Customer service is not only about everyday relationships and contacts with the recipient of our products and services. It is also about constantly analyzing their needs, desires and finding ways to satisfy them. Due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large number of companies had to work remotely, which made identifying customer needs quite a challenge.
Customer service. Promotional tools that must be used
The COVID-19 epidemic has caused the term customer experience (CX) to gain importance. Analyzing and solving customer problems has become much more difficult. So how can we improve customer service in the new era, since we already know that there is no going back to what it was like before the epidemic?
There are many tools on the market that can be useful both in remote/online and direct contacts. Below we have selected the key and most helpful ones, the operation and method of use of which may be essential to improve customer service.
Media monitoring. Social listening tools and brand image
Social media monitoring tools are designed to listen to what is being said in social media about a company, brand or any other topic. The market offers many solutions in this area that are more or less tailored to the needs of companies, but they all undoubtedly have one basic feature in common. They allow you to search social media for mentions of a company/brand/product and extract not only what is being said, but also valuable information.
Internet and social media monitoring is perfect for analyzing the effectiveness of current campaigns, analyzing opinions and comments on new products and assessing the general reception of any decisions made by the company. But that’s not all. This type of software can also be used to check what our competition is doing. This will make it easier to compare their strategy with our own. This in turn results in the introduction of necessary changes.
Internet monitoring will also play a key role in avoiding or suppressing image crises that can occur anytime and anywhere. We are talking about media that live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Fortunately, social listening works in real time, so if any negative reactions appear online, we will be able to quickly locate the source of their origin and take concrete steps to nip the crisis in the bud.
Internet monitoring. Sentiment analysis and analysis of emotions in Internet user opinions. Insight marketing
Explaining this is a bit complicated, but sentiment analysis is essentially a tool for reviewing communication – whether it is emails, tweets or other – and extracting the information contained within it. However, it is more than just reading text. Sentiment analysis is the analysis of tones and contexts to best assess the meaning of words, rather than taking them at face value.
Sentimenti has an excellent tool to help analyze feedback. It also goes beyond the simple sentiment that companies have known so far, as it provides insight not only into whether a given opinion is positive or negative, but also to what extent. Additionally, the emotions contained in the customer’s comments are examined. There are as many as 8 of them.
Interestingly, Sentimenti tools, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, examine tens of thousands of opinions in the blink of an eye as if over 20,000 people were reading and evaluating them. If one person did it, the analysis would take several or a dozen days. This is a revolutionary solution that has not been available on the Polish market so far. It is also based on science and is the result of months of expensive research on real people, not an artificial algorithm.
Sentimental analysis is particularly useful in markets where opinions change quickly and services must be constantly updated. However, any organization that wants to save time and respond to customer opinions faster and more effectively will also benefit from this analysis. It is good that ready-made software already exists for this type of analysis, which – considering the complexity – is much more convenient.
SMMW, behavioral analytics and consumer behavior research
Behavioral analytics involves studying consumer behavior on the web. The primary use of such tools is to predict customer needs and desires and proactively solve problems that may arise even before they occur. By checking user demographics, their previous purchases, and similar information, you can predict much of what general problems may arise. Using personal data, you can better understand their unique behavior.
A/B testing, which can be obtained from Google Optimize or a similar tool, is particularly important for checking the effects of changes to the page, while session replay tools such as Hotjar provide more in-depth insight. Behavioral analytics can also be used in sales, where cross-selling and personalization can provide a big boost in revenue by ensuring purchases in places where customers might not see the right products.
It is also useful for creating personalized marketing campaigns and tracking return on investment. Hotjar and Lucky Orange offer tools such as heatmaps, which are particularly helpful in this case. They will help you understand what your visitors are doing on your website, what they are clicking on, and what they may not be seeing.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Customer segments. Ways of communicating on the internet
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a relatively new technology on the market. The concept of CRM did not emerge until the 1980s. The idea behind CRM is to enable organizations to manage customer interactions and streamline processes to improve overall customer service. The goal is to increase profitability for the business, but it’s also a give-and-take approach that delivers real benefits not just to you, but to the customer as well.
The benefits to the business are wide-ranging. Sales teams can use CRM information to see how individual teams, campaigns, and products are performing. Marketing teams can use CRM data to predict the customer journey a particular person or demographic group might take and tailor their approach to the customer accordingly. Meanwhile, customer service agents can track cases efficiently across multiple platforms without the risk of misinterpreting queries.
Tools in action. Cloud software
Cloud software allows for a personalized approach to customers and extends its reach beyond anything that could have been expected just a few years ago.
Cloud computing not only allows organizations to track the effects of strategies and changes in real time, but also enables every department in the company to access information from anywhere. Key examples include Salesforce, a SaaS platform with useful marketing features, and file-sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive.
This approach is similar to what is currently being used in scientific research. And for good reason. Cloud software allows teams across the company to instantly access any information in a database and use it to improve the customer experience. Instead of individual teams figuring out what works and what doesn’t, they can skip any mistakes that have already been tried and immediately improve the customer experience.
While this approach is more beneficial for large companies — also for cost reasons — there are advantages for smaller businesses as well. With a centralized place where all information is stored — online, without the risk of losing files or accidental corruption — teams can save time preparing for previous events.
What is omnichannel? Learn about omnichannel sales
Omnichannel often goes hand in hand with cloud databases. It’s simply a must-have if you have multiple channels of communication with your customers. This approach takes all of your contact lines and combines them into a single database, which varies from company to company. In some smaller organizations, a simple spreadsheet will suffice. In larger companies, a cloud database is often essential for cross-departmental and remote communication.
So what are the benefits of omnichannel for consumers? When communicating with someone about a query, no one likes to repeat themselves. Having easily accessible information that someone can access, even if it’s not the person who wrote the data, not only saves employees time and effort, but also prevents the customer from getting frustrated due to a lack of communication.
The best response is a quick response. Another thing is to provide the customer with all the necessary information without bothering them again.
Companies like Disney, Walgreens, and Starbucks have successfully implemented the omnichannel approach. And since tools like Salesforce Social Hub, TalkDesk, and Genesys Multi-Channel are available on the market and can help your business, why not give it a try?
Promoting your business online. Your company website and its constant monitoring
Google Analytics is a must. By that, we mean tracking user behavior on your company website, how they navigate it, what sections they focus on with their mouse, and what links they click on. This is about tracking actions, which is completely harmless and non-invasive, since the customer visiting your website has necessarily given their consent to interact with you.
Tracking your website can reveal a lot about your site’s layout, allowing you to identify any awkward elements that may need to be changed, showing how users navigate irregularly, and where they may end up leaving without making a purchase.
The data collected from tracking your website can be easily translated into a mapping of the online customer journey, thus deepening your understanding of how your customer thinks. While it won’t directly benefit your customers, the information you collect can provide insight into how to best design your website to make it easier for your customers to access the key information they’re looking for.
What’s on the market? Adobe Analytics offers traffic and multi-channel data collection, while Clicky analyzes real-time data on page views and events. Which tool you choose really depends on your business’s needs. Each offers the same basic tracking features with different analysis options.
Chatbots in Marketing and Process Automation
We left the topic of automation for last. It’s exactly what it sounds like: creating a system that does the job for you as much as possible. There are many ways to successfully implement it in customer service. For example, fully automated call centers or chatbots, which have become increasingly popular in recent years.
Some business leaders still scratch their heads at the thought of bots talking to their customers. But they’re very advanced and can be a great way to narrow down online queries — much like the aforementioned automated telephone switchboards.
More advanced versions can also tap into previous interactions or FAQ databases to find answers without involving a human agent. In this case, the benefit to the customer is speed, as a computer program can respond to any interaction almost immediately.
One of the most important benefits of automated responses is 24/7 support, not just during business hours. While there’s certainly no human touch that comes with talking to a team member, those needing help will prefer a bot’s response to waiting until the next morning to get valuable information that could ultimately be crucial to making a sale or turning a customer over to a competitor.
To sum up…
Customer experience is all about information. The more of it we have, the harder it is to find anything meaningful in it. However, with the right tools, which we wrote about below, you can let your computers do most of the work and still get much more meaningful analyses.
Speed is key these days when it comes to customer satisfaction, especially the younger ones. That’s why it’s worth taking a closer look at our advice and checking which of them meet the needs of companies.