The New Year has finally arrived, and with it comes an increasing demand to satisfy the growing needs of tech-savvy customers. In today’s digitally-connected world, your clients expect to interact with your business through a range of diverse channels, from instant messaging to an audio call.
If you’re not equipped with the right resources and personnel to meet their expectations, then you might risk losing valuable custom, and profits. In fact, 78% of customers abandon a transaction due to poor customer service.
The good news is that if you can equip your IT stars with the right technology in 2018, you can set your company apart from other competitors in the marketplace. This can translate to bigger sales, stronger connections with your target audience, and better brand loyalty.
So, where can you begin?
Step 1: Understand your Audience with Data Analytics
Data analytics is more than just a buzzword for marketing automation technicians. The more information you have about your sector, chosen market, and the buying journey your customer go through, the more you can adapt your strategy to suit the needs of crucial big-spenders.
Making the most of big data might mean accessing the support of a specialist recruitment agency so that you can find a data specialist for your organisation. On the other hand, you may need to invest in new technology to make gathering and analysing information more manageable for your existing team.
Ultimately, the information you collect will be the key to identifying customer pain points, discovering the solutions your clients need most, and producing a better range of products and services.
Step 2: Upgrade Your Team to AI
Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) for the age of customer satisfaction doesn’t mean replacing all your technicians with robots or chatbots. Instead, it’s about selecting the machine learning solutions that will support your sales experts, and deliver better satisfaction to your customers.
For instance, many of today’s consumers feel frustrated when they phone a customer service line, just to be passed between various support agents who ask them to repeat their issue several times. Artificial intelligence solutions today can gather information about a customer before an agent ever answers the phone. With the help of an automation expert, your AI can then instantly direct each call towards the representative best suited to handle a specific problem.
With the development of things like natural language processing and sentiment analysis, new AI strategies can even evaluate customer tone of voice and warn you if they’re beginning to feel upset or frustrated.
Step 3: Deliver an Omnichannel Experience
Today, hiring the perfect customer response team for your technology business is about more than looking for experts who know how to answer the phone, and respond to queries in person. Today’s customer service agents must be equipped to handle complaints and conversations on a collection of channels, all the way from mobile to social media.
If you don’t have enough people in your staff to respond to every query on your website, over the phone, and via email, then it may be a good idea to invest in chatbots as an alternative solution. Bringing robotic applications into your organisation might mean that chatbots handle more of the admin associated with serving customers. This means that your sales employees have more time to focus on the issues that demand their attention.
Step 4: Align Customer Service and Sales
As more businesses recognise the importance of excellent customer experience in their differentiation strategies, they also begin to notice the problems that come with separating different groups in the professional space.
In the past, sales and service teams have operated in separate silos, rarely working together to streamline the buying cycle. However, the development of new technologies might mean that bringing your staff together leads to a better contextual experience for your customer. For instance, if your sales team provides your service team with knowledge about a client’s buying patterns, an agent might be able to suggest better solutions to that individual’s problems during their next conversation.
Your Salesforce expert may be particularly useful in helping you bridge the gap between support and sales.
Step 5: Empower your Customers
Finally, today’s customers no longer need agents to hold their hand throughout the buying process. Companies are selling to a generation of “digital nomads” who feel comfortable interacting with AI and serving themselves through automated checkouts.
While your clients expect 24/7 support from your organisation, that doesn’t mean that they want to call your contact centre at 2am is just to troubleshoot an issue. Instead, most consumers would prefer to access digital self-service strategies, complete with FAQs, automated chat bots, and instant messaging services.
As your investors become increasingly independent, it’s essential to ensure that you have the right staff on hand to support their journey. However, you’ll also need to invest in the technology that allows your shopper to serve themselves too.
Resource On Demand is Europe’s first specialist Salesforce Recruitment Company. We assist the world’s leading organisations to grow their technology teams. Supporting companies to fill roles that span across digital marketing, marketing automation, Human Capital Management, CRM system management, software testing and Salesforce.
The team at Resource On Demand have access to an extensive database of key talent, registering over 8000 professionals each year. To find out how we can support you call us on +44 20 8123 7769 or rod@resourceondemand.com.