“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000.”
This quote by Jeff Bezos might not be the most positive to start this article with, but who are we kidding? We all know how powerful word of mouth is, especially when it is combined with the internet. The numbers escalate very quickly to hundreds, thousands or millions.
In this new era, your customers will leave you within the snap of a finger if you fail to meet their expectations. Which puts you in a position where you are in a constant race with yourself, and with the other players in the market. Due to this reason, we have realized we cannot let that happen to you. So a post about the customer support tools a company needs to adapt in order to not be left behind by its customers was a clear choice for us.
The Evolution of Customer Support
Have we always been in such a race? When we look back in time, we realize how customer support has changed its shape through generations. Answering phone calls to writing emails back and forth, and eventually to chatting with customers on social media. The race was always there. But now with the technology advancing exponentially and AI making its way into our lives, it got a lot faster.
Businesses cannot get away with being present on online platforms anymore. They also need to be available 24/7 to support their customers who seek instant gratification. If this sounds extreme, just think about your life. Don’t you expect everything to run smoothly? You don’t want to wait for a page to load. If it’s not up and running in a second, you close the page and switch to another one. This is how impatient we all are. Now more than ever.
Today’s reality is the reason why customer support operators are under so much pressure. They should be quick but personal enough to connect customers and brands on a deeper emotional level.
If your business is growing and so are your incoming customer requests, you must be feeling the pain. We know, it is hard to be a high performer in today’s world. Which is why we need a solution that would help us achieve our goals, and keep our support staff from having nightmares. In other words, the right customer support tools.
The Need for State-of-the-art Customer Service
Great customer service comes with many benefits. But what makes it great? The secret is optimizing customer support with state-of-the-art solutions and digitizing through technologies that allow smarter and faster results.
Many companies already offer such digital services to delight their customers with the latest technology. Which means businesses that still haven’t mastered instant messaging or social media, are in trouble. If they want to survive on the market, they will have to learn these accustomed digital customer support tools, and fast!
So, if you don’t know if you have the right strategy for your customer support, we are here for you. We created a checklist of features to make your solution the best it can be.
Live Chat
The first step towards digitizing your business is live chat. As we use messaging more than any other mean of communication, it’s only natural for businesses to establish connections with their customers via text.
In fact, companies using live chat increase their sales by 51% thanks to immediate and customized support. This is not a surprise, as many people with busy schedules prefer online shopping during working hours via live chats. It’s simple and it takes very little time. It’s the perfect solution.
Some Tools for You
There are many live chat solutions on the market for you to choose from. Some, such as LiveChat offer strictly just live chat services. Others, like EngageBay, Botsify, LiveAgent, and MobileMonkey, give you a choice to use the live chat together with chatbots. We mention the AI integration in your live chat for a plethora of reasons, but the most important one is automation.
The Use of Chatbots
Many companies are either using or planning to use chatbots to create customer loyalty through interactive self-service. In fact, Gartner projects that by the year 2020, 85% of all customer service interactions will be handled by chatbots!
Soon enough, chatbots will be the new standard, and businesses that do not follow suit, will be out of the market in the next 10 years. So, the sooner you start using chatbots, the higher chances you will have for a competitive edge in the market.
The customer perspective
Almost 70% of customers leave businesses due to poor customer service. They want the information they need without a hassle, and they do not want to queue for who knows how long just to talk to someone. This is exactly why they (and you) need chatbots! Chatbots are available 24/7 and provide instant support that meets customers’ expectations spot-on, ensuring a high level of satisfaction, which means that chatbots are the perfect customers support tools.
Remember the race? AI assistants are capable of resolving up to 80% of chat sessions, and they can manage multiple sessions at once. It is, of course, a big bonus if your chatbot also uses machine learning technology. Those who do can be trained to adapt to conversations so they recognize patterns. With each interaction, they become better and more human, providing a smooth experience for your user with optimal results.
The business perspective
From the business perspective, chatbots allow you to allocate resources to more important tasks that require human expertise. By automating their response to repetitive inquiries such as FAQ’s, you can speed up and scale your customer service, which again makes them the perfect customer support tools.
Another strategy would be implementing a chatbot that helps your customers by giving them options. Having buttons not only saves you time in training but also helps you measure their responses. For example, you could easily track which problems were faced the most. You could then work on optimizing that specific issue and increase your customer satisfaction ratio. In turn, your happy customers become recurring customers, that are very likely to recommend you to their friends.
However, these solutions are for simple complaints, as chatbots are not yet able to respond to complex customer requests well enough. Which is why you should see them as an assistant to your support staff. In other words, chatbots are an excellent addition to your team but don’t forget that they still need supervision.
Some Tools for You
Just like live chat, there are many companies providing chatbot solutions, like Botsify, LiveAgent, and MobileMonkey, to name a few. Before you choose though, make sure you do your research. Some of them offer more diverse features than others.
Different Platforms
Communication channels are a crucial block in your business plan which is why you need to know where to find your target group, and how. You need to take that under consideration when choosing the right chatbot solution. Some services, such as MobileMonkey are available on only one platform.
If you are a startup, this may be enough, and you would use the chatbot on a channel relevant for your users. However, if you are a larger company, your wide audience prefers interacting on different platforms. Then, you might want to tap into all of those to increase your reach with a tool like LiveAgent.
Ready vs. Self-Built
Another differentiator is whether you want to build your own bot or use an already-built one. With companies like MobileMonkey, you can deploy simple AIs even if you are not a programmer. In fact, you do not need to code at all.
But, if you want a more capable AI, let’s say one that uses machine learning and adapts to conversations, you may want a more complex solution. In this case, it is better to use tools like Dialogflow. Dialogflow APIs are provided for free by Google, and they enable you to quickly and easily create and train agents based on your needs.
Conversation Take-over
So far it’s clear that we love chatbots, but sadly, they still can’t completely replace human interactions. Therefore, seamlessly taking over the conversation is the key to the best customer experience. Dialogflow, for example, does not allow you to interact with your customers. But others, such as MobileMonkey and Botsify do. And they promise an easy agent take-over which doesn’t interfere with the flow of the conversation.
So the question now is what to do? Which service do you choose? Do you go with door number one or door number two? Well, our answer is, why not both?
Integrations
Digitizing your customer support is not easy, as you may end up using ten different applications at once. That is why many companies struggle with multitasking between tabs to stay on track with their customer inquiries. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to manage everything from only one platform?
Customer Relations Management
The ticketing system is what makes or breaks your customer service while you are growing your customer base. By creating tickets, you prioritize tasks and easily assign them to others in your team. This way, you keep track of all requests regardless of the channels they come from. Email, chat, or social media, all at the same place.
Thus, integrating programs like Zendesk or AgileCRM are crucial for your business, and are important criteria when choosing the right bot.
Easy transition from web to mobile
When you are in front your computer, it’s easy to keep an eye on your customers. But, in order to stay in touch with them on the go, you may want to choose a solution that allows you to answer them through your phone. This is why some services provide apps for both Android and iOS that connect you with your customers.
Reports and Analytics
Last but not least, it is important to analyze, track and measure important metrics from your customer support and take actions to optimize them. Tools like LiveChat, LiveAgent, and MobileMonkey provide analysis which you can use to have an overview of the number of requests coming in, as well as the support agents’ performance.
The tool with all the answers
Making the right choice may feel overwhelming, as it affects your business’s future in so many ways. But what if we tell you we found a solution that ticks all the boxes on our list? So, instead of you looking at your options like Homer does in this picture, why don’t we save you from the paradox of choice.
After doing our research, we have found Kommunicate, a tool that provides you with all the necessary features. More than that, you can find the perfect balance between automated and personalized support. So as promised at the beginning of the article Kommunicate is the answer to which customer support tools your company needs to adapt.
Next Level Live Chat
First off, Kommunicate provides you with more than just a live chat solution with its next-level chat software. From your personal dashboard, Kommunicate allows you to collect contact information and create a lead base. At the same time, you can reach out to users directly with personalized responses.
To automate and optimize the customer support services, Kommunicate also makes use of contextual triggers that help users on specific pages. Moreover, the tool allows the integration on FAQ pages so your customers can quickly access it and get help when needed, without interacting with your agents.
Moreover, Kommunicate also provides a CRM app to keep businesses in touch with their customers on the go. The app gives you quick access to your customer support live chat so you can take over whenever needed, from your phone.
Chatbot integration
When it comes to chatbots, Kommunicate has three solutions. The first and simplest solution is integrating Liz into your live chat function. Liz is an AI-based FAQ bot, there to help your customers with useful articles while giving them the human feel of the conversation. So, instead of having your users scroll through a boring FAQ page, you have Liz!
The second solution is asking Kommunicate to build you a bot. This option is perfect if you don’t have the resources to build and train your own bot, as the Kommunicate team does it for you.
However, if you do have a bot already, you can choose the third solution and integrate it instead. This way you have complete control over its training while benefiting from the rest of the Kommunicate services.
Integrations
Kommunicate understands perfectly how difficult it is to efficiently manage your customer support while using multiple other applications. Which is why it allows Zendesk and Agile CRM integration for easy ticketing, Clearbit to build your lead base, and Helpdocs to import your own FAQs. In other words, an entire suit to help you be the best at customer services.
Reports and Analytics
All your efforts may lead to very little if you don’t have an overview of your support activities. Kommunicate provides a simple to use analytics panel that helps you optimize response resolution time, monitor agents’ performance and constantly improve.
Customer support to your customer support
Kommunicate stole our heart for many reasons. But most importantly, they have always been by our side whenever we needed assistance. They lead by example and show you how to make your customers happy, by making you happy. Through your dashboard, you can reach out to their team any time, and you will receive a reply right away.
Bonus Feature, Pricing
Last but not least, one of the reasons we find Kommunicate to be such a great tool is their fair pricing. Not only that they provide their partners with all these features, but they share our value of helping startups and small companies compete with big corporations. Which is why Kommunicate charges only 10$ a month per agent integration.
Conclusion
Customer support can easily be overlooked or postponed for “when you have the resources”. But in reality, this crucial service must not be neglected if you want your business to survive. As we showed in this article, there are many ways to digitize customer support. There are also many customer support tools that offer the necessary features for you to succeed. However, we find Kommunicate to be the tool to bring the most value, through their variety of features and fair prices.
If you want to read more about other cool technologies we explored, visit our blog. You can learn more about AI, chatbots and other great technologies. Also, if you have an exciting project in mind, please contact us. We can help you build the right solution for you and digitize your business.
Finally, if you have some interesting topics in mind that you would like us to look into, reach out to us on Facebook or LinkedIn, or simply write to our chatbot. We are here for you!
