Customer Service: How to Succeed With Customers at Every Point of Contact
This intelligence can be used to enhance web self-service, as well as email; live, web-based support; and traditional phone transactions. Call-center agents at these companies receive relevant response suggestions and view other key alerts right at their desktops to help them provide personalized service to all current customers, regardless of how they've chosen to contact the call center.
Retailers can incorporate these tools into their point-of-sale systems, allowing them to capture the same data which feeds into the overall database of customer preferences and experiences. Having this information about activities through other channels also uncovers strong opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Once you have information about your visitors, knowledge management tools can then allow agents to access information and respond to customer inquiries.
These suggestions aren't meant to be cut and pasted into email responses (or even repeated robotically via telephone) to customers. Rather, they take relevant pieces of information and incorporate them into responses to ensure that each customer receives personalized service. The same goes for retail sites, where visitor knowledge can even be paired with customer data from a CRM program.
Common Elements
of Multichannel Success
Multichannel strategies and offerings may vary among industry type, product/services offered and corporate culture, but the approach to satisfying online consumers among the most successful companies is similar. Retailers can use these common, winning approaches to bolster their multichannel offerings:
• Offer dynamic self-support options. The best self-support tools enable customers to quickly find answers and information while dramatically reducing the number of routine requests that call-center agents must field. These include continually updated and information-rich FAQ lists, highly interactive search engines, and personalized online accounts.
• Give customers access to agent-assisted multichannel usage tools. Organizations sink large investments of money and resources into their multichannel strategies, and that includes their efforts to drive customers to channels outside of the call center. Live-agent assistance can help push customer confidence in self-service channels with advanced web chat applications as well as "click-to-talk" applications, which provide real-time support to online customers.
To enhance the quality of live, web-based transactions, top call-center providers couple their chat and click-to-talk applications with dynamic collaboration (co-browsing and form-sharing) tools.
Take advantage of tools that help you respond to all email inquiries efficiently and correctly. Specialized email management systems can automatically — and evenly — distribute customer email inquiries among a call center's agents. Call centers typically use a system's auto-reply feature to confirm that a message has been received and to let customers know the expected turnaround time for a full response (the best e-support providers respond to each email in less than 24 hours).
