Your customer service strategy plays a vital role in minimizing customer attrition. A study from Microsoft has found that 90% of customers take customer service into consideration when deciding whether or not to work with a company. You might think that you have a well-functioning customer service strategy, but it won’t be very effective if it lacks online support elements.
While traditional customer service strategies remain important, new technology and mediums also must be prioritized. Companies with well-executed online customer service strategies have online conversion rates that are 8% higher than those that do not.
Your company can’t afford to overlook the importance of instituting the right online customer service practices. This strategy goes beyond merely retaining the right customer service professionals to engage with online visitors. You must also make sure that the user experience of your website is properly optimized to aid customers in discovering the resources that they need.
Here are some important optimization tips to maximize the benefits of your customer service strategy.
Implement a proper navigation structure to help customers find the right resources
Many factors come into play with your customer service strategy. Although adequately trained professionals are clearly important, it is also important to provide the right resources for your customers.
Unfortunately, merely creating these resources is not enough. Many companies have created plenty of documents to help educate their customers, but they don’t make them very visible. Unless you are searching the companies brand name on Google, you are unlikely to find them.
It is better to link to these resources in your navigation menu. You can have a link saying something like “FAQ”, which customers can use to get answers to their most pressing questions. You might want to have a drop-down menu that provides links to specific types of issues, so they can search for their answer more easily. You can link to things like your portfolio for more information (you should learn how to make a portfolio if you have never done so before).
Create chatbots that are capable of handling simple inquiries
One of the biggest mistakes that many brands make is assuming that customers won’t want to engage with chatbots. This is a major misconception that needs to be dispelled.
According to a survey taken in 2018, 69% of people would prefer talking to a chatbot over a human customer service representative. Many people enjoy the fact that they can get quick and simple answers from chatbots without feeling like they are interrupting somebody.
Also, chatbots help people get more timely assistance. People can get immediate answers to their questions with chatbots without having to wait for a customer service representative to be available. This also minimizes the bottleneck that would be created by having human employees spend significant amounts of time answering quick, routine questions.
Use plug-ins instead of developing your own custom scripts and applications
You don’t want to feel obligated to reinvent the wheel when you are developing customer service features for your website. This is especially true if you are trying to develop a successful customer service strategy.
You will find a number of third-party apps and tools that will help you implement a successful online customer service strategy. You can work with third-party vendors like Zendesk to get access to these tools.
There are a number of benefits to this approach instead of creating your own backend customer service platform:
- They can be easily embedded into popular content management systems. This means that you don’t have to create separate pages that are disjointed from the rest of your template or worry about compatibility issues with the rest of the site features.
- You won’t need to worry about bugs that will cause the applications to stop working. The leading third-party applications will have been thoroughly tested to resolve any of these concerns.
- You will be able to easily connect many of these applications with other third-party tools, which makes it possible to leverage the features of all of them simultaneously.
- Most of these tools have their own analytics dashboards, which makes it easier to assess the performance that they provide and make appropriate changes with your customer service team.
You will save yourself hundreds of hours of development and countless frustrations if you rely on existing third-party apps. There is no reason to invest so much time developing these tools yourself.
Make sure that you have an SSL certificate
Customer privacy is more important than ever these days. One poll found that 85% of customers feel companies need to be more cautious about data security. They are going to be highly reluctant to work with any company that uses a website that is not adequately secured.
This is especially true if they are trying to get customer service assistance on your site. When people ask for customer service assistance, they will have to share highly sensitive information, such as their credit card numbers, address and employer information. if you work in a healthcare related profession, then you will also have to think about HIPAA issues.
There are a number of steps that you will need to take to ensure customer information is adequately secured. One of the most important steps that you should take is getting an SSL certificate. All of the links that customers used to engage with your customer service team should be HTTPS connections.
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