5 Tips - Improve Your Customer Service

Customer Service is one of the most important departments a company has. Good customer service is in charge of strengthening relationships with customers, who in turn leave positive reviews, encouraging others to buy from your company. A good team with qualified agents is crucial. But using the right tools is also crucial to making service even better and more efficient.

In this article, we will guide you through why automation is the best way to improve your digital channels and give you five tips to improve your customer service and its efficiency.

The first step to improve your Customer Service is to make sure you have all your bases covered and be present everywhere, at any time. There are some customers that prefer contacting the company directly via email, and others, who would rather search for an answer to their question on there own (through self service channels like help pages or chatbots).This means making sure every customer has their preferred method of solving and answering their questions at the reach of their hand. Take action and do not delay the integration of digital communication channels. The most popular digital communication channels among customers are the help page, the email inbox, the contact form and the chat / messenger. To automate all these channels with just one system, we developed the OMQ products. How to integrate them within a few hours and automate your service channels you can learn here.

This point is more relevant than ever, as the digital age has made it so that customers have ever higher expectations of customer service and cannot longer rely on one-on-one customer support. As face-to-face interactions in stores are not as common, it is all the more important to take care of customers online as well. Company

Having direct and indirect channels, including self-service, can also reduce backlog and alleviate some pressure your customer service representatives have. If you want to read further into how to reduce backlog, you can click here.

As customer service agents go into training, it is engraved on their heads that “The customer is always right” to then be thrown out into a world where that is not always true. They have to navigate between the company policies and the customers’ expectations, which can often result in long and sometimes useless back and forth with the customer. These situations leave the customer feeling uncared-for and more often than not impact your sales, as they feel they cannot trust the company and will not come back. This can also lead to bad reviews, which can also affect the revenue.

So what does “the customer is always right” really mean? It aims at always looking for solutions, even when they seem out of reach. “Human skills” are the best skills to have in your team, especially when it comes to de-escalating a situation. The best skill you can have in your team is problem-solving oriented people, but it does not only have to stop at the human representatives.

These human skills can also be trained, so that your agents give answers that dissipate those tense customer interactions. You can go here to read our “4 Tips on how to de-escalate customer service”.

Big teams can take a lot of inquiries and the repetitiveness as well as the load is less obvious, but even then waiting times can be long and tedious for even the most easy-to-answer inquiries. Another detail that a big team might bring with it is its costs, which do not always translate into more sales or revenue.

With the right tools, a small team can also be incredibly efficient in customer service, both money and support wise. To ease their load when it comes to their skills and time, take those repetitive questions and even processes away by automating them. A great example of an innovative and efficient tool is OMQ Assist, which automates the answering process of the ticket system by helping to write the response. It reads and understands the request to then suggest matching answers that can be placed directly as a module in an answer template. If this is something that sparks your interest and want to know more about how it works, you can find more information here.

Parallel to the last point, the reason why waiting times get longer is that agents are overwhelmed and burnt-out by repetitive tasks, which delays answering times in those high-volume times. When a unique case comes, agents have already spent a lot of energy on those repetitive tasks and have to push themselves extra hard to really solve the unique case, which might cause fatigue and a decrease in their performance. This frustrates both customers and agents.

Automating processes will not only shorten those answering times, but can also improve your employees’ working environment by reducing the manual work in those repetitive questions and allowing them to really take on those challenging, unique requests. Happy and invigorated agents will go the extra mile and usually have better solutions for those tricky requests, which in turn takes care of customers’ needs. Agent satisfaction has a direct correlation to customer satisfaction.

Giving your agents efficient and innovative tools that makes their work easier: it boosts their morale and increases sales. Integrating new tools does not mean it has to be stressful or tiresome. You can integrate an AI-based software to your pre-existing communication channels such as your help page, ticket system, email inbox, contact form or chatbot. This can be done both independently or by integrating it to an already existing CRM. If you want to know more about our third party integrations and how they work, you can read this article.

Sometimes the answers are right in front of us, but the process to get to them makes it seem more complicated or farther away. From the customer side, unclear and complicated answers can be frustrating, as it feels as if the company is just trying to avoid the requests, or just does not care about their customers. From the agents’ point of view, if there are a lot of steps in a process, there is a higher chance of making mistakes and giving out misinformation. Even when trying to correct them and paying attention to detail, their job becomes less efficient and more time consuming.

Steps can be removed by automating the whole answering process. This not only offers straightforward answers but also skips human labour in steps, such as data entry and verification, but also saves time for the representatives who can really put their efforts into those atypical inquiries.

A great way to save time in the answering process, is to avoid the customer sending the request in the first place by offering self-service options such as a help page. A well-built help page is clear, organized and has a user-friendly layout. If you want to upgrade it and save even more time for you and your customers, you can use AI to automate it, so that the trending topics appear first, as more often than not people will come over and over again with the same question. This shortens the searching time, as you can offer an answer directly with the autosearch function. This function automatically suggests matching questions that are being asked frequently, therefore making the process faster and more useful. You can do this by using software that tracks the frequency of the questions asked, and re-arranges them accordingly. To read more about it, you can click here.

OMQ Solutions: for big and small companies

If you want to start making some or all of the changes above, but you are not sure where to look, we would like to formally introduce ourselves: we are OMQ, an AI-based software company that helps you and your customer service by automating different communication channels.

All of our products are AI-based and rely on a central knowledge base, which stores and distributes the service knowledge. It automates answers by scanning the customers’ request, understanding the question and then pairing the question with matching answers in the central knowledge base. As it is an intelligent system, it can learn from customer or agent feedback, getting better and more accurate with each use. Currently, our system supports 32 languages. Our technology boosts ticket systems, help pages, email inboxes, contact forms and instant messaging with chatbots, by making them more efficient and optimizing the answering time. If you want to read more in-depth about our products, you can always click here.

If you want to make your customer service better and more efficient, you can request a demo or ask questions about how we can help, by clicking here.