levels of questions with a bot, then they may want to talk to a person. Or they may want to explain their problem to a person and then be diverted to a bot. They may need 1-2 sessions of handholding, where a human agent is available throughout to get used to the bot.

3. What Should my Bot Know? Build a Knowledge Base

The third stage in implementing your bot is getting your knowledge base together for it. That is, once you have clearly defined what your bot is going to do, this stage will involve gathering as much information as possible to make your bot effective. For example, access to user details, product details, contact numbers. What all databases will they have access to? Will they integrate with your support desk software? Will they have third party contact details to transfer calls to if required?

4. Creating Your Bot

Now your developer has everything needed to build your bot. They will plan your bot flow. They will decide where you need algorithms to recognize entities, or intent or sentiment. They will create tight scripts including concise questions and answers based on your user research. And create personas using elements of voice like pitch, tone, accent. (For example, depending on your business, your bot can sound fun, casual or professional). They will use this persona to define language style and fillers. And very soon your bot will be ready for action.

What Features Should my Voice Bot Have?

All voice interfaces use Natural Language Processing or NLP to interpret words. But what differentiates one bot platform from another? What features ensure a smooth conversation?

The ability to understand meaning: We are not always literal when we speak. A bot should be able to use Intent analysis to extract the meaning behind words. For example, they should be able to understand that when a person says “sure” or “why not” they are most likely saying yes. And when they say, “I’m good”, “later” and “not really”, they’re probably saying “no”.

The ability to pause and listen: It may sound rude but being able to interrupt a bot is one of its best features. Ever got annoyed during a long IVR monologue? By contrast, you should be able to interrupt a bot. For example, if you say “no, I’m not interested”, “or you got it wrong, that’s not what I’m looking for”, or “sorry, could you repeat that”, your bot should be able to pause, listen and speak accordingly.

Streaming recognition: As with all technology, speed is essential to a pleasant experience. You voice bot should be able to interpret at the same rate at which your customer speaks. There shouldn’t be any lags.

Personalization: Your caller should not have to repeat themselves. Integrations with your support desk software should ensure that your bot greets caller by name, knows caller history, can estimate most likely reason for calling based on this history and personalize suggestions based on all this customer knowledge.

Access to live agents: At any time during an interaction, your caller should easily be able to revert to a live agent. You should define user-oriented fallback rules, such as, if your bot can’t understand the user issue within a single question, you should revert to a live agent on priority.

AI-powered to continuously learn: An AI-powered bot doesn’t stop learning. It continuously improves its accuracy based on previous results.

The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system makes sure that callers can navigate to the right team through nothing more than a series of keypad presses.

After all, with an IVR system in place, businesses can

1.  Automate the customer identification process with voice prompts
2.  Predict why customers are calling to speed up service
3.  Collect important information from the customer during wait time
4.  Prioritize calls based on value
5.  Personalize messages and prompts
6.  Handle high call volume and surges efficiently
7.  Ensure customers are routed to the best agent for their issue
8.  Track and report customer issues to improve future service
9.  Reduce overhead costs, including staffing

Cloud-based IVR systems are flexible to implement — and equally popular with small and mid-sized businesses whose goal is to avoid costly and unwieldy infrastructure. A thoughtfully deployed IVR is a confidence builder for customers – imagine the delight of approaching a support call with pleasure instead of dread.

Cloud-based tools are also constantly evolving to make agents and customer lives easier and simpler. IVR systems, thankfully, will continue to play a pivotal role, mainly because there is so much scope for scalability and innovation. Here are some key areas through which you can evolve your IVR:

Application-Programming Interface (API) Based Interaction

Customers are the best ambassadors for your business. As extensive users of your product, they are always looking for ways to maximize ROI — and are likely to rely heavily on support. This dependency is critical, so IVR systems will add flexibility by supporting APIs that enable integration with other vendors and applications. These integrations unlock a host of ways for your IVR to intelligently route your customers and provide greater personalization; they hold a promise of contextual awareness that will elevate your customer experience.

Information Extensions

Customer issues present themselves in endless variety. With an IVR system in place, the most common customer problems, the ones that don’t necessarily require an agent to tackle like your account balance, can be tackled with an automated response. On the other hand, if customer problems are unique, then agents can be ready to address them immediately. With information extensions, customers can be routed in tighter, more efficient systems that improve response times and customer satisfaction by providing self-service options.

Improved User Interface

In the world of customer service, the mantra for the future is “less is always more.” As popular as the telephone is, by the time customers reach a support agent, they are often frustrated. Despite the self-serve nature of phone support, it’s essential to manage the process to keep menu options to a minimum, avoid marketing messages, and above all minimize wait times. It’s critical to test and re-test the IVR experience to make sure the process is not losing you customers.

Business Value and Impact

Having the right IVR system in place has significant benefits for businesses. The ability to track the campaigns that are driving the conversations means you can adjust your messaging and hone your responses. Conducting customer surveys and tracking marketing and sales activities brings valuable insights that are bound to fuel customer acquisition, target the right prospects, support sales efforts, and improve revenue strategies.