Customer
 success metrics are essential to the growth of every SaaS company.

With the increasing amount of intuitive software programs providing detailed data analytics to businesses, it’s no wonder that data-driven decision-making is now commonplace across almost all industries. Measuring key performance indicators (KPI) should be a standard business practice, ensuring organizations measure progress toward strategic objectives, and identifying strengths and areas for improvement.

When it comes to your SaaS business, you need to be measuring and evaluating your customer success. This helps you analyze how much value your customers gain from your product, and you can select particular KPIs to help you do so.

But what exactly is customer success? How does it differ from customer service? And how do you go about measuring and evaluating customer success?

What is customer success?

Customer success can be defined as the strategies needed to help customers gain value from your product or service. In the SaaS industry, this usually concentrates on the digital user experience, such as offering the best business phone service or service desk management. 

A customer success team is proactive and focuses on building relationships with customers to meet their needs effectively and ensure they find success with the product. The main focus for customer success is understanding customer goals and objectives, measuring customer success metrics, and ensuring each product meets customers’ needs. 

With the help of a customer success scorecard, managers can then use these valuable insights to gain a clearer view of where the company is in achieving its customer-specific goals.

How is customer success different from customer service?

Customer success is a proactive process by nature. It focuses on identifying what success means to the customer and helping them achieve it through the use of your product or service. Customer service, on the other hand, is a reactive tactic that’s based on solving problems. 

For example, a customer service team will be involved in dealing with customer complaints, troubleshooting, refunds, and so on. A customer success team will proactively work with customers to reduce the likelihood of customers needing to contact the customer service team!

While it is true that both customer success and customer service are indeed linked, they are certainly not the same thing. Customers are becoming more and more demanding, and it is becoming harder to stay competitive in an increasingly complex marketplace. Many businesses are now leveraging hybrid cloud benefits to foster positive relationships with customers and put customer success at the forefront of their growth strategy. 

10 essential customer success metrics SaaS businesses should measure

Measuring customer success metrics is essential in your SaaS business, but it isn’t necessarily straightforward. If you are wondering how to measure customer success, follow our guide to 10 essential metrics for customer success in your SaaS business and make sure you’re on the right track. 

This section will focus on the following customer metrics:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer churn rate
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Customer retention rate
• Renewal rate
• Average time on the platform
• Product usage rate
• Active users
• Free trial conversion rate

Keep in mind these success metrics examples can always be built on. Continuously monitor these CSM metrics as part of your wider strategy and look at them alongside other KPIs to gain a holistic view of your company’s success, from the customer journey to product UX.

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures customer satisfaction levels at a specific moment in time. For example, you could measure CSAT at multiple touchpoints in the user journey such as when interacting with a particular feature on your webpage, or after an interaction with a team member.

Often collected as a simple survey response with a scale, this is a very common customer metric and one of the most straightforward ways to gauge customer satisfaction, particularly when evaluating customer success in your SaaS business. Knowing CSAT at various touchpoints can help customer success teams identify possible areas for improvement in the customer journey and therefore proactively work on improving customer satisfaction and success. 

CSAT is adaptable to meet the needs of your research, in that you can set the questions and the scale you want to use. You might ask customers how satisfied they were with their experience on a scale of 1-5, or ask them simply to rate their experience as good or bad. You can get a CSAT score by dividing the number of positive responses by the total number of responses and then multiplying the answer by 100 to get a percentage.

While CSAT is hugely useful, it is important to note that it is an indicator of short-term customer satisfaction and does not necessarily give you the complete picture. You should therefore combine CSAT with other KPIs to fully understand customer success. 

2. Net promoter score (NPS)

Another way of measuring customer satisfaction is by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is a measure of how likely users are to recommend your product to others. In a similar way to CSAT, you ask customers to use a scale from 1-10 to rate how likely they are to recommend you to others.

Depending on their scores, customers can be divided into three categories:

• The detractors – customers who answered 6 or less.
• The passives – customers who answered 7 or 8. 
• The promoters – customers who answered 9 or 10. 

Customer success teams can use this success metric example to work on resolving the issues of detractors as well as finding out why the promoters are so happy and what can be done to turn the passives into promoters. You can find your NPS by calculating the percentage of your promoters minus the percentage of your detractors. Tracking this metric over time can give you valuable insights into your customer satisfaction and therefore help you evaluate customer success. 

Your organization can buy domain names and embed NPS surveys into your site at various points. An NPS survey is usually followed by an opportunity for users to give an explanation for their score. This gives you valuable qualitative data and allows customer success teams to address any key themes or trends that arise. 

3. Customer churn rate

Customer churn is defined as the number of customers you lose within a specified period of time. Most commonly, the customer churn rate is calculated monthly. Depending on the type of business you run, examples of customer churn could be the loss of a recurring contract for your cloud communication solutions, closed accounts, or canceled subscriptions. 

Customer churn limits growth and profitability and can affect your reputation too. Clearly, a high customer churn rate indicates low levels of customer success and needs to be addressed.

To calculate the customer churn rate, you need to know the number of customers lost in the given timeframe and divide it by the number of customers at the beginning of that period. Multiply the result by 100 to obtain your churn rate. 

Understanding the specifics of customer churn can help customer success teams proactively try to prevent it from happening in the future. For example, to keep your churn rate low, you may need to ensure you provide support at various touchpoints or offer your customers more value than competitors. 

4. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the average revenue generated from a customer over their lifetime with your business. Increasing your LTV increases overall profitability. 

When it comes to SaaS, most businesses are looking for customers to stay by repeating subscriptions or contracts. The longer the customers stay, the lower your costs are per customer, and the higher the CLV. For example, you may want to calculate the CLV for your law practice management software, in order to measure its effectiveness and build a picture of customer success. 

As a measure of customer success, it links with revenue and is therefore an important metric for any business looking to grow. To calculate your CLV you need to multiply your annual revenue per customer by the customer relationship in years. Subtract your customer acquisition cost to find your average CLV. 

An effective customer success team will be able to increase the annual revenue per customer and the average length of customer relationships in order to increase the CLV.

5. Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate should be one of your key customer success metrics in SaaS. Due to the nature of SaaS, companies tend to have ongoing customer relationships rather than engaging in one-off transactions. Customer retention rate measures the percentage of existing customers that have been retained in a given period. 

To calculate the customer retention rate, subtract the number of new customers in a given timeframe from the number of customers at the end of that timeframe. Then divide your answer by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that timeframe. Multiply your answer by 100 to get your customer retention rate as a percentage. 

At the end of the day, one of the most important indications that your customers are satisfied is if they continue to do business with you. Effective customer success efforts will boost customer retention in your organization. 

6. Renewal rate

Renewal rate is one of the most essential customer success KPIs for SaaS businesses. Naturally, the number of customers who continue to renew contracts and keep using your product is a key indicator of customer success. 

Your renewal rate can tell you a lot. If your renewal rate is high then you can be confident that customers are satisfied with your product or service and are happy to commit to using it for another set period of time. If the renewal rate is low, however, this indicates that customers have not had success and you should investigate how to improve your product and provide a better customer experience.

To calculate your renewal rate, simply divide the number of customers who renewed their subscription by the number of users who were due to renew. Then, multiply your answer by 100.

7. Average time in application

It is highly useful for SaaS businesses to understand how much time customers are spending using a particular software or application. Using this metric alongside customer feedback tools can give you a better understanding of your customer’s behavior, which then allows you to make improvements as required. 

Understanding this, along with other key KPIs for customer success, can really help your SaaS business to provide customers with the best experience possible.

8. Product usage rate

You can tell how valuable your product is to customers by identifying how much they use it. Tracking how often customers use a product and how long they spend using it can give you valuable insights into customer success.

In order to calculate this customer success KPI, you must first decide which intervals you will measure (daily, weekly, monthly, etc). Then, find out what percentage of your users are using the product at each interval.

9. Active users

Measuring active users tells you how many customers use a product or service on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Alongside product usage rate, this gives you a picture of how customers use your product. Understanding how your product is used is essential for evaluating customer success in SaaS and helps you improve your customer experience.

10. Free trial conversion rate

Many SaaS companies offer free trials to customers who sign up for the first time. Allowing people to try before they buy is a fantastic tool for SaaS businesses to increase user numbers. 

If you offer a free trial, it is essential to measure your free trial conversion rate. This customer success metric tells you how many customers are continuing beyond the free trial and committing to the paid version.

To find your free trial conversion rate, divide the number of customers using the free trial by the number who went on to buy a paid subscription. Decide when you will measure this, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually. Remember to monitor this metric regularly to give you an indication of the success of your free trials over time.

Key takeaways

The customer success metrics described in this article are essential for evaluating customer success in your SaaS business. Tracking, monitoring, and responding to each KPI for customer success will allow you to identify areas for improvement as well as celebrate goals. 

Ultimately, happy and satisfied customers will return to you again and again. By using data to analyze the above metrics for success examples, you can optimize the customer experience and help people achieve their business goals. And if you can help customers meet their goals, they will not only value the products and services you provide, they’re more likely to be loyal to your company and recommend you to others. 

As a result, your customer success rates will skyrocket as you keep existing customers happy while welcoming new ones on board, ultimately leading to sustainable growth for your SaaS business. 

The post Customer Success Metrics: 10 Key Indicators for SaaS Companies appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Supporting non-techies requires a patient and empathetic approach, focusing on clear communication to bridge the knowledge gap.

The IT field is full of jargon and complex processes. IT support is no exception. As we know, IT support aims to keep business processes running smoothly and increase customer satisfaction. However, companies often fall into the trap of blindly following complex guidelines and described processes without seeing the full IT picture. Although the implementation of all these rules and techniques does provide better IT controls, in the end, the company does not get the desired result. It ceases to meet its obligations to customers and users.

There are a couple of ways to help the users forget about dealing with complex IT issues. If a company has a big and distributed infrastructure, it might make sense to hire a vendor for proactive monitoring of IT issues in order to fix them before they cause problems (it’s often called managed IT). Another approach is to simplify IT support.

This is a typical example of how NOT to explain the process of solving an IT problem to a user: “Medium importance laptop incident report has been moved to the problem management team because its RCA is unknown to us. We will apply a new change with minimal risk, fix the current state of your CI, and update the CMDB.”

Here is an alternative and user-friendly wording: “We will analyze the root cause of your laptop problem and let you know as soon as we can fix it”.

We often hear statements like “Implementing IT support is comparable to launching a rocket into space” because people tend to overcomplicate things. So, what can be done to make IT support easier? Here are some small tips that will have a huge impact on your IT support:

• Follow what’s right for your customer
• Revise the definitions of terms
• Put theory into practice
• Nurture the corporate culture

Now let’s discuss them in detail.

Patience, Grasshopper

When you’ve worked in customer support for a while, you have an overflowing cup of patience to draw from. When dealing with non-technical customers, it’s even more important to keep your cool and go slow. Rushing or skipping steps in the explanation will only make them more frustrated, and you’ll have to start again from the beginning.

Non-technical customers might appear frustrated or short-tempered at first. This is often because they are embarrassed they don’t understand. They might be a business owner or otherwise competent individual who doesn’t normally have trouble doing things themselves. Needing to ask for help, or feeling “out of the loop” can lead to imposter syndrome symptoms.

Needing to ask for help, or feeling “out of the loop” can lead to imposter syndrome symptoms.

Imposter syndrome is when qualified people feel like they are in a position they aren’t qualified to be in. They start doubting themselves. They become worried someone will “discover” that they shouldn’t be there, and that leads to defensiveness.

Whoever your non-technical customers are, it’s your job to educate them, just like every other customer. It might take a little longer, but the end result is so much more rewarding.

ELI5

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

– Albert Einstein (probably)

From the Einstein quote came the popular Reddit community “Explain Like I’m Five” where complex questions are answered simply in terms non-experts can understand.

When working with non-technical customers we should aim for the same level of detail as the questions in this subreddit. When there’s simpler words available, use them in place of long unnecessary words. The Simple English Wikipedia is a great example of explaining topics using only basic, common english words. You might be surprised at how much you can say with very few words!

Don’t assume knowledge. If you’re asking someone to open up an incognito browser window, provide steps on how to do so. If someone is trying to access the API for the first time, make sure they know how to use oAuth. Just because it’s familiar to you doesn’t mean it’s familiar to everyone. We all have to learn from the beginning.

Don’t assume knowledge. If you ask someone to open up an incognito mode, provide a how-to.

Metaphorically speaking…

There’s no better way to explain something complicated than by using metaphors. Take this example from a scientific paper about explaining your research to the average person:

“For example, genes are book chapters and amino acids are words. All together, genes tell a story. Transcription and translation are reading a book from start to end and understanding it. A genome is a collection of books telling a big story, the story of someone’s life.”

Come up with metaphors for the toughest concepts you have to explain often. For example, the Twitter API is like a pipeline to tweet information. We can pull different levers based on what we information we want and either pull or push data to Twitter through the pipeline.

The best metaphors evoke images in your mind and are relevant to almost everyone. Using common objects and scenarios in explanations makes an obscure principle seem simple and familiar.

The best metaphors evoke images in your mind and are relevant to almost everyone.

Test out a variety of metaphors and save the ones that work the best (ie customers understand them) as macros. You’ll always have a good explanation at your fingertips.

Get the Media on your side

It’s estimated that 65% of all people are visual learners. This means they learn and absorb information better when presented with images, charts and videos than text alone. Other people learn better by doing (kinesthetic learners), or through listening (auditory learners).

It’s estimated that 65% of all people are visual learners.

Embrace all types of learners in your support workflow by providing a variety of media resources for customers. You might create walk through videos for your support center, record screenflows during support chats or use in-line help manuals to let users walk themselves through tutorials.

Personalizing media helps too. If you’re trying to explain something specific to the customer, it might be helpful to snap a quick screenshot and label it with the instructions for them to follow. Jing and Screenflow are two popular tools that make sending a quick screenshot super easy.

Other tools to have in your multimedia support belt:

• Video tutorials
• Up-to-date screenshots
• How-to GIFs
• Steps provided in bulleted lists
• Tutorials that provide example projects
• Inline help manuals
• Screenshare technology

Encourage an Open Door Policy

How many times have you heard someone start a question with “apologies for the stupid question” or “sorry to be a newbie….” ? Probably quite often. Humans are terrified of being judged for asking questions. In support, we have a responsibility to not pass judgement. And even better, we should be encouraging our customers to continue asking questions!

I used to work with an exceptionally confused woman who would pop up in our chat queue daily. It was clear she was put in charge of setting up the system in spite of having no experience at all with the product. At first, she asked simple questions about the different features. Then, she graduated to more advanced questions about custom settings and workflows. Eventually she picked up a little bit of coding so she could customize her system even further. She became one of our biggest power users.

Imagine what would have happened if we didn’t make her feel welcome to ask us any questions. We would have lost a huge advocate, and she probably would have given up early.

Keep the door open for learners by ending support sessions on a positive note. Encourage them to come back if they run into more questions. Suggest additional resources if they seem keen. Empathize with how tough it can be to learn something new.

Learning a new skill is difficult for everyone. We should be so excited that we get to help our users learn something new.

Bonus tips on how to handle non-techies:

Follow what’s right for your customer

One of the reasons IT giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon are so successful is because they have put the understanding of user needs first.

The companies understand the importance of supporting the users, and the customer experience management market is showing significant growth every year. In 2022, for example, it was worth $11.34 billion worldwide.

IT customer support is focused on creating an excellent interconnectivity system, and its main objective is to solve customer requests. So, you have to understand your client’s needs and strive to meet the main business goals. Sometimes simple basics are more effective than complex processes.

Let’s take a scenario of a typical daily conversation between an IT support person and a customer:

• Customer: “My laptop crashed during an important presentation! I need help as soon as possible!”
• IT support: “Okay, provide me with additional information. Give me your ID and username.”
• Customer: “User78, executive director”.
• IT support: “Thank you, give me your laptop’s serial number”.
• Customer: “I don’t know! Where will I find it?”
• IT support “No problem. Confirm the creation of the incident and remember the incident number to know the status of the solution. We’ll have it resolved soon.”
• Customer: “Why do I have to do anything else!? I need you to fix my problem right now!”
• IT support: “Sorry, but that’s how the process works. Confirm the ticket registration.”
• Customer: “Incident or ticket? I don’t understand!”

The discussion ends.

This situation is familiar to any customer and IT support professional. It is incredibly frustrating. You should simplify IT support, not fill it with jargon that doesn’t make sense to users. You must reduce redundant procedures and simplify interaction protocols. By the way, appointment booking software can facilitate the interaction between your IT support and customers.

Revise the definitions of terms

Dialogues like this one are confusing and frustrating for customers:

• Customer: “I need to report a problem with my laptop.”
• IT support “Sorry! Only support specialists can create problem reports.”

Agreeing on definitions used to communicate with users and within IT support is essential. You must communicate with the customer in their language, even if they use the wrong IT terms. In this example, the term “problem” had a different meaning for the customer and the IT support specialist.

Consistency and simplicity in the language of communication are critical. Try to convey information to the customer in terms he or she understands. This will significantly simplify the implementation and use of IT support.

Put theory into practice

While it’s crucial to know theory, it’s even more important to practice it. This is especially true when implementing ITIL methodology in your organization. Traditionally, the theory assumes the division of technical support into levels (L1, L2). The handling of calls is divided into groups depending on the complexity.

But new methodologies such as Agile and DevOps simplify ITSM and promote a collaborative approach to problem-solving. This leads to faster incident resolution and greater efficiency as members of different teams and levels can collaborate on solving the same problem.

Implementing ITIL processes requires proper training for end users and IT support professionals. Their training must include practical examples that apply to real work – only then will the implementation be successful.

Remember: it is crucial not to dogmatically follow the methodology described in ITIL but to apply it to personal experience, continuously improving processes in your own company.

Nurture the corporate culture

Corporate culture plays a significant role in the success of any business process. You should:

• Develop a mindset that generates new change.
• Make the culture open – employees can innovate and adopt new methods themselves.
• Consistently collect feedback and revise existing processes based on the results of its processing.
• Start small and strive for more – move to a process model in stages to simplify IT support.
• Develop a collaborative environment that allows tech support professionals to collaborate, implement an Agile approach, etc.

Fostering a culture of learning and providing accessible resources is paramount. Offering user-friendly documentation, tutorials, and online training materials can yield amazing results for your company. Use these strategies to equip non-techies with the knowledge they need to address common IT problems. Creating a supportive environment where questions are encouraged and assistance is readily available can also boost confidence and reduce anxiety.

Ultimately, the development of corporate culture and implementation of the service model is beneficial to the economic state of the business, as it makes the calculation of financial costs and income from services more transparent.

Conclusion

Simplifying IT support for non-techies is essential in today’s digital age. As technology advances and becomes an integral part of our lives, it’s important to ensure that individuals without technical expertise can easily and effectively navigate and troubleshoot everyday IT issues. By implementing the strategies and tips discussed in this article, IT support can confidently handle IT challenges for non-techies.

The post Simplifying IT Support for Non-Techies: Strategies and Tips appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Social media support is an essential part of customer satisfaction strategy for many companies.

Having a presence on social media networks is essential for businesses in today’s world. The key to a successful social media strategy lies in providing customer support through all available channels.

Offering top-notch customer service can set you apart from competitors and make it a preferred choice for customers. Furthermore, providing excellent service can boost customer satisfaction and increase brand loyalty. Let’s explore how you can enhance your social media support.

Revise your social media presence

To determine which social media platforms to prioritize, consider the following factors:

1. Ability to maintain: If you don’t have external support like an agency or social media manager, it’s best to focus on a few platforms that you can manage effectively. Quality is more important than quantity in this case.
2. Existing content ideas: If you already have ideas for posts, whether they are text or photo-based, it’s advisable to create a content plan using these ideas instead of starting from scratch. This allows you to kickstart your social media presence with engaging content.
3. Active audience: If you already have social media pages with a certain number of followers, it’s worth reviving these pages and engaging with your existing audience. Reestablishing a connection with your engaged followers can result in higher levels of interaction and broader audience reach.

For a more comprehensive guide, check out Tips on Social Media Strategy for Your Customer Service. It provides step-by-step guidance to help you optimize your social media presence for effective customer support.

Choose the types of support to provide

Decide which types of support you will offer on social media. This could include answering general inquiries, resolving complaints, providing technical assistance, or offering product recommendations. 

A useful strategy is to empower customer agents to take ownership of customer issues and follow through until resolution. This can prevent situations where a client seeks assistance through messaging, only to be redirected to a hotline by the agent.

A preferable approach would be to enable customer agents to ask pertinent questions to all applicable departments and managers with the ability to resolve clients’ concerns.

Social media support can offer consulting services and advice to provide clients with a clear path forward.

In addition to direct support, you can leverage social media to share educational content that addresses common customer questions or provides tips and tutorials related to your products or industry. By proactively sharing valuable information, you empower customers to find solutions on their own and establish your brand as a knowledgeable authority.

As a brand representative, you have the option to suggest your blog or success stories as a way for customers to have a seamless first interaction with your brand.

Create guidelines for handling different scenarios+

Develop guidelines to handle various customer scenarios, including common inquiries, complaints, and complex issues. Outline steps to take, appropriate language to use, and escalation procedures when necessary. For each scenario, outline a step-by-step approach that your support team can follow. These steps should provide a clear roadmap for handling the situation effectively. For example, in the case of a complaint, the steps may include acknowledging the complaint, gathering relevant information, proposing a solution, and following up to ensure customer satisfaction.

The experience of your team can make the process of developing guidelines easier, so be patient and allow your team to collect the most common questions from your customers. Don’t hesitate to use templates and best practices from the professionals of the industry. 

Regularly review and update your guidelines to adapt to new and evolving customer scenarios. Social media platforms and customer needs change over time, so it’s important to stay agile and responsive to ensure effective support.

It’s important to be truthful with your audience and acknowledge any mistakes that you may have made.

Monitor social media mentions

Regularly monitor your social media accounts for mentions, tags, comments, and direct messages related to your brand. Use social listening tools or built-in platform features to stay on top of customer conversations. To continue to the previous point, build a routine for your customer support team when agents will have access to monitoring tools and accurately handle every mention and reaction. 

Social media can sometimes become a platform for customers to voice their complaints or express dissatisfaction publicly. By actively monitoring your social media accounts, you gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, identify issues early on, and promptly address customer inquiries or concerns. Respond empathetically, acknowledge the issue, and work towards finding a satisfactory resolution. Providing prompt and effective complaint resolution demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction.

By keeping an eye on brand mentions, identifying brand advocates, and connecting with your target audience becomes more convenient.

Integrate social media with other support channels

Ensure a seamless experience by integrating social media support with your other customer support channels, such as email, phone, or live chat. This integration prevents silos and provides consistent support across channels.

Integrating social media support with other channels allows your team to access a unified view of customer information. When a customer reaches out on social media, your support representatives can easily access relevant details, such as previous interactions, purchase history, or account information, regardless of the channel the customer initially used. This holistic view helps in providing personalized and context-aware support.

Consider the following strategies for smooth integration:

• Implement a centralized customer support platform or CRM system that consolidates inquiries from different channels into a single interface.
• Establish clear routing and escalation processes to ensure inquiries are properly directed to the right team members or departments.
• Leverage automation and ticketing systems to streamline support workflows and ensure no inquiries fall through the cracks.
• Regularly review and optimize your integration strategy based on customer feedback, emerging trends, and technological advancements.

Respond promptly

Aim to respond to customer inquiries and messages on social media as quickly as possible. Recognize that customers expect quick and efficient support when reaching out on social media. By responding promptly, you demonstrate that their time is important to you and that you are dedicated to resolving their concerns in a timely manner. Set clear response time targets and strive to meet or exceed them consistently. Leverage automation tools, chatbots, and team coordination to optimize response times and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.

According to Global State of Customer Service Report, 18% of users expect the answer immediately to social media questions, and 28% of responders expect the answer within an hour. 

Not all inquiries carry the same level of urgency. Train your support team to identify and prioritize urgent or sensitive issues that require immediate attention. For example, a customer reporting a critical product malfunction should be prioritized over a general product inquiry. Implement escalation procedures to handle urgent matters promptly.

Establish privacy and security rules

Social media platforms are public, so establish protocols for handling sensitive information. When necessary, guide customers to move the conversation to a private channel or direct them to a secure support platform. Emphasize the importance of handling personal information in compliance with applicable data protection laws and regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA. Train your support team on handling sensitive data securely and responsibly. 

Stay vigilant and proactive by regularly reviewing and updating your privacy and security protocols. Keep up with industry best practices and evolving privacy regulations to ensure that your protocols remain effective and compliant. Conduct periodic audits or assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities and address them promptly.

Provide educational resources, such as FAQs or blog posts, to inform customers about safeguarding their personal information and guide them on the appropriate channels for sensitive inquiries.

Continuously learn and adapt

Stay updated on social media trends, new features, and customer preferences. Actively seek opportunities for learning and making the customer experience better. Regularly review and refine your support processes based on customer feedback and evolving customer needs. Collaborate with your colleagues and other teams within the company, such as product or marketing teams. This collaboration allows you to access additional expertise and resources, enabling you to provide comprehensive and accurate customer support.

Be ready to expand your social media presence

Important to look for new ways to be in touch with your customers. Keep an eye on industry publications, blogs, and news sources to learn about new platforms gaining popularity or catering to specific demographics. Once you have identified potential platforms or niche channels, consider piloting your support presence on those channels. Start by allocating resources to monitor and respond to customer inquiries on the new platform. Evaluate the response rate, customer engagement, and overall impact on customer loyalty. Based on the results, you can make informed decisions about expanding or refining your presence on the platform.

Engage with influencers and thought leaders in your industry who have a strong presence on social media. These individuals often have insights into emerging platforms and can provide recommendations based on their experiences. Collaborating with influencers can also help you reach new audiences and build customer loyalty.

Conducting surveys and gathering feedback

Social media platforms can serve as a means to gather feedback and opinions from your customers. You can create surveys or polls to gather insights about customer preferences, experiences, and expectations. Use Nicereply for an easy and smooth process to take customer’s opinions and gather more feedback from CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), and NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. This feedback can be invaluable for improving your products, services, and overall customer support strategy.

By adhering to these guidelines and implementing them effectively, you can elevate the quality of your customer service on social media channels. Consistently delivering exceptional customer support on social media helps to build a positive reputation for your brand. Satisfied customers are more likely to share their positive experiences with others, whether through word-of-mouth recommendations or by posting favorable reviews and comments on social media. This organic promotion can generate positive buzz and attract new customers.

This positive reputation, combined with customer advocacy, can contribute to long-term success and growth for your business.

The post 5-Star Social Media Support: Your Brand’s Ultimate Weapon appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Focusing on ways to reduce Average Handle Time will help you keep your team lean and powerful.

As customer support professionals, we’re not strangers to data and metrics. It seems we’re always measuring something. In fact, I think we might be obsessed with data. But data helps us do our jobs, and ultimately helps improve the customer experience.

The problem with being data-obsessed is that we can sometimes drive the wrong behaviors. For example, think about the time it takes to handle a ticket. If we optimize too far in the direction of efficiency, it’s possible to negatively impact quality. In this post, we’re going to look at Average Handle Time (AHT) and share five ways you can reduce Average Handle Time without sacrificing quality.

What is average handle time (AHT)?

Average handle Time, or AHT, is a metric used traditionally in contact centers where the point of contact is immediate (meaning phone calls or live chats, not email). The purpose of AHT is to measure the average time customers (and the agents helping them) spend on a call or chat, including hold time and conversation time.

While AHT is more commonly used in contact centers with phone or live chat support, it can be helpful to look at this metric in non-immediate contact channels (email/tickets) as well.

I think of AHT in non-immediate channels as a way to measure the time it takes to respond once the ticket is being actioned by the agent. In other words, the timer starts once the agent opens and begins reading the ticket.

Many help desk tools have time tracking features built-in, so that you can easily measure the time it takes to “handle” or resolve each ticket. By doing this, you’ll be able to get a better understanding of your team’s overall AHT, and you can use that data to make operational decisions and improvements.

How to calculate Average Handle Time (AHT)

Example:

Total Talk Time (1700 minutes), plus Total Hold Time (500 minutes), plus Follow up Time (300 minutes), divided by the amount of calls (120). The resulting 20 minutes is the Average Handle Time.

This calculation is better suited for call centers, but similar formula can be used to calculate AHT when using other channels, like messaging and chat or email.

Average Handle Time is one of my favorite metrics to look at because it involves figuring out ways to improve processes on the agent side, which ultimately effect the customer experience. AHT helps managers determine hiring and training needs, as well as identify issues with current processes and tools.

The longer it takes to handle a ticket, the longer customers have to wait and the more agents you will need to have on staff to handle the same number of tickets. Simply put, AHT can be looked at as a way to measure efficiency.

Benefits of a low AHT

It’s important to note that AHT, like most metrics, should be looked at alongside other metrics. In other words, don’t only look at AHT and make all of your decisions based on that metric alone. It’s important to consider other metrics as well.

For example, if you do something to lower AHT, and it works, but the result from that is a decrease in customer satisfaction, you might want to reevaluate your strategy. Having said that, there are several benefits to improving your AHT.

It can lead to happier customers

Customers love a high quality, fast response. If you can do that, you have nailed the ideal customer support interaction. Fast responses that lack quality often lead to a more negative customer experience than a high-quality response that takes more time.

If you already have the “quality” part down, there might be ways you can maintain that level of quality while reducing the time it takes to work on tickets. The faster you work through tickets, the faster you respond to all tickets in the queue, and customers appreciate that. In other words, average handle time has a direct relationship with average response time.

It can keep support costs down

Making the process of answering tickets more efficient will only make your support team as a whole more productive. Identify areas of friction throughout the process, and find ways to remove them.

Focusing on ways to reduce Average Handle Time will help you keep your team lean and powerful.

It can create happier support agents

Support agents love to work smarter, not harder. A clunky tool and process can lead to disgruntled and uninspired employees. Use tools and systems that enable the team to get the required tasks done quickly, and if they’re a delight to use, even better.

Happy support agents stick around longer, and provide that much more value to your customers.

5 ways to reduce Average Handle Time

A low AHT has a ton of benefits for your customers and your support team. Now, let’s look at some of the ways you can reduce Average Handle Time – without sacrificing quality.

1. Use efficient tools and processes to reduce Average Handle Time

Use the right tool for the job. If you’re a scrappy startup, you might not need the enterprise-level help desk tool right now. In fact, it might be bogging you down and having a negative impact on your AHT, ultimately affecting a lot of other business metrics. Avoid unnecessary friction in workflows, and always be looking for ways to work smarter.

Keyboard shortcuts and macros are your friend, use them! Most importantly, know how to use the tools you’re required to use. If you’re a manager, make sure the necessary training opportunities are in place when onboarding new team members.

2. Know the product(s) you’re supporting

Support agents need to know and understand the product(s) they’re supporting. Effective ticket routing can help with this, and there are tools out there that can do this really well. Getting the right tickets to the right agent can have a positive impact on reducing average handle time because it avoids the ticket being passed around from agent to agent, which just kills time.

Using a tool like Monkey Learn or Answer IQ, you can automate some of these processes to save even more time.

With agile development, products are constantly changing and adding new functionality. It can be hard to keep up with this rapid pace of development, but agents need to be trained on the subject matter they’re expected to handle, otherwise it will just take more time to… handle. It’s important to stay up to speed on product changes, improvements, and new features.

Set up regular lunch and learns, or weekly demos. Stay close to the product team or implement systems so that you know what has changed and how it works.

3. Make it a goal to resolve in the first contact

Resolving tickets on the first response always feels like a big win, and it is! By putting in the extra effort to deliver a flawless first response, you’ll avoid having additional responses to deal with which can improve the Average Handle Time. There are several things you can do to knock that first response out of the park.

Use screenshots and other visual aids like animated gifs. CloudApp is great for this. Collect information proactively, so that support agents don’t need to seek additional information out in the first response. You can ask for some of this information in the contact form. You can also build a custom integration that pulls in relevant data from your internal systems so that it’s easily accessible within support tickets.

Many help desk tools have integrations with CRMs like Salesforce to pipe in information for this reason.

Finally, provide the single best answer (try to avoid multiple options when possible). Options confuse customers, so be careful how you phrase them; you want to be as clear as possible in your first response in an effort to reduce room for questions or clarifications. Whenever possible, give customers a single answer that sets them on the path to success.

4. Look at other data

To understand how you can decrease your Average Handle Time, you first need to have an understanding of which cases have a low AHT and which cases have a high AHT. Then, you need to understand why that’s the case.

Are the high cases all assigned to a specific agent? If so, additional training might be needed. Is your AHT high across the board? Maybe you need to reevaluate the process of handling a support request; there could be too many steps and requirements in place, or internal knowledge might be difficult to navigate.

It’s also possible that your tickets are highly technical in nature, in which case, a high AHT might be expected, and you might need to hire more support agents in order to maintain a reasonable response time.

5. Know where your internal knowledge is stored and make it easily accessible

No support agent relies solely on their brain to store all the information they need to do their job. There’s too much information for that. That’s why most support teams maintain a library of internal documents.

Internal documentation is a support agent’s best friend. For example, when someone reaches out to cancel their account… what’s the protocol? This is the type of information that should be stored internally (and perhaps externally as well) to help new and existing team members find the information they need quickly.

Guru is great for making small bits of knowledge easily accessible to support teams. Another tool worth looking into for streamlining knowledge is Digital Genius.

How can Average Handle Time influence your CSAT

Average Handle Time can also have a big influence on your Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT).

CSAT is the king of the customer support metric scorecard, but speed metrics like Average Handle Time, Time to First Response, and Time to full resolution are the crowned princes.

While we all know that response speed in support is important, different customer bases have different sensitivities to response speed. Underestimate it, and you won’t be getting back to your customers as quickly as they expect.

Overestimate it, and you risk being overstaffed or wasting valuable team resources where they could be better used elsewhere.

Agents should not aim to lower their AHT simply to get the caller off the phone, or provide mediocre answers to respond fast as possible. That certainly harm the quality of your support and lower CSAT scores.

Conclusion

Reducing Average Handle Time isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about optimizing your processes and improving the customer experience. As you start to analyze your AHT data, make sure you keep a close eye on happiness and satisfaction metrics.

Speed and quality are tough to balance, but in most cases, I’d make the argument that quality should always be a priority.

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Average Handle Time Without Sacrificing Quality appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Discover 8 Front integrations that offer enhanced support to customers and elevate the level of customer service.

We love Front. Their app makes collaboration between different people and teams extremely easy.

Instead of old-fashioned tickets, it puts conversations at the center of the entire workflow, making it that much easier to retain that special human touch when talking to customers.

And we’re not the only ones who love Front. Over 5,500 customers counting brands like Mailchimp, YCombinator, Stripe, and Shopify seem to think so too. Among their most recent accomplishments are a successfully raised $59M seed round from earlier this year as well as being listed in a prestigious list of in the world. For 3 years in a row! On the 21st place this year! The Front is definitely doing something right.

The Front continues to add new features, but sometimes you need a functionality that’s just not part of what Front aims to be. To solve this, Front integrates with 67 different apps to help its 5,500 customers execute their 4 different use cases.

Why use Front integrations?

There are 2 main reasons why you may want to consider using a 3rd party app with Front.

You want features not available in Front

Front is a fantastic tool, but first of all, it’s a fast-growing business. To continue their scaling, they need to be laser-focused on what they do best, and as such, not every niche use case is going to make it on their roadmap. Using a 3rd party app integration can be a great way to acquire new functionality, like sending Customer Satisfaction surveys, sending SMS text messages or measuring Net Promoter Score straight from Front’s great UI.

You want to share data between different platforms

Chances are you are already using several different business platforms today. Your email campaigns live in MailChimp, your support conversations in Front, your sales communication in Pipedrive…

Having systems that don’t talk to each other is referred to as having your data in “silos”, and since no customer interaction happens in a vacuum, it is highly undesirable. One of the ways to remedy this is to integrate your tools via APIs so they can share information and communicate with each other.

Best Front integrations

• Nicereply
• CloudTalk
• Zoom
• Pipedrive
• Shopify
• Twilio
• Trello & JIRA

To help you do that, we’ve compiled this list of the most helpful apps that integrate with Front, based on our personal experiences as well as customer reviews.

The best app to get customer feedback: Nicereply

4.5 stars on G2 crowd based on 302 reviews

Front is all about collaborating on customer conversations. But how do you know if your reply helped your customers or not? And how do you get better at resolving your customers’ issues over time? The answer is customer feedback.

Nicereply helps you collect customer feedback via email satisfaction surveys.

You can trigger the surveys automatically, after resolving a ticket or place them in the signature of every email you send out. This way you can measure the most popular customer service quality metrics – Customer Satisfaction, Customer Effort Score, and Net Promoter Score. Front’s very own support team is collecting customer feedback this way with Nicereply, measuring CSAT in every message, while surveying for Customer Effort Score after a conversation is closed. You can learn more about how Front uses Nicereply to provide a seamless experience in a case study we published last year.

What’s more, you can also see all this data within Front as a comment.

What do Nicereply customers say?

The best app to talk with your customers: CloudTalk

4.4 stars on G2Crowd based on 230 reviews

You can accomplish a lot over an email or a chat nowadays, but sometimes the best way to go is a good, old-fashioned phone call.

CloudTalk puts a modern spin on this and lets you both make and receive calls via their cloud call center solution. It comes packed with over 40 advanced call center features as well as 25+ integrations to help you set up a workflow that fits your business.

Every time you receive an incoming call, the caller’s profile with his entire customer history comes up, so you know who’s calling you and what to expect even before you pick up the phone.

What do CloudTalk’s customers say?

The best app to talk with your team: Zoom

4.5 stars on G2Crowd based on more than 30,000 reviews

I don’t think Zoom needs any introduction in 2020, but just in case you’re a hermit who’s been living under a rock for the past year, Zoom is currently the go-to app for scheduling and attending video meetings.
The Zoom integration for Front lets you quickly add a Zoom meeting when creating calendar events in Front Calendar, as well as start a call from the comments bar in a single click.

What do Zoom’s customers say?

The best app to help your sales/success team: Pipedrive

4.3 stars on G2Crowd based on 1,200 reviews

Sales and support teams come into contact more often, than most people realize. Oftentimes your new leads may be in touch with several teams at once. Your sales team may be trying to close the deal, your success team is working hard on onboarding the customer and your support team is there to make sure any problem encountered along the way is resolved as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

The problem is when these teams use different tools and thus have access to different information. Pipedrive’s integration for Front synchronizes information about contacts, deals, and activities between Pipedrive and Front and helps your customer data get out of those nasty silos.

What do Pipedrive’s users think?

The best app for eCommerce teams: Shopify

4.3 stars on G2Crowd based on 3,400 reviews

Shopify is the go-to platform to design, open, and run an online business. Their integration for Front lets you see data about your customers such as their address, orders or refunds directly in your Front inbox. This way you have all the information you need to get their order on track.

You can connect multiple stores with your Front account.

What do Shopify’s customers say?

The best app to text your customers: Twilio

While SMS texting has been surpassed by different IM platforms, like Messenger and WhatsApp, a simple text message can often cut through the noise in a way email never could. That makes them ideal for important notices and messages your customers shouldn’t miss.

Twilio integration lets you create an SMS channel in Front to manage your SMS messages alongside all your other channels.

Afterward you can send, receive, and reply to SMS messages directly from Front.

What do Twilio’s customers say?

The best app to keep everything organized: Trello / JIRA

Trello: 4.3 stars on G2Crowd; JIRA: 4.2 stars on G2Crowd

Yes, it’s a 2-in-1, but hear me out. Both tools come from the project management giant – Atlassian. Trello is a fantastic light-weight tool for organizing smaller teams and projects, while JIRA is a massive tool ready to carry an entire enterprise. It really depends on your team here, but both tools are fantastic for keeping your team organized and on track.

Trello’s integrations lets you pull up existing Trello cards for additional context, or create new ones when needed.

In a similar matter, integration Front with JIRA allows you to link, access, and create JIRA issues, set due dates, assignees to keep product ideas, feedback and requests flowing between different teams.

What do Trello’s users say?

What do JIRA’s users say?

Build your own support stack

These are some of the best tools you can integrate with Front based on our experiences, but there are many others out there. It’s now up to you to define what needs to be done to enhance your workflows. Integrating a new app is usually just a few clicks away from Front’s list of integrations, so don’t hesitate to start exploring!

Also if you think there’s a great app out there that we’ve missed, feel free to reach out to us at editor@nicereply.com to let us know! Have fun building your support stack.

The post 8 Best Front Integrations To Provide Better Support appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Building customer loyalty requires a strong bond and trust with customers through quality experiences and exceptional support.

In today’s highly competitive market, customer service has become a key factor in the success of many businesses. To maintain long-term customer loyalty, it is important to build a relationship that can generate repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. It’s cheaper to retain customers than it is to acquire new ones, so companies should make customer loyalty a priority. Of course, not everyone knows this. Michael Scott had to be reminded of this in an episode of The Office.

In this blog, we will discuss nine ways for building customer loyalty, retain customers and create brand champions in the year 2023. These steps will help businesses create customer-centric cultures, strengthen relationships with customers, and retain more clients. By actively pursuing these steps, businesses can create a more loyal customer base and reap the benefits of increased revenue.

1 Put Customers First

Putting customers first should be a top priority for every business. Sounds simple, right? Sadly, so many businesses fail to put their customers first with their actions. Putting customers first means taking a customer-centric approach to all aspects of the business, from product development to marketing to customer support. Companies can avoid short-term thinking by focusing on customer needs and expectations for long-lasting growth.

For example, customer support staff can prioritize customers’ needs by working quickly and communicating well with their clients so that they feel valued rather than just getting automated responses. By focusing on customers, companies can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. This enables product development teams to meet real-world needs and improve the experience of using their products. By understanding customers’ pain points and designing solutions to solve them, businesses can attract more loyal customers.

It’s not just about customer service professionals focusing on customers. It’s about the entire company. Even the accounting department can prioritize customer needs by creating a seamless billing and payment process. It’s about every aspect of the customer journey being focused on the customer.

2 Empower Employees

When employees are empowered to make decisions that benefit customers, customer satisfaction and loyalty can improve significantly. By giving workers autonomy from their managers so they don’t feel afraid of repercussions for making unpopular choices on behalf of the company, businesses create cultures where exceptional customer service is not only possible but encouraged. And this is only one of many ways in building customer loyalty.

When employees are empowered to make decisions, they feel more invested in their work and motivated to go above and beyond for the sake of customer satisfaction. In turn, customers feel valued and appreciated, leading to increased loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel franchise is known for its high customer service, and one way it achieves this is by empowering its employees to spend up to $2,000 per guest in order to resolve any issues or provide special accommodations.

3 Reward Loyal Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and it is essential to reward loyal customers to maintain their loyalty and keep them coming back. Unfortunately, many businesses offer better deals to new customer than existing ones, but there are plenty of ways to show a long-time customer you appreciate their business. One effective way to reward loyal customers is through loyalty programs. For example, Starbucks’ rewards program allows customers to earn points for every purchase they make, which can be redeemed for free drinks, food, and other rewards. This not only incentivizes customers to continue buying from Starbucks but also makes them feel appreciated for their repeat business/addiction.

4 Make it Easy to Do Business With You

Making it easy for customers to do business with you is crucial to improving their experience and enabling better retention. Businesses that offer convenience and simplicity to their customers will stand out from the competition. Here are three areas where businesses can make it easier for customers to do business with them:

1. Sign-Up Process: Many potential customers find the sign-up process too complicated, so businesses should simplify this by reducing required fields, allowing social media sign-ins and offering guest checkout options. By making the sign-up process easier, businesses can increase conversion rates and improve the customer experience.
2. Asking for Support: The more support channels you offer, the better equipped your company will be to handle customer service queries quickly and efficiently. Additionally, providing self-service options such as a knowledge base or FAQ section can enable customers to find solutions on their own—resulting in an improved customer experience and reduced support costs.
3. Referrals: Referral programs can be an effective way to acquire new customers, but they can also be a way to reward loyal customers for their business. Businesses that offer incentives for referrals can encourage satisfied customers to promote their products or services, which increases revenue and reduces customer-acquisition costs.

5 Listen to Feedback (All Feedback is a Gift)

Listening to customer feedback is crucial for businesses that want to improve their products or services. All feedback, whether positive or negative, can provide valuable insights into what customers want and need. Building customer loyalty must start by listening to customers’ feedback, examining their suggestions carefully… and then making changes based on what has been learned is a way for businesses to improve customer satisfaction and generate positive word-of-mouth.

Customers who take the time to provide feedback want their voices heard and valued. By listening to suggestions, businesses can show that they care about customers and are committed to providing a positive experience by making changes based on those suggestions. For example, a restaurant that receives negative feedback about slow service can implement changes such as hiring more servers or reorganizing the kitchen to improve efficiency. By doing so, they can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty—two factors that are crucial for success in today’s competitive marketplace.

6 Embrace Technology in Building Customer Loyalty

Embracing technology can enhance the customer experience and help businesses stay competitive. By using tools such as chatbots and automated ticket responses based on message context, businesses can provide quick and efficient customer support—as well as freeing up employees’ time to focus on more complex issues.

Chatbot technology allows businesses to provide 24/7 support for common issues and answer customer questions. It can also help companies respond to inquiries faster by automating ticket responses based on keywords. While it’s crucial to provide customers with an automated self-service solution, you should also make sure that they have access to a human representative if needed.

Text-expansion utilities like TextExpander can make your human agents more efficient, more consistent, and dramatically improve how quickly they handle tickets. SketchUp’s customer support team saves 2,160 hours per year thanks to TextExpander.

7 Proactively Address Problems and Acknowledge Mistakes

Proactively addressing customer problems and concerns is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. When something happens that affects its customers, a business should let them know right away and keep them informed about the situation. Being proactive and transparent reassures patrons of your business’s reliability.

By acknowledging and addressing customer problems and concerns, businesses can also prevent negative reviews—proactively addressing issues can help turn a negative situation into a positive one. Owning up to mistakes and taking responsibility for customer dissatisfaction are essential if you want customers to remain loyal.

When a business makes a mistake, admitting it and apologizing for the inconvenience can often save the relationship with customers. Acknowledging mistakes allows businesses to provide their customers with a positive experience by showing that they care about customer satisfaction. It’s important to take responsibility for the mistake and work to make it right.

8 Focus on Employee Satisfaction

There is a direct relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Happy employees tend to provide better customer service, and that could lead to increased loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.

By focusing on employee satisfaction, businesses can:

1. Create a culture of exceptional customer service.
2. Build customer loyalty much easier.

When employees are trained and equipped to do their jobs well, they become more satisfied with their jobs—and the company benefits from lower employee turnover. Providing rewards for good service encourages other employees to provide exceptional levels of customer satisfaction.

9 Offer A Strong Value Proposition With Your Products/Services

A strong value proposition is the foundation of a successful business. All businesses should focus on communicating clearly what they offer and why it will benefit people to do business with them.

By clearly defining their value proposition and delivering on it consistently, businesses can create loyal customers who will come back again and again. It’s important to regularly evaluate how well the business is fulfilling its value proposition, and make adjustments as needed in order to maintain customer loyalty over time.

Wrap up about building customer loyalty

Competition between businesses is fierce in today’s marketplace, and building customer loyalty is the key to success. By focusing obsessively on giving their customers what they want, businesses can create great experiences for them and generate positive word of mouth. Businesses that devote too much attention and resources to internal affairs, rather than concentrating on their customers’ needs, risk making decisions that are not in the best interests of those customers.

By following the 9 actionable steps outlined in this article—putting customers first, empowering employees, making it easy to do business, listening to feedback, proactively addressing problems and acknowledging mistakes, focusing on employee satisfaction, and offering a strong value proposition—businesses can create a culture of exceptional customer service and create brand champions who will recommend their products or services to others.

Businesses that obsess over providing value to customers will retain loyal ones and attract new ones. By keeping your customers happy, you can create a positive reputation, increase revenue—and grow the business!

The post Building Customer Loyalty: 9 Proven Steps to Boost Customer Retention appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

To understand Customer Experience Management (CXM) and its importance, brands must first absorb the impact good (or bad) customer experience has on their customers and reputation.

What is customer experience management?

Customer Experience is how a customer feels about your brand. ‘Feels’ is indicative of emotions – what emotions a customer is going through as they interact with your brand throughout their journey, from first contact until they stop being a customer.

Customer experience is an ongoing event. Every time a customer uses your product or service, every time they talk to a support rep, every time they see a marketing campaign, they are experiencing your brand.

That is why having a strong CXM strategy in place is incredibly important – the experience never ceases to impact the customer, so you need to always be delivering.

The implementation of CXM strategies is quite different today than it was a few years ago. We live in a highly digital world, and customer experience, in the context of digital, is very different from what it was when business was done through physical stores.

For example, customers can now reach brands from multiple channels instantly, customers have a huge number of options for their needs, engaging and disengaging with a brand is as simple as a click, and so on.

Source

And that is why Customer Experience Management is so crucial. The aim of CXM is to understand customer experiences and deploy strategies to enhance them for better engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

CXM strategies in 2024 need to be tailored for the digital world, and that is what we will cover in this article.

The Benefits of CXM

1 Fosters loyalty in customers and increases user retention

Acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, and increasing retention by just 5% can increase company profits from 25 to 95 percent.

Customer retention is a result of multiple brand strategies, but CX alone drives close to 67% of customer loyalty which is more than what brand reputation and pricing drive combined.

Any brand looking to increase customer retention numbers should first focus on creating an impactful customer experience management framework.

Mattress company Casper’s marketing bot Insomnobot3000 is a great example of what going above and beyond can do for a brand.

Source

Insomnobot3000 is an ML-enabled chatbot developed by the mattress company, but its purpose is not what you would think. The bot was not built to sell mattresses but to be a ‘friend’ to insomniacs.

People who stayed up late could engage the bot via their phone and have conversations about anything, from TV shows like Seinfeld to the latest football match.

What was its purpose if not to drive sales? To build customer relationships.

The bot elevated Casper’s reputation and helped them generate $100 million in sales within just one year of the bot’s launch.

2 Increases sales through referrals

Loyal customers will refer your brand to their friends and family, and it is a known fact that word-of-mouth is more effective than even paid ads and leads to five times more sales.

And loyalty is driven by CX.

When customers have an excellent experience, they publicize it. In a world that is highly connected thanks to technology, this customer feedback is magnified. Having a well-defined CXM strategy helps you deliver good experiences, consistently.

3 A great CXM strategy creates a loyalty-referral-loyalty loop

Customers who have a good experience with a brand spread the word to their peers, and studies have shown that 28% of people find that promoting a brand through word-of-mouth increases their affinity to the brand.

In essence, good CX leads to happy customers who invest in the brand by referring to it, and this roots them to the brand, even more, further increasing loyalty and retention.

4 Use customer feedback to drive sales

93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. Customer reviews are powerful and generating genuine customer reviews should be one of the top strategies for digital marketers.

The challenge with generating reviews, however, is interrupting customers for a review, nudging them to put in the effort and write one, and getting feedback that is positive.

All of these challenges are solved through a well-defined CXM strategy that includes feedback surveys and polls. Delivering an impactful experience will increase a brand’s chances of getting a quick and positive review from a customer.

CXM Framework That Works in 2023

Step 1: Empower your employees

CXM strategies are built for customers but executed by employees. Employees need to understand the purpose and impact of each step in the customer experience funnel; they need to take ownership of the experience being delivered.

You can achieve this through technology and training. Implement tools that help employees meet their customer experience KPIs. If engaging within five seconds is a KPI, implement an omnichannel platform so they can quickly jump onto any channel through one dashboard.

If customers expect three-day follow-ups, use an email platform to automate conversations.
Employees should also be trained to analyze customer experience metrics.

Understanding why churn rate is increasing or Average Time on Site is decreasing will enable them to look for solutions. Empowering the drivers of customer experience will automatically improve customer experience.

Source

Step 2: Leverage customer feedback for insights into CX

Lastly, turn your attention to the customer and get direct feedback from them about their experience with the brand. No platform can explain a customer’s pain points or delight better than the customer themself.

Customer satisfaction surveys serve this purpose well. A CSS can be configured to trigger after a customer interacts with your brand and you can collect their feedback when their experience is fresh.

You can also implement a manual feedback process if you believe that the personal touch will enhance customers’ experience. To do so, collect user information at different points in the journey or use external tools, like email finders, to get customer information that you can use.

Remember to use authentic user information only. Sending out emails to wrong IDs will land you in their spam box and affect your domain. To avoid this, make sure to do proper DMARC setup and focus on other technical details of emailing.

Gnanaprakash Rathinam, Founder of Clearout, a company that offers email verification and validation service, correctly says that “email finder tools help in finding verified addresses and in turn support customer feedback collection”.

Step 3: Map out your customer journey

Customer Journey can be seen as a map that shows the path users take as they interact with your brand.

Knowing where the customer is in the funnel will tell you what they are interacting with and this will help you implement experience enhancers at the right location.

Mapping out the customer journey should start right at the ideation stage, and then be improved using live data. Insights from the latter should drive improvements in the former, and this should continue to be an iterative process.

Source

For example, let’s say you track user journeys and find out that your marketing campaigns are driving huge traffic to the website but conversions are low. You have found the choking point – the website.

By using tools like data analytics and screen recorders, you can see where on the website users are dropping off from, and why. Once you have identified the pain point, you can take action to alleviate it.

A great example of the use of user journeys to create excellent UX is Airbnb. Airbnb recognized its two core customers – homeowners looking to host through them and people looking for a place to stay.

They have divided the site into these two segments and then further created sections of different features each cohort will find useful. This makes the site extremely user-friendly, people can quickly find what they want and this makes them appreciate the site.

Step 4: Implement an omnichannel approach

Delivering an omnichannel experience is extremely important in 2023 because of the number of channels customers have to connect with a brand. In fact, a survey by Qualtrics found that brands that deliver an omnichannel experience retain 89% of their customers on average, while companies that don’t retain 33% of their customers on average.

Firstly, it is important to have a widespread presence because different customers prefer different platforms when connecting with a brand. While some may prefer using Facebook chat or Instagram DMs for seeking support, some others may prefer sending emails or tweeting at your brand.

Secondly, it is important to integrate these channels with one another for smooth customer flow. Customer journeys should be fluid, which means that they should be able to move from one channel to another seamlessly with no loss of continuity, and that requires integrating channels with one another.

With these two aspects managed, brands will be able to deliver an omnichannel experience. This may seem complicated, but there are omnichannel platforms available that make the process much easier to implement, execute, and manage.

Step 5: Set KPIs for tracking and improvement

Setting targets and measuring the results of your CXM strategies is important to improve the framework. KPIs not only set targets for the CXM framework but also for employees who drive customer experience activities.

What KPIs do you track and measure is important. Here are a few every company must track:

1. Customer acquisition rate
2.  Customer churn rate
3.  Conversion rate
4. Cart abandonment rate
5. Direct traffic
6. Pages per visit
7. Average resolution time
8. Campaign ROI
9. Net Promoter Score
10.  Customer Satisfaction Score

Types of CXM Tools You Can Use

1 Survey & form builders

Collecting user feedback at the point of interaction is a key part of improving the customer experience. For example, right after a support chat is terminated, the customer should be asked how their experience was so you get real-time feedback.

Achieving this is easy today because of third-party survey and form builder tools that are readily available to be used out of the box. You can create Net Promoter Score surveys to get product/service feedback, Market Fit surveys, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, and more.

2 Use a helpdesk for omnichannel experiences and great support

We mentioned the need for an omnichannel experience earlier. Customers should be given the option of reaching your brand through multiple channels and these channels need to deliver a seamless and continuous experience. The challenge with this is management – managing different channels, conversations, etc. That’s where a helpdesk comes in handy.

Helpdesks have modules like social channel integration, a ticketing system, an email platform, a shared inbox, and so on that help brands manage all their channels and conversations in one location.

Implementing a helpdesk gives you an added advantage. It enhances the customer support processes. The ticketing system, for example, helps the team keep track of all queries and solve them based on priority. It also helps customers keep track of their issues and get updates on the resolution.

Great customer support has a massive impact on customer experience.

Source

There are many helpdesks available that you can use on a subscription basis, like Hiver, Zendesk, Freshworks, etc. They deliver a fully functional platform for a subscription enabling you to get started with omnichannel right from the get-go.

3 Content Management Systems

The content on your online site is what customers interact with first. They turn to it to get the information they need before continuing with their journey. Content should be tailored for relevance, and add value to the reader, and the customer.

This is also how search engines rank sites – based on relevance to the user. Whether you’re launching a podcast, writing educational blog articles, or sharing posts on social media, it’s important to be relevant to potential prospects.

Content Management Systems like WordPress, Shopify, and Drupal are easy to use and give you a host of plugins/apps that can be used to enhance the content being published.

WordPress, for example, has SEO plugins like Yoast and SEOPress that give content creators great insights into their SEO score by analyzing the content against the keywords they wish to rank.

The USP of CMS platforms, however, is the ease of use. Businesses can create, publish, and modify content faster and this allows them to put out more content more frequently to help their customers.

Conclusion

Implementing a CXM framework and purchasing supporting tools is going to be worthwhile. It will help enhance customer experience which will, in turn, increase your customer acquisition rate and retention rate, both of which greatly increase revenue.

Having a strategy for CXM helps your brand deliver great CX, consistently.

Consistency in delivering a good experience is as important as the experience itself, especially in today’s digital era.

The post The Complete Guide to Customer Experience Management in 2024 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Looking to improve your support team’s ticket management?

Unlock your support team’s potential and deliver exceptional customer service with these 8 expert tips for ticket management. When you’re an early-stage startup or you’ve just launched support for a new product, you tend to focus on each support interaction.

Replying to your customers in a friendly and helpful way—while solving their problems—is the most direct way to provide that great experience. And it works.

For a while.

Past a certain size, your support ticket queue becomes its own beast. Some people describe it as an “enormous, gelatinous, sticky, messy blob” or “25,000 Jack Russell terriers with their heads stuck in paper sacks.”

Seem like an exaggeration? You’d be surprised (or maybe not, if you’ve been in support for long enough). 

As your business grows, your support queue can morph into something that’s overwhelming, all-consuming, and out of control. But with the right ticket management methods in place, it can provide clarity, priorities, direction, and that great feeling of a job well done at the end of the day. 

It’s important to get this right, because delivering a great customer experience has wide-reaching positive consequences for your business, ranging from better customer retention to more referrals to increased revenue. In fact, an NPS Promoter score has a customer lifetime value that’s 600%-1,400% higher than a Detractor.

How ticket management influences customer support

We (humans) tend to assume that workload is static. 

If it takes 10 minutes to answer a ticket, that’s just how long it takes. It would take the same 10 minutes regardless of when you’re answering, what you might have done before, or what you need to do after. That’s just what it takes to do the job, right? 

Wrong. 

Bad ticket management reinforces this lesson like nothing else. 

At its core, ticket management is about organizing and prioritizing customer support tickets. The goal is to manage the flow of the ticket from the moment it’s created to the point it’s resolved. Reducing and optimizing the steps involved makes all the difference. 

Here’s an example: Say a ticket gets reassigned repeatedly. Each time it’s reassigned, someone has to open it, read it, think about it, and reassign it. That’s all wasted time. 
Better ticket queue management leads to better customer service, reduced response times, higher customer satisfaction, and a more productive customer service team.

8 ways to improve your support team’s ticket management

The good news is there are a lot of easy wins when it comes to ticket management. 

Here are 8 ways to streamline your queue today:

1. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize!
2. Create the minimum necessary views
3. Agree on a standardized workflow
4. Automate as much as possible
5. Create a triage role
6. Maintain a good overview
7. Make the queue motivating
8. Keep experimenting!

1. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize!

Ticket management starts with setting good priorities. 

Many companies use the first in, first out (FIFO) method with great success. It’s a simple and easy way to prioritize: whoever contacts you first gets answered first.

But it’s not the only way to approach your support tickets. Other options you should consider include:

• Giving higher value customers preferential treatment. Customers that pay for a higher tier plan get a faster response. 
• Treating some types of issues as more urgent than others. For example, if a customer experiences a failed payment, this could be a higher priority than a “how-to” question. 
• Allowing customers to select the urgency when they create the ticket. This often works best if you offer a business-critical service. 

You can also mix and match these approaches. Perhaps higher value customers get prioritized, but a payment issue always gets bumped to the top of your queue, regardless of who it’s from. 

93% of customers will likely make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. The difficulty is in defining what that excellent customer service looks like for your customers, then consistently delivering it. 

2. Create the minimum necessary views

You’ve probably heard of the principle “as little as possible, as much as necessary.” It’s traditionally used in agriculture, but it’s also a good principle for support.

It’s much easier to manage your support queue if you have one view. Everyone in the team always works in the same view when they’re working on tickets. 

Why? Because every additional view reduces focus, creates distractions, and makes it feel like you’re playing whack-a-mole. Your team has to spread their attention and switch focus every time they switch a view. 

So while minimizing views is wise, there will be reasons you need multiple views: for different types of tickets, different categories of customers, or to separate urgent cases from the rest. All of these allow for some level specialization. Specialization increases efficiency, as long as your team is clear on what they should be focused on.
Every support team has its sweet spot when it comes to ticket views. What’s yours?

3. Agree on a standardized workflow

A standardized workflow defines how every person works on tickets. You can agree on some ground rules within the team, such as:

• Avoid cherry-picking
• Answer assigned tickets first (or last, or in the same order as the main queue).
• Every person can freely hand off one ticket to someone else that day if they’re struggling or frustrated.
• Clean up all open tickets before going on vacation.
• Leave notes describing your findings when you do in-depth investigation or testing.

Defining these rules as a team creates a sense of shared commitment and responsibility, making the queue easier to manage.

4. Automate as much as possible

Automation reduces human error and saves massive amounts of time. 

In the context of ticket management, automation usually refers to automatic ticket categorization, tagging, or prioritization. It can also include auto-replies, reminders sent to your team, or pushed certain tickets to the top of the queue (e.g. when a ticket approaches your SLA). 

Automation can also extend out to things like macros, chatbots, and more. While some tools—like chatbots—aren’t technically managing your queue, each time they help your customers self-service, that’s one less ticket you’ll see in your queue. 
When your queue is automatically prioritized, sorted, and streamlined, your team can focus their energy on responding to customers.

5. Create a triage role

Did you know that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as essential or very important when they have a customer service question? And 60% of those customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. 

Even if you can’t usually deliver that response time for all tickets, you can create systems that ensure at least some of your customers have that experience. 

One way to do that—while organizing the queue efficiently—is to have a triage role. 

The triage role typically involves:

• Reviewing and prioritizing incoming support requests.
• Categorizing them based on their type and level of urgency (if this isn’t automated).
• Assigning tickets to the right team members. 
• Solving any tickets that can be answered quickly with a macro.
• Identifying new issues or bugs that only emerge now.

An effective ticket triaging process can deliver a near immediate response for simple customer issues, while also shortening the wait time for the rest of your customer base.

6. Maintain a good overview

The power of a good dashboard in enabling ticket management cannot be overstated.

Whether you use a dashboard or find a way to do this inside your helpdesk, maintaining a good overview of the queue makes a huge difference to your team’s ability to organize their work. 

Everyone on your team should know: 

• The size of the queue
• The incoming ticket volume for that day (or week)
• How many tickets were answered that day
• The distribution of open tickets based on status, such as the number of on-hold or pending tickets

Having this overview makes it easier for the team as a whole to keep track of the queue and manage their priorities accordingly.

7. Make the queue motivating

Let’s be honest: working in a ticket queue is a Sisyphean task. 

If you’re not familiar with Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was punished by the gods. His punishment? To push a huge boulder up a hill for all eternity. Each time he neared the top, the boulder would roll back down and he’d have to begin all over. 

The support queue never ends. You can answer all the tickets, hit inbox zero…but wait a few minutes and new tickets will always appear. Working in customer support is hardest when the whole team works like mad, but the ticket backlog just doesn’t budge because the incoming volume is equally as high. 

Focusing on motivation can dramatically change how your team manages this never-ending ticket workload. Here are some surprisingly reliable examples:

• Set goals for the team. Setting ambitious, achievable goals is an extremely effective way to rally and motivate your team. If incoming volume is high, it might be good to set a goal of answered tickets—because that’s one thing that’s within your team’s control.
• Celebrate goal achievement. Throw a party. Buy everyone lunch. Create a little firework animation in your helpdesk if you achieve a weekly goal. Big or small, celebrating wins encourages hard work. 
• Have a visual representation of progress, such as a progress bar on your dashboard. It may seem like a small addition, but it helps keep the team focused and on task. 

Another way to make sure the queue doesn’t get draining is to give your team tasks that are not ticket-related.

It might sound counterintuitive to say you can improve your ticket management by reducing the time your team spends in the queue, but people need variety to perform at their best. 74% of all customer support team members experience burnout throughout their careers. Queue fatigue is a big driver of that burnout.

8. Keep experimenting!

Ticket management is a never-ending experiment. 

As your team and company grow, your process will change. Your ticket volume will ebb and flow. Some methods might work great for now, but they’ll need tweaking at other times. That’s why you have to keep experimenting. 

Give your team regular opportunities to take stock of your current system. Explore what’s working and what isn’t. Listen to their feedback.

Experiment with different specialized techniques to tackle specific problems:

• Filter out some tickets to reply to later. When you’re working efficiently, some tickets might take the wind out of your sails and slow you down. These are often very long or complex tickets. Dealing with these separately can keep your team in the zone. 

• Batch bug reports. It’s easier to notice if a new bug crops up when those tickets are handled as a batch. This can make identifying bugs much faster and decrease the effort of testing. 

• Assign specialized roles for some periods. If your team often struggles to answer some types of tickets, assigning them might make a huge difference. These could be old(er) tickets that everyone avoids, or tickets from certain channels (like social media). 

• Hide the queue. Most helpdesks offer a feature like Zendesk’s “Guided mode” that allows you to hide the whole queue so your team can only see the tickets they need to work on. This is a great way to handle stressful situations. 

• Use round-robin ticket assignment. Round-robin assignment means assigning a ticket to each agent randomly until they have the same number of tickets. If you need to combat cherry-picking and want to improve knowledge across the team, this can be a great tactic. 

Great ticket management unlocks your team’s productivity

setting up the queue in a way that works for them.

As a support leader, giving your team the tools they need to provide an amazing customer experience should be priority number one. Managing the queue may be a never-ending challenge, but improving your ticket management is one tool that can transform your entire support team.

The post Ticket Management: 8 Game-changing Tips from Support Experts appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses approach customer engagement and experience.

AI-powered solutions are, and shaping a new era of personalized, seamless, and efficient interactions.

In this article, we will explore how AI is revolutionizing these crucial aspects of business, delving into the innovative tools and technologies that are empowering companies to better understand, anticipate, and cater to their customer’s unique needs and preferences. Let’s dive into how AI transforms the customer experience and all factors that influence it.

The following are a few examples of how AI technology has been redefining customer service.

1. Amazon: Amazon’s AI chatbots are trained to understand natural language and are perfectly capable of answering common customer questions and handling simple queries.  The chatbots can intelligently escalate queries to a human customer service representative if a customer’s issue cannot be resolved.
2. Uber: Uber’s platform leverages AI in its customer service segment to offer effective chatbot assistance with various requests.  Uber’s AI-powered service can automatically check for ride status, update customer payment information and resolve queries with rides.
3. Apple: Apple’s AI-powered Siri helps customers with an array of tasks that include information searches, setting reminders, and making phone calls.  Apple leverages AI tech in its Genius Bar appointment system.  Through machine learning algorithms, Apple predicts wait times in order to effectively optimize headcount.  
4. Airbnb: Airbnb applied AI to provide highly tailored recommendations to customers based on their searches and preferences.   

This article explores how online businesses can leverage digital marketing software that is powered by AI to deliver better customer experience.

How is AI Redefining Customer Engagement & Customer Experience?

Attention to customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty is important to maintain high customer engagement.  A well-executed marketing strategy that is built around customer engagement delivers higher revenues and business growth.  

Proper and consistent monitoring and measurement of customer engagement levels provide great feedback to spot areas for improvement.  For example, low levels of customer engagement highlight areas for improvement such as customer service, product quality, or marketing efforts. Customer engagement is a powerful measure that drives businesses to produce what customers expect.

As a result, businesses stand out from their competition and thrive in a highly competitive market.  AI technology improves consumer engagement as it enables more interactivity and personalized content.  As described below, AI is contributing to many different segments of digital marketing software built around the enhancement of customer engagement.  

AI Content Writers

AI-powered writing software opens up a whole new world of opportunities for customization and personalization of your content. 

AI-powered content writers are applied to generate content that is specifically targeted toward the preferences of your audience. Take control of your content and build highly attractive text for your audience with the power of AI. Make your blog stand out with catchy and intriguing headlines that will capture the attention of the right audience. 

A next-generation version of AI Content Writers is capable of generating SEO-optimised long-form content so it can rank on top of search engines like Google and Bing. This makes your website more visible and highly accessible to the audience.  The AI-powered software will also automatically link the generated content with other relevant material/articles on your website. 

This will encourage visitors to engage and spend more time on your website.  The above features make the process of content generation highly cost-efficient and scalable for your business.  

AI content writers work seamlessly with chatbots and virtual assistants as well. Customers can expect highly personalized responses to their queries, taking customer engagement to the next level. Asking chatbots about a particular product will return responses based on specific preferences.  Virtual assistants can recommend other products/colors/sizes that may be more suitable for you.  You should consider AI content writers as part of your plan to automate AI customer service.  

Overall, AI content writers work well with descriptive content but are not yet mature enough to be able to generate a subjective narrative e.g. reviews, comparisons, etc.  If applied in this context, make sure to double-check the generated content.  

Tip for support managers:

Struggling to create flawless support emails? Let smart AI tools come to help you, or explore Nicereply’s free resource with the most common support phrases.

AI Video Generators 

AI video generators are new additions to AI-powered software that use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze consumer preferences and other data.  This tool creates customized video content in a fraction of the time taken to produce video content in a studio.  AI technology empowers you to build video content from a text or image source, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

The following are a few examples of how to use AI video generators to build the most creative videos for highly personalized customer experiences.

1. How have you been promoting the use case for your product so far?  With video generators, you can now create animated explainer videos to promote your product and educate your visitors.  Engage your visitors and build better customer experiences with animated explainer videos.
2. Do you want to focus your marketing on product demonstrations? Use video generators to show a visual representation of how to use your product/service, showcasing the main features and benefits to the end customer.
3. Do you have a strong following on social media? Build creative social media videos to capture the attention of existing and prospective followers with eye-catching animations, text overlays, and other tricks.  
4. Have you considered virtual tours for your product/service? Visualization through virtual tours is highly relevant for real estate museums and other locations. Use video generators to create highly engaging virtual tours on websites or social media platforms and create customer experiences like never before.  Do you want to be more creative?  Use video generators to immerse your users into never experienced simulations e.g. Jurassic era or a Viking warzone and place your product/service accordingly.  
5. Take customer interactions to a whole new level with AI video generators by building human-like avatars to deliver a personalized virtual service. Use this technology to convert customer experience pain points into competitive advantages.

The possibilities with AI video generators are endless.  As the technology for video generators continues to evolve, we will see improved customer engagement with more personality and character that will make them look more human.  

Tip for support managers:

Particularly in customer service, incorporating video can be a powerful aid in resolving difficult situations, providing much-needed clarity and guidance to clients who may be uncertain about their next steps. Don’t hesitate to harness the capabilities of AI tools within your help center either. 

AI Picture Generators  

AI picture generators create highly personalized and interactive out-of-the-box visuals (images, 3D models, drawings, paintings, digital art). They help in successfully engaging customers based on their tastes and individualized interests.  

Amongst other use cases (e.g. creating unique artistic work at scale), AI picture generators are extremely useful for businesses with a strong demand for visual content, some good examples are:

1. DALL-E: Developed by OpenAI, DALL-E can generate creative and novel images from textual descriptions, producing a wide range of illustrations, designs, and artwork based on user input.

2. NVIDIA GauGAN: This AI-powered tool by NVIDIA enables users to create realistic landscape images by converting simple sketches or drawings into detailed, photorealistic scenes.
3. RunwayML: A platform that allows users to experiment with various AI models, including image synthesis and style transfer, to generate artistic images or transform existing ones.
4. DeepArt.io: By using neural style transfer techniques, DeepArt.io allows users to turn their photos into artwork inspired by famous artists or styles.
5. Artbreeder: A collaborative AI platform where users can create, explore, and share new images by blending existing ones, generating unique visuals through a process akin to genetic breeding.

AI Text-to-speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology translates written text into spoken words that can be used for virtual assistance.  It can also be added to accessibility features for visually impaired audiences.  This new tech brings a whole new dimension of accessibility, automation, personalization and entertainment that increases customer satisfaction and engagement. The following are a few examples on how to apply AI text-to-speech to your customer service.

TTS technology enables businesses to create voice-enabled virtual assistants with interactive voice response (IVR) systems, rendering highly realistic interactions with customers.

1. Do you operate a 24/7 customer support team? Try AI text-to-speech and provide basic but personalized customer support services during off-peak hours with pre-recorded messages.
2. Draft scripts in different languages and easily convert them to speech. This gives you access to a wider audience and improves customer engagement.
3. Use AI text-to-speech technology to greet your customers when visiting your website or engaging with customer service. Tailor your AI to greet customers by name and add a personalized touch to your service.
4. Upgrade your AI chatbots to create personalized messages for different cases. As an example, you can respond to a customer’s call querying a product through a tailored pre-recorded message. 
5. Use AI text-to-speech and build scripts for an interactive voice response system. This helps your customers access your website more easily, improving overall customer experience.

AI Autopost

AI auto post uses AI technology to post tailored content on social platforms. The tool is used for post-scheduling, creating and publishing content, and predictive analysis of consumer needs and engagement.  AI auto-posts are also used to interact with platform users without the need for human input.   How can AI auto-post be used to improve customer engagement?

1. Try AI auto-post to personalize the content of your posts. The recommendations of this tool are based on customer information that includes interests, purchasing, and browsing history.
2. Use AI auto post to schedule effective and timely posting of content when customers are actively online. 
3. Integrate AI auto-post to your chat service and build trust and engagement with your customers with programmed customer response in real time.  
4. Build better content with insights and analytics on customers provided by AI auto-post.   
5. Engage with your customer proactively and start conversations by asking questions or giving tailored suggestions with AI auto-post.

As highlighted above, AI auto-post is all about communicating the proper content with your customers promptly.  If you are a business with a focus on social media marketing, then this tool is a great asset to have to communicate more effectively with your audience.

Tips for support managers:

Learn how automation and AI let you be more personal with customers and not sound like a robot. Check out Nicereply’s free resource.

AI Graphics

AI graphics technology brings innovation to the field of virtual graphics by creating highly realistic and immersive graphics and interactive digital media. Here are some interesting use cases that can make your business’s customer service experiences more pleasant.

AI graphics technology is highly useful to design virtual assistants with human-like features and behavior. Make customer interactions with your customer support more engaging and natural. It is recommended to use this technology in conjunction with other AI services mentioned above to ensure that the ‘human look’ of the virtual assistant is complemented by human-like interaction.

Another interesting recommendation to put AI graphics into practice is to use them to build an effective visual search tool engine. Enabling visual search for your customers gives them the option to upload an image of a product they are looking for. In return, the AI graphics system processes the information to identify the product and provide relevant results. Overall, this brings a new form of searching for a product on your website that is more pleasant and seamless.

AI graphics are highly useful in enhancing customer engagement in areas where the visual element is predominant (e.g. youtube advert). AI graphics tools are not particularly useful in other areas where the form of customer engagement involves text or sounds (e.g. articles & blog content).

Conclusion

As AI technology evolves, smaller businesses should start looking at how this powerful technology can be applied to other strategies to ignite business growth.  In the above, we have looked at the many use cases for AI-powered tools to ignite customer engagement and improve customer experience.

As a small business with a limited budget, you may feel overly cautious about trusting AI technology with your current processes. However, try to use specific feedback tools such as pop-up surveys to cross-check the effectiveness of AI-powered decisions. Remember that customer feedback is crucial if you want to optimize the AI strategy that best fits your business.

The post How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Learn how to set goals for your customer service team so you can retain more, churn less, increase loyalty, and drive greater customer satisfaction.

The right goals for customer service can make or break your relationship with your customer. But, knowing that, regardless of the industry, every company has the need to meet customer expectations, can lead to ensuring you’re able to set customer service goals that matter.

Look at Amazon, for example. They operated at a loss for years in order to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet. And they were able to do so because they were laser focused on keeping the customer at the center of everything they did.

The same holds true whether you’re a solopreneur, mom-and-pop business, startup, or member of the Fortune 500.

Without satisfied customers, you’ll be dead in the water.

Customers are the lifeblood of your organization. As a result, you’ll want to best determine how to:

• Bring in new customers
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Create customer loyalty
• Increase customer retention rate

But, where do you start?

High-quality customer service. Yep, having excellent customer service skills is a surefire way of achieving exactly what you want. There is no better marketing or retention tactic than giving your customers exactly what you said you would.

Only better.

But that’s easier said than done. How do you even accomplish this?

Goals.

Setting the correct goals for your customer service representatives has more impact on your outcomes than anything else. With the right goals in place, your team knows what they’re striving for. They have a north star.

I’m going to show you how to set goals for customer service that actually matter. We’re going to set (and achieve) the right customer support and customer service objectives for your company. Your SMART goals.

If this seems a little vague, don’t worry. We’ll dive into SMART goals for customer service representatives below.

What Is A SMART Goal In Customer Service?

Setting a general customer service goal like “improve net promoter score” is relatively easy. However, the goal needs to be easily understood and attainable.

This can be difficult. By having SMART goals, your customer service objectives are much more realistic. You give your customer service teams something better to focus on and you form the most significant part of your customer service strategy. Customer service team goals become:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Time-Bound

It’s worth diving into some practical examples of this and how you can achieve success.

Why You Need To Set Customer Service Goals

Before diving into some practical examples of a SMART goal for customer service, it’s worth digging into their importance of them.

A SMART goal offers multiple advantages to you and your customer service team, including:

• Manage Team Performance – Goals give you a benchmark for how your team performs, letting you better manage their performance. You’ll see if your customer service team is going above and beyond or falling short.
• Aligning Actions – Goals give everyone something specific to work toward. Since these will be the same goals for everyone, it aligns everyone’s efforts and makes your business run more smoothly.

• Improves Customer Service – Perhaps the most obvious benefit of customer service goals, you’ll see improvement in your team’s overall performance. You’ll have happier, more loyal customers that buying from you more often. I can’t stress enough the impact a loyal customer will have on the health of your company.

But, where do you even start?

Follow the example of those around you. That’s right, you don’t have to be a trailblazer.

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” – Anonymous

Borrow from the example set by those that have the resources to test and iterate. Obviously, you can set your own customer service goals, but there are multiple examples of goals that companies like Chik-Fil-A and Zappos have laid out and successfully executed.

We’ll break them down so they can show you how to set customer service goals that actually matter. By the end of this, all you’ll need to do is set the impact areas that you want to test.

5 Customer Service Goal Examples

1. Better Customer Advocacy

Have you built and nurtured relationships with your customers? Would they recommend your business to others? Would they advocate for you? If none of these are the case, then it’s one of the more important customer service goals you’ll need to strive for.

The better you can do this, the more likely it is you’ll bring in new customers. You can improve this in multiple ways, with improving customer satisfaction rates being one of the more notable.

Chik-Fil-A has led the fast food industry in customer advocacy for 8 years in a row. 8 years!!

Their commitment to customer satisfaction is shown in this viral video (more than 4M views) of a cashier chasing a car to ensure they received their correct meal.

I’m not saying you need to be a track star chasing down your customers just to say “have a good day”. But, you should go the extra mile to improve customer advocacy.

If I wanted to make make “Improve customer advocacy” a SMART goal, it may look something like:

• Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 1 pt by converting 3% of our passive users (NPS: 30-70) to promoters (NPS: 70-100) within 3-months.

2. Boost Satisfaction Rates

How satisfied are your customers with your business? Do they walk away from every interaction feeling they received what they were looking for? If not, did they at least feel like they were heard and their concerns will be addressed? If you can answer yes to either of these, then your customer service agents are already doing well.

That doesn’t mean your customers are as satisfied as they could be, however.

Conduct customer surveys to get feedback about your business and figure out how happy they are with your business. If this is less than optimal, you can find ways to address the problems your customers have. These same customer surveys can help to find areas where you can improve.

The key is to actually use the customer feedback you receive.

WalletHub ranks Geico as the highest-rated insurance for customer satisfaction. This is a blend of customer service, affordability, and coverage, amongst other factors.

Maybe you’ll want to improve customer satisfaction through a loyalty discount or, rather than waiting for them to reach out to your support reps, you have your customer success team check in first.

You’ll have improved customer retention before you know it, so make sure your customer service department focuses on it.

If I wanted to make make “boosting satisfaction rates” a SMART goal, it may look something like:

• Improve New Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) by 20% within the first 3 weeks of signing up for our service. We’ll accomplish this by the end of H1.

3. Reduce Waiting Times

There are few things more frustrating than being asked to “hold for just a moment” for the third time when chatting with a rep. Speed is vital when you’re dealing with customers.

We live in a time where convenience is king and our attention spans are just over 8 seconds. By speeding up your response time and reducing waiting times, you make the customer experience much more pleasant.

Don’t just focus on getting a customer service agent to respond quickly, though. Make sure your employees are properly equipped to deal with any potential problems that may arise.

Zappos recognized that this is a vital part of the customer experience. They continue to lead the way with customer service reps that respond nearly instantly whether you’re communicating via chat, email, or phone.

Each of your customer service representative should make this an essential part of their customer appreciation strategy. Having a better response time will lead to a more consistent customer experience and have a significant impact on your customer churn rate.

If I wanted to make make “create a positive customer experience through reduced wait times” a SMART goal, it may look something like:

• Improve individual emails per hour (EPH) from 6.7 to 7.4 by the end of October.

4. Lower Cost-Per-Contact

Cost-per-contact is one of the significant key performance indicators to focus on when running your business. Aim to have this as low as possible so you can make a profit out of each sale your company makes. If you’re able to reduce the operating expenses associated with customer service, then your team can point to ways that they’re improving the overall health of the company.

To figure out your cost-per-contact, add up your company’s entire costs. From salaries to software, everything should be included in this. Divide the total by the number of customer contacts you can handle.

Split this into different categories. For example, evaluating chat vs. email vs. in-person support vs. phone will help you to determine the most cost-effective strategies. Once you understand this, you’ll be able to implement the right touchpoints based on the tier of the client, effectively lowering your cost-per-contact.

If I wanted to make make “lower the company cost-per-contact” a SMART goal, it may look something like:

• Integrate chatbots and move 100% of our free plan users to an automated responder that links back to the correct knowledge base articles for their needs by the end of the year.

5. Increase Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a vital part of a company’s success and customer service can have as much of an impact on it as the quality of the product.

We’ve all heard that it costs more to acquire new customers than to retain existing customers. Well, we’re talking 5X more. This is significant and it’s the reason that Amazon continues to sit at the throne of customer loyalty. A strong customer loyalty strategy encourages customers to buy from you again and again, turning them into repeat and more profitable customers.

Take a customer-centric approach to encourage them to keep coming back. You can achieve this by having your customer service team offer tremendous value to your customers. The more they give, the more they get.

Take the time to show you appreciate them. There are a number of ways to do this. If they buy from you online, for example, take the time to send them a follow-up email thanking them for the purchase. You can automate this to reduce the amount of time it takes while still seeing the benefits.

You’ll end up with a larger, more loyal customer base over it.

If I wanted to make make “increase customer loyalty” a SMART goal, it may look something like:

• Increase return purchases by 15% within 60 days of original purchase. We will accomplish this in the next 6-months.

How To Set Your Own Customer Service Goals

The above are meant as guidelines. However, evaluate your team and your customers to determine how best to come up with customer service goals that fit your needs. Build a strategy by following these great examples of customer service goals.

SMART customer service goals are an effective and practical way of improving the customer experience.

Follow the strategy letter by letter. Empower your team by involving them in the process. Be specific with what you want to achieve.

• Make the goals achievable (but, not easy).
• Make each goal time-bound.
• Make sure each deadline is realistic for your overall goal and that your customer support team doesn’t feel disheartened or defeated before beginning.

Focus on customer service goals and improve them gradually. With the entire team working on them, good customer service is well within your reach.

Summing Up

Improving customer service is critical for any business to succeed and grow. Your customers are the lifeblood of your company. By setting SMART goals for customer service, you can develop a practical plan to improve your overall customer satisfaction rates.

Whether it’s boosting satisfaction rates, lowering cost-per-contact, reducing wait times, or anything in-between, focusing on the right goals makes sure your team is aligned and working toward solutions that will drive the results your company needs. 

The post How to Set Goals for Customer Service that Actually Matter appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.