3 Innovations in Customer Service

Technical advances have done a lot of wonderful, game-changing things, but they’ve also made it much easier and quicker for customers to complain. This has forced brands and contact centers to amp up their customer service strategies. These innovative customer service ideas could have a major impact on the customer experience.

1. Let customers test products or services before purchasing them.

Free trials can go a long way towards landing committed customers. Trying before buying isn’t yet the standard across the board, but it should be. By letting customers try out your product or service for a limited time, you tell them that you believe so much in what you’re selling that you know they’ll get on board. Contemporary customer service is all about making the customer’s life easier. Let them wait to pay until they’re sure they want to make a purchase.

2. Use videos to answer complex questions

The more complex a FAQ, the more text you’re going to need to answer it. A lot of customers aren’t going to take the time to read a lengthy blog or social media post, which means they’ll either (a) go without finding their answer, which won’t leave them as satisfied as possible, or (b) call to speak with a live agent, which puts more pressure on your staff. An excellent alternative is to record a video that answers the question. You can solve the problem in less time than it would take to read the answer, and videos are also highly shareable, so your customers can help you spread the word.

3. Make it easy to do even unwanted actions.

Stellar customer service shouldn’t end when a customer wants to switch providers or go with one of your competitors. You should still treat the customer well even if you’re going to lose their business – treating them well at this stage could actually convince them to stay with you or come back at some point down the road. Transparency should be embraced at every stage, even if the customer wants to close or delete their account. By doing something like hiding the “delete account” button, you’re getting in the way of the customer having an easy, seamless interaction with your brand.

 

Impactful customer service strategies are thoughtful, too. By combining innovation with high-level awareness, you can appeal to the customer’s emotions while meeting their tech-savvy needs.

4 Expert Tips for Creating a VoC Program

Voice of the Customer (VoC) may be a term used by businesses and contact centers, but it’s also a straightforward technique: collecting customer feedback – their “voice” – to figure out what their expectations are and whether or not you’re giving them the experience they want.

A VoC program has four parts to it:

• Listening by collecting data
• Understanding and gleaning insight from the data you’ve collected
• Distributing those insights to your team
• Taking action

Here are four ways to knock your VoC program out of the park.

1. Create the plan backwards.

It’s difficult to create an effective VoC program if you don’t know the end goal. Figure that out first, taking into account your customer personas, and then start creating the roadmap that will get you there. From there, add the metrics you’ll need to collect and strategies for collecting them.

2. Ask new questions.

If you’re going to use surveys as part of your VoC strategy, limit the number of questions you ask the customer. To do this, remove any questions you already know the answer to. The idea here is to uncover the most valuable information, which is the info you don’t yet have – this isn’t the place to get confirmation on the answers you already know.

3. Think outside-the-box when listening.

In the past, rankings, scores and structured surveys were the main ways of collecting VoC data. Those techniques alone don’t work anymore, though, especially with so much unstructured data out there. Today’s data needs to include things like chat logs, social comments, social reviews and voice recordings.

4. Just get started.

Start collecting data ASAP while you work on the rest of your VoC program. It’s easy to fall into the trap of waiting for everything to be perfect before you start gathering VoC information, but the truth is that your VoC program is going to continually evolve and change, and you’re going to be refining your strategy for as long as you have customers.

Don’t be afraid to jump in by choosing one touchpoint and one metric and just starting – refer to your customer journey map to choose an important one. To measure, isolate the treatment group so you can split-test your strategy.

By tuning into the voices of your customers, you have a better chance of improving customer engagement and the customer experience as a whole.

4 Voice of the Customer Tools for Collecting Feedback

Analytics often track what a customer does, but voice of the customer tools figure out why someone performs an action. Several voice of the customer tools can be used to collect feedback. The feedback tool you choose depends on your goal.

1. Community Forums

Customers can discuss their experiences with one another in forums. These are great places to find out what customers need and which needs aren’t being met. They’re hubs for suggestions and ideas that a brand can use to guide everything from product development to customer support practices.

2. Visual Feedback

Brands that have recently launched a new website or mobile app can benefit from visual feedback tools. Elements on a page will have the option to provide feedback. The customer can make a note about what they think about a specific element and then a screenshot will be sent to the appropriate department or agent. The customer uses his or her own words to describe a problem, which helps brands figure out which parts of a page or app are faulty or unclear.

3. E-shop Reviews

E-shop surveys are auto-emailed to customers after they purchase or receive a product. A short assessment survey asks the customer to rate their experience or the product on a scale of one to five. There’s also a section where customers can write in an account of their experience. The benefits of this type of feedback are twofold. First, the brand learns about the customer’s experience and can opt to reach out to the customer if they submit low scores or describe a problem. Second, if the star ratings are published on a review site, other shoppers will be influenced by them, and a brand with high ratings will attract more customers.

4. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics delve deep into a recording to uncover intelligence from customer-agent conversations. Advanced software digs through dialogue to isolate specific phrases and words. Results can be organized and then compared to reason codes (why customers contacted support) as well as trends to determine recurring problems.

Voice of the customer feedback tools help contact centers to determine what people do and do not like about a brand. By pinpointing why someone may choose, stay with or leave a brand, the entire customer journey can be updated and adapted to meet specific customer needs.

 

A Vision of Seamless, Fully-Integrated, End-to-End Customer Engagement

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Today is a truly momentous day, and a very proud one, for all of us at Creative Virtual. Our vision has always been to offer organisations the technology to enable seamless, fully-integrated, end-to-end customer engagement, and to back that technology with the experience of an expert, knowledgeable team. Once we established ourselves as independently recognised leaders in the virtual customer assistant (VCA) space, we underpinned all our channel support with our critically-acclaimed V-Portal™ (knowledge management, workflow management and business intelligence) platform. Today we realised our vision with the official launch of our newest product: V-Person Live Chat™.

Defining industry best practice

V-Person Live Chat completes our customer engagement jigsaw because it successfully blends virtual and real customer support in a way that no other vendor in the marketplace can provide today. Our many years of experience with integrating our V-Person virtual agent technology with other live chat systems made us realise that there was a huge opportunity for organisations to benefit from a deeper blending of the two technologies. This inspired us to develop our own live chat product which is now defining industry best practice through the tight integration of a single knowledgebase for both virtual and real agents, a unique feedback loop and a customisable workflow provided by V-Portal.

At Creative Virtual we closely monitor developing trends and the evolution of engagement touchpoints in order to provide enterprises with cutting-edge Smart Help solutions. It is clear to us that the contact centre in its current form is finished. As there is a transition to more automation, combining virtual and real customer support with a central knowledge management and workflow platform will be key for organisations. We’ve addressed this contact centre shift with the deep integration of virtual agents and live chat, particularly with our unique feedback loop that allows live chat agents to help keep content accurate for both virtual and real agents just by doing their normal jobs.

A complete approach to learning

Our V-Person technology utilises a hybrid approach of human curation of content and self-learning to give organisations a predictable and reliable customer self-service option. We have developed this approach based on our extensive experience and our partnerships with some of the world’s largest organisations. We understand how enterprises want to use virtual agents and chatbots to deliver effective self-service today and how the customer support landscape is evolving for them in the future.

Human curation of content allows organisations to be absolutely sure that their VCA is responding to users in a predictable way. At any point in time, designated content editors have full access to the knowledgebase to make updates that can be deployed instantly to the virtual agent. Organisations never need to wait for the system to ‘re-learn’ the new information. This human element is combined with the virtual agent’s ability to become more intelligent and adapt through self-learning.

V-Person’s statistical algorithm processes user journeys to return a list of related questions that is a true reflection of how users asking for similar information engaged with the virtual agent. Organisations also benefit from our statistical approach to self-learning with tightly integrated business intelligence reporting. V-Portal brings together voice of the customer feedback and user surveys with conversational data in real-time, actionable analytics that are directly linked to the virtual assistant’s knowledgebase.

Now with V-Person Live Chat, we are able to complete our approach to learning with our unique feedback loops. V-Portal enables enterprises to implement feedback loops that allow live agents to provide real-time comments and suggestions on content so that they can improve the virtual agent just by doing their normal job.

This hybrid approach to learning enables V-Person implementations to adapt in a very predictable way. The combination of human and self-learning is important for continually improving the system while also enabling enterprises to maintain control over the reliability of the VCA responses.

Where we go from here

Seeing our vision of seamless, fully-integrated, end-to-end customer engagement come to fruition is an important milestone, but certainly not the end of the roadmap for us. We are looking forward to rolling out our new live chat product to our customer organisations and experiencing with them new levels of customer engagement success. By continuing our collaboration with them, we will look to make new updates to our workflow and do more development around the self-learning aspects of our technology. Our roadmap is all about combining best practices around knowledge curation and self-learning, and integrating V-Person with best-of-breed technologies to provide a world leading enterprise level end-to-end digital customer engagement platform.

Whether you are currently using live chat and/or a virtual agent to support customers or just starting to think about implementing these tools, the best way to see how V-Person Live Chat can benefit your organisation is by requesting a personalised demo.

You can also read more about how we are combining virtual and real support with a live chat solution that is defining industry best practice in our V-Person Live Chat Overview.

5 VOC Best Practices

Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs are an asset to contact centers. According to CRMSearch.com, when VoC isn’t correctly taken into account, customer experience goals, as well as marketing and sales objectives, suffer. Below are five VOC best practices.

1. Add VOC data collection to the customer experience strategy

According to the American Marketing Association, customer-focused organizations routinely conduct surveys and hold focus group sessions; ask for comments, including complaints; and search social media for customer commentary. Online, customers write solicited and unsolicited reviews, which is where companies can find out about customer wants, needs, likes and dislikes

2. Categorize and prioritize VOC data.

Create a hierarchy of VOC data, with related preferences grouped together. Within that, customers can be segmented based on a variety of details, including objectives, transactions, buying behaviors, loyalty program attributes and social media behaviors, among others.

3. Gather VOC data in one area

Contact centers use multiple applications and systems to manage VOC data, including survey tools, Excel, marketing applications, and VOc solutions from organizations such as NICE, Verint, and InMoment. These systems should be consolidated so that VOC data can be easily accessed and leveraged. Master Data Management is used to consolidate, standardize and distribute data. A VOC program shouldn’t be launched before the IT department has created a way to handle the complex data.

4. Train employees to match behaviors to VOC discoveries.

VOC data can be part of training programs for staff members who deal directly with customers. While a company may tell their customer service reps that customers expect courteous and responsive service, the meaning of those expectations isn’t always clear. According to Bain & Company, while 80% of CEOs feel that they deliver superior customer experience, just 8% of customers agree. By using specific customer feedback data, “courteous” and “responsive” can be defined. Employees will then understand exactly what customers expect.

5. Tell others about achieved excellence in customer service.

Improvement in customer experience and awards for customer service excellence should be promoted. Information can be used on the company’s website, in social media messaging, on advertisements, and as part of marketing campaigns. Positive data influences buying decisions, attracts new customers, directs public opinion, and builds a positive reputation for a business. Customer experience stories should be shared with staff members as well. Providing examples of how agents have gone above and beyond customer expectations promotes a culture that’s focused on customer loyalty