Your customer service team will better relate with this title.
Do you know why?
It is because they probably can already tell that the number of queries they get from customers is increasing dramatically.
In the UK alone, companies deal with over 400 million queries every month. Customers contact brands more often nowadays than they did 3 or 5 years ago.
And guess who’s bearing the brunt of this increase?
That’s right, your customer service team.
All over the world, customer service agents are swamped with calls, chats, emails, and social media messages. Many brands have to spend more to be able to cope with the load, thus negatively impacting their revenue.
And that’s not all…
Customers now want more detailed answers from brands. They want companies they do business with to give them satisfactory answers quickly. In fact, some customers even say they’ll go to the competition if these demands aren’t met.
How then can your brand cope with the rising number of queries?
Here are 5 effective ways you can handle this increase in queries like a boss:
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Employ Self-Service
Thanks to technology, you can provide answers to customer queries on autopilot. Self-service gained popularity over a decade ago, but it is more useful now than it has ever been.
As a matter of fact, a study has shown that 83% of customers don’t mind using self-service. In addition to that, 64% say they are okay with getting answers from chatbots.
So, look to integrate a self-help platform such as chatbots on your website or mobile app. This will help your customers get quick and accurate answers while leaving your agents to attend to more pressing queries.
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Equip Your Customer Service Agents
A poorly equipped customer agent is a bad as an untrained one.
Many customer service agents are overwhelmed with customer enquiries because they are ill-equipped to handle them.
Therefore, you need to empower agents with the right tools to deliver excellent service to your customers. Not only that, your customer agents will enjoy their work better when they have the right tools to work with.
First, provide a central knowledge base that every agent can access at any time. A central knowledge base will enable your team to provide speedy response to customers, regardless of the channel.
Second, give your customer service team a platform that automatically reroutes messages to team members who are experts in the area of the query.
Third, use AI to analyse the tone of text-based enquires in order to discern the emotional ‘colour’ of the message. This will help your team members respond appropriately to emotionally charged queries.
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Analyse Customer Feedback And Make Adjustments
Customer feedback holds a ton of information about what customers are saying about your brand. And so, if there’s a recurring complaint about a particular issue, it means you need to do something about it.
You must learn to take-in customer feedback, evaluate it to learn what most customers are saying, and make the right adjustments.
This will reduce the number of queries about that particular problem. Thus, reducing the total number of queries.
Therefore, invest into creating VoC programs that effectively listen to your customers and provide accurate insights about their current ails.
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Predict Future Customer Queries
How, you ask?
With a thorough study and understanding of your customers’ journey, you predict what questions might come up along the way. Some of these questions may be typical and not unusual and therefore would be easy to solve ever before they are arise.
Consequently, this will make the online self-service platform work better as it will provide answers without customers asking.
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Get Rid Of Duplicate Queries
In the information age, when everything is at our finger tips, we have gotten impatient.
Your customers, too.
And so, customers may send the same question through another channel if they don’t get a response the first time. This causes duplicate queries and adds to the daily load of queries that customer service teams have to tackle.
The solution is simple.
To avoid this, implement an automatic response that prompts customers that their message has been received. It should also give them a time-frame that they can expect a response from your team.
As a result, your customers will be patient and not try to resend the same question through another channel.
In conclusion…
Customer queries will continue to increase. I don’t think there’s anything you or I can do to stop it. The best you can do is to grow with it.
Implementing these 5 tips will help ease the stress your team is already experiencing. And also help them provide quality service, the increasing queries notwithstanding.
Speaking of equipping your customer service team…
You can provide them with a Wi-Fi analytics and marketing tool like Spoton Wi-Fi.
This tool will help you collect valuable customer data in real-time. Afterwards, you and your team can evaluate the data and garner customer insight which will help you better understand your customers.
With this insight, you can run better and more personalized marketing campaigns. You can answer customer questions before they even ask because you’d know them better.
Ready to learn more about our Wi-Fi marketing & analytics tool? Contact us, let’s fill you in.
You can also request a free demo to see how it works.
POSTED ON February 21, 2020Share:
