How To Build A Winning Customer Service Culture

Back to the future: Early GPT beta users transform customer experiences with Freddy AI

Thu, 25 May 2023 14:39:24 GMT

Back to the future: Early GPT beta users transform customer experiences with Freddy AI

80 million bot conversations in just one month!

“Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?”

Much like Marty McFly in “Back to the Future,” we can’t always see the road ahead. But when it comes to technology and business software, we can certainly play a role in paving and shaping it. I think even Marty would agree that it’s an incredibly exciting time for tech, as the road is open for possibilities where generative AI innovations can make for great customer and employee experiences.

In March, we announced the Freshworks launch of Freddy AI powered by GPT . These advancements in Freddy AI are off to a solid start and results are showing they’re making your lives (and your customers’ lives) easier by having more conversations with fewer clicks!

But before we unveil our AI vision and what lies ahead at our Q2 ‘23 Launch on June 22, let’s take a moment to look back at how the Freddy AI for Freshchat Beta is going.

This GPT-based private beta launch garnered interest from 335 existing customers and 55 new prospects. And our top five customers have utilized these features more than 1,000 times in the last month alone.

Exploring Freddy AI for Freshchat Beta: Enhancing efficiency and personalization

The Freddy AI for Freshchat Beta offered an array of new capabilities, including Message Rephrase, Conversation Summarization, and Solution Article Generator.

Rephrase empowers customer service agents to deliver support that is both effective and efficient by enhancing the clarity and impact of their communication with customers. Throughout the beta, agents utilized the rephrase feature over 18,600 times, allowing them to serve their customers more quickly and effectively with an estimated 50% time savings.

Conversation Summarization lets agents automatically generate a summary of the entire customer conversation. Instead of relying on collaborators or introducing a new agent to sift through the entire conversation for context, a quick glance at the summary provides a clear understanding of the entire context and the next steps. Notably, agents made use of the conversation summarization function over 1,400 times during the beta, resulting in an estimated 57% time savings.

Solution Article Generator simplifies the process of creating standardized knowledge-base articles and FAQs with minimal effort. With just a few prompts, agents can generate comprehensive content without spending extra time on extensive writing, copy editing, and formatting. During the beta, this feature was used over 200 times, saving agents an estimated 67% of time by eliminating article creation from scratch and empowering them to prioritize high-value customer engagements instead.

Customers also had the opportunity to participate in the Freshmarketer beta launch, and the results speak for themselves.

With the Email Copy Generator feature, sellers can effortlessly personalize emails to address individual prospects’ needs and pain points. The impact of this feature is evident in the significant increase in clicks on the Freddy subject-line generation icon over the past two weeks, with a 50% increase from April 30 to May 6 and a remarkable 175% increase from May 7 to May 13 compared to the previous weeks. Furthermore, an impressive 84% of users have selected Freddy’s suggested subject lines, resulting in an estimated 73% reduction in time spent on creating personalized copy.

Maximizing value through Freddy AI’s existing features

AI is not new to Freshworks. We’ve been at the forefront of innovation in this space since 2018, continuously pushing boundaries to provide exceptional solutions. The testament to our success lies in the value our customers derive from our products. Just in the past month, our customers engaged in nearly 80 million bot conversations. Within that 30-day period, our bots autonomously handled 819,000 conversations, effectively freeing up valuable time for agents to focus on high-value interactions.

In addition to the overall benefits, customers have experienced significant value through features powered by Freddy AI.

The Thank You Detector optimized agent workflows on over 638,000 tickets by precisely identifying ticket escalations and unresolved issues, ensuring that only those cases were reopened, resulting in a 27% reduction of manual tasks for agents and helping close tickets faster . Timely ticket closure also provided leaders with a clearer understanding of key metrics, such as average handle time. Additionally, Auto Triage efficiently routed over 14,700 tickets to the appropriate teams, saving agents an estimated 83% of time on ticket triaging. These AI-powered automation features seamlessly optimized agents’ workflows, resulting in substantial improvements in their overall efficiency.

The bottom line: With or without the DeLorean, Freshworks sure is taking Freddy AI into the future by tapping into the power of generative AI to completely reimagine customer and employee experiences at scale.

If you would like to find out more about how to integrate AI in to your customer experience and engagement workflows get in touch with us now at Freshworks UK partner for Helpdesk, Service desk and CRM (omnis-cx.co.uk)

How to choose an incident management software

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 16:46:33 GMT

How to choose an ITIL incident management software

The ITIL definition of an incident is “an unplanned interruption to or a quality reduction of an IT service”.

In your IT ecosystem, an incident may be caused due to a malfunctioning asset, or a network failure. Common incidents include issues with the printer, Wi-Fi connectivity, application locks, email service, laptop, file sharing, unresponsive servers, or even authentication errors. Incident management is the process of managing the life cycle of all incidents to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the business impact. This definition illustrates how indispensable a strong incident management process is for an organization in order to ensure smooth operations with minimal to no downtime.

So, now that we have established the importance of incident management, here’s what you need to know before choosing the right incident management tool. This blog details the top 5 features to look for in incident management software, and will aid you in your selection process.

1. User-friendly interface with multi-channel support: One of the key features of incident management software should be that it is user-friendly and accessible to the end user. Software that is hard to use causes frustration among employees. The design of your incident management software should be so intuitive, that even non-IT employees find what they are looking for without having to navigate through the complexities. Remember, the goal is to avoid tech frustration and boost employee experience.

Your incident management software should enable self-service, wherein the end user can raise tickets via a people-centric portal. The idea is to consumerize the ticketing-raising experience, so the tool should have multi-channel support. Whether it is email, phone, chat, or other methods, it should be accessible across channels.

2. Powered by automation: Manually intensive low-priority tasks can be replaced by automation for a quicker and more efficient ticket resolution process. Artificial Intelligence allows for tickets to be routed to the right person or team. Automation is a great way to put a unified process in place to meet the service demands of employees. This also saves time for your IT teams, as they are not preoccupied with routine manual tasks and can prioritize more important activities. As a whole, tickets are closed faster and the business operates more smoothly.

3. Alerts and notifications: Keeping users informed at the right time (sometimes even ahead of time) is one of the key requirements of the incident management process. While this is particularly essential in industries like mining or energy, they come in handy for all industries and fields. Real-time alerts and notifications keep all involved parties aware of the progress of the incident in question which helps keep things systematic and organized. This also helps them plan their work accordingly so that they save precious time.

4. Integrations with other software : While choosing incident management software, it is vital to ensure its compatibility with other systems and applications currently in use at your organization. This makes it easier for employees to get accustomed to this incident management solution. Whether it is for communication purposes, for using data, or for change requests or notifications, it is very convenient when your service desk can be integrated with other business software/applications.

If you’re looking to get started with ITSM integrations, this guide can help you.

5. Mobile compatibility: Most employees in the modern era prefer to be able to access their incident management tools via their cell phones. Your incident management tools should be compatible with various kinds of devices, both Android and iOS. This compatibility is especially important in the case of emergencies as it allows users to track their ticket progress on the go.

Freshservice’s incident management features:

1. A single platform with multi-channel support: Enable end-users to reach support via multiple channels such as email, a self-service portal, mobile app, phone, Freddy chatbot, feedback widgets, or walk-ups. Freshservice automatically logs all emails as tickets.

2. Intelligent automation of tickets: Freshservice automatically categorizes tickets based on historical ticket data with Freddy, the Freshservice AI engine. It also automatically prioritizes tickets based on impact and urgency. Tickets are auto-assigned to the right agents or groups through round-robin or load-balancing auto-assignment.

3. Bird’s eye view of service desk performance: With a single dashboard, you Get visibility into all your tickets and track their progress. This also helps you to collaborate with your team from a single screen and know who’s working on a ticket, its priority, and its status.

4. Robust knowledge base: Freshervice’s comprehensive knowledge base with solutions to incidents and problems that can be used by support agents and end-users as well. A knowledge base empowers end-users to resolve their IT issues on their own from the self-service portal. This can be done with a simple search without having to wait for a technician to get back to them.

Click here to learn more about Freshservice’s incident management features. With Freshservice, you can Track, prioritize, and assign tickets effortlessly, and automate resolution processes to drive efficiency. Are you interested to get started with your incident management journey? Get a free 21-day trial of Freshservice today.

How to use Google Business Messages to Engage with Customers

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 19:02:43 GMT

How to use Google Business Messages to Engage with Customers

Customer service expectations have never been higher, and there’s still a lot of customer friction when it comes to online support. While chatbots and live chat can help brands proactively reach out, customers still reach out via traditional channels such as your website, email, call, and social media when they need to get help. But all these channels don’t allow for immediate support.

Providing real-time assistance while customers are still searching for solutions was out of the question…until now.

Google Business Messages makes it possible to interact with potential customers across Google’s suite of products, including Search and Maps, to engage and inform right at the moment that a question or request comes in. If they have a question, you can provide the kind of rapid assistance that encourages them to become a customer.

Learn more about how Google Business Messages works and how you can use Freshchat to supercharge your results.

What is Google Business Messages?

Google Business Messages (GBM) is a real-time chat feature in your Google Business Profile. It lets users send messages to the businesses they are looking at in Google Maps or Local Search.

Think of it like Google’s version of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but instead of users visiting your website or downloading your app to speak to you, they can do so right within Google itself.

How does Google Business Messages work?

Google Business Messages are built into your company’s Google Business Card. This is the block of information a user sees when they search for your brand or a relevant keyword in Google Search or Google Maps.

The Business Card of brands that are GBM enabled will show a chat button alongside buttons such as ‘Call’ or ‘Website’ that let users call the businesses, get directions, and visit the company website. When they opt to chat, users are greeted with a custom message from the brand when they first initiate a chat and can select from pre-populated questions. A real-time chat can then continue as normal.

How to get started using Google Business Messages

Enabling Google Business Messages is easy, but you’ll need to create a Google Business Profile first. If you already have an account, simply follow these steps:

Go to Google Maps
Click Updates, Messages, Business
Click Settings
Turn on Messaging
Turn on notifications so you get new message alerts

Benefits of Google Business Messages

There are plenty of reasons you should consider turning on Google Business Messages today.

1. Engage customers at the moment of consideration

Google Business Messages lets you capture customers right at the point they are deciding between brands. These are high-intent users who want to make a purchase, making them great potential customers. Provide great customer engagement, and you may just convert them.

2. Leverage the world’s most popular search engine

Google handles over 90% of all searches. Very few channels will allow you to attract such a large number of potential visitors, pre-qualify their intent, and wow them with exceptional customer service. They don’t even have to click on your listing to speak with you, either.

3. Reduce support costs

Handling requests via live chat on Google Business Messages can significantly reduce support costs in several ways. Firstly, answering chat messages costs far less than responding to customers by phone. Second, if you deploy an AI chatbot to automate responses to the vast majority of queries, you don’t even need to hire more support reps to handle an increase in the number of requests.

4. Enhance your brand on Google

Given the size of Google, it’s essential for businesses of all sizes to have as big a presence on the platform as possible. On top of great imagery and excellent customer reviews, turning o n Google Business Messages pro vides another way to help your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace by highlighting the ease of access to your business whenever someone sees your Google Business Card.

5. Give customers the experience they want

Customers prefe r live chat ov er every other support channel. But usually, they have to visit your site or app to contact you. This isn’t the case with GBM. Now customers can use their preferred contact method on their favourite search engine, significantly reducing the amount of friction in your customer experience.

Best practices to get the most from GBM

1. Create a welcome message

The welcome message is the first thing a user sees when clicking the message button. Get the relationship off to the best start possible by creating a warm, friendly, and engaging message.

You can thank users for reaching out, ask them how they can help, or let them know when a live customer service rep will man your GBM service. If you’re still stuck on what to say, why not start a live chat with all of your competitors who have enabled the tool and get some inspiration?

2. Be quick to reply

It’s probably not news to you that customers want fast responses to chat messages – which real-time interaction on GBM allows. However, keeping a low Average Response Time isn’t just about improving the customer experience. Google may remove the message button from your Business Profile if you don’t respond fast enough. That’s because Google wants to ensure they give their users the best response experience possible.

You can speed up your response time by integrating GBM into an omnichannel messaging platform like Freshchat that enables you to deploy a chatbot within GBM. In doing so, you can bring down response times, deflect basic queries or intelligently hand off queries to agents, all of which can significantly improve your response time.

3. Automate answers to FAQs

Do you find that most of your customers ask the same questions? Then why not take a proactive approach and create an FAQ section of your website that answers them all in one place? Better still, create a chatbot that has an automated response every time someone asks one of these questions. That way, users don’t even have to wait for a customer service rep to reply to get an answer.

4. Use live chat to strengthen relationships

Don’t just rely on chatbots a nd automated FAQs to run your GBM service, however. Sometimes customers will ask the kind of complex questions that chatbots can’t be programmed to answer. That’s why you need to make sure you have human customer support reps ready to take over if required.

You can still give them tools to improve the customer experience, for instance. One option is to use a tool like Freshchat that intelligently assign s conversations to th e most qualified rep or the one with the most capacity. As a result, customers get a fast response from a rep who knows what they’re talking about.

5. Integrate GBM with a messaging platform

If you already have a multi-channel communication strategy, it can pay dividends to integrate GBM into a customer messaging software platform like Freshchat. With Freshchat, you can bring all of your conversations across live chat, chatbots, Facebook Messaging, and Apple Business Chat into one place along with Google Business Messages, using the Freshworks Neo platform Unified Channels API.

Once there, you can use Freshchat’s AI-powered chatbots to handle basic queries or redirect them to support agents using the platform’s intelligent handoff capabilities. You can also use Freshchat’s analytics capabilities to track the performance of your reps and chatbots and collect the kind of feedback you need to improve your service.

What makes Freshchat the best business texting platform?

AI chatbots

Using Freshchat means you don’t have to answer every single GBM query yourself. Use our platform’s AI-powered chatbots to answer common queries automatically.

Single view across messaging channels

Use Freshchat to get a consolidated view of all customer conversations, including GBM questions. That makes everything easier to track and easier to manage.

Intelligent agent handoff

Speed up GBM responses by using Freshchat’s IntelliAssign to automatically route chats based on your rep’s skill level or chat load. That also means no more manual assignments for customer service managers.

Real-time insights

Identify how to improve your customer support service with real-time dashboards and custom reports that analyze customer service rep and chatbot performance .

Easy setup

It’s easy to link GBM with Freshchat thanks to our unique API. A quick guide to integrating Business Messages with your Freshchat account

Go to Admin > Integrations > Google’s Business Messages.
Click ‘Add account.’ You will be redirected to a form.
Fill out the form and submit the details.
Our Onboarding team will then set up the integration on the Business Messages Admin console.
After verification, the Business Messages agent will appear in your Freshchat account.
This Business Messages agent can then be mapped to the required Topic in your Freshchat account.
You can edit the Topic, choose to trigger a bot to answer questions, or assign it to a group for direct agent interaction.
Hit Publish once you’re done.

Get started with Google Business Messages and Freshchat

Managing GBM doesn’t have to make your support service more complicated. By integrating GBM with the Freshchat platform, you can automate replies using chatbots and speed up replies by intelligently assigning queries to support staff. Get start ed with Freshchat toda y.

5 must-haves in your problem management software

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 17:19:29 GMT

5 must-haves in your problem management software

What is problem management?

In ITSM terms, an incident is a single unplanned interruption or reduction of the quality of an IT service. A problem, on the other hand, is a larger issue. ITIL™ defines a problem as “a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents.” Problem management entails the set of processes and activities responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems that could happen in an IT service. The crux of problem management is to go beyond just finding a solution, but rather the underlying cause of the incident and finding the best way to eliminate this root cause.

Problem management can save your organization thousands of dollars and can play a big role in increasing both employee and customer satisfaction.

Did you know that reports suggest that downtime can cost organizations $300,000 per hour?

This cost can be even higher for web-based services. One of the primary goals of problem management is to reduce MTTR (mean-time-to-repair) by using a structured root cause analysis process and custom workflows. A good problem management process helps prevent future problems and disruptions and aims to minimize the overall impact on the business. If implemented correctly, problem management improves service design and delivery and increases productivity.

If you are considering implementing a problem management software to reduce/prevent downtime and enhance employee satisfaction, here are:

The top 5 capabilities to look for in a problem management software:

Automation: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of problem management and aids all ITIL processes like incident management, change management, and asset management, thus, improving IT service management as a whole. Automation is involved in every step of the problem management process. Right from the problem detection phase to closure, automated alerts are sent to all the stakeholders. Moreover, once a problem is closed, automation makes it easy to ask for feedback and conduct reviews to help improve the process. The software aids in the follow-up process without manual effort.
Known Error Database (KEDB): A KEDB is a rich repository of problems that have occurred in the past and their respective workarounds. Keeping a record is instrumental in ensuring a swifter resolution of problems. While workarounds are not permanent solutions, they help to minimize impact until a long-term solution can be reached. Overall, it helps prevent recurring problems and ensures that there is transparency throughout this process.
Visibility: Your problem management software should have a dashboard that shows timelines, deadlines, and severity/urgency of problems. This dashboard goes a long way in providing clarity and keeping all steps of the problem management process systematic and transparent. It also makes it easier to conduct a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and stay organized. This consolidated view of incidents associated with a problem, issues, and causes, helps the problem management team reach solutions faster and more efficiently.
Proactive: There are two types of problem management, proactive and reactive. Proactive problem management aims to identify future incidents and prevent them from re-occurring by identifying and eliminating the root cause before they can cause service-impacting incidents. Having problem management software makes the proactive approach easier to implement. This method of problem management empowers your IT team to thoroughly investigate, find the underlying causes. This is incredibly beneficial for creating an open environment for learning and communication, which, in turn, can increase agent productivity.
Tracking Service Level Agreements (SLAs): A good problem management software will keep up with SLAs based on severity and urgency and helps improve the resolution times of problems. This helps your IT team to stay on top of your entire IT ecosystem and prioritize problems that affect more critical services.

Freshservice and problem management:

So, it is clear that problem management is a crucial part of delivering proactive service management. This, in turn, helps prevent disruptions to business and deflects a fairly large volume of low-priority, repetitive and redundant tickets. Freshservice has a number of embedded features that helps you implement a robust problem management process.

Automation: It is easy to change status, close, and communicate about a problem’s associated incidents.
Visibility: With Freshservice, you can seamlessly conduct root cause analyses, and record its impact, symptoms, and solutions or workarounds. The dashboard also helps you monitor its progress and view the timeline of events leading up to the problem.
Transparency: The KEDB of Freshservice helps you link problems to existing incidents, changes, or releases. This way, you can plan ahead for downtime or service disruptions. Having this helps prevent redundancy in resolutions and gives agents much-needed context about the tickets.
Prevent future incidents: Freshservice gives easy reference to solutions and workarounds all within a single window.

If you are interested in learning more about Freshservice’s problem management capabilities, click here . You can even get a free trial of Freshservice for 21-days . So, get a glimpse into advanced problem management features and more for no cost.

The State Of The Service Desk, 2022

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:29:20 GMT

Summary

Despite high satisfaction rates with the service desk, data suggests that employees are living with ongoing problems that the service desk can’t fix. This isn’t IT’s fault, but rather the result of systemic devaluation of employee experience (EX). Putting EX at the core of technology considerations is critical to reducing employee and productivity disruption.

The State Of The Service Desk, 2022

The transition to remote work upended IT support and the service desk function. Thanks to Herculean efforts, IT teams have reestablished some semblance of operations normalcy: According to Forrester’s Future Of Work Survey, 2021, 66% of employees contact the service desk more than once a year, and 67% of employees who contact the service desk report being satisfied with their service desk (see Figure 1).

Despite high satisfaction, data suggests that employees are living with ongoing problems the service desk can’t fix. A third of employees we surveyed in the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Australia report avoiding the service desk (see Figure 2). Two countervailing forces create these contradictory results — the human-facilitated side of IT and the systems that technology organizations use to empower employees.

The human side of IT is creating positive service interactions ... Humans delivering these services are doing their best to meet employee needs, but they often lack the resources, authority, analytics, or permissions required to help resolve long-running issues. Even with these limitations, practitioners are doing surprisingly well — in addition to high satisfaction, 47% of employees report receiving a fix in under an hour. In fact, for most technology issues, employees still prefer to interact with a human than use self-service mechanisms (see Figure 3).
... but systemic experience issues are making employees apathetic. While IT is satisfying employees in a given interaction, gaps persist. A majority of employees report avoiding the service desk and living with issues the service desk can’t fix, and only 47% of employees we surveyed report that the service desk adequately supports their remote work experience. While some issues today are outside IT’s control (e.g., home network troubleshooting), understanding the EX impact of these problems warrants deeper investigation, and most IT organizations aren’t doing this today. Only 40% of employees say their service desk actively seeks their feedback.

Begin Building A Better Service Desk

These systematic technology problems have a direct drain on productivity and EX. The reason that these problems have persisted is straightforward — the service desk, and IT in general, continue to face resource limitations and lack of support for EX considerations in purchasing.

According to the VP and global support lead at a professional services organization, “I had an old CFO (and the CIO agreed) who said to me, ‘If your satisfaction ratings are high, that means we should cut your budget.’” Meeting employee needs will require a shift in mindset around technology experience — from IT to finance — and a reexamination of the role the service desk plays in empowering employees. To begin this process:

Begin collecting experience feedback (on more than just service interactions). With less than half of respondents reporting that the service desk seeks their feedback, there’s an obvious first step for service improvement. Many organizations are investing in mechanisms to understand experience drivers according to Forrester’s 2021 data, which shows that 65% of software decision-makers report adopting, having adopted, or planning to adopt end-user experience management (EUEM) solutions — many of which have native user surveying capabilities. Organizations that haven’t done so should make this a priority for this year.
Recognize that Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) isn’t enough to understand EX in IT. For organizations already collecting experience feedback, focus on building out an end-to-end understanding of employee journeys. If you’re only measuring experience during interactions , you’re excluding the population that avoids the service desk. Once these reluctant employees are accounted for, you’ll have a clearer roadmap for fixing organizational experience gaps.
Establish senior leadership accountability for EX, the service desk, and overall IT. According to Forrester’s 2021 data, 51% of infrastructure decision-makers report that their IT organization has a team goal for EX and that they personally are held accountable for these goals. Technology silos complicate this; for example, end-user computing can’t take responsibility for the performance of finance applications. But these internal distinctions don’t — and shouldn’t — matter to end users. Members of senior leadership who are responsible for employees’ technology journeys must all be goaled on identifying existing shortcomings and improving technology EX.
Develop internal IT talent — tenure is undervalued. The longer IT professionals work within an organization, the more experience they develop with the various quirks of the environment. These individuals are some of your best assets for identifying shortcomings, and they provide you with a talent pool you can invest in upskilling to meet organizational needs. Clear career progression, including sponsoring certifications, can prove an organizational selling point during skills shortages.
Write simpler knowledge how-tos to free up L1. Despite employees’ preferences for interacting with humans to resolve their tech issues, you need mechanisms to provide faster support. Employees we surveyed report that only 21% of service desk issues are resolved within five minutes. One part of accelerating support is making information end-user friendly. Most IT knowledge is overly technical and written from an IT-facing perspective. For your most common inquiries, write knowledge in coordination with end-users to ensure that it’s useful to those outside of IT.
Leverage self-service mechanisms. Human support agents shouldn’t manage password reset processes. Your employees don’t want that, either — 66% would prefer a password reset managed by a self-service mechanism (like a catalogue entry or chatbot). Automating this task allows your practitioners more time for other issues like diagnosing broken devices, which users prefer resolving with a person.

Become proactive. Though it’s easier said than done, proactivity is the ultimate tool to reduce chronic IT issues. Proactive tech support isn’t a single solution or tool ; it’s the adoption of foundational elements that you can build from (see Figure 4). Critical elements to these foundational pieces include increased environmental visibility, user experience surveying, on-device automated common issue remediation, and transaction tracing. For example, EUEM solutions can detect battery failures before they occur. This is the final component of helping your users reduce the chronic technology issues they face.

Introducing Freshmarketer for Shopify: the only multichannel conversational marketing CRM

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 19:37:24 GMT

Introducing Freshmarketer for Shopify: the only multichannel conversational marketing CRM

Until the start of March 2020, when the global lockdown came into effect, the world as we knew had a clear schism when it came to retail. There was brick and mortar retail that drew in the volumes and then there was online shopping which was reserved for a few select categories such as apparel and electronics.

Two years since, there’s been a flip in trends. Shoppers and retailers, in the thousands, have migrated to online shopping and have ensured that retail e-commerce has shifted from one of necessity to one of ubiquity.

The pandemic-induced curbs on movement have nudged small businesses globally towards a new model for exploring sales and marketing—digital-first.

A key player at the forefront of this shift towards e-commerce is Shopify. Shopify’s e-commerce platform, which powers 1.75 million businesses globally, is a harbinger of this shift and accounted for some 3.6 million jobs at the height of the pandemic.

For both traditional retail businesses and emerging e-commerce businesses, stepping into digital brings challenges in setting up and scaling digital processes that help them engage with and improve conversions from their online stores. Having multiple solutions that are incompatible with each other prevents companies from building a holistic picture. To aid this burgeoning segment with their marketing and sales outreach, we are happy to announce Freshmarketer for Shopify, an integration tailor-made for Shopify businesses.

With this integration, your CRM experience will be optimized to suit e-commerce selling and works straight out of the box.

The Freshmarketer for Shopify integration brings with it the following benefits for you, the retailer:

Targetted Outreach and Automation

Use Shopify web store events as filters to create customer cohorts and target them based on their visits and purchase behavior. With Shopify playbooks, access and set up business-specific workflows such as “abandoned cart recovery” and “shipping emails” with minimum effort. Build on top of existing templates and configure complex marketing journeys that cover every aspect of your customer interaction.

Multichannel Engagement

Run multichannel campaigns that increase the efficacy of your outreach. With Freshmarketer, engage with your customers 1:1 and at scale via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat. Be it personalized engagement for undecided buyers or nurture campaigns to target returning customers or transactional messages after checkout, engage with your customers across channels of their choice to deliver the best experiences.

For visitors that land on your online store, engage them with self-service bots and prevent sales from falling through because your customers had to wait. Boost engagement with returning customers by deploying bots that run targeted campaigns.

Drive meaningful conversations with context

With the details page, every single buyer who makes a purchase from your store now gets assigned a dedicated page that tracks every single website visit and action. This helps you understand buyer intent when engaging 1:1 with the customers.

Furthermore, set up personalized campaigns to target different cohorts such as new customers and returning customers. This helps deliver a better customer experience and improve conversions.

Actionable insights for your online store

With Freshmarketer, the marketing dashboard works straight out of the box and tracks key metrics from Shopify such as Selling Volume, Avg Order Value, Top Items sold, Campaign performance, and more.

Your pitch needs an audience. Your product needs a store. With Freshmarketer for Shopify, you’ve got both covered. So go ahead, set up the integration, and enjoy the benefits of having a marketing solution designed to aid millions of Shopify storefronts and yours.

Is work tech keeping pace with employee expectations?

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 18:33:23 GMT

Is work tech keeping pace with employee expectations?

The short answer? Not so much!

New global research from Freshworks shows that despite a pandemic-driven tech spend surge, nine in ten (91%) employees are still frustrated by workplace tech. It reveals that businesses globally face a potential workplace crisis due to inadequate technology, damaging employee productivity, mental health, and the ability to retain talent.

The truth is, the concept of tech frustration is not entirely new. I’m sure most of us reading this article would’ve had personal accounts of dealing with inadequate tech at the workplace. Whether hampered by slow speeds, response times from helpdesks, ineffective collaboration, or not having the right technology tools to do our jobs, we’ve been there, done that.

But that’s changing, and for a good reason.

At a time when almost half (44%) of employees globally are considering changing jobs, easy-to-use technology makes a surprising impact on employee satisfaction. Addressing this expectation gap is now business critical. Seven in ten (71%) business leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new employer if their current job does not provide access to the tools, technology, or information they need to do their jobs well.

The emerging advantage in the war for talent

With the war for talent showing no signs of slowing down, business leaders are expected to deliver consumer-grade experiences, especially when it comes to technology. But it’s not enough to have any old technology; you need the right technology, and it has to be fit for purpose.

In such a fluid labour market, easy-to-use technology can make a surprising impact on employee satisfaction. While pay and benefits top the reasons to move jobs, lack of flexible working opportunities and innovative tech is in the top five.

The impact on retention is further reinforced by the fact that 44% of employees admitted that their company’s increased investment in automation could dissuade them from finding a new job.

Impact on productivity and business efficiency

The employee experience isn’t the only thing harmed by insufficient workplace technology; it’s also harming the wider business. Freshworks’ survey reveals that legacy tech is restraining business productivity as frustrated employees grapple with daily IT challenges.

Nearly three in five (57%) employees who feel this frustration say it makes them less productive. Over two in five (44%) employees surveyed say the time spent dealing with technology issues has increased since the beginning of the pandemic.

Final thoughts

Keeping employees satisfied in their work is an eternal challenge, doubly so when remote working has ignited IT frustrations. But the benefits of employee satisfaction, including improvements to productivity and loyalty, make the efforts to drive it worthwhile.

The new age workforce has very little tolerance for archaic tools. When employees are considering moving jobs without hesitation, there’s never been a more critical moment for companies to take another look at their technology set-up or risk losing the war for talent, tangible competitive advantage, and business success.

To know more about the state of workplace technology, subscribe to our newsletter.

6 ITSM tool features to improve employee experience

Mon, 09 May 2022 14:19:09 GMT

Leverage these 6 features of your ITSM tool to improve employee experience

With a paradigm shift to hybrid work practices and remote working, some critical questions arise. Firstly, how can organizations optimize employee engagement by using service management technology and principles? Secondly, how to digitize processes and assets? Thirdly, and most importantly, how to keep operations running in a world where the ‘work-from-anywhere’ workforce model is prevalent?

According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, 82% of executives say that employees’ happiness at work is impacted by how well the workplace technology performs. This shows the importance of having a good ITSM tool to enhance employee experience.

It is evident that companies need to focus on right-sizing IT service management, by leveraging robust automation, self-service, chatbots, multichannel support, and more, on an integrated platform to deliver a delightful employee experience from day one. Freshservice is an ITSM solution like no other that enables a delightful employee experience within an organization for seamless digital transformation using a no-code platform that is rapidly deployed.

Here are 6 ways in which an ITSM tool can enhance employee experience:

1: Employee Onboarding

A delightful employee experience begins from the onboarding stage. How does Freshservice make employee onboarding seamless? HR executives can collaborate with the IT team to create role-specific onboarding kits, include key stakeholders, and raise onboarding requests easily from a self-service portal to track progress. New hires experience a smooth onboarding process starting from day one, even in a digital workplace.

What’s more, employee essentials like ID cards, laptops, and workplace accessories can be listed within an organized service catalog. Whether it is requested on behalf of the new employee or the employee places a request, the service catalog can be designed for new employees to have everything they need to gear up for their new position.

Multiple key stakeholders, such as the Reporting manager, HR manager, and IT manager can all be added to the portal as part of the approval process. In case of bulk onboarding, HR teams can upload employee information into the portal and onboarding forms can be sent to respective managers and employees.

2: Self-service portal

One way to make IT requests convenient and seamless for employees is to enable a self-service portal. Employees across various teams within the organization can help themselves anytime and anywhere by raising a ticket. Moreover, the portal enables requesters to track the progress of tickets.

Setting up a self-service for requests ensures that there is a neat and organized catalog of available services so that employees are able to effortlessly request a service. The self-service portal in Freshservice can be set up in a way that is user-friendly and customizable according to a company’s brand policies.

Self-service is a great way to enable IT agents to save time that is usually spent doing mundane tasks and empower all employees in an organization to help themselves by raising a ticket on their own.

3. Service Catalogue

When businesses list all services offered to end-users in the form of a catalog, it forms a ‘service catalog’. The ideal service catalog is built according to the requirements of end-users and it is a transparent system to let them know what services are available to them. The UI needs to be intuitive and approval requests should be automated for ease.

The service catalog in Freshservice ensures that employees do not have to fill out lengthy forms and the sections are designed to save time and be as user-friendly as possible. Whether they require access to tools such as MS Office or a tangible item like a laptop, the employee can find it in the service catalog.

Ultimately, a neat and organized service catalog eliminates ambiguities and grey areas for end-users. It clearly shows them the services they’re eligible for with an easy way to raise requests.

4. Knowledge Base

A comprehensive knowledge base with solutions to incidents and problems can be beneficial to employees. Employees can find answers to their problems/questions by searching within the knowledge base. They don’t have to wait for a technician to respond and can instantaneously resolve queries.

Freshservice’s knowledge base is particularly helpful with its auto-suggest/smart-suggest feature. This proactively provides solutions before a ticket can be raised.

Moreover, Freshservice ensures that the impact of issues is minimized by finding temporary workarounds until more permanent solutions (and root cause) are found.

5. Multichannel support

While more organizations are moving towards WFH (Work from Home) and WFA (Work from Anywhere) workforce models, customer-grade IT service management becomes essential. The key is to have a no-code, unified service platform that enables collaboration in the most user-friendly manner possible. This means, multi-channel integration and support.

When support is available on channels like chat, phone, email, and virtual agent, it makes remote working easier . Moreover, Freshservice can be integrated with collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

6. AI powered chatbots

AI is the future of IT service management. With self-service portals gaining prominence in various industries, we cannot underestimate the power of chatbots. Not only can it save money, but it can also save time and make day-to-day work simpler for employees. Chatbots mimic human conversations. They engage in real-time-human-like conversations powered by Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), and Natural language processing (NLP) technologies to make everyday jobs easier and more efficient. Since chatbots are powered by AI and require minimal human involvement, there is lesser room for error.

Freshservice virtual agent is pre-trained on the most common IT service management (ITSM) and Enterprise service management (ESM) use cases using our AI-powered platform – Freddy. Employees can get instant response and resolution to their IT issues, while agents save more time and can focus on resolving complex and high-value issues.

According to 2022 Key Issues by the Hackett Group , 61% of companies have enterprise digital transformation on their agenda. So, while making this transformation, companies need to ensure that they don’t overspend their IT budget.

When choosing an ITSM tool, it is important to pick a tool that aligns with the needs of the organization, fits the budget, and is user-friendly. Do you agree? If so, get ready to right-size your IT service management with an intuitive and fast-time-to-value solution. Try Freshservice for free for 21 days for a delightful employee experience.

Why You Should Switch To A Modern Cloud-Based ITSM Solution.

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:57:36 GMT

Why You Should Switch To A Modern Cloud-Based ITSM Solution.

Is my service desk investment paying off?

Is my service desk delivering true business value?

Are we incurring costs that are not under control?

Are we able to leverage the service desk beyond IT use cases?

If your current ITSM solution makes you question its true value and reliability, are you even using the right ITSM tool?

We don’t think so!

Let’s get one thing straight. We don’t advocate a one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, we firmly believe that every organization must assess its business needs, IT infrastructure, and day-to-day incremental requirements, among other things, to arrive at the right solution that can tackle its IT service management challenges.

But, how do you identify these challenges when you are buried neck-deep in everyday low-complexity tasks? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

This article walks you through three scenarios where we think you have an opportunity to flip the switch on your ITSM strategy.

Let’s dive in!

Scenario 1: A simple workflow change within your ITSM suite disrupts your entire workflow

If something as simple as creating a service request for application access wears you out, then there’s a serious flaw in your current ITSM tool.

The clunky nature of most legacy ITSM software will draw your service desk into months of coding and scripting just to implement simple workflow changes, leaving you with an extended timeline. And boy, do we all know what an extended timeline can do to the business!

To implement changes more rapidly and ensure uninterrupted services for your employees, you need to look for a tool that makes implementing workflow changes a breeze.

A tool like Freshservice, for instance, has a simple drag and drop UI to implement workflow changes and change management requests.

You can also set simple automation rules and leverage built-in functionalities to eliminate redundant tasks and simplify your work further.

Scenario 2: Your ITSM tool is high maintenance, sending your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through the roof!

You thought you could make a one-time high-cost investment on a legacy ITSM tool and get away with it?

No way.

Expensive licenses, hidden costs, and recurring expenses will leave you struggling to find the real value of your ITSM tool.

And that’s just the beginning. A long pay period, slow time-to-value, and a struggle to achieve real ROI will follow as long as you continue to invest in maintaining your legacy tool.

What if you could pay for only what you use and nothing more?

Enter Freshservice.

Not to toot our own horn, but Freshservice provides a transparent, predictable, and controllable TCO. Our transparent subscription plans are created to offer a pay-as-you-go model with no hidden costs and easy management.

Scenario 3: You’re always looking for external help to manage your ITSM tool.

Yet another downside to using a legacy ITSM tool is that you’re always looking for outside help to manage your tool.

Legacy tools are, more often than not, built using custom code. Specialized skills are required to implement, maintain, and upgrade the tool. This means you have to call in coders who built the platform to fix what’s broken, adding to your already high maintenance costs.

Even for simple workflow changes, there’s a hunt for external consultants, commercial negotiations, the creation of a statement of work, and then the need to map out elaborate project plans.

That’s a lot of work! And quite unnecessary.

It doesn’t take an army to implement Freshservice. With our intuitive, out-of-the-box, and highly configurable IT service desk; you’re not compelled to break the bank either.

With Freshservice’s no-code platform, you can rapidly develop enterprise-grade customizations, get expert onboarding and migration services instantly.

Final thoughts

If you’re looking to find opportunities to flip the switch on your ITSM strategy, we’ve got just what you need.

Based on our experience of working with businesses that have turned around their IT service management, we’ve created an ebook that narrows down seven scenarios where we think there’s an opportunity to flip the switch on your ITSM strategy.

This ebook enables you to dig deeper and find answers to critical questions that can optimize your ITSM solution. The ebook also gives you insights into new-age innovations and helps you transform into a world-class business.

Interested? Click HERE to get your free copy.

And, if you’ve made up your mind to switch to a modern cloud-based ITSM solution, get started on our 21-day free trial and explore the full potential of Freshservice.

Nine reasons your customers want to be able to text support

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:40:58 GMT

Nine reasons your customers want to be able
to text support

Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers.

If your business doesn’t already offer texting support, then here are the nine reasons you should..

1. Customers spend a lot of time on their phones

People in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on their cell phones each day. Mobile commerce, or purchases made on mobile devices, is expected to account for 45 percent of the total market in the U.S. by the end of 2020, according to Business Insider .

Besides people using their phones for more than personal communication and shopping, they are also working from their phones. All of this points to the fact that your customers are already spending more time on mobile than anywhere else. And nothing is more accessible to a mobile user than texting. So it is high time that your business starts texting your existing support. Meet your customers where they are.

2. Your customers prefer texting

Now that we know customers are already on their phones, but does that also mean they want to text businesses? Yes.

Customers want to be able to text your support team simply because they prefer texting over long-winded support calls. Reportedly, 52 percent of customers prefer texting over other support communication channels.

Another reason why texting should be preferred is that it has a 98 percent open rate . That means your customers will read your message nearly every time, which only makes it easier for you to resolve all of your customers’ support questions.

If you meet your customers where they want to talk they’ll view your business more favorably too. Research shows that 65 percent of consumers feel positive toward businesses that they have the option to message.

3. Speed

The average response time for texting is just 90 seconds. On top of that, 95 percent of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. This is way quicker than your average email response time and thus will make your customer feel valued.

Part of what can help to speed this process up is a good texting platform that your customer support team can work with. Such a platform can host all of the support messages, where they can see, respond to, or share messages. Some texting platforms like Textline can even integrate with your favorite customer support tools like Freshdesk and Slack. These integrations make responding and managing customer support requests easier.

Another reason why texting is simply better when it comes to speed is that texts are inherently short. You’re limited to 160 characters and so are your customers. Realistically, there’s only so much one can squeeze into one text that naturally forces the sender to keep the message simple and clear.

4. Reduced active wait

Customers don’t like waiting. Nearly 60 percent of customers said they would hang up if put on hold for more than a minute. Texting eliminates that hold time and gives your customers more of their day back. The beauty of texting is that it’s quick, convenient, and doesn’t interrupt your customer’s day.

Texting also comes with built-in expectations around timing and the natural flow of conversations. While responses are expected, there’s an understanding that it may take a bit of time. This differs from live chat, which expects near-instant replies.

With texting, even if you think there might be a wait for getting your customers some help, you can use a simple text to let your customers know that you are working on an answer but it might take a bit of time. This will help them to continue with their day without sitting by the phone waiting.

Let’s look at the following example of one such situation.

5. More privacy

Anyone who’s been a customer has probably felt that sense of dread knowing when they have to call customer support. They need to plan to be in a private place and potentially wait for a break from work. Texting offers you the option to contact support discreetly at any time.

This added privacy can go a long way in keeping customers happy. Plus, they can text at nearly any time in their day means that they don’t have to plan their call or use their personal break or lunchtime waiting on hold.

6. Texting offers MMS

It’s not only about the words between you and your customers, you can share more than that.

You can share more than just words with your customers. With texting services for businesses, you get MMS too – the ability to share photos and images. This can help you understand the issue better and arrive at necessary resolutions quickly.

A customer might send a photo of a damaged item, or maybe of a job they’re requesting a quote for. Texting makes it easier for them to reach out to you with a small time commitment. You can also send links to bills, or PDFs of invoices.

Take a look at the following example of when it might be helpful for a customer to send a photo:

7. Written record

Customer support is a continuous interaction that requires multiple revisits to previous conversations for maximum benefit.

With a phone call, the closest thing you’ll get to a written record is the notes left by the customer service agent who last spoke with a customer. This can lead to customers waiting while the current agent looks into any previous call records. However, with texting, there’s an actual written record. Of course, there can still be notes to assist the written records, thus offering a richer background to help the customer support team close tickets faster.

8. Texting offers low impact personal connection

Your customers don’t solely want to hear from you, 85 percent of them say they want to be able to interact with you. Texting allows you to have that two-way personal communication without increasing time output or sacrificing relationships with other customers. A benefit that comes with texting is that it’s a familiar form of communication. Your customers are used to texting with friends and family, so you can adopt that friendly tone when you contact them as well.

There are some points of contact that simply make more sense via text than via phone call or an email. Customers are sometimes more open to offering feedback or responding to you through a text.

An example of this is simply following up with a customer after they made a purchase to see how they like it. It also allows for increasing their loyalty or potentially selling them another product. The personal touch which texting offers can go a long way in improving your relationship with your customer.

Look at the example below:

9. Texting is less stressful

When it comes to making a phone call, your customers just don’t want to do it. Nearly 59 percent of customers would prefer to use almost any other channel than make a call. Part of the reason for that is that phone calls can be stressful.

Bad hold music, long wait times, and the potential for being passed from one agent to another are all big drawbacks for customers that can force them to opt for a different customer service provider who prefers texting over voice calls.

Now that we have reached the end of this blog post, we would like to briefly summarize everything we talked about – Texting is a very powerful tool to interact with your customers. When you align your customer support initiatives with topline texting services, you can rest assured that not only customer experience , but your retention rates will also improve.

If you are convinced and would like to know more about text-based services for your customer support, then please feel free to contact us to find out more.

Author: Nina Godlewski

Main Illustrator: Prasanna Bhupendran

7 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:28:36 GMT

7 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high.

There are many factors that might impact your average response time, including:

the number of steps that agents have to take to find customer history and previous interactions
the difficulty in communicating and collaborating with other teams
absolute ticket volumes, as well as ticket volume to agent ratio
the frequency of complex issues that routinely take longer to solve

To help you tackle these challenges in an efficient manner, we’ve put together this article where we deep dive into the average response times across channels, and also look at effective ways to improve customer responsiveness.

What is responsiveness in customer service?

Simply put, customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently a company responds to customers. From a customer support standpoint, it is the time taken by the support agents to respond to your customers. It’s important to note that customer responsiveness covers first response time, and also the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution. Customers would be delighted if they get connected to an agent immediately but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries.

Striking a balance between speed and quality is the biggest challenge faced by customer support agents. However, by clearly communicating the expected wait and query resolution time beforehand, you can help set the right expectations with customers. This will also enable customers to gain trust in your brand, and help you build customer loyalty. But the real question here is – how can you deliver timely and consistent customer support when you handle different communication channels?

The answer to this question lies in understanding the expected response times for each channel as well as knowing how to deliver better customer experience.

How crucial is the customer response time for each channel?

The average response time or average wait time differs for each support channel. Here is a breakdown of the average response time for each customer service channel.

Email

According to SuperOffice, the average wait time for an email is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Here is a representation of the percentage of different age groups expecting an email reply within 1 hour.

Phone and Live chat

People reach out to phone and live chat support to receive a fast and immediate response. Thus the average response time for the former is 3 seconds and the latter is under 1 minute.

Social Media

The average response time for social media differs across different platforms. Here is a graphical representation of the average response time of popular social media channels namely Facebook and Twitter.

Pro Tip: Though there is a specified average wait time for each of these channels, we recommend you to respond as fast as possible to your customer queries.

How to improve customer responsiveness and create a better customer experience

#1. Understand your customers

Identifying the channels your customers are more comfortable with is the first step in improving your customer responsiveness. Surveys and customer feedback forms can help you understand what customers expect in terms of wait times, and whether they were happy with the experience they had. This in turn can be fed back into your support strategy, and you can use the insights to make decisions such as hire more people, assign more resources on channels that customers expect faster service like chat. Knowing your customer better and engaging with them will help you outperform your competitors.

#2. Leverage the power of technology

There are multiple ways that technology can help optimize and automate repetitive tasks in customer service, and thereby significantly improve your team’s responsiveness.

Make use of a helpdesk software to streamline your support process. A good helpdesk software will help you prioritize the issues that need attention and bring all channels of communication onto one dashboard so agents don’t have to toggle between many tools. It offers historical context and 360 view of every customer by tracking customer journey across each channel and collaboration with other teams without losing context.
Power your helpdesk or support software with automation to respond quickly to your customers. Automation will be hugely helpful to improve your customer responsiveness. Freshdesk Omni Route automatically assigns messages, chats, tickets, and phone calls to the right agent based on their agent loads. It also scans the customer inquiries and assigns it to the right team depending on the issue type and the channel they contacted you with. Furthermore, it will also update the progress of the issue to the customers.
Deploying AI-driven chatbots to your support software is a boon to your business. They can handle customers and bring down your average first response time. With Freddy, the agents don’t have to spend time sorting the incoming tickets or answering the common queries that arise every day. It categorizes, prioritizes the incoming queries and also solves repetitive support processes with just a single click. The agents can bid adieu to these mundane tasks and focus on complex customer needs.

#3. Provide consistent support experience

When providing support via different channels, the challenge lies in keeping it consistent without losing customer context across channels. An omnichannel support solution not only lets you manage multiple customer service channels from a single-window but will also help you provide a seamless and consistent support experience. The customers can reach out to you via any channels and receive a contextual response without having to worry about which channel is the best to reach out to you.

#4. Provide resources for self-support

Implementing self-service options like a customer portal or a knowledge base is a perfect resource for the customers to solve their issues on their own, without having to wait to connect to an agent for every simple or common issue that arises. This will decrease the number of incoming queries to the customer support teams, and therefore reduce agent load and improve response times. This will free up agent time to address customers with bigger issues at hand.

#5. Train your employees

A skilled workforce can perform better and build good customer relationships. Training your customer support staff on the importance of customer satisfaction and informing them about the expected response times for each channel will help them provide better support. Make sure your agents are aware of the common types of customer service questions or issues raised on your brand or business and are well-equipped to answer them. Also, ensure that your agents have access to your knowledge base so that all your employees can deliver a consistent support experience. This can be made easier with Freddy Answers, which automatically responds to the customers with the best answers from your knowledge base. It goes above and beyond by identifying intent and follows up the answer to bring conversational flow and engages with your customers.

#6. Make use of canned responses and incorporate personalization

Canned responses or templates help you respond quickly to common customer issues with just a click. This saves you the time and effort of having to write the same messages or answers over and over again for different customers. With Freddy AI article and canned response suggestor, you can immediately send out a response without having to search through your list of canned responses or templates.

#7. Set performance goals and monitor individual customer response time

Performance goals are essential for monitoring your customer support. Tracking metrics such as average response time, number of agent responses per ticket, and total time spent on a ticket will help you know where you stand and provide a better customer support experience. Set different benchmarks for each channel. As mentioned earlier, the average response time varies from channel to channel. So you will need to monitor the responsiveness of your support and query volumes separately for each channel. These goals motivate your agents to reach their goals and in turn, helps your business deliver a faster customer response.

Closing Thoughts

While rushing to offer faster responses to customers, try to stay as human as possible. What separates human agents from bots is the ability to understand and connect with your customers. Ensure that you listen to your customers and provide the right solution. Customer responsiveness is not only about fast responses but also the right responses and solutions. Improving your customer responsiveness indicates that you are on the fast and right track to win customers for life.

For a FREE trial of FreshDesk click here

Source

https://www.superoffice.com/blog/response-times/

Author: Aysha Shereen

Freshdesk Omnichannel delivers a 462% ROI according to Forrester study

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 14:50:01 GMT

Freshdesk Omnichannel delivers a 462% ROI according to Forrester study

Investment in digital transformation efforts must translate to direct business benefits by reducing costs while growing faster. The Total Economic Impact™ Study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Freshworks, illustrates how Freshdesk Omnichannel can revolutionize your contact center.

Drive cost savings, improve agent productivity, and accelerate time to value with Freshdesk Omnichannel.

Reduce ticket volume by 27% with self-service and AI-powered chatbots
Save $2.9 million by shifting from phone to digital service channels like chat and messaging
Improve average handle time by 25% with Freshdesk’s intuitive, powerful agent desktop
Save $610,000 by automating administrative tasks and reporting

Forrester Consulting was commissioned by Freshworks to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) by conducting a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study of enterprises that have deployed Freshdesk.

Download The Total Economic Impact™ Study

By clicking on download you agree to receive electronic marketing communications from Omnis-Cx and understand you can unsubscribe anytime

by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link in any email or by contacting Omnis-Cx.

Getting Actionable Insights from Customer Support Conversations

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:38:39 GMT

Getting Actionable Insights from Customer Support Conversations

We’re in a world where the customer is king. We rely on them to reach out to us, tell us how they feel, tell their friends about us and, of course, to continue spending their money with us. We could just take each of these interactions at face value and continue on with our day, but gaining more actionable insights from customer support conversations helps perpetuate a pattern of customer happiness and loyalty.

Actionable insights go beyond the raw data that you pull from your CRM, helpdesk, or other software. Instead of just a single point of data, actionable insights offer a clear path for an organization to follow in order to best make changes to processes or strategy.

Unfortunately, while gathering data is common, aggregating actionable insights is not. Forrester reports that 74% of companies say they want to have strong data processes, but only 29% are actually successful in actioning their analytics. Luckily, though, customer support conversations are some of the easiest places to collect actionable insights. Here are a few straightforward ways to get started today.

Read your reviews (and have AI analyze them for deeper insights)

While you can gain a ton of insights just by reading what your customers have to say about reviews, they will be even more actionable if you analyze them. Using machine learning can help you uncover trends that you might not be able to see with just a human reviewing every response. This is especially true in situations where there is so much data available that it’s near impossible to read it all. In those cases, reading just a sample of your responses would never be reflective of your customers’ sentiments overall. AI gives a much more accurate analysis overall because it analyzes everything.

Determining that survey responses are overall positive or trending down is just a starting point for further analysis. Use high-impact text analysis tools and methodologies to mine verbatim feedback about how customers truly feel about your product or service and how they want to be engaged. Not only will this help point you in the right direction for what needs to shift it will also give you a better handle on what you’re already doing correctly. It will also help you to find correlations between customer feedback and actions that they’re taking within your product.

Listen to your customers on social media

Almost everyone has some form of social media presence, and it’s in your best interest to capitalize on that. While offering social media support properly is more difficult than people expect, the payback is worth it. A Bain & Company report on social media found that customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20-40% more with those companies than their other customers do.

Social listening is generally best practiced when you’ve made it easy for your customers to reach out to you. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds make it easy and quick for people to share how they’re thinking without having to jump through a ton of hoops or engage with you directly.

Monitoring this free and undirected flow of information allows your team to move away from the bias of the specific questions you might ask in surveys. There, you get into the meat and potatoes of what people are actually thinking and when they’re thinking it.

Social media listening also helps teams assess customers’ intent to purchase, determine segments around customer interests or sentiment and determine which communities are most active for them (and where they should invest potential marketing spend).

Identify at-risk segments

The best way to give your customers a superior experience is to appropriately segment them using up-to-date data. There are a number of things that you can segment on, including:

Customer journey timeline location
Sentiment, NPS, CSAT
Industry
Professional position
Behavior
Spend

From there, information that you glean from customer feedback data can be put to use improving your segments. You can track your most at-risk segments, and put specific efforts into their retention. Start by segmenting based on the more structured and straight-forward data points such as CSAT survey or churn numbers, and then delve deeper. When you read into more unstructured data, such as customer feedback comments, you get more insight into which segments are particularly at risk. It also opens you up to more deeply understanding how product changes and updates affect your customers’ engagement with your product.

For example, you can dive into feedback from customers in specific segments to see which struggle most with a specific feature. You can also uncover things like cost-aversion and specifically target segments with proactive support or marketing campaigns. Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat, believes that close to 50% of your segments should be based on a customer’s goals and struggles with your product. Diving more deeply into the specific, unstructured data behind each segment helps get you closer to that goal.

Correlate your customer support conversation metrics with company-wide KPIs

For some companies, support feels irrelevant when it comes to conversations about company-wide KPIs or goals. But, just because support isn’t directly responsible for things like product deadlines or NPS survey doesn’t mean that the two can’t be correlated.

When you start to correlate customer ticket volume or actions within your product with things like bug reports, or churn metrics, it helps tell a more compelling story about what’s really happening. Sure, you likely get churn responses from a survey that you send out after the fact, but correlating those pieces of data with things like support ticket satisfaction, volume or first response time can get you a better picture of how your support team can make an impact on company-wide metrics.

You can also use natural language processing (NLP) to dive deeper into sentiment for an even stronger comparison. NLP allows insights teams to analyze customer conversations based on what they’re actually saying, not just the basic sentiment or score being given, as well as how they feel about certain features or issues.

If you’re able to see correlations between a segment of customers, negative sentiment around a product release and churn rates, you have an actionable insight!

Follow your volume

Pay attention to the peaks and valleys of your support volume. If you’ve just released a new product, do you see a spike in tickets? What about if you push a large bug fix? Understanding how work outside of your customer experience team affects the customer experience can be integral for perfecting your processes.

After you’ve made a major change, such as a new product feature, a bug squash or a change in refund policy, following the volume in the inbox can help give you a map for how to better handle it in the future. If you segment and review specific tickets related to the change, you’ll be able to see what to improve (or what customers really loved) so you can build it intentionally in the future.

Consider, for example, if you were to see a large number of tickets coming in about documentation after the release of a new product. A review of the tickets shows that people were looking for documentation but couldn’t seem to find anything that helped. That means that you may want to look into what your process for creating and curating documentation looks like for future releases.

To close

Customer conversations are a data gold mine when it comes to helpful information about where you can take action. Your customers are, after all, the most important part of your business. They keep your doors open and lights on. Using their words to directly impact your company strategies and processes is the best way to keep yourself afloat and successful.

Use AI, such as NLP and text analytics, to get more precise and applicable information about how your customers are doing and feeling. Listen to them, both in reviews and on social media, to see if there’s anything that you can find between the lines. Follow the trends in your support volume to see where you’re doing things right and deflecting tickets, or where there are opportunities for you to do better. Finally, use all of this information to keep the good experience train rolling.

How to Deliver Excellent Customer Service Across Channels [Infographic]

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 12:45:52 GMT

Best Practices to Deliver Excellent Customer Service Across Channels [Infographic]

In today’s fast growing economy, customers service expectations from businesses and brands have sky rocketed. Providing the kind of customer service that retains existing customers and brings in new ones is essential and it all begins with quick and seamless support on multiple channels.

In this infographic we walk you through the best practices to scale your customer service across multiple channels of support including phone, email, chat, and social media.

Illustrated by Vinodhkumar Neelakandan

Time Management Techniques for Remote Working

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 15:55:51 GMT

Time Management Techniques for Remote Working

Thanks to the pandemic, more people than ever are embracing remote working. Whether or not this becomes the norm for many businesses is yet to be seen. But are salespeople at their productive best while working from home? If you are not used to working from home, effective time management might be a challenge.

This can have harmful effects on your and your team’s productivity. Everyone has different ways of managing time, so if you’re unsure of how to maximize efficiency, here are a few time management techniques you can try.

What is Time Management?

Haven’t you always observed how some people multitask like a pro and complete all their tasks before time. While some struggle to complete tasks and always cross the deadline? Time management is no art to master. Time management is a skill where you learn to use your time productively and efficiently.

What are Time Management skills?

Some skills, when practiced regularly, can help you become adept at time management.

Planning – If you make it a habit to plan for tasks you need to accomplish in a day, then you easily strike it off your list. Allot time for tasks, ensure you complete them and become a master planner.
Persistence – Be confident that you can complete your tasks and do not give up on them midway. Hustle through the day, by focusing on priority tasks first and take all efforts to ensure your tasks are completed.
Delegation – Managing your time efficiently does not mean you have to complete all your tasks by yourself. Knowing what and when to delegate is an important time management skill. It is important to assign tasks to those who can carry it out in, and not overload yourself with tasks.
Organization – Stay on top of important tasks, allot time for each considering how long each would take, resources you would need to accomplish them and bottlenecks.

Time Management Strategies

1. Treat It Like a Day at the Office

Treating your remote work like you’re still in the office will keep you in a super-productive mindset. You allow yourself a start time and an end time, as well as time for lunch. This schedule really allows you to plan your day effectively. You know what you need to do and when.

As the day progresses, you discover what tasks demand more attention than others. From there you have the freedom to adjust your schedule to suit you. If you know that some tasks could take a long time but others won’t, it’s easy to bump them for later in the day.

While perceiving your home like the office, you can also look forward to finishing the day. This will motivate you to get your work completed. It also helps eliminate the temptation to treat yourself to a long lunch or other time-wasting activities. It’s important to continue the momentum you’ve already built up.

Of course, there will be times when you need to finish late, but this is no different from the office where you stay after-hours.

2. Give Yourself a Designated Work Space

One key thing that affects time management when working from home is that salespeople do not give themselves a designated workspace. The bed or in front of the TV are common areas, but let’s be honest here – these bring with them too many distractions.

One key time management technique is to dedicate a morning to creating a designated workspace. This space should be free from distractions and outfitted with as many office items as you need. Your desk should be tidy and have everything ready when you need it, including all your device chargers, notepad, pen, water bottle and other accessories so you don’t have to step out of the room.

By organizing your work area, you’ll be able to get into the right frame of mind to complete your assignments for the day. It will also stop you from getting sidetracked, keeping you on task for as long as you need to be.

3. Avoid Irrelevant Tasks

Remote work will never be quite the same as office work. Even when you try to get rid of distractions, there are always unimportant tasks in the back of your mind that you convince yourself you need to do. These trivial tasks can snowball. Cleaning the dishes after breakfast might only take five minutes, but it’s easy to get sidetracked after doing the dishes and attending to something else as well.

It’s these tasks that can affect your time management. Suddenly, you lose an hour of your day because you washed the dishes, cleaned the counter, replaced a lightbulb, and rearranged the refrigerator. While snippets of housework are useful, they can also ruin the schedule you’ve set out for yourself.

Aside from irrelevant household tasks, there are also work-based tasks that are not always essential. The sooner you recognize what you need to be there for and what you can avoid, you will find you can manage your time better.

Some meetings are unnecessary, and if you feel that that’s the case, replace it with an email. You do not have to accept every meeting that comes your way. You’ll waste way too much time waiting for everybody to log on and get settled. Instead, use the time to work on more pressing matters.

4. Give Yourself a Break

There’s nothing wrong with taking a break! Taking regular breaks is just as beneficial as giving yourself a productive space. Breaks take your mind off the work for a few minutes, helping your brain recharge and making you more productive when back on-task.

Take yourself away from your workspace. Sit in the garden or take a stroll around the neighborhood. Anything that gets you away from the ‘office’ is helpful.

If you stay at your desk all day, you risk your brain associating even your break times with work, which can lead to burnout. You won’t be able to work as efficiently throughout the day, and you’ll hit a wall at some point. You will be unable to be at your best any longer. With a proper break that separates you from the workday, you can expect to stay on top of your time management.

5. Use Time Management Tools

If you still find yourself struggling to stay on task or are unable to manage your time as efficiently as you want to, time management tools like Jibble, Tomatotimers, and Rescuetime are useful. With these, you can keep a record of the minutes you spend working before stopping and then starting again. Time management tools alert you if you are slacking and remind you to focus on priority tasks.

Time management apps can provide a vital perspective on how you spend your day. You can use them to unlock insight into how much time you actually waste while working. By analyzing this information, you can make adjustments to your remote working habit to manage your time better.

By noticing which triggers cause you to halt your work, you can start to recognize when you are getting off-task before it happens. During this downtime, you can mitigate the drop in productivity by putting your mind towards something else. It’s worth taking this time to reply to emails or make notes regarding client meetings for the next day. Even if you are not doing the work you are supposed to be doing, you are still not wasting time. While all wasted time quickly adds up, so does the time you use economically.

Anyone not familiar with remote work will take a bit of time to adapt to these time management techniques. By exploring which idea works best for you, it’s easy to manage your time effectively. You’ll find yourself surprisingly more productive and a lot less stressed, making your remote work more successful.

Handling distractions and improving focus while working from home

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:26:23 GMT

Handling distractions and improving focus while working

from home

Written by Kaavya Karthikeyan on June 15, 2020

I don’t know about you but working from home has been a pretty hard proposition for me. Let’s face it. Rolling out of bed, putting some clothes on, sitting at the computer and contemplating productive work sounds challenging––even as a thought. I can barely sit in a spot for 30 minutes without feeling the urge to grab a snack or play with my dog.

This is very natural though. And while I occasionally feel guilty that I’m not spending all my time working, learning, and improving myself, I have learned to cope with the feeling. What we all forget is that we’re working from a place usually reserved for relaxation and unwinding. So, of course, everything is going to be different. The goals you set, the work you do, and even your schedules are going to be a challenge. Keeping your eyes on the prize is not going to be simple. So how do you manage your time and stay focused?

Here are some tips to handle WFH distractions and improving your focus.

Prioritize what you have to do

We all have a lot of things to get done. However, often, we don’t sort these by order of importance. For example, you have two articles going out. While one needs more research, the other has a closer due date. It can be hard for you to decide which one to prioritize but you have to make that call because you need to get your work done.

Unless you put your tasks in order and tackle them systematically, you’ll end up going around in circles and get very little done. Not prioritizing your tasks also means that you might have trouble managing your time and eventually end up doing a sloppy job.

Look at the bigger picture

While finishing off smaller tasks on your list can make you feel productive, you have to ask yourself how much these contribute to your end goals. For example: building an index of articles you’ve written so far. While it might not seem very helpful, it will greatly speed up future research especially if you need to frequently refer to your work. On the other hand, sending an email to your product users, which only takes up a small portion of your day, might leave you feeling like you’ve accomplished something and entitle you to a break, even if you have more work left.

Once you do this, figure out which things help you towards your ultimate goals and get cracking on them!

Reward yourself with your favorite distractions

You’re going to be affected by distractions no matter what, as we’ve mentioned earlier. However, rather than letting this derail you, you can instead make them work in your favor.

For instance, you love spending time on Reddit? Give yourself 20 minutes to browse to your heart’s desire after an hour or two of work. By rewarding yourself with a controlled level of things that distract you, you can strike that balance between work and play!

Stay engaged during meetings

Meetings have always been hard to pay attention to, all the more so when someone is talking about something that doesn’t really concern you. This is amplified to a new level of difficulty in a work-from-home environment. The temptation to let our minds go astray during a meeting always exists, and it is even more obvious when you can mute yourself and turn off your video and do your own thing.

This is bad on multiple levels though, as you may not just end up missing something important, you might also be distracting others. To avoid zoning out, try and take notes based on what the speaker is saying. Ask questions to get more details and also to stay in the loop.

Track your day and optimize

Look at how your day passes and make notes. Are you spending too much time on social media? Does your 20-minute break to watch an episode of a show turn into a binge? By identifying where you get sidetracked and lose your valuable time, you can cut down on them and be more productive.

Optimization is also good – if you know you spend a lot of time going back and forth with your team or looking at emails, set aside time during the day to do these rather than constantly.

Work when you’re most productive

Some of us work better at night while for others it’s the opposite. It is important to collaborate with your team, but equally important is doing tasks solo when you’re most productive. Inform the people you work with about when you’ll be working and schedule a time to catch up that works for everyone.

Use time-management techniques

There are a variety of techniques available out there but one that I personally find really effective is the Pomodoro technique.

In this, you work for 25-minute sessions (pomodoros), and take a 5-minute break after each session. After 4 cycles, you take a 20-minute break. I find this works for me because I have trouble keeping my mind on things for longer than 20 to 30 minutes and by taking these short breaks, I feel refreshed.

Another technique I find useful is dividing my day into time slots. For instance, spending the hour before lunch researching an article, and the two after lunch to come up with a first draft, and so on.

Working from home isn’t easy. Sure, you no longer have that traffic-ridden commute, and, of course, there is the comfort of working in your pajamas. But, all the little things you do to get ready for work places you in that “work” mindset, something you no longer have. It’s okay to ease into things. The above list might help you focus better and in the long run, see better results and even have more time to relax and enjoy yourself.

What are your tips for focusing on work and managing time? Let us know in the comments below!

Freshworks recognised as a 'visionary' in the 2020 CRM CEC Gartner Magic Quadrant

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 12:56:52 GMT

Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center - Published 4 June 2020 - ID G00432951 - 45 min read

Gartner just published their latest Magic Quadrant research on customer service and contact center applications and has recognized Freshworks as a ’Visionary’ for our cloud-based omnichannel customer service platform, Freshdesk.

We believe this confirms our ability to help businesses drive customer loyalty with our unique people plus bots strategy. Our customer service platform with native customer and agent-facing AI capabilities has helped us expand our mid-market and enterprise presence. We also believe that our ability to offer rich omnichannel support, a 360° view of the customer, and powerful collaboration tools have made us a regular on the Magic Quadrant.

Why you should read this report

The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) report examines the global market for customer service and support applications. It helps business leaders identify the latest customer service priorities and evaluate a wide range of customer service applications to make the right choice.

This Gartner report specifically answers the following questions:

How Gartner views the current CEC ecosystem?
How equipped are current vendors in addressing the demanding needs of today’s CECs?
What are the key considerations for businesses looking to implement CRM and CEC technologies?
How Gartner analysts evaluate and position Freshworks and other technologies and service providers?

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Brian Manusama, Nadine LeBlanc 4 June 2020.

Get complimentary access to this exclusive report

Tips to manage your team while working from home

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 16:53:44 GMT

Tips to manage your team while working from home

Some of the world’s largest tech companies are embracing remote work at least for the foreseeable future.

That brings with it a whole new set of challenges. Managing teams, for example. That’s challenging enough when everyone is in the same building. But managing them while you and your team are working remotely? That’s a whole new ball game.

A lot of us are now first-time remote managers and some of our old management techniques just don’t apply anymore. Working from home, by definition, means that your team’s professional and personal lives are going to be more intertwined than ever. They will also have to face challenges in collaboration, motivation, productivity and more!

Here are our tips on what you can do to help them and to make remote team management a smooth experience for everyone involved.

Set realistic goals and deadlines

Working from home doesn’t automatically mean that your team will have more time to work. Yes, they can save the time usually spent on their commute, but they now have to deal with a change of routine, new workspace, and distractions that did not exist in the office space.

Having deadlines that are too stringent during this time will only affect their productivity more. Give them some time to get acclimatized to the situation and create a new routine for themselves. Relax your deadlines if you can. If you do not have control over the deadlines, then try to reduce the goals and the scope of the projects for a brief period.

Encourage your team to take ownership

The aspect of teamwork that takes the biggest hit while working from home is collaboration. Providing hands-on training to your team, following up with them informally to see how they are doing, reviewing their work, and communicating feedback can become very challenging.

What used to be a simple water-cooler conversation now becomes a meeting. Whether you are following up on email or chat or a phone call, things become more formal and it increases stress for your team.

The best way to tackle this is by encouraging your team to take complete ownership of their projects. Have a single call to set clear expectations at the beginning. Allow them to make mistakes initially and let them learn from it. Just make sure they know you are always around to help.

While this might affect the quality of work and deadlines in the short term, it will help your team perform better in the longer run. Even when you are not working from home.

Modify your team’s sub-culture

Every team has a sub-culture derived from the overall culture of the organization. But holding your team to the same culture codes now may not be possible. Modify your sub-culture to suit the current situation.

If you don’t have an existing culture code for remote work, you can use these primary principles as a foundation to build upon.

Transparency : everyone should be clear about what the other person is working on. Your team members should provide unprompted status updates and keep each other in the loop.

Accountability : Your team should own what they do, start to finish. Set expectations that are reasonable and accepted by your team, and ensure they hold themselves accountable to these.

Communication : Your team should explicitly call out their work hours in your choice of communication tool. They can be unavailable now and then but they should make it clear when they’ll be back.

Be proud of their work : Working from home notwithstanding, your team should strive to provide their best work and love what they do. When you and your team take pride in what you all do, the final output will be so much better.

Tools are key

Remote collaboration is complicated but luckily there are plenty of tools that you can use to make it easier. Whether it is for planning (Trello), communication (Slack), sharing files (Drive), or tracking metrics (Analytics), encourage your team to use these tools extensively. Set aside some time to train your team on the tools too, if they are using them for the first time.

Hold periodic meetings

It is essential that you plan your day, week, and even month or longer out in advance. When you’re working remotely, this is all the more important as you need this framework to proceed with your day. By having these goals to work towards, it is easier for you to estimate the necessary time needed and divide your day properly. There are three things you need to do for your team:

Have a meeting at the start of every month to set a tentative roadmap and plan the goals for every week during this.
Have short daily standup meetings where each person talks about their plans for the day.
At the end of the week, have a longer meeting where everyone covers what they did, whether they’re still on track, and talk about if they need anything from the rest of the team.

Work around different timezones

Everyone has a time of the day they function best at even if you’re working in the same region. Some of your employees might be working in a different timezone. For both these reasons, your teammates might work during different hours and it might be hard to work together if you need to. To function effectively as a team, you all have to talk and find a common time for collaboration on projects that have multiple contributors.

Set aside time for some fun

One of the biggest mistakes that managers do is talking only about work during calls. This makes the teams miss the camaraderie they felt while working together in an office. While nothing can replace in-person conversations, a good way to replicate that is by setting aside some time for fun.

This could just be spending five minutes at the beginning of your daily standups talking about anything BUT work. It could also mean a weekly call where you and your team introduce your family and pets to each other, share what you are all reading, watching, or cooking, or even showcase hidden talents. Doing this not only creates happiness, it shows your team that you understand that their loved ones and hobbies are just as important as work. It makes you understand your team and their motivations better as well.

Be vigilant

Working from home can trigger various negative emotions like depression and demotivation and it’s your job as a manager to care for your team’s mental well-being. Keep your video turned on during team meetings and encourage them to do the same. If you notice a team member being withdrawn or behaving differently than normal, reach out to them separately and make sure they are doing okay. Have more one-on-one meetings with the team than you normally would and offer them help in any way you can.

The one thing you need to do while implementing these points is to “Lead by example”. Be the person you want them to be. Talk about the challenges you are facing while working from home to encourage them to air out their own concerns. Showcase the best practices around communication and availability that you want them to follow. The converse is true as well- give yourself the benefit of the doubt just like you would with your team because this is all new to you too!

So what are your tips for managing a team while working from home?

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Intelligent Bots

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:25:59 GMT

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Intelligent Bots

Like IoT, Machine Learning and AI, ‘Chatbots’ too have become a buzzword in the last few years with many companies foraying into this space and some even providing DIY bot solutions to customers. But not many people truly understand the wide range of functionalities that bots can offer.

Bots are much more than the little popup chat window on a website or app that says ‘hello’ to visitors. In fact, they are already an essential component of several popular services that we use everyday like Netflix, Amazon and Google.

Intelligent bots can be programmed to perform a large number of tasks and work on multiple platforms. Conversational bots are among the most popular bots for businesses since they can emulate conversations with a human being – something new age customers appreciate far more than ticketing systems and long waiting times. If your business hasn’t used bots yet, then this will be worth a read because beyond 2020, the winners will be those who can quickly adopt new technology and stay relevant.

1. Bots can reduce Operating Costs

As a business grows and wins more customers, so does the need to improve customer satisfaction and retention. In many cases, this is achieved by employing large customer service teams that are deployed to service existing customers. But what happens when the number of customers keeps growing? Team sizes also increase and are sometimes even outsourced to meet demand. This model poses huge logistical and managerial challenges for organizations who will then have to invest more to make these processes efficient. Customers can often become dissatisfied for something as simple as not being able to find the answer to an FAQ, or being made to wait for a few minutes longer. In contrast, a single bot can service dozens of customers simultaneously, saving time, cost and improving satisfaction levels.

2. Bots can increase Productivity

Productive teams are very essential for a business to function efficiently. When servicing teams get overloaded with large volumes of customer requests, it can increase their burden and result in stress and lower levels of productivity. With bots as the first responders, a large number of customers can be engaged simultaneously. This leaves the servicing teams with more time to address genuine customer issues, allocate their energy more efficiently and communicate better with each other.

3. Bots can do multiple tasks simultaneously, 24/7

For better output, it is imperative that all business processes are executed with maximum efficiency. Bots can be deployed to perform a variety of functions such as sending brochures to potential customers, answering FAQs, raising service requests, extending warranties, facilitating purchases, storing invoices and communicating with employees. Bots are also not restricted by time – they are available at all times irrespective of whether the office is open or not.

4. Bots can boost Customer Satisfaction and Ratings

Customers like brands that are dedicated to solving their problems. Most millennial customers dislike waiting for long periods to get their queries addressed, and appreciate if they can communicate with a service executive directly. As conversational bots are available 24/7 and accessible on channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, customers can get instant answers to their queries all while ‘talking’ to a bot, instead of waiting. This can significantly improve customer satisfaction levels and win favourable reviews, in turn attracting more customers.

5. Bots can help you in Marketing & Promotions

Bots are a relatively new technology and while businesses are rapidly adopting them, they can still be something to talk about in the media. Using the latest technology gives the business a competitive edge and makes it future-proof for tomorrow’s challenges. Capitalizing on bots and automation can draw attention to a business an drive potential customers to try it out for themselves. In addition to this, bots themselves can be programmed to automate broadcasting of information on various media channels

With the world moving towards smart technology and an ‘always connected’ environment, the adoption of solutions like bots is expected to pick up quickly in the next few years.

For more information on conversational bots and their integration, please visit our dedicated page or drop a message to info@omnis-cx.co.uk

How To Build A Winning Customer Service Culture

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 21:35:32 GMT

How To Build A Winning Customer Service Culture In Your Company

What is service culture, exactly? Is it a templated approach to customer service that support teams take? No, it isn’t as simple as that. Service culture is a sustainable organizational culture that bridges the void between workplace culture and customer-centricity. It encourages a collective effort from customer-facing teams across your company to inherently prioritize customers.

While workplace culture is more organization and employee-oriented, service culture puts customers at the forefront of every business goal, organizational vision, and support outcome.

Why is service culture important?

Healthcare and hospitality industries have made empathy and care an integral part of great customer service. Luxury hotels like The Ritz Carlton have set dizzying benchmarks for an outstanding customer service culture. Their customer success stories reflect how support agents look to delight customers at every possible turn.

An example of exceptional service culture

Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Centre decided to transform what would have been a normal brand engagement on Twitter–into a WOW moment for a customer. A guest at their resort, Christina, had enquired about a special alarm clock kept in her hotel room. Her tweets suggested that she has been a loyal customer of Gaylord Opryland Resort for the past three years.

Now, without an exceptional service culture ingrained in their organization, the support team of Gaylord Opryland Resort Resort could not have sensed an opportunity to reward a repeat customer. The below screen-grab shows what transpired.

Businesses like Zappos and United Airlines have inculcated this brand of exceptional service culture into their support strategy to drive repeat business.

Here’s a service culture story from Zappos

There’s a reason why Zappos’ customer service team is knighted as the “Customer Loyalty Team”.

One of the Zappos agents clocked a record 10-hour call with a customer, which involved discussions about the customer’s ways of living life in Texas. The conversation ultimately led to a purchase of boots after 10 hours and 29 minutes. This was soon bettered by another agent from Zappos who got on a 10 hour and 43-minute call!

While the purchasing intent of the customers is sometimes beyond the control of customer service, Zappos ensures that every customer has his/her story heard if they’d like to–and its service agents engage in any conversation without prejudice or time limitations.

This story shows how Zappos has developed a tight-knit service culture that is steeped in acquiring customers-for-life by providing exceptional customer service.

Service Culture may have begun as a B2C practice, but it’s now important to B2B companies as well

The need for a customer-centric service culture is usually only emphasized in B2C companies – most famously in Amazon. While B2C customer service is designed to trigger emotions and immediate action, B2B support is more about value and intent. In fact, since it’s a business at the other end of the support channel that knows what it needs, the expectations on customer service are even higher.

How to develop a customer service culture?

A customer service culture isn’t something that can be built on the go. It needs a proper framework, and if required, multiple iterations until it starts reflecting positively. Your company can develop a seamless customer service culture from the grassroots-level by inculcating the following measures.

#1 Service culture starts from the top

When CEOs provide support to customers, it helps them determine where their customer service efforts stand. This opens up a plethora of opportunities in the B2B market to identify untapped product potential and the need for new features. CEOs also end up learning a lot about empathy and escalation management from the support agents.

Customers feel reassured when they find a CEO on support, replying to queries and posting solution articles. The company’s service culture strikes a chord with them when the CEO is receptive and serious about customer feedback. Support agents can seek inspiration, ideas, and workarounds, by looking at the way the top brass of the organization handles customers.

CEO on Support is one such initiative that puts into practice the idea of encouraging CEOs to support customers–both to improve customer service and take home invaluable product ideas.

#2 Customer service training

Train your workforce to handle customers with empathy no matter how cold the situation is. Customer expectations have to be prioritized at all turns over what’s easier for the company or as a support agent. The customer service team must be given the armory to readily provide support through any communication channel that the customer prefers.

#3 Rewards & Recognition

Nothing inspires employees to work better than some appreciation and validation from their peers. Incentivizing your employees’ customer service efforts will show how much you care for them. Metrics can be set-up for other channels and weighed against common benchmarks to recognize your employees with helpdesk badges and incentives.

The customer service agents can work more diligently when they are given first-response and resolution-time goals. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will help them act with a sense of urgency in handling customer issues. But to make sure that SLAs are met without hiccups, your customer service needs a helpdesk that is intuitive, non-bloated, and easy-to-use.

"If you look after your staff well, they will look after your customers. Simple" - @richardbranson #ServiceCulture

#4 Gamification of customer support

Gamifying the entire support process can create a healthy competition between your customer service agents. Helpdesk gamification is an innovative way to scale up your support. It also gives them the much-needed motivation to serve customers better. And when delighting customers becomes more fun than all work, a winning service culture starts developing in tandem!

#5 Feedback & Survey

Modern organizations are now fine-tuning their service strategy by recording customer feedback and taking customer satisfaction surveys. Acting upon feedback and surveys from customers helps instill a deep-rooted sense of service culture in your employees. It also shows the customers how much your company values their feedback. Decathlon, a renowned sports goods retailer, leveraged Freshdesk’s feedback & survey capabilities to achieve an impressive 82% customer satisfaction rating. Decathlon is fast becoming a great example of a business that is built upon the premise of benchmark service culture.

What are the factors that create service culture in a company?

A sustainable customer service strategy transforms service culture from being a “support effort” to a “way of life”. Modern businesses can leverage this transformation by adopting two quintessential customer support practices to create a service culture.

#1 Accountable Autonomy

The service culture of your company must encourage every support agent to adopt a personal responsibility towards delighting the customers. Agents should inculcate best practices such as proactively checking a customer’s history of interactions, purchases, and intent before engaging with them, following up with internal teams to ensure a speedy resolution, and even keeping customers updated on the status of their complaint.

To make sure the support function stays aligned to customer expectations, they also need to have openness to adopt technology and find new solutions to delighting customers. Because technology not only improves customer experience but it also makes support easier.

#2 Inter-team collaboration

There are many instances in customer support where support agents have to collaborate with other internal teams to resolve an issue. Not only should there be an environment of personal responsibility, but frictionless collaboration is also another critical component needed to improve service culture. For instance, it would be very easy for the finance team or the engineering team to refuse to pitch in and help out, as the request might not fall within their ‘primary responsibilities’.

However, in the interest of imbuing a sense of service culture, your company needs to encourage collaboration between internal teams and frontline service teams to solve customer issues faster. Collaboration between different employees and teams within the workplace will help your company build an organizational culture of team spirit and shared values.

Freshconnect is a team collaboration tool offered as a free integration with Freshdesk. It helps teams within your workplace and also third-party partners to work together to resolve customer queries.

Bridge the gap between Company Culture and Customer Service

Establishing a relationship between the service and culture of an organization will create a self-sustainable support ecosystem. An organization-wide service culture encapsulates functions like customer service, finance, partner relationships, corporate strategies, workflows, and business processes–to channel them towards a common goal of customer-centricity.

Bringing about these changes used to result in tedious overhauls of organizational hierarchy and existing processes. But with technology, all you have to do is onboard your teams into a client support software with a helpdesk. Helpdesks can help you interweave all these functions to enable company culture and service goals to complement each other. Find out how a helpdesk can help your company drive a customer-first service culture at all turns.

33% of CRM implementations fail

183:792268553 (Jeff Ince) — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:15:18 GMT

The 6-Step Guide to Effectively Implementing a CRM Solution for your Business

So you’ve chosen a CRM solution for your company. What next? You have to implement it. But, implementing a CRM is not as easy as it sounds.

Research shows that around 33% of all CRM implementations fail. And some of the most common reasons for failure are low user adoption, slow system performance, and implementing the CRM in haste.

If you are implementing a CRM for the first time and want it to be successful, you need an implementation plan.

But, before we talk about a plan for implementing your CRM solution, let’s rewind the clock a bit.

When you were in the process of choosing the right CRM solution for your business, your priorities would have been:

• Contemplating the choice between an on-premise solution and a cloud solution

• Evaluating different solutions

• Choosing the right plan to go with

• Figuring out how this new tool will impact you, your employees, and your business processes

This implies that you went about this process in a systematic manner knowingly or unknowingly.

You need to embark upon your implementation process in a similar fashion.

Here are six steps for a successful CRM implementation:

Step 1 — Come up with a good implementation outline

Start off with segmenting your employees, sales processes, and data because this is an important factor for the outline.

Your employees are the most crucial part of the plan. Their routine, i.e., the sales process, is going to be changed with the implementation of the CRM: what was previously achieved with spreadsheets and paper notes is going to be completely digitized. The data structure is all the information that is mapped from the previous tool into the CRM.

Start off by talking to your employees.

Sit and spend an entire day with them to understand different aspects of the system such as:

• Its ease of use

• How simple it is to set up

• Is the information displayed in a single page or runs into multiple pages?

Similarly, it is critical to understand what challenges they face in the current system such as:

• Manual lead and customer data entry

• Maintaining multiple spreadsheets

• Using a multitude of tools to achieve tasks

This step gives you big pointers to how you can sell this project to the end-users.

Step 2 — Form a team for the implementation

You need to appoint five key personnel who will play a big part in the implementation process:

– The Senior Executive — The senior executive in your implementation team can be the head of sales or the CEO. They are your advocates for the CRM. A higher-up executive is more authoritative and influential, and their words sound more credible and convincing.

– The Spearhead — A sales-savvy techie or a marketer in your company who will lead this project. This person will also test out the CRM for custom use-cases and ensure the solution is good to go.

For this crucial role, you should select someone who has the willingness to learn about the product and educate your team as well.

– The Internal Champion — The “champion” is a term for one rep in your sales team to learn the CRM as much as they can and become well-versed with it before its execution.

Although having a senior executive helps with the advocacy, an internal champion rep connects better with other sales reps in the team. The internal champion can help explain — with hard-hitting pain points — how much better the CRM is compared to Excel sheets or paper notes.

The champion also drives the implementation of the CRM by acting as a liaison for other reps and works directly under the spearhead. This means your reps can reach out to them to get an early glimpse of the CRM and clarify their doubts before it is completely rolled out.

– The IT Specialist — The IT specialist heads the IT team to help ensure that your system is free of bugs and tests the CRM for optimal performance.

– The Handler — The handler is your sales ops manager who will work in tandem with the IT specialist’s team to administer the CRM solution, migrate data, and customize it.

– Brief your employees about the change

The senior executive in your company can brief your employees about the following:

• What a CRM is

• Why you are implementing the CRM

• What the business impact is

• When it is going to be implemented and how it replaces your current process

• Or if you’re attempting to implement it for the second time, how different your approach is from the last time you had tried

These key discussion points give your employees a heads up about this new change and help them prepare for the change, which in turn can increase the adoption levels of the CRM.

– Set a date to make the CRM live

This date is your target, and you need to put in your maximum effort to ensure that the CRM is implemented by then.

Many things can go wrong.

You may experience meeting targets as plausible distractions at work.

One thing you can avoid in general is setting a go-live target of one day. In all honesty, it is impossible to completely implement the CRM solution in a single day.

Even if you manage to do so, you will be faced with the herculean task of fixing things you may have missed out.

To implement your CRM bug-free, you need to set a go-live date of 3 months from the day you start the implementation.

Step 3 — Come up with a good change management plan

Change management is largely people-driven and the roles they play in this step are critical to determining the success of your CRM implementation.

From giving master roles to sales reps to conducting regular sessions to educate your employees about the CRM, how you take this step will have a strong bearing on whether the solution is used optimally or below its full potential.

– Take the time to educate your sales reps

Let’s face it — the sales reps in your company are most impacted by the CRM solution.

To start with, do this: if your company is using Excel for contact management, compare it side-by-side with the CRM. Having regular sessions like this helps your employees understand exactly how the CRM steps in in place of spreadsheets.

Explaining each feature of the CRM by correlating it with spreadsheets allows your employees to grasp the concept of a CRM better.

Step 4 — Prepare for the CRM launch

– Customize the CRM according to your needs

Customizing the CRM is crucial as it helps you tune it according to your business process.

It is a known fact that every industry has its own sales process and jargon.

How does customizing the CRM solution help?

• For one, a customized experience makes it easier for your reps to use the CRM. They’d know exactly what to find and where to find it.

• When the customized CRM solution perfectly emulates the way you handle your sales, it is innate and much more structured.

Take the case of the “contacts” module, for example.

If your team refers to contacts as clients or customers, the sales head can easily go about making this customization and as a result, this reflects throughout the CRM.

Another example of how you can customize the CRM is by having multiple pipelines. Multiple pipelines can be used for multiple products or sales processes — which helps in keeping things clutter-free. Most CRM solutions allow you to have up to 10 pipelines.

Remember, a great CRM solution always allows you to customize it from end-to-end.

Ideally, the handler should be in charge of customizing the CRM solution, because they know and understand the nuances of the sales team perfectly.

– Set user roles and permission levels

Coming from spreadsheets, you would definitely see the need for users and permission levels set for every sales rep.

But consider this:

• Are your leads following leads that are not theirs?

• Have you noticed your reps going through the entire database to find their lead or customer?

This sets a need for clear user roles and permissions. And a CRM solution allows you to do this.

When your company grows and you add more users to your CRM, you have to regulate access for team members.

And hence, it is only fitting that they are allowed to view and access only what is relevant to them.

In such situations, System Administrators can create roles to set the right level of permissions for users.

The handler can work with the IT specialist’s team to administer clear roles and permissions for the reps in the system.

– Back up and migrate data to the CRM

Understandably, migrating from your old tool to one that is completely different can be hard. But, as you’ve found out so far, it doesn’t need to be if you have some tricks up your sleeve.

Now that you’re nearing the launch date, you have to transfer data. This is necessary to ensure that none of your data is missed out in the final implemented system — which can be troublesome.

Who can do this task?

The handler. They can simply clean and back up data from your existing tool and completely transfer it to the CRM.

This process is not difficult because many modern CRM solutions allow you to easily migrate information by simply uploading your leads, contacts, accounts, and deal CSV files.

Step 5 — Testing and confirming if everything’s good to go

“Testing” often sounds like a complex and time-consuming process but, in reality, it isn’t.

You need to have this step to double-check on everything you’ve done so far with the help of the IT specialist, who heads this task.

To begin with, divide your testing process like this (not necessarily in order):

• Testing the system based on stress levels

• Performance and loading time

• Usability

• Data integrity

Now that you have a plan for testing operations, the IT specialist’s team can check the system to ensure the following:

• No duplication or missing data

• Roles and permissions are clearly defined

• The loading time of the CRM is consistent

• Performance of the CRM under peak usage is good

• Data updates are synced universally and data integrity is maintained

Step 6 — Launching the CRM

During the launch, all your employees have become aware of the CRM solution and you can finally transition from your older methods to the new way of working.

Or can you?

It is possible that your employees are so used to Excel that they go back to using it.

Your biggest challenge now is ensuring your employees use the CRM. This means you’ll have to prevent them from eventually going back to Excel or any other older method that the CRM is meant to replace.

Here are some tips you can follow to prevent this:

1. One easy way to prevent your employees from doing so is to make it mandatory to use the CRM.

2. Make your sales ops manager fetch a report for metrics directly from the CRM. When you inform employees that their target attainment will be measured from the CRM and from no other methods, you will surely see a spike in adoption levels.

3. You can also showcase some real-time stats to prove how the CRM solution works better than your older methods.

For example, do this: after six months, you can craft a comparison report that shows how many leads slipped through the cracks because of older methods and how this has reduced considerably by using a CRM solution.

These are essentially nurture programs and real-time stories that you can present to prove that CRM really has made life easier for your company.

Final Notes

CRM implementation cannot be done in a day and even if you try to, you won’t see great results. This is why each step in the CRM implementation is important, from coming up with a plan to ensuring that employees adapt to it. The key here is your employees — the ones who will be using the solution on a daily basis — so, when you include them in the implementation process from the very beginning, you are well on course for better adoption and usage.

Freshsales CRM is easy to set up and use with powerful functionalities, making it an all-in-one solution for businesses. Try it free and witness your employees make more sales and improve their sales productivity.

For more information on how to best implement your CRM system contact us on info@omnis-cx.co.uk

The art of driving ROI from customer engagement

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 23:50:58 GMT

The art of driving ROI from customer engagement

How can you make the most of all the customers you gain from your website traffic? The answer lies in being able to combine the elements so you can make a return on investment (ROI).

If that sounds difficult or too complex, don’t worry. It’s not nearly as challenging as you might think. Getting an ROI from customers who come to your site and take time to like, comment or share your content, is easy.

This post will help you learn exactly what those are and how you can leverage them to your advantage. Focusing on these elements will help you see an ROI in no time.

Use data to understand your customers

Before you can earn revenue from your customers, you have to take time to understand them. After all, you can’t design anything if you don’t know who you’re talking to.

Fortunately, this is where technology comes to the rescue. With the right tools, you’ll be able to understand more about your customers through data gathering.

For instance, having lots of shares and comments on your site is excellent. But if you’re not tracking the engagement data, the likes and shares don’t give you any insight into your actual customer base. Without this insight, you will not have any direction as to how you can improve your services.

Data gathering can help you uncover details about your visitors and buyers. This can include things like where they’re located, what they’re looking for, the most loyal customers, and the ones who visit your site most frequently.

You can then use this information to target relevant information to your customers. For instance, if the majority of your customers are from the United States, you can use that knowledge to speak more directly to their geographic region, and also tailor your communication in a way that your content is more personalized.

That kind of effort is always noticed and appreciated by your customers, and they will feel more connected to your brand, and are more likely to be loyal to it.

Not only are loyal customers your biggest advocates, it is far more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain your existing ones.

Leveraging the right data to make your product more specialized to your audience, means attracting more buyers, which equals more ROI for your business. That’s why when it comes to customer engagement, data talks.

To illustrate, let’s look at this statistic. Medallia collected data that shows that in a single transaction, the most loyal brand customers of a leading apparel chain spend 15% more than those who aren’t brand loyal.

Brand loyalty also carries benefits in the long-term. For instance, brand advocates visit you 10% to 15% more and spend about the same percentage more than customers who feel impartial about their shopping experiences with you.

When you consider these statistics, it only makes sense to use customer experience management tools to understand what customers like, what they don’t, and how to connect with them on a deeper level to foster brand loyalty.

This runs parallel to our next key point.

Know your customers on a personal level

No one likes to be grouped with the masses. Everyone enjoys feeling special and being recognized as an individual. That doesn’t change when it comes to digital interactions. To score an ROI, you’ll need to make every effort to ensure your customers feel appreciated and unique.

The only way to recognize them and appreciate them as individuals is to know them as individuals. While that may seem like it’s a feat too tedious to achieve or much more easily accomplished through in-person interactions, don’t worry. There are tools what will make this process easier, coupled with the help of data-driven engagement platforms. For example, they can tell you how your customers interact with your site.

Are they most frequently contacting you through email? App? Via text?

A good customer engagement management (CEM) system will also give you details about individuals, such as how much they’ve spent with you till date, how frequently they visit your site, how long they’ve been members with you, and what products they routinely purchase from you.

Using this information, you can then design content specifically for the right people and deliver it to them through the proper channels.

For instance, you can personalize rewards for them based on their tastes, like offering them a free box of their favorite donuts on their birthday, because that’s the flavor of donuts your data indicates they routinely buy.

Also, if you know a customer engages most frequently with you through your app versus desktop, you can feed targeted specials or messages to them through these preferred channels.

Doing this also ensures you’re not missing out on communicating with them by sending them messages in one medium when they usually interact with you in another.

Again, being able to know your customers well enough to tailor your approach to them will show them you care. And when they sense your attention and focus on them, they’ll be more likely to give both their loyalty and business to you willingly.

Give your best customers VIP treatment

True, everyone loves to feel special, but the ones you should make feel most special are those most loyal to you.

Data can reveal which of your customers fall into this category. And once you know who they are, you should make every effort to reward them for that loyalty. Why? Because according to statistics, 20% of your customers drive approximately 80% of your revenue. And that 20% is your most loyal customers.

Offering VIP specials, first dibs on sales, and other such exclusive perks can go a long way in making a substantial impact on your ROI.

To do this, first identify your most loyal customers, then leverage data analytics to get to know more about them (age, gender, demographic, location, etc.). Once you have all this information, you can then determine a customized way to offer rewards.

If you’re not sure quite how to choose which customers to reward for their loyalty, you might consider those who fall into the falling categories:

The ones who frequent you the most

The ones who spend the most

The ones who have been around the longest

Once you’re able to categorize your customers into the above groups, you can then choose how to segment them further.

For instance, you can choose to reward groups by spend thresholds. This is particularly a great option if your customer mix comprises mostly of millennials. This generation most enjoys a rewards/loyalty program, which inclines them to continue being loyal to your brand.

In fact, 22% of millennials indicated rewards programs as a brand loyalty driver more than any other generation surveyed.

So if you don’t have a way to reward your top customers just yet, that should definitely be an item on your to-do list. Especially if you want to see a positive impact on your ROI.

Leverage engagement to your advantage by encouraging feedback

When customers are on your site engaging with you, collecting their feedback can really help boost your business and your ROI. A best practice is to collect this feedback in real-time, when it’s most effectively given and received. Chat boxes or pop up ratings, for example, allow customers to quickly offer their thoughts. Plus they’re tools that are affordable, simple, effective, and easy-to-implement.

Aside from providing you with insight into how you can drive customer satisfaction and improve your business, feedback has another positive perk. Generally, those who you’re able to gather feedback from are those who end up spending more with your company.

Also, by collecting feedback to drive future improvements, you can ensure future customer satisfaction, which is also proven to boost ROI. On average, a whopping 86% of customers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. And you won’t know their definition of a great experience unless you ask.

Keep up with your data to track your progress with ROI

You now know several different ways you can boost your ROI for the long term. But perhaps the most important of all is to test your efforts.

As you’re implementing different tactics to increase your returns, keep track of whether those tactics are actually working and also how well they’re working. That way you’ll know which ones to keep up with and which ones, potentially, to abandon in exchange for another tactic.

Here are some metrics to track so you can measure improvements over your past performances:

Return customers : track how much you’ve made from customers who left for a while but who you won back through your customer engagement efforts.
The number of loyalty customers : see how many of your customers have stayed with you for a considerable period (defined by you).

Number of high-spend customers : count the number of customers who are spending the most at your business.
Number of frequent visitors : customers who regularly pay you a visit are likely to buy more regularly from you as well, so keep up with them. But also be sure to track how/whether their visits correlate with their spend levels.

Conclusion

As you can see, earning an ROI from people who are already loyal to your site and brand isn’t nearly as difficult as it may initially appear. All it takes is a little strategy, the right c ustomer engagement analytics tools, and some patience. Ultimately, you’ll be surprised at how far these things can go.

Earning ROI from your customer engagement basically boils down to a few key factors: being able to leverage data, knowing your customers personally, rewarding the ones most loyal (remember, the ones who spend the most account for the majority of your ROI), soliciting feedback (preferably in real-time, like through live chat) and keeping up with your progress.

Stick true to these tips, and you’ll see your customer engagements reward you in the form of ROI in no time.

How To Build A Winning Customer Service Culture

Back to the future: Early GPT beta users transform customer experiences with Freddy AI

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How to choose an ITIL incident management software

How to use Google Business Messages to Engage with Customers

How to use Google Business Messages to Engage with Customers

What is Google Business Messages?

How does Google Business Messages work?

How to get started using Google Business Messages

Benefits of Google Business Messages

1. Engage customers at the moment of consideration

2. Leverage the world’s most popular search engine

3. Reduce support costs

4. Enhance your brand on Google

5. Give customers the experience they want

Best practices to get the most from GBM

1. Create a welcome message

2. Be quick to reply

3. Automate answers to FAQs

4. Use live chat to strengthen relationships

5. Integrate GBM with a messaging platform

What makes Freshchat the best business texting platform?

AI chatbots

Single view across messaging channels

Intelligent agent handoff

Real-time insights

Easy setup

Get started with Google Business Messages and Freshchat

5 must-haves in your problem management software

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The State Of The Service Desk, 2022

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Is work tech keeping pace with employee expectations?

Is work tech keeping pace with employee expectations?

The emerging advantage in the war for talent

Impact on productivity and business efficiency

Final thoughts

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Leverage these 6 features of your ITSM tool to improve employee experience

﻿

Why You Should Switch To A Modern Cloud-Based ITSM Solution.

Why You Should Switch To A Modern Cloud-Based ITSM Solution.

Scenario 2: Your ITSM tool is high maintenance, sending your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through the roof!

Scenario 3: You’re always looking for external help to manage your ITSM tool.

Final thoughts

Nine reasons your customers want to be able to text support

Nine reasons your customers want to be able to text support

5. More privacy

6. Texting offers MMS

7. Written record

8. Texting offers low impact personal connection

9. Texting is less stressful

7 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

7 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

Phone and Live chat

Social Media

How to improve customer responsiveness and create a better customer experience

#1. Understand your customers

#2. Leverage the power of technology

#3. Provide consistent support experience

#4. Provide resources for self-support

#5. Train your employees

#6. Make use of canned responses and incorporate personalization

#7. Set performance goals and monitor individual customer response time

Closing Thoughts

Source

https://www.superoffice.com/blog/response-times/

Author: Aysha Shereen

Freshdesk Omnichannel delivers a 462% ROI according to Forrester study

Freshdesk Omnichannel delivers a 462% ROI according to Forrester study

Download The Total Economic Impact™ Study

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to text support

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from home

Written by Kaavya Karthikeyan on June 15, 2020