Give Your Customer Support an Edge with these Services

One of the biggest challenges for modern businesses is to build differentiators that will win customer loyalty. Businesses used to rely on product quality as the key differentiator till now. However, a great product is no longer enough today. Chances are at least a handful of your competitors offer products that are comparable to yours. 

That’s exactly where factors beyond your core product come into the picture. While it’s relatively easy to replicate the features of your product offering, it’s quite difficult to replicate the experience that you create for your customers or the way you make them feel with ai powered customer service. 

So how do you turn the outsourced customer service function into your competitive edge?
The answer lies in blending artificial intelligence customer service with the platform you use to serve and support your customers. These are the things that actually lie under the hood but make a huge difference. So if your customer support platform isn’t teaming up with some key technologies, you might be losing out on lots of things.

We’ve grouped these technology tools under two heads based on their functions: software, and communications. 

Connecting with a powerful software

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is your key to not only the relationship with your customers but a lot of other core functional areas. As a matter of fact, a great CRM can ensure great customer service, power cross-selling, and drive revenue growth. Interestingly, a CRM can also assist your business in remaining compliant with certain guidelines, like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).

By ensuring your customer support platform works in sync with a CRM, you derive several benefits. When your customers interact with the support team, their preferences can be recorded meticulously, something that a CRM will be able to take advantage of later on. This sharpens your teams’ understanding of your customers, so you can personalize the communication during all subsequent interactions. The result: you can steer the customer towards a purchase they’d be happy with.

Secondly, when your support system has teamed up with a strong CRM, you find it easier to fine-tune your buyer persona. Understanding the smallest of details about your customers helps in selling better, but that’s not the only benefit. It helps you better understand the challenges they face, which will help you in product development and feature anticipation.

Next, your CRM provides accurate information to your teams for every single customer who’s reaching out. The support team will be able to weave this information in their calls or emails and make the customer realize you’re listening. Your customers feel valued because they see you’re going the extra mile to understand their needs and challenges. And what better way to improve your customer loyalty than making them feel valued?

Finally, your CRM can help you comply with data privacy laws. When your customer provides consent to be contacted, your CRM will keep a record for that. That way, before your support teams make any outbound calls or send out emails introducing a new feature of your products, they know they aren’t violating any regulations. 

Don’t forget that non-compliance can have negative consequences besides penal action from the competent authority. For instance, if your emails go to customers who haven’t consented, they may mark your email as spam. The email ecosystem will soon step in and suspect you of being a spammer. As a result, the deliverability of your subsequent emails will be substantially lower.

Communicating made easier

Imagine you’re a financial consultancy whose customer base is retail investors. Your customers call you regularly for reasons ranging from asking for a financial statement of a particular period to understanding a feature of a certain product. How do you make sure you capitalize upon the moment and provide them the experience they will value? The first part of the answer is cloud telephony.

To begin with, incoming calls will be diverted based on availability, round-robin, or any other pre-decided logic (in addition to the IVR selection made by the caller). Next, because of cloud telephony, your support platform can draw out detailed reports of the calls, including recordings wherever applicable. Such recordings help you optimize the communication and decide future strategies. 

In addition to that, cloud telephony is a stable and reliable system. And the best part is, it is practically a plug-and-play solution.

The second part of the answer is making sure your customer service system has integrated with a messaging service. As mentioned earlier in this section, a messaging service helps you immediately capitalize upon the moment by enabling you to message a customer even while they’re on the call. That would not only show how prompt you are in responding to their needs but also helps them make decisions quickly (and save time).

Moreover, a messaging service is highly cost-effective, and when weighed against the benefits it brings to your support function, it’s only natural that you’ll want to use it.

The summing up

Today, customer support is no longer about passively registering customer complaints and issuing tickets – it’s an active business function that has the potential to play a critical role in your business. 

Your support platform is no doubt good by itself, but when you add the power of some additional technology features to it, you begin to get amazing results. This includes having a CRM in place, using cloud telephony, and using a messaging service, among others.

Now that the technology to engage better with customers is more widely available and used, you’ll want to leverage that and beat the competition. An experienced team at a customer support platform company can ensure superior quality of service and free your teams to focus on driving growth for your business.