As a business, you’re looking to serve your customers as well as possible. Each happy customer means a potential return customer, a potential referral, and potential positive reviews online. So customer service is only becoming more important for firms looking not only to establish a presence online but also to grow it organically. In this short guide, we’ll look at three new customer service methods that you can take advantage of to offer multiple avenues for your customers to follow to interact with your business.
Social media bots
We’ve been using social media for well over a decade now – and our use has reached the point at which we fully expect the businesses we trade with to have a profile on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If they don’t, we might even consider them unprofessional and untrustworthy. Having a profile on these platforms no longer just means establishing a presence: it means being there to answer queries and take on feedback from customers.
But on social media, you can be inundated with requests, requiring several staff to sift through and manage. That’s why firms have developed bots, which can direct customers to the relevant resource or solution without human input. You can trial an Instagram bot for your company’s Instagram page to see what they’re all about – and how much time they’ll save you in customer service provision.
Website automation
Plenty of businesses would consider their real home on the web to be their website, not their social media pages. That makes sense, especially for those firms that sell products directly from their website’s pages. It’s here that customers are also likely to want service – and here, too, where bots can be useful in automating your customer journeys and getting them directed to the right pages.
Here, we’re talking about getting a chatbot set up with Yes/No answers to help direct users to the correct FAQ section, hopefully answering their query. To avoid any frustration, offer users a chance to contact a text-chat human if they don’t find the answers they’re looking for – something one member of staff can manage, even if they’re juggling several different chats at once.
Phone calls
Industry professionals have been remarking on the decline of the phone call in customer services for some time, leaving new businesses without a direct line to their customer services personnel. This is a poor idea: plenty of consumers out there still prefer the human touch and to get someone on the end of the phone to answer calls. If you can’t provide this service, it may be worth outsourcing to a call center that can deal with your incoming calls.
Either way, you do need to be contactable over the phone. Customers suspicious, upset, or in need of urgent assistance become incredibly frustrated with the lack of a human face behind a business and deeply appreciate someone picking up the phone to them. So while this isn’t new, it’s something to refocus on to serve your customers better in 2022.
Use these three customer service methods to cover all bases when dealing with your end customers in the coming year.