Key strategies for upgrading your customer service
Do you have to handle hundreds of requests every day through a call center or support team? In the saturated markets of banking, insurance, real estate and healthcare, the quality of a product or service alone is no longer enough to convince. What customers and prospects remember is direct contact with the men and women who make up your company. If they've waited half an hour on the phone to solve a problem, they'll have no qualms about turning to the competition, or even sharing their bad experience on the web.
Improving customer experience (CX) means improving customer service. But how do you go about it? What tools and methods should you put in place? Here's our practical advice.
Adding value to your advisors
If customer service is considered the company's showcase, it's the advisors who represent it. They need to be patient, clear and, of course, good listeners. It's by taking care of them that you'll make your support service evolve in the right direction, because the way you manage your teams will inevitably have an impact on the quality of customer relations. This logical phenomenon, known as symmetry of attention, explains the mirror effect between employee commitment and customer satisfaction.
Here are a few ways to make your agents more valuable to your company:
- Set an example through management, by training them in team management and reinforcing the corporate culture;
- Improve the quality of life at work, by providing access to the right tools, a pleasant environment and encouraging communication;
- Enhance and develop their skills by making training a priority;
- Relieve teams of simple, repetitive tasks with little added value, with the help of artificial intelligence.
Imagine that your advisors are your company's first customers. If they're happy and motivated, the support department will be all the more productive!
Automate your customer service
The best way to save your agents time is toautomate customer service. Whether customer relationship management is dedicated to an in-house support team or an outsourced call center, human resources can be supported by artificial intelligence to cope with high call volumes and reduce the average handling time (AHT) of incoming calls.
To manage peak call volumes, many sectors (banking, insurance, healthcare, transport...) are now equipping themselves with virtual assistants, in particular chatbots (in writing) and callbot (over the phone). Renault's financial subsidiary DIACwhich chose Zaion's technology to answer its 2,000 calls a day. Customers used to wait up to 25 minutes on the phone before reaching an advisor. Now, an unanswered call is handled by a Zaion callbot, theOverflowbot, to guide the customer, or even answer his query directly, without the need for a human agent. Today, for example, customers can find out their remaining credit balance in less than three minutes, using the callbot alone.
With automation via AI, your advisors are relieved of repetitive tasks and can focus on more complex and motivating missions.
Make yourself available
The callbot not only reduces waiting time on the phone, it's also available 24/7. Your customer service team can be reached at any time, even during off-hours and vacations. This availability is essential in today's digital age. A customer who encounters a problem needs to contact your support department immediately. If you're unreachable, you'll severely damage the customer experience or prevent someone from completing their purchase, hence the importance of multi-channel support. Don't just offer your customers and prospects the telephone. Think of e-mail, chat, SMS or social networks too... By multiplying points of contact, you encourage fluid communication and improve customer satisfaction. We also recommend integrating multilingual bots, as Europ Assistance Belgium with Zaion's callbot.
Striking a balance between bot and human
Artificial intelligence makes life easier for customers and agents alike. Nevertheless, it would be unfortunate to think that bots should replace humans. Artificial intelligence is indeed a technology that can resolve certain queries and respond in the place of your agents, but we're talking here only about tasks that can be automated (booking an appointment, checking a balance, requesting information...). A customer will hate to battle with a chatbot that can't answer because the query is too complex for the software. The AI system needs to be able to correctly qualify the request, so that it can refer the customer to the right person if necessary. The important thing is to streamline the customer journey and respond as quickly as possible to the request.
Personalize the customer journey
Customers need to move fast, but they also need to feel understood. To do this, it's best to boost your automation tool with machine learning. This technique, based on algorithms, enables us to learn from past exchanges and continually improve. It's the best way to personalize customer relations. The system will gather information as it is exchanged. It will also pass this information on from one channel to another, recording it in a database - hence the importance of multiplying contact points. In this way, you'll get to know your customers better and be able to deliver personalized messages.
Measure customer satisfaction on an ongoing basis
Customer satisfaction is not a given. It evolves with every contact you have with your company, which is why you need to measure it accurately on an ongoing basis. This can be done by simply surveying customers via chatbot, callbot, forum or e-mail, but the ideal way is to decipher past conversations directly. Contact periods and times, waiting times, engagement rates, call paths... It's by analyzing your conversational flows that you'll find ways to improve the customer experience.
Zaion's all-in-one monitoring platform lets you supervise exchanges in real time and generate customized KPIs according to your business needs. It alerts you immediately to indicators that are faulty, and measures bots' comprehension rate.
Zaion's AI is capable of extracting important data from conversations in order to evaluate your performance. It doesn't just record vocal and written exchanges: it analyzes them. Tone of voice, silences, intentions... The callbot detects emotions, bases itself on the customer's history and even recommends responses based on your procedures and corporate values. It makes your agents' work easier, while enabling them to observe the entire call flow. A practical and effective way to continuously improve the customer experience!
