The Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

When customer service agents respond to customer concerns, do they understand how the customer feels at the end of the exchange with the representative? To deliver excellent customer service on any channel—whether it be by phone, chat, SMS, email, or social media--it’s not enough to handle concerns in a timely and professional manner. Customer satisfaction surveys allow companies to better understand what is working well, and what areas need improvement.

Such surveys can have a critical impact on the reputation of a company and its long-term success in numerous ways. For example, properly addressing customer concerns can result in fewer negative comments that customers might be tempted to post on social media channels or spread by word of mouth. The direct result is greater loyalty and a stronger chance for customer retention, as well as the possibility of attracting new business, as customer service improves. Companies may also learn what products or services customers are looking for and work to offer them to further grow their business. Lastly, it’s important to note that it costs more to attract new customers than to retain existing ones. Statistics show that it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire new customers when one factors in the marketing costs involved in seeking potential clients, nurturing leads, and finally making sales.

Two ways to conduct these surveys are post-contact and periodic. With a post-contact survey, a customer may agree at the start or end of an exchange with a customer service agent—on any channel--to complete a satisfaction survey detailing the experience they just had. This kind of survey allows a company to monitor and improve a specific agent’s performance as well as follow the case history of a specific client to provide better individualized service. With a periodic survey, customers may be contacted on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis to provide overall feedback, and this may be beneficial for the company’s strategic planning and marketing campaigns.

Regardless of the type of survey given, there are a few points to follow in order to increase the likelihood of getting useful feedback. For one, it’s important not to make any survey too long—more than 10 questions is usually considered too time-consuming for a customer. Keep the questions specific enough so that the answers yield insightful information—for example, it’s better to ask how knowledgeable the agent was in resolving an issue than asking if the agent was merely professional. Such questions reveal information not only about the customer’s perception of the service offered but also how skilled the agents are in conveying information and whether they need additional training to provide the right service. Another point is to use a consistent scale on all questions. If one question asks to rate service on a scale of 0 to 10, every question should be answered on the same scale to prevent confusion, allow each question to carry the same level of importance, and allow the customer the same flexibility of response to each question. Lastly, it’s important to allow for qualitative feedback on a survey. On any channel other than the phone, it’s simple to ask the customer at the end of the survey to write any additional comments they may have. If the survey is conducted by phone, a voice recording is a good option.

To deliver the best customer service, it’s important to understand how your customers feel and give them a chance to tell you why. In this way, companies may better tailor services to their customers’ needs and offer an optimum customer engagement experience.

Learn more at www.vocalcom.com.

The Benefits of WebRTC for the Contact Center

In the modern contact center, agents communicate with customers over many more channels as they did in the past. No longer is it necessary to handle customer service concerns only by phone as many contact centers today embrace the omnichannel experience to connect via SMS, chat, social media, email, and video as well. For this reason, it’s more important than ever to ensure smooth communication on both sides of a customer service exchange.

WebRTC is a communications standard that enables such real-time communications (RTC) to be offered directly on the web without the need for plug-ins, downloads, installations, or third-party software as the web browser is the application itself. The standard comes fully equipped with all that is necessary to engage in real-time, multimedia communications—whether it be via phone, video call, email, chat, SMS, or social media. Without additional plug-ins, contact centers can reach customers on all channels in a more efficient manner, and the customer likewise benefits from a better engagement experience. For example, if a customer is on a company website looking for the solution to a technology issue, a customer service agent may send a chat request as a means of helping out the customer. With no need for additional plug-ins and the fact that WebRTC is browser-neutral, the customer can rest assured that the chat process will go smoothly no matter which browser he or she is using while the agent can confidently proceed with the customer contact knowing that there won’t be any technical issues on either end.

WebRTC brings a wealth of advantages to contact centers including increased ease-of-use, rapid connectivity, and cost efficiency. As agents are able to connect quickly and efficiently with customers in real-time across multiple channels, they may resolve problems faster and with greater confidence while customers are also able to connect faster than ever. If contact centers do not already utilize the omnichannel strategy, WebRTC makes it possible to do so without sacrificing the quality of agent-customer interactions. The rapid connectivity further allows for customers to build greater trust in the companies they give business to as their problems are solved more efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction and improving customer retention rates. Lastly, WebRTC’s highly scalable model and function from a single platform helps businesses reduce costs by reducing contact time between agents and customers while eliminating the costs of fragmented or siloed technologies normally required to run a contact center. With WebRTC, contact centers and customers alike are set for a seamless experience across all channels as companies become more competitive by offering a high-quality customer service experience. Learn more at www.vocalcom.com.

The Rising Trend of Mobile Marketing

Consumers nowadays are showing an increasing predilection for researching products and making purchases on mobile devices rather than desktops. A recent Forrester report revealed that mobile commerce surpassed desktops in retail traffic last year, while Prosper Mobile Insights indicates that 81% of smartphone users have done product research from their phones with 50% eventually making a purchase through the same device. The preference for mobile commerce therefore presents demand and opportunity for mobile marketing strategies to attract new customers and foster brand loyalty.

One important strategy involves mobile optimization of emails and websites. According to a Litmus research report, 51% of consumers check their e-mail on a smartphone or tablet, yet 80% reported deleting the email if it was hard to read or did or format properly. What message can be taken away from this? When sending emails to customers, it’s critical that the format be optimized for mobile so the message--or reward--is never lost. Use a clean, uncluttered layout, large font, and small, concisely written blocks of text instead of long paragraphs—this will dramatically improve the appearance of your email and make it easier to read. While images can enhance appearance, large image files may take too long to load. It’s wisest to keep images to a minimum and also ensure that customers can respond or navigate to a new (also mobile-optimized) page with buttons. Remember that space is limited on a mobile interface and customers are always looking to save time—so keep it simple and straightforward.

Website optimization is just as critical. While the appearance of a mobile version website does not have to match the web version exactly, the content should be rich and not lacking in critical resources. Once again, buttons allowing the customer to make a purchase, contact the business, or link to social media should be easy to find and functional. Links are hard to click on, so they should be avoided whenever possible. Research has shown that shoppers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers an engaging mobile experience, and keep in mind that customers often compare web and mobile versions when it comes to fostering brand loyalty.

Lastly, never underestimate the power of social media. As many consumers enjoy accessing their various social media accounts from their mobile devices, businesses are poised to reach a greater audience by marketing directly to their customers through these sites and making it easy for them to leave reviews. Businesses may offer especially targeted deals to customers based on their purchase history, for example. Consumers also like to look up reviews before making purchases, with First Data reporting that 81% of smartphone users checking social media for reviews before buying. It’s therefore critical to integrate a mobile program with customer reviews and offer social media sharing buttons on mobile to facilitate mobile marketing.

When done right, mobile marketing strategies provide excellent ways for businesses to attract customers and build loyalty. Therefore, companies need to strategize how and when to engage with their customers to ensure optimum success. Learn more at www.vocalcom.com.

Innovating Customer Experience Through Twitter

Social customer service is a rapidly growing trend and sign of the times. Customers nowadays are eager to get quick answers on their favorite social media sites, sometimes on the go. While networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, Pinterest, and Instagram provide excellent platforms for marketing and customer service, perhaps the most conversation-centric site demanding extra attention in the domain of customer service is Twitter.

Unlike the other sites, Twitter focuses on real-time conversation and in many ways mirrors traditional chat while giving companies the opportunity to market their products and services with its fast moving, highly public exchanges between people. For this reason, companies can make the most of this platform by using specific strategies that will deliver the best customer service possible.

Keep posts personal and personable. Whenever engaging in a Twitter exchange, agents should always introduce themselves and any other agents who may become involved in the case. It’s important to avoid automated messages as Twitter gives companies the chance to engage in conversation just as an agent might do over the phone; it’s an opportunity to make customers feel you care about their needs. Make the customer service interaction personal by addressing the customer by name as well, and of course keep the tone friendly as you would on any other channel.

Be timely. Unlike other social media sites, Twitter moves fast. If a customer addresses an agent, it’s critical to respond quickly and keep the conversation fluid. If other agents need to be involved to address a concern, make sure to keep them informed of the conversation so as to avoid making the customer repeat information. If a customer case begins to take much time or cannot be addressed appropriately with the 140-character limitation on Twitter, move the conversation offline to a channel of the customer’s choice.

Consider multiple Twitter accounts. Some companies have found it very useful to run multiple Twitter accounts for different departments or even different regions if they have a global presence. This allows greater focus on individual cases and ensures that customers are directed to the right place without wasting time. One simple strategy is to have a customer service Twitter account where customers can easily find the support they need.

Don’t forget that conversations are public. While private messages may be sent on Twitter, most exchanges occur publicly and therefore increase visibility of a brand. This could be positive or negative depending on how one looks at it. If a customer does not get a timely response and begins to complain, this could of course hurt a company’s reputation. However, with attentive customer service that’s well-timed, professional, and cheerful, companies may reap great benefits and gain strong customer loyalty. When a customer is satisfied, marking a tweet as “favorite” or retweeting the customer’s positive comments are excellent ways to promote a positive image of a brand.

Like all social media sites, Twitter bears great potential for optimizing customer service, attracting new customers, and gaining brand loyalty. However, its conversational nature and specific social features offer unique ways for companies to reach out to customers which, when done properly, can greatly enhance the customer engagement experience. Learn more about social customer service software solutions at www.vocalcom.com.

ITV wins coveted Customer Service award with Vocalcom Cloud contact center solution

Vocalcom is proud to announce that ITV, a new client for the company in 2014, has been awarded the “Best Customer Services in Telecom & Media” by UBM (United Business Media) achieving its best ever score of 95.6% satisfaction. The company achieved this despite tough competition from other blue chip companies such as BT, Virgin Media and SKY and while transitioning to the Vocalcom cloud contact center solution.

Vocalcom partnered with the ITV Viewer Services division in providing them with true unified communications through a cloud based contact centre solution and a platform for them to launch further technologies.

Stephen Morris, Head of Viewer Services for ITV responsible for selecting and implementing the Vocalcom solution commented the award: “We selected Vocalcom because they could provide everything we needed in one single package. We were looking for a “one-stop-shop”, a unified communications provider who could supply us with a real multi-channel customer management portal that incorporated everything from voice, email, white mail, SMS and socials networks. Vocalcom provided just that and were instrumental in the seamless transition between customer management systems.”

Michael Pavlou, Managing Director of Vocalcom UK & Eire added: “ITV were very clear on their objectives and we are very pleased to have accompanied them in their endeavour to enhance the way they manage their customer relations. With CRM teams spread across the UK, our Cloud Contact Software was a great fit for ITV and we will continue to support them in their endeavours to remain top of the CRM game”.

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About Vocalcom Omnichannel Customer Service Solution

The Vocalcom contact centre software provides unique capabilities that enable agents to handle calls more effectively and move seamlessly between voice, email, chat, and mobile care. The solution allows inbound, outbound or blended contact centres to operate efficiently across multiple channels, with all-in-one reporting, and out of the box CRM integration. Designed by Contact Center people for Contact Center people, Vocalcom’s Effortless Contact Center™ provides clients with a solution that is fast to deploy, easily manageable and allows our clients to be innovative with the Customer Experience they provide.

About Vocalcom

With 20 years experience, Vocalcom is the leading pioneer in providing multi-channel Contact Center solutions for customer service, sales and telemarketing.

Used by over 3,500 companies in 49 countries for over ten billion contacts each year, Vocalcom Effortless Contact Center™ is packaged as an inclusive all-in-one solution available on-premises or in the cloud. For more information, visit www.vocalcom.com 

  Multichannel or Omnichannel: How Do You Best Serve Your Customers?

Delivering effective customer service means tailoring to the needs of the customer. In this day and age, companies are poised to reach more customers than ever before with the use of multichannel strategies, which allow consumers to make transactions through the channel of their choice such as chat, SMS, or social media, to name a few. Consumers continue to show an increasing demand for non-voice channels to meet their customer service needs, so companies which adopt multiple channels for customer engagement are well suited for attracting and retaining clients.

In the past year, however, businesses have increasingly fine-tuned their customer engagement strategies by adopting an omnichannel strategy—a subtle yet critical shift from multichannel engagement. While multichannels allow customers to simply make contact with a company over multiple touch points, the company may not have optimized the customer experience across all devices (for example, smartphones, laptops, and tablets) or focused on delivering a truly seamless message across these channels.

The omnichannel strategy, on the other hand, delivers exactly that. This method of customer engagement adopts the perspective of the customer by delivering a seamless and consistent message across all channels, allowing a customer to begin a transaction in one channel or on one device and move to another fluidly without losing a quality customer service experience. While companies which use this approach also use multiple channels to engage their customers, they take the additional steps of ensuring consistency across channels at all times while always considering which device the customer may be using. For example, a company which offers a mobile version of its website would ensure that this version is fully accessible, has the same visual appearance as the website, and delivers the same messages to the customer while enabling exactly the same client interactions (such as purchasing or contacting a customer service agent, for example) that are available on the website.

Google trends indicates that there was a steady surge in searches for the word “omnichannel” between 2013 and 2014, showing a growing predilection toward the use of this newer customer engagement strategy.

Furthermore, an Aberdeen Group report demonstrates the value of employing an omnichannel strategy to grow one’s business, allowing businesses to achieve an 89% customer retention rate while growing annual company revenue by 9.5% year after year.

When businesses employ an omnichannel customer engagement strategy, several benefits are reaped over the use of a basic multichannel strategy. By delivering a consistent message across all channels, one can assume that the customer will more easily access the information needed and therefore increase customer satisfaction.

This positive experience then naturally leads to better sales. In addition, businesses are in a position to better collect data from their customers by tracking how and when they interact across channels, providing excellent insight from which companies may develop best practices. Lastly, employees in retail settings are better prepared to work efficiently with clients when armed with devices such as tablets which provide quick and easy access to customer data.

Regardless of the customer engagement strategy used, taking advantage of the wealth of business opportunities afforded by multichannel and omnichannel practices is key to keeping customers satisfied and making your business grow.

Top 7 Considerations for Customer Engagement in 2015

With the arrival of the new year, it’s time to consider what the new trends will be for customer engagement in 2015. Since advances in technology provide constant opportunity and demand for changes to your call and contact centers, implementing new strategies is essential to staying on top of the game.  Here are the key trends of 2014 to consider this year.

Multichannel/Omnichannel

Consumers continue to show an increasing demand for non-voice channels to meet their customer service needs.  While companies frequently employ a multichannel strategy which allows customers to make transactions through the channel of their choice—via SMS, chat, or apps, for example—2014 saw the steady rise of the omnichannel. The latter adopts the perspective of the customer by delivering a seamless and consistent message across all channels, allowing the customer to begin a transaction in one channel and move to another fluidly. As indicated by Google trends, there was a marked surge in searches for the word omnichannel between 2013 and 2014. As some might argue that the omnichannel strategy is multichannel at its most enhanced, expect to see a steadily increasing demand for both strategies with a particular emphasis on the omnichannel.

Mobile customer engagement

The advent of new technologies coupled with falling prices has increasingly made smartphones the consumer’s preference over standard feature phones, with a particularly rising demand from emerging countries.  The GSMA—the organization which represents the interests of the world’s mobile operators—reports massive growth in smartphone use over the next six years with an estimated 6 billion in use by 2020. Furthermore, the International Data Corporation predicts that 1.4 billion smartphones will ship in 2015. A rise in smartphone use translates into a growing demand for customer service through integrated in mobile apps, therefore creating opportunities for companies to optimize their mobile engagement strategies to drive sales.

Analytics

Analyzing and understanding customer behavior are essential to providing excellent customer service.  By understanding past behaviors of customers, companies can resolve customer issues more efficiently as big data collected on the customer will enable representatives to quickly and accurately offer solutions without a need for asking many questions. As customers are also connected to brands on many channels, it is vital to collect, analyze, and treat data across all channels—provide employees with the right tools for understanding, so they in turn may provide optimum customer service.

Automation/Self-service

In 2014, the use of intelligent assistants became increasingly popular among consumers when engaging in customer service, as many companies are striving to better implement such services to enhance the customer service experience. Intelligent assistants are effective for providing quick, efficient service tailored to a customer’s personal needs, all the while reducing costs for companies, shifting expenses to more critical tasks, and increasing live agent productivity. As highlighted at Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference 2014, companies such as Hyatt Hotels are using automated services to streamline the reservation process while food industry chains such as Domino’s Pizza enable faster ordering and delivery. According to NLI News, Infiniti Research predicted that the global Intelligent Virtual Assistant market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39.32% over the period 2013-2018 while Grand View Research predicted that the global market for such technology would reach $3.1 billion by 2020.

The Internet of Things

In the modern age, smartphones and computers are not the only devices with a wireless connection. The Internet of Things—when the internet is connected to physical objects, thereby rendering them “smart objects”—is set to revolutionize customer service. According to ABI Research, by 2020, more than 50 billion additional devices will be wirelessly connected to physical things. By enabling objects such as household appliances (refrigerators, for example) to communicate problems directly to the manufacturer or to the consumer before the problem actually arises, the Internet of Things allows for efficient customer service by diagnosing and predicting problems in a proactive manner. Companies are therefore poised to deliver stellar customer service when smart objects’ data are properly analyzed and addressed, and customers and businesses alike will no longer need to spend time troubleshooting issues which can be prevented in the first place.

The Cloud

Customer service departments have become increasingly dependent on cloud technology. Hosted solutions have made cloud technology less expensive and easier to upgrade, therefore making it a preferred choice for contact centers. Markets and Markets predicts that the global cloud-based contact center market will grow to more than $10 billion in 2019.

Effortless

To build and maintain customer loyalty, customer engagement needs to be effortless. People value time and convenience—and ultimately the money they save—meaning that companies must strive to make their customer service experience as quick and painless as possible by providing the best solutions in an efficient manner. According to CEB, 65% of effort comes from the customer’s interpretation of how a customer representative made them feel. It is therefore essential to ensure that customer service representatives have the right skills for delivering optimum, positive customer engagement and preserving loyalty.

Excellent and effortless customer engagement depend on the commitment of agents, supervisors, and contact center managers and their willingness to deliver on this promise. Yet the effortless experience should be available to all, whether it be the consumer or the employee delivering service. To offer your customers the best service possible, technology providers of contact center solutions must provide an effortless experience from the start.