Arguably one of the most important aspects of running a business is its customer service. Without reliable, solid support in place, customers feel like your brand doesn’t care about their concerns or fixing their problems. As soon as they have a question or need assistance, your business must show them it’s present to help in any way it can.
But how do you deliver exceptional customer service while working from home? Due to the coronavirus pandemic, most people have had to adjust to remote work. Tending to customers’ needs and doing so efficiently can be an obstacle if you haven’t done it before.
A staggering 80 percent of consumers say they’ll quit doing business with a company after a poor customer service experience. Providing adequate support is a top priority for customers looking for brands to invest in. If your business fails to provide quick, effective solutions, then you face losing conversions and positive results.
Here are a few ways to get started if you want to learn how to deliver better customer service to your customers while working remotely.
Research Your Audience
For any marketing strategy to be effective, it needs to appeal to the right audience. If not, it’s catering to the wrong people who don’t care about its message and definitely won’t respond to it. You can’t exceed expectations if you don’t know what those expectations are, so getting to know your target market is crucial for success.
There are many ways to research your target audience, including:
- Google Analytics. Your site’s analytics give you vital information such as where users spend the most and least time, where they bounce from the page, and more. Using these insights help you create content and campaigns relevant to their interests and needs.
- Studying your competitors’ audience. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of customers to research, you can look at your competitors instead. Even after building a customer base, it’s still a good idea to see what their users are saying. You can learn more about their habits, buying behaviors, complaints, and more.
- Sending customer surveys. Surveys are a great way to receive direct feedback from your audience and find out anything you want. Hearing directly from the source gives you the most accurate, up-to-date information you can apply to your customer service strategy.
- Going through social media. With more than 3.81 billion social media users worldwide, your target audience is expressing their thoughts about your brand. Their opinions give ou insight into what they want and how you can better cater to them as potential customers.
Use Live Chat & Chatbots
In recent years, more ecommerce businesses have turned to live chat to improve their customer service department. As your business grows, so does its demand. If you don’t have the resources to help all your customers, you’ll quickly lose them to your competitors. Live chat uses human agents to manage your online support and provide speedy solutions.
But let’s say you don’t have the budget to hire round-the-clock customer service representatives. You have no one to tend to visitors’ needs in a different time zone or outside of business hours. In that case, it’s a good idea to consider employing chatbots for your support needs.
Chatbots use artificial intelligence, along with predefined rules and algorithms, to hold online conversations with site visitors. It can use previous data to predict and assist users so they can find a quick solution and continue to engage with your content. Around 60 percent of consumers have used chatbots to find answers on a website, making it a secure way to find what they’re looking for.
Chatbots are also great at humanizing your brand and making new visitors feel more comfortable engaging with your content. With the information they have, they can give personalized recommendations, talk with personality, and use emojis and colloquial language to sound more casual. All of these elements combined make for a relaxed yet productive conversation between brand and customer.
Invest in Automation
When customers browse your website, they’re looking for solutions to their problems and answers to their questions. If they don’t receive instant support, they’re likely to bounce from your site and never come back. It’s important to make a positive first impression so you can build return visitors who convert into paying customers.
To streamline your customer service processes, you need to invest in marketing automation. With this software, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, lead visitors to the right destination, and move them through the sales funnel.
Instead of spending time performing routine tasks, automation gives you the ability to work on other aspects of your company. It’s easier to keep visitors happy and increase customer retention when you prioritize building solid customer relationships.
Marketing automation can do a lot to streamline your customer service department, including:
- Scheduling appointments
- Leading users to specific webpages and information
- Answering visitors’ questions
- Providing customer support
- Segmenting your email subscribers
- Sending personalized, targeted content
Automation also gives you peace of mind knowing that the details of your business are taken care of. Manually performing these tasks takes time, money, and effort you could spend elsewhere to maximize your productivity. That way, you see better results in less time.
Over to You
For those who aren’t used to it, providing customer service while working from home can be a challenge. But that doesn’t mean you can’t deliver exception results and keep your customers happy. In many ways, providing service remotely gives you advantages that working in an office wouldn’t. By researching your target market and investing in the right tools, your business can provide customer support that goes beyond their expectations.
