Immense changes and pressures are a reality for many businesses, and doing more with less is no longer optional. Quick service is one of the top three most valued customer service attributes. When it comes to building customer loyalty, every interaction matters. Ensuring your team can deliver exceptional support while staying efficient is no longer a nice-to-have, but now essential for your business to succeed.
Brands might wonder how they are supposed to do more with less all while supporting growing consumer expectations. A CX strategy must be both efficient and effective in order to set up an organization for success — here’s how to achieve personalized service with limited resources.
Leverage Technology to Augment Your Team’s Efficiency
Most companies can’t afford to have unlimited agents working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortunately technology like intelligent automation can enable customer service teams to work more efficiently and focus on the customers who need the most help. But this also means that the role of a customer service agent will change.
Technology can bolster your team’s efficiency efforts, but for a deeper look at the ways to leverage AI for intelligent customer service, check out our e-book on the subject.
Automate Low-Level Support
Chatbots can be used to answer simple questions like order status or business hours, and direct customers to a help center if human intervention is not needed. They can also be used to gather initial information before sending a conversation to a live agent.
Automate Routine Tasks
Oftentimes the most tedious tasks on an agent’s plate are manual and repetitive, and may not require any human intervention. Luckily intelligent automation can auto populate useful data like contact information, or tag conversations based on things like issue type or location.
Automate Complex Business Processes
Through practices like queues and routing, agents don’t need to waste time transferring customers and redirecting them to the right team. Conversations can be automatically classified and routed to the best and most appropriate agent for a speedy and personalized resolution. You may want to route certain personas to different teams based on their specific needs. Not only will this reduce wait and handle times, it will also maximize team capacity by directing real-time conversation traffic to the right person at the right time.
Augment Agent Support
Beyond freeing up agent time, technology can also be used to arm support agents with all the information they need to quickly and accurately service their customers. AI can suggest messages to send to customers based on their intent, historical conversations and customer attributes, which can become more accurate and personalized over time in conjunction with a machine learning model.
Predict Outcomes
By using predictive analytics, companies can forecast future conversation volume and staffing needs based on historical data. That means agents will avoid fire drills and customers will have quick, convenient and thorough support in their times of need.
Use Personalization to Deliver Effective CX & Build Loyalty
With time freed up by technology, your agents will have the capacity to adopt a different kind of role — one that involves taking a relationship-oriented approach to their interactions. This will provide the opportunity to create loyal customers and a community of fans. Our research revealed that CX professionals believe personalized experiences will be the most important attribute in customer service by 2025, so it’s vital to start working towards this now if your organization hasn’t already.
The modern customer wants to buy a product or service, but they don’t want to be treated like a transaction. With the help of technology in step three, your agents can devote more of their time to delivering a personalized approach that elevates your customers beyond being just a number in a queue.
Proactive support can help your organization get ahead of potential issues before customers are even aware of a problem, or even create opportunities to build loyalty and generate sales. Imagine leveraging automation to repeatedly match your customers with the same agent, allowing them to develop rapport. This not only makes a customer feel heard and valued, but also provides an exceptional service experience that can allow your brand to stand out from the crowd.
Want to learn more strategies to deliver efficient and effective support? Download the full guide here.
