“Evil wins when good people do nothing.”

The cloudy mood of the current situation touched almost everyone. The Nicereply team is no exception.

We feel a responsibility to express empathy with our Ukrainian neighbors and the need to contribute with our help. We have selected companies that deserve your attention, help, and financial contributions.

We are glad that through these non-profit organizations we can help those who need it most. See the Slovak organizations that help Ukrainian refugees.

Človek v ohrození (People in need)

People in need is a Slovak organization that helps people who have lost security, dignity, or freedom for various reasons. Now they help thousands of refugees who are coming to Slovakia.

If you want to support this organization you can switch to the English language and help in various fields.

You can find detailed information about how you can help Ukrainian refugees here.

Kto pomôže Ukrajine (Who will help the Ukraine?)

Thanks to this organization you can help in several ways:

There is also a contact form in the Ukrainian language. Or a document with important information for people who are coming to Slovakia.

Visit their website in English mutation for more information or donation.

Magna

Magna is another company that has been providing medical assistance where it is needed for years. You can provide donations (one-time or monthly) through Magna here.

IPčko

IPčko is a Slovak organization that provides psychological counseling, especially to young people. A person who needs help can contact them by message or email. They didn’t hesitate to help Ukrainian citizens and launched telephone assistance in the Ukrainian language.

You can support their initiative here.

Mareena

Mareena helps at one of the most critical places – at the eastern border crossing of Vyšné Nemecké. In addition, they update an important page for Ukrainian refugees.

As in previous cases, you can support this organization by one-time or regular donation.

Bonus Tip: Facebook Fundraising

If you want to make your own donation, you can do it through your Facebook account. All you need to do is to choose a preferred non-profit organization and the amount of money you want to collect.

For more information visit this page.

The post Nicereply Stands with Ukraine: Tips on How your Business Can Help Too appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

We are glad to see you moving forward.

You improve the customer experience, make your customers’ lives easier and keep loyal customers satisfied. Nicereply is awarding outstanding support teams in 3 different categories: Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Loyalty (NPS), and Effortless Experience (CES). Additionally, there are two honorable awards for the biggest growth and most ratings in each category.

Teams in every category were selected for their excellent support performance throughout 2021. You can also see some interesting stats & rankings about the year 2021 in Nicereply.

The success of companies that provide excellent customer service is a great inspiration to us. We are very happy to announce the top performing companies of the last year! Click and see the winners below.

The post Winners of Customer Happiness Awards 2022 Have Been Announced! appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

We are incredibly thankful you joined us on the ride through 2021.

Even though the pandemic continued bugging us throughout 2021, we’ve enjoyed an inspiring year full of quality content that helped thousands of support representatives.

Looking back, we published podcasts (23 episodes) and blog posts (228 posts) full of tips and tricks to improve your customer experience.

So whether you have visited our blog or listened to the Customer Experience Leaders Chat podcast, we are incredibly thankful you joined us on the ride through 2021.

We prepared a little roundup of some of the most successful and our favorite posts/podcasts from this past year.

5 Most Favorite Blog Posts Published in 2021

7 Important Customer Service Phrases to Use in 2021

Word choice and language you use can affect how your customers are feeling and it can make a lasting impact on your relationships. The right words enhance customer engagement, drive up satisfaction, and reduce customer churn rate. That’s why it is so crucial to consider what phrases to use and pay attention to.

In this blog post, we’ve brought together 7 phrases that will supercharge your CX in 2021+ a list of phrases to use & avoid in your support career.

Why You Should Treat Your Support Job Like Your Yoga Practice

Benchmarking CSAT, NPS, and CES: What’s a Good Score to Have?

You might be looking at your latest survey results and wondering… Are these good? How do we compare to our competitors? Should we be doing more?

This is where benchmarking is helpful. By comparing your survey results to other companies, you add context to your scores.

We’ve compiled benchmarks to help you compare your CSAT, NPS, and CES scores to industry standards and inspire your goal setting.

Benchmarking CSAT, NPS, and CES: What’s a Good Score to Have?

7 Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of your User Onboarding

User onboarding can be used in several different ways. While many use it specifically for new users, you can also see benefits when introducing new products or reintroducing functionality after a user has had a period of usage lapse.

But how do you measure whether your work is effective or ineffective?

In this blog post, we’ll break down seven different ways to measure your onboarding effectiveness and continue to improve on it.

7 Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of your User Onboarding

12 Questions You Should Ask When Interviewing an Outsourcer

If your business is growing fast, then your customer service ticket volume is, too. At some point, the inquiries from customers can be too much to handle internally. So for many companies, outsourcing is the best next move. However, it can be daunting to begin the process of finding the right business process outsourcer (BPO). But asking questions will help you understand how each outsourcer operates, so you’re picking the right partner for your unique needs.

Here are 12 questions every company should ask while interviewing an outsourcer + what answers to expect in return.

12 Questions You Should Ask When Interviewing an Outsourcer

How Do You Measure Your Customer Service Team’s Capacity?

Capacity planning is often more of an art than a science. There are many unknowns such as volume, release cycles, and the constant battles for budget and unexpected attrition. But once you find a model that fits, your forecasting will improve, your hiring practices will have more structure, and your budget won’t be wasted.

In this article, we explore the basic concepts of capacity planning that will help you create a model that works for your team.
5 favorite podcast episodes published in 2021

How Do You Measure Your Customer Service Team’s Capacity? 

5 favorite podcast episodes published in 2021

The Ultimate Guide to CES with Challenger Inc. [Podcast]

In this special episode, we talked to Scott Rothman, Market Director at Challenger Inc. – a global leader in training, technology, and consulting to win today’s complex sale.

We discuss what CES is, how it can benefit your company, and how you can train your support agents to provide an effortless experience.

The Value of Support Agent Writing with HelpScout [Podcast]

A good Knowledge Base article can help customers self-help when you are not available and speed up the responses to repeated questions. Mat Patterson, Customer Service Educator at Help Scout, sees a broader scope for the support team’s writing.

Listen to the episode to hear how you can make writing a pivotal piece of your support team to engage with your customers and ensure your company’s story gets told.

Surprising and Delighting your Customers with Koala [Podcast]

In this episode, we talk to Marc Bindlechner, Director of Customer Service at Koala – winner of the 2021 Nicereply Customer Happiness Award for Customer Effort.

Marc from Koala highlights some tips and tricks on how you can perpetually delight your customers.

Transitioning from Customer Support to Customer Experience with Grindr [Podcast]

In this episode, we talk to Alice Hunsberger, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Grindr – the largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people.

Alice from Grindr describes the roles she has within her team to facilitate these activities and what you need to do to move from a support team to a customer experience team.

Creating a Seamless Customer Experience with Rancher Labs (SUSE)

In this episode, we talk to Bala Gopalan, Vice President of Support at Rancher Labs (SUSE) – provider of an open-source container management software for enterprises.

Listen as Bala from Rancher Labs highlights the importance of making the experience more convenient and bringing more heart to the customers.

Thank you for joining us for the ride in 2021!

The post Our Favorite Customer Support Reads and Listens of 2021 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Support automation helps customer support teams deliver the same (or better) customer experience much faster.

Automation seems too good to be true. The marketing buzz can often stretch the truth of what’s currently possible. No, there isn’t a bot that can answer all your customer questions instantly. Yes, automation can still create those frustrating loops that leave customers begging to talk to a human. But the failings of automation don’t mean that you should avoid it all together. When deployed wisely, customer support automation can help your humans provide better, faster support.

To help you dig through the noise and find the actually helpful use-cases for automation, we’ve gathered seven practical examples of customer support teams using automation.

Onboarding with Proactive Emails

Imagine if you had to remember to email every new client with a list of things they should do. Not only would you probably miss a few emails, but you’d also be spending a lot of time trying to figure out what customers need what information.

This is where automation comes in handy. You can start by simply sending out emails after one, three, or five days after the customer has signed up. Trello does a great job of this, breaking the parts of their product into a series of onboarding emails.

For more advanced automation, trigger onboarding emails based on user activity. When I recently purchased a new sports watch and connected it to Strava, a running app, I started getting emails to set certain things up. For example, once I’d uploaded my first activity, Strava reminded me to sync my heart rate monitor.

Because these onboarding emails are specific to the user, they have a bigger impact. Plus, they prevent customers from needing to talk to customer service agents for help – they already have all the information they need to be successful.

Create Feedback Loops

Sense Labs used Nicereply to build an automated real-time feedback loop. “Using Nicereply, we can immediately respond to a customer as soon as they contact us, have a productive interaction, and see their feedback and ratings within minutes,” says Aisha Strauss, Director of Customer Success at Sense. “If the interaction wasn’t satisfactory, we can reach out immediately, taking our customer support to the next level of 100% follow-through. This approach has helped us provide the best-in-class customer experience.”

Sense automatically sends out a customer satisfaction survey after every interaction. If the customer responds negatively, the conversation is automatically escalated so a senior team member can step-in and help out. This makes sure that every interaction is resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.

Proactive SLA Assignments

Cisco Meraki run automations on every email that comes through their inbox. With reminder tags, they can ensure that emails are responded to in under 15 minutes. “The tag will flag the message as urgent if no one has replied within that time,” Michael Randall, Sales Support Team Lead says. “Front lets us know automatically when we need to follow up.” This makes sure that their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met, both internally and externally.

It’s important to note that these automations don’t take a lot of knowledge to set up. There’s no programming required. Because Cisco Meraki uses Front, they only have to indicate the tags they want applied, and what they want the tags to mean. From there, the platform handles everything automatically.

Assign Conversations to Specific Team Members

Hootsuite’s customer success team uses automations to make sure each customer contact is handled by the right person. Sometimes that person is the customer’s account manager, but sometimes it’s a more technical member of the team with unique expertise.

Laura Ene, Customer Success Team Lead, says, “We love that we can leave a comment on an email and escalate it, and we know that nothing will get lost in Slack.” Automations are perfect for making sure everything moves smoothly and nothing gets dropped. In a busy team like Hootsuite, that’s critical.

Paging PagerDuty

The great thing about automations is that they can run 24/7 – even when it’s not possible to have agents watching all the time. This makes automations a great way to trigger notifications for critical issues, such as downtime or VIP customer inquiries.

Jason Dugdale, Tooling and Support Engineer at Front, uses Zapier to bring an on-call agent’s attention to urgent conversations.

“When a conversation in Front triggers our 24/7 on-call alert, we trigger a PagerDuty alert for the on-call agent,” explains Jason. They’ve set it up so that only certain customers can trigger the alarm by sending in an “urgent” message.

They’ve also set up a Zap to @mention that teammate in Front, and bring attention to that conversation. The Zap can also send a messsage to Slack for additional visibility. The behind the scenes automation makes sure that the entire team can rest easy.

Team Happiness

Not all automation needs to be customer facing to be valuable. Sam Olson, Support Manager at Hudl, uses Zapier to build internal automations that keep his team running smoothly. For examples, Sam says he’s combined a Slack workflow with Zapier to make it easy for someone to request a schedule change and then be notified when that change was approved. They also have set up birthday automations and a Spotify playlist automation to help build team camaraderie.

Tagging incoming tickets

Tagging customer support tickets is a big part of most support agents’ jobs. But this is a task that no-one really wants to do. That’s why improvements in automated tagging are so exciting. MonkeyLearn’s natural language processing (NLP) software enables companies to detect themes, keywords and sentiments in natural language.

Archer, investment management software, used MonkeyLearn’s automation platform to triage, tag and sort through an increasingly large number of customer conversations.

Alyssa Wilkowski, Senior Programmer Analyst at Archer explains why these automations were so important to their success. “To efficiently absorb our fast-increasing volumes, we required automations to stand in as quarterback of our tickets, to file but take no action on others, and to recognize and escalate requests for which we are contractually obligated to meet specified service levels.” Their automation solution improved response times by 65% and agent productivity by 20%.

Automate the pain away!

When deployed thoughtfully, automation helps customer support teams deliver the same (or better) customer experience much faster. Whether you use automation for organization, repetitive tasks, or triggering emails, it’s going to make your life easier.

If you decide you want to start automating customer support, start by looking for the tasks that your team does every day. These will yield the biggest results, and your team will be happy to have them off their plates. From there, consider how you can offer proactive support through automation – can you notify agents of outdated tickets? Or email users with new information? Finding these moments that are ripe for automation will help you develop a thoughtful support automation strategy.

The post Seven Practical Examples of Customer Support Automation appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Learn how automation and AI let you be more personal with customers and not sound like a robot.

In this brand new ebook by Front and Nicereply, we’ll walk you through the basics of support automation, its limitations, and examples of how you can use it today.

We’re no stranger to automation if you think about it. From ordering groceries online to booking tickets to that must-see concert, you can use automation just about everywhere. Automation in customer service is no exception.

As our tech-savvy world continues to evolve with no sign of slowing down, speed and efficiency are no longer a luxury. We expect it. And the business world has automation to thank for lending a helping hand in delivering exactly that to customers. In fact, experts predict 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent by 2020.

Yet many people still think automation is bound to replace human interaction. In reality, automation doesn’t mean all hope for human connection is lost and customer support agents will be replaced by robots one by one (we’re still a long way from that).

By reading our new ebook you’ll learn:

• What is automation? What is AI?
• The limits of AI and automation
• Examples of AI in customer support
• How to automate support without losing authenticity
• How to implement automation thoughtfully for your team

The post Get a Brand New Ebook on Automating Customer Support appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

If you have a support team that needs to serve various customer skillsets or a complex product, cobrowsing tools might be the right choice to improve your support offering.

You can listen to Customer Experience Leaders Chat also on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts

One significant disadvantage for most support teams is that there is always a gap between what they can see and what the customer sees. Differing perspective, terminology, technical savvy, etc. can all impact the length of a support conversation and create customer frustration. It’s intuitive that if you could just look over the customer’s shoulder, it’d be easier to provide a high-care service. Derek Homann, Co-founder of Median, knows that virtually transporting your agents to view precisely what the customer is looking at will improve resolution time, customer satisfaction and remove ambiguity.

In conversation with Derek Homann, Co-founder of Median

Cobrowsing is often confused with screensharing and video conferencing tools, so Derek starts by explaining the differences between these technologies and why the needs of a support team typically align closer to cobrowse tools. Video conferencing tools are known to have screensharing capabilities, but they have drawbacks concerning security and privacy.

We examine why cobrowsing is more secure than these applications; from accidentally seeing family photos and other Personally identifiable information (PII) to protecting credit card numbers and passwords. Then we dig into how cobrowse tools fit into the current support technology stack to increase your agents’ ability to solve tickets quickly. Finally, we address one of the biggest concerns with any of these technologies: Do I really need these tools if my product is cloud-based?

If you have a support team that needs to serve various customer skillsets or a complex product, cobrowsing tools might be the right choice to improve your support offering. Join our conversation for some deeper insight into the world of looking over your customers’ shoulders to solve tickets more easily.

The post How to Use Cobrowsing for Improved Customer Experience with Median [Podcast] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Celebrate Leaders in Customer Service

In 2014 we started a tradition of honoring the best support teams among our customers.

We’re thankful that with the help of amazing customer service teams we get to continue the tradition in the year 2021.

This year, we’re giving awards in 3 categories, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Loyalty (NPS), and Effortless Experience (CES). We’re also giving out a couple of honorable mentions to companies achieving Biggest Growth & Most Ratings in the three main categories.

And in addition to awarding amazing support teams, we prepared some interesting stats about the year 2020 in Nicereply.

Let’s announce the winners of Customer Happiness Awards 2021!

Congratulations to every winning team in Customer Happiness Awards 2021!

The post Winners of Customer Happiness Awards 2021 have been announced! appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

The key to earning brand loyalty is to deliver the best possible customer experience.

Unfortunately, this often poses a challenge. Your customer support team shouldn’t spend excessive time on each ticket since they’ll never work through the queue making other customers wait days—or maybe even weeks.

As a customer support manager you want to help customers and your support team as much as possible. You want the best possible answers with the least time spent on each ticket. You want to increase your CSAT without sacrificing confidence in your brand.

The good news is there are some strategies to eliminate a customer’s perception of a “clueless” agent. You can reduce the amount of time a customer is cycled through a recurring set of solutions.

Even if you’ve got good strategies in place—and no matter how awesome your company’s customer support operation is—there’s always room to grow.

One excellent way to enhance your customer support experience is to add practical reinforcement to every customer support ticket. This is where your Knowledge Base comes in.

Your Knowledge Base: An Underused Wealth of Knowledge

Chances are your business already has a treasure trove of answers to common questions housed in a Knowledge Base. This resource is customer-centric and mainly built so your customers can find the answers to their problems on their own.

But no matter how robust and easy to use your knowledge base support is, not all customers will know where to look or how to search it. You’ll inevitably end up with support tickets—even for issues where the answer is in your Knowledge Base.

Even though you’ve got the answers to your customers’ questions, some of your customers aren’t seeing them for whatever reason. Maybe there’s no clear link in your app or your website to your self-serve support. Or it could be that your Knowledge Base needs reorganizing. This is something you should definitely research to determine why.

But first things first. Since you can’t avoid these tickets, you can still mitigate the issue by identifying ways to minimize the time your customer support team members spend re-typing or re-explaining recurrent support issues.

You can do this by finding ways for your customer support team to spend less time on each ticket by closely weaving together support answers and your Knowledge Base.

Here are some strategies I’ve used to help promote our Knowledge Base in every customer support interaction.

Make Your Knowledge Base More Accessible for Your Support Team

While your Knowledge Base was built to assist your support team by driving down repeat tickets, it might not always work as intended when tickets are being replied to.

Some support team members might find it time-consuming to search for and find the right knowledge base article (and then verify it answers the customer’s question). Other customer support team members might decide it’s simpler to just type up the answer from scratch rather than search.

Either approach is time-consuming and can back up responses to your support requests. It’s great for that one-time ticket but not so great for your team as a whole.

One answer to this dilemma is to find ways to enable your team to access your Knowledge Base articles with ease. You can do this by:

● Improving your knowledge bases search engine by adding keywords or tags in the software you use
● Enabling ways to share standardized organizational information with a simple search, copy, and paste solution
● Integrating auto-complete functions or friendly canned responses to complete common search phrases and hard to spell words

Making your Knowledge Base articles more accessible can empower your customer support team to answer customer support tickets quicker and with more context. It’ll also allow them to move onto other support tasks that need a more personal touch that can’t be handled with your Knowledge Base.

And this isn’t just helpful for your support team. Customers will be more likely to check out your self-serve support if they’re being directed there in ticket replies.

Use Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

If your customer support team finds a significant percentage of their tickets use the same Knowledge Base articles, set up some keyboard shortcuts for those articles. This can easily shave minutes off each support request.

Look for a text expander app that interfaces well with your existing setup. Then create custom shortcuts using phrases you wouldn’t normally type, such as wifirefr or cssexplain. When typing those short strings, a text expander can transform them into the assigned URL saving your team major time.

Essentially any app or other standardized shortcut you can integrate into your software boosts productivity and shortens the time agents spend on each ticket. This means customers will rapidly get the help they need while allowing customer support team members to quickly focus on other important tasks needing attention.

Encourage the Right Kind of Swipe File

Encourage your support team members to create a swipe file. But before doing so, make sure you put proper guidelines in place.

You want to avoid each team member keeping their own proprietary list of complete answers. This leads to inconsistent customer experiences because individual team members’ answers will vary. Some responses will go out of date, while others may be completely wrong.

If that’s your current customer support culture, I recommend you look to add consistency to your support team responses. Start by making certain all solutions are streamlined and consistent. Establish a centralized list of answers that all of your customer support agents can access.

This way, everyone goes to the same sources for their answers every time.

A link-filled swipe file can also be a huge time saver. Using whatever notes or text editor tool your company prefers, your agents should create a list of links to the knowledge base articles they find themselves using frequently. This way, they aren’t searching from scratch each time but can pull up the right link in seconds.

By implementing these fixes, you should see your customer response times lower considerably and their answer satisfaction increase—and that’s the name of the game.

Don’t Send Links Without Context

As powerful as sending Knowledge Base links can be, doing so isn’t a total replacement for the customer support experience. I don’t recommend dropping links into support chats without context. Doing that will feel impersonal and frustrating to your customers nearly every time.

Think of the Knowledge Base links as enhancements to your service rather than the service itself. You should still create a brief answer to the customer’s question in the ticket (these answers, too, can be crafted into macros or keyboard shortcuts or pulled from a customer service Knowledge Base).

The Knowledge Base link comes after your answer. It’s an enhancement for the customer, not the answer itself. Here’s an example of how I’d set this up myself:

Sure thing! Head to Settings > Company > Name to change your organization’s name. More on that over here [Changing Your Organization Name](link to the article here).

These templates should definitely be written in a consistent tone that aligns with your business’s brand and voice, but you get the point.

Adding a personal message and simple instructions are always better than just sending over a link to your Knowledge Base. Essentially your note should enhance the customer experience without sterilizing it.

Improve Your Knowledge Base Itself

The bottom line—and painful truth—is no solution will work very well if your Knowledge Base doesn’t work very well. A hard-to-use knowledge base creates tons of friction for your support team and customers alike. And no one wants that.

Strive to make it easier for your customers to self-serve and reduce your customer support team’s stress. The reality is eliminating tickets completely is next to impossible, but you can improve your knowledge base and ticket resolution time.

Make it so your customers and support team can easily search and find the answers they need.

• Place links to your Knowledge Base in an obvious location on your website and app
• Organize the Knowledge Base in a logical way
• Use easy to understand language, so you avoid your team having to interpret things that are harder to explain (e.g., avoid technical language and always use simple language)
• Keep your knowledge base fully stocked—if something is found missing add it as soon as you notice
• Routinely update your knowledge to avoid wrong information going out. Plan to update at least 2-4 times a year

Create a Better Support Environment for Your Team and Customers

Establishing an easily found and useful knowledge database simplifies things for your customers and your team. The end result is you’ll almost always find your reps will be more likely to interact with it.

In a nutshell, promoting your Knowledge Base—both internally and externally—is the key to its successful use. Make your knowledge base something your reps are proud of and want to use and something your customers will easily find and understand.

The post How to Promote Your Knowledge Base in Customer Support appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Why follow the “old rules” instead of improving the user experience and sell more?

Every business is changing, and the web industry is progressing faster than anything else. Rules of the games never remain the same – things that worked five years or even a year ago might not work anymore. Webmasters around the globe are testing different approaches, and today we’re going to talk about the ones that obviously don’t work.

What should you remove from your site? There are at least seven things that may annoy your customers, and we describe each of them below.

Please note that everything you can see below isn’t an absolute truth, but it works in at least 90 percent of cases, so why not take it into consideration?

Stock photos, especially photos of people

Nielsen Norman Group did an interesting study where they confirmed what we all suspected – users hate and usually ignore stock images of people. Some may say that nothing is wrong with ignoring pics – after all, part of them is always ignored as purely decorative elements. However, if you are selling something on the web, gaining a customer’s trust is your top priority. Pictures of products and staff are what can increase the level of trust significantly.

Let’s be honest – stock photos of people in offices look completely unnatural, and site visitors understand this immediately.

Consequently, pictures aimed at making people trust you do exactly the opposite. If you don’t want to spend money on hiring a professional photographer, ask someone to take a photo or take a selfie – it would be much better than uploading a photo of a “perfect” and unnaturally happy blue-collar worker.

Vague, unclear headlines

The so-called vague words like “excellence,” “experience,” “dedication,” and so on in headlines are the “white noise” for a customer. They don’t really say anything about you, your company, your niche, etc. Simply put, such vague headers don’t perform their main and only function: they don’t tell visitors who you are and what you do, don’t inform them.

That is why we recommend removing the vague words telling them that you are the best in something and replacing them with a phrase that actually explains to customers what they can get from you and why they need it.

404 pages

You should remove all dead links and 404 pages from your website, and you should do it regularly. Yes, it is a well-known fact, but surprisingly, a lot of webmasters forget about it or ignore the importance of audit. This, of course, is the wrong approach because 404 pages frustrate the user and significantly worsen the UX.

The good news is you shouldn’t do it manually – there are plenty of quality SEO tools to audit the website. We usually use SE Ranking to test all pages and links on the site, find the broken and non-existent ones twice a month and remove them. By the way, using such platforms as SE Ranking is always a good idea because you can solve multiple problems simultaneously, for example, find missing meta tags, correct technical errors, check loading speed, scan images, etc.

Social media icons in headers

Social media icons are important because you should provide site visitors with an opportunity to share your post on popular social media websites. This may get you more traffic than you ever expected, but this can also distract users from the post itself. There is a chance that a user will stay on YouTube and forget about what they’ve just searched for.

So, what’s the solution? A reader can become a lead if you don’t put icons in your header – putting it in your footer is a much better option. Moreover, you shouldn’t use too vivid colors for your icons – making them grey or beige, or pink ( or any other not too visually prominent color, depending on your color scheme) is a good option.

Email links

Posting email addresses is an old habit, but the truth is we all should finally give up providing them on websites. Why? Because there is a better way to provide great customer support, answer the questions, tell more about the services and special offers than sharing your email address. We recommend using contact forms instead – that is how you can protect yourself from tons of spam that robots are sending to everyone who has ever posted the email address, avoid being measured in Google Analytics, and improve your marketing.

Creating a Contact Us page allows a user to reach you without leaving the site, allows you to provide extra useful content, answer the specific questions, group the questions and redirect them to the right departments, etc. After all, you will be able to contact users who are really interested in getting those emails from you without annoying ones who don’t actually need that.

Auto-play videos & music

Audios and videos are great – they make your content even more useful and illustrative. However, most users hate when websites are literally too loud, especially if they have dozens of tabs open. We bet you visited such websites, too – you are looking for some info and cannot figure out where that disturbingly loud sound comes from.

In most cases, users just close the site just because it is the simplest and the fastest way to turn off that sound, not to mention that they come to get the useful information and not to get scared to death. Simply put, if you don’t disable auto-play, you usually provide a horrible user experience. You can avoid it with a few clicks – just disable the auto-play feature, and you will make the most of useful videos and audio files.

Too long paragraphs, too much text

Everyone’s in a rush nowadays, and the only thing that users actually want is to find the info they need. They want to do it immediately, and it’s nearly impossible if they have to search for the right piece of content in a huge, poorly-structured text.

That is particularly relevant for eCommerce websites. If you are selling the product, you should provide the most useful information about it. Long, vague descriptions make visitors leave the site, and the short paragraphs, lists, and pics make them stay and buy.

Conclusion

Some may say that this is obvious, but if you visit a few random websites on the web, you are likely to see at least one of those things. Paradoxically, each of them is aimed at attracting customers, but they are actually annoying users. So why follow the “old rules” instead of improving the user experience and sell more?

The post Stop Annoying Your Customers: Things You Should Remove From Your Website Forever appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

When Sukhpreet identified that the team was not excelling as much as hoped, she started to look deeper into the customer needs.

You can listen to Customer Experience Leaders Chat also on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts

Customer Success is a concept that isn’t well defined. Some leaders see it as a sales function focused on renewals and upsells. Others imagine a value-driver function, such as an implementation team or subject matter specialists. And some companies see it as account management, ensuring the customers’ business inquiries post-sale are handled with care. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it highlights that customer success is likely a unique team that varies based on what your customers demand.

Or what if it is more than just one function? Sukhpreet Anand, VP of Operations at Unifyed, discovered that having a single definition of customer success didn’t work for their business model. She found that two distinct roles within success were necessary to meet and exceed their customer demands. So to help her customers achieve success, she re-imagined her customer success team.

In Conversation with Sukhpreet Anand, VP of Operations at Unifyed

Customer success ultimately is a team that helps make customers successful. When Sukhpreet identified that the team was not excelling as much as hoped, she started to look deeper into the customer needs. The customers were demanding a high level of relationship engagement before their renewal conversations and also requesting ongoing account management focused on driving product value. It was clear that solving these problems required different skill sets and, therefore, a change in the hiring approach.

Please listen to our conversation as Sukhpreet outlines what she observed, how she structured the team, the differences in hiring profiles, and how you can determine if this approach will benefit you and your customers!

The post How Unifyed is Focusing the Responsibilities of a Customer Success Team [Podcast] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.