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In an increasingly competitive and fast-moving economic environment, customer services today need efficiency at all levels to keep customers loyal and satisfied. And thus contribute to maintain a good brand image.
On their side, 71% of customers want to solve their problem without having to talk to a human... but only 13% of companies are able to offer them such a solution!(source: Intercom). At the same time, 75% of users prefer the phone for a complete and quick response(source: Zendesk). But how to combine these two needs that seem contradictory?
To offer a CX (Customer Experience) that meets these new needs, there are technologies such as Conversational AI, allowing to improve customer care on many aspects. Moreover, 70% of companies have invested in 2022 in new tools to make customer service more proactive and efficient: are you part of it?
- 1. How to improve customer service efficiency and performance?
- Optimize your technology infrastructure to improve productivity
- Implement automation tools
- Analyze the use and performance of your media and its tools
- 2. Your customer support for loyalty and retention
- Answer 100% of your calls - 24/7
- Personalize your calls with an integrated CRM
- 3. The right tools for the best customer experience (CX)
- Conclusion
1. How to improve customer service efficiency and performance?
The efficiency of a customer service department is directly linked to two essential factors: the tools made available to agents, and their ability to take control of them and use them easily on a daily basis. Managers will be responsible for managing and setting the parameters of these tools thanks to a complete analysis of the customer service usage data via the contact center dashboard. Here are our three tips for improving the efficiency of your customer support.
Optimize your technology infrastructure to improve productivity
Without powerful tools, even your best agents won't be able to achieve the level of productivity required to properly respond to new customer demands. Indeed, your contact center must be agile and flexible, and custom-built with the tools necessary to meet your real needs. It must bring together all of your communication channels, while using new technologies to support your customers.
Start with your VoIP softphone as a base (provided by your cloud telephony solution like Aircall), where you will then add and integrate the tools, applications and features necessary to optimize your customer exchanges. Indeed, VoIP software like Aircall's allows you to manage your entire contact center from the same platform, while integrating your business tools (CRM, Helpdesk) and performance applications (conversational AI, automation, etc).
To optimize your performance, your applications must be integrated with each other. Your virtual agent solution (such as Reecall) should be able to exchange real-time data with your VoIP and transfer calls. A conversational AI solution like Reecall can automate customer service and inbound call management to optimize costs and satisfaction.
These integrations allow your customer service team to be much more efficient and able to handle more inbound requests, focusing on high value tasks.
Implement automation tools
The automation of repetitive and non-value added tasks is essential to gain efficiency, but also to keep your teams motivated. Your customers know the importance and value of human interaction (especially for specific requests), but they also know that not all questions require human intervention!
This is the challenge of automating your customer service: to efficiently provide an answer or information without monopolizing an agent, thanks in particular to IVR (Interactive Voice Response) andtask automation applications. To go further, conversational AI can qualify your customers' more complex needs as well as handle simple requests in natural language.
While automation tools save considerable time in providing "usual" answers, conversational AI fills the need for quick "self-service" or "self-care" answers. Indeed, conversational AI allows customers to interact in a more natural way with virtual agents, whether in writing or verbally, while freeing up time for human agents and drastically reducing customer waiting time.
Analyze the use and performance of your media and its tools
Analyzing your customer service business is critical at all levels of your optimization: before, during, and after the implementation of your new tools and conversational AI. With the dashboard of your cloud telephony solution, you can analyze your needs and discover how automation or conversational AI tools can address them favorably.
For example, how to reduce the frequency of contacts from the same customer each year, how to reduce the average wait time, how to optimize the time spent with each agent before getting their answer, how to increase the number of customer support contacts without increasing the number of agents, and many other answers allowing service improvement without increasing costs.
Analyzing this data can also reveal new trends and customer needs that are difficult to uncover without a thorough study of your data. Fortunately, a comprehensive dashboard like Aircall's makes it easy to quickly identify the right decisions to make to optimize your customer service.
In the end, all these data and KPIs will allow you to improve your customer satisfaction, your brand image, a better customer retention in the long term and a higher frequency of purchases.
2. Your customer support for loyalty and retention
Customer service is generally at the forefront of a user's interactions with a brand. It is therefore a matter of responding as effectively as possible to their requests and expectations, by putting in place the right practices and tools for your agents and customer success .
Answer 100% of your calls - 24/7
Still unthinkable a few years ago, the emergence of cloud telephony and the integration of the right tools now make it possible to answer 100% of calls 24 hours a day. And this, without adding extra work to the support team. Quite the contrary.
Indeed, the configuration of a powerful IVR, coupled with the integration of a conversational AI tool like Reecall, allows you to provide a large number of answers to your customers at any time of the day, without interfering with the customer service team, which can focus on high value-added calls.
Your customers will be able to solve a large number of queries themselves, generating a particular satisfaction.
Personalize your calls with an integrated CRM
Customer satisfaction depends on a set of criteria, where the relationship with the brand plays a major role. The knowledge of a customer file and its history is therefore essential when your users contact your support.
By integrating your CRM with your VoIP telephony solution, you offer your customer service department the possibility of having in real time (incoming and outgoing calls) the entire context of the customer with the brand: previous exchanges, frequency of calls, seniority, etc. Thus, your support team will be able to adapt and personalize their exchanges and conversations.
And to take it a step further, some tools and applications, integrated with your cloud telephony center, even allow you to anticipate certain actions and recommendations thanks to AI and machine learning. Your customers will feel that they are being considered at their true value, and this satisfaction will only be beneficial in their overall experience with the brand.
3. The right tools for the best customer experience (CX)
Choosing and implementing the right tools for your customer support will be the key to its success. Design the true custom Tech Stack that truly fits the needs of your team... and your customers!
From your helpdesk to your cloud telephony solution, including your CRM and a conversational AI solution, the integration of your various business tools will be of particular importance in the implementation of an excellent customer experience throughout the customer journey.
Indeed, the benefits of a complete infrastructure with a conversational AI application are numerous:
- Quality of service (QS) close to 100% from the first second thanks to immediate and continuous customer care.
- Consistent and predictive responses to a vast majority of routine customer requests. Conversational AI can handle up to 7 times more tickets processed than a human agent.
- Real-time access to call and activity data through connected dashboards allows managers to optimize processes and resources quickly in a matter of moments.
- It becomes easier to anticipate and deal with peaks of incoming calls, its number no longer being limited by your human resources thanks to AI taking over.
- Simple and repetitive requests are now handled automatically, leaving the more complex calls to the agents, who will be able to put forward their expertise.
- Up to 70% of tickets can be handled efficiently during the call or through automatic follow-up.
- Reduced human and logistical costs, for better overall performance.
- Agents are obviously more efficient, but above all they can finally concentrate on calls with greater added value. Their work comfort is thus greatly improved, for a better motivation that is felt in their exchanges with customers. AI does not replace the human being, but comes to his service.
Conclusion
The performance of a customer service department is intrinsically linked to the tools made available to the team. Indeed, while 40% of companies find that repetitive requests are a real challenge for their customer support, many solutions are now available to respond favorably to these problems, starting with the integration of a conversational AI solution to your cloud telephony.
