Today, having a great product isn’t enough – you need to have great customer service and support to match.

Almost every single customer (96%) is said to consider customer service an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand!

So, what kind of service do customers want these days?

As our lives become increasingly digital, both the way businesses provide customer support and what customers expect from brands have changed.

The increase in digital communication has resulted in customers now expecting more transparency, abundance of information, ability to reach businesses through various channels and at all hours, as well as faster and more personalised responses.

According to the UK Institute of Customer Service (UKICS), good customer service not only impacts your customer experiences, but correlates directly with your business’ bottom line. Thus, the companies that score below sector averages in customer satisfaction have an average profit (EBITDA) of 14.5%, while those scoring above sector average enjoy a 24.7% rate.

The solution is digital

To manage the new challenges of increased customer demands, many businesses are turning to digital customer engagement solutions.

When done right, technology can help companies create greater customer experiences and reap the benefits.

Statistics show that those companies that have embraced digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their competitors, while 82% of top-performing companies say they pay close attention to enhancing customer experience with digital technology.

Digital tools such as customer support solutions, live chat, self-service resources, and online customer service centers can help you make sure your customers always have a touchpoint – regardless of where they are and when they want to contact you. Such tools will also help you provide consistent and timely responses and updates in an organized and systematic way.

Here’s three ways SuperOffice Service can help you manage your queries and take your customer service to the next level.

1. Bringing order to and staying in control of your service process

As your business grows, your support to customers and suppliers has to grow too.

Relying on back-and-forth email exchanges or excel sheets will eventually run its course.

Customers today expect to reach your business via a channel that is convenient for them, not the one you defined for them! So, you need to be ready to offer support via email, phone, chat, online, or even social media.

An overwhelming majority – 9 in 10 consumers expect a seamless experience (omni-channel service) when moving from one communication method to another.

In its 2020 report, PWC found that the number of companies investing in the omni-channel experience has jumped from 20% to more than 80%.

However, when requests start to come in from multiple channels, it can become difficult to keep up and ensure you are providing a consistent experience across all channels.

Research shows 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, so it is very important to make sure every customer gets timely responses and the answers they are looking for.

Without a systematic approach, your support teams are likely to waste time looking for requests and systematizing them, which leads to frustration, delays, bottlenecks, and, regrettably, unhappy customers.

Streamline all customer service inquiries

SuperOffice Service offers an automated ticketing system that collects all incoming customer inquiries, organizes them and routes to the right support agents.

Whether your customers prefer to contact you via chat, web forms, SMS, emails, or phone, SuperOffice Service will gather these in one place.

Every request is automatically assigned a unique reference number that puts it into a queueing system and tracks all communication related to it. This will give your team access to all the information they need to help that customer quickly and efficiently.

You can also set up automatic routing and escalation so that requests are automatically directed to the right category and the right person. If a request has been unanswered for a set amount of time, the system will automatically escalate it.

And best of all is that it gives you transparency. Different departments across the organization can easily access the same information, which helps to better organize your organizational workflow, as well as ensure better customer experience.

Stay updated on your service request handling status

SuperOffice Service dashboards will help you get real-time insights on how you and your team are performing with customer service request execution.

The dashboards will give you an instant overview of your request statuses and all cases in the queue. For example, is there a VIP customer that has been waiting for a response for longer than your promised response time? Or is one of your service agents overloaded with requests? Use the dashboards to better manage your team and your own queries on a day-to-day basis.

Image 1: SuperOffice Service dashboards will give you an instant real-time snapshot of your customer service status.

Analyze your customer service progress

SuperOffice Service reports automatically collect the historical customer service data and thus help you see how your request handling has evolved.

By analyzing this data you can notice trends, changing patterns or emerging issues. Pulling various reports will help you review and understand where you might need to make changes or improvements.

For example, you may see that your incoming requests are high on weekends, suggesting you may need to consider having extra support available during that time. Or maybe there is a particular product that many customers are struggling with, so you need to share better information around this.

Image 2: SuperOffice Service reports will help you look at historical trends to identify what you need to focus on going forward.

2. Speeding up customer service delivery and improving access to resources

One of the most important characteristics of a great customer service is speed.

Yet many companies are slow off the mark in responding to customers or even responding at all!

According to our own Customer Service Benchmark report, the average response time to handle a customer service request was 12 hours and 10 minutes while 62% of companies failed even to respond to customers at all.

The research highlights that a majority of the 1,000 companies in the study are not only failing to meet customer expectations, but also lose millions of dollars and customers, as well as engage in unnecessary internal follow-up work.

Automate responses and create reply templates

To make sure you respond to every customer, you can set up automated confirmation responses in SuperOffice Service. They will let your customers know immediately that you have received their request.

To be even more helpful, you can include your customer support working hours, a unique request ID for tracking the request, and any other supporting information. This way your customer will be reassured that not only their request is being attended to, but also have clear expectations on when they are likely to get a response.

More often than not you will receive similar questions from your customers on a regular basis. To manage such requests efficiently, SuperOffice Service comes with a reply template feature that works like email signatures.

Once reply templates are set up, you can choose a particular response from your predefined list with just a few clicks. The templates containing answers to routine questions can be individual or centralized to ensure consistency across your team.

Image 3: Set up and use reply templates for routine questions to speed up your response time.

Offer various self-help options

Another great way to ensure timely responses is to let customers help themselves.

Give them access to quick and easy solutions to their problems without having to wait or deal with anyone. FAQs, forums, Knowledge base, how-to videos – anything goes when it comes to creating a rich repository of self-service resources.

Self-service is a real buzz nowadays, as multiple studies have shown that:

• 70% of customers expect a company’s website to include a self-service application; 
• 73% of customers want to solve product or service issues on their own;
• 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative; 
• 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, if it were available and tailored to their needs.

With SuperOffice Service you can quickly and easily build up a library of FAQs, allowing your customers to find the answers they’re looking for by themselves, while at the same time providing a support reference point and link for reply templates for your agents.

SuperOffice’s Customer Center is a service portal where customers can log in to not only search the FAQs, but also view any request history and ask questions.

The SuperOffice Customer Center is a standalone portal that can be integrated into your website and set up in minutes. The portal will let you offer your customers round-the-clock support from anywhere. You can use the page both as a general knowledge base and to provide status updates and additional information.

For example, is there a service issue with your software? How long do you expect to resolve it and what should your customers do in the meantime? This will help your customers stay informed and save your team time and energy on dealing with routine questions.

3. Exceeding expectations through knowledge, action and connection

The quality of the service you offer to your customers is probably the single most important factor in keeping them happy.

One of the best ways to do that is for your service teams to have a 360-degree view of your customers.

A 360-degree customer view is a collection of all your customer data saved in one place. From the basic contact information to all past and present purchasing data and all interactions with customer service.

According to Gartner, less than 10% of companies have a 360-degree view of their customers. And only 5% are able to use a 360-degree view to systemically serve their customers, and, as a consequence, gain a strong competitive advantage.

Get a panoramic view of a customer

SuperOffice Service is fully integrated with your CRM system, meaning your support agents will always have a panoramic view of the customer.

They will be able to access all relevant customer details, any pending activity or documentation (quotes, orders, invoices, etc.) and all admin, marketing, sales or customer support interaction history that are typically stored in CRM software. This will provide your agents with substantial context to any customer inquiry and a possibility to offer a more relevant and personalized response.

Another great benefit of the 360-degree customer view is that it allows better cross-departmental collaboration, most notably that between sales, marketing and service. Sharing the same customer view, through a shared CRM means that these departments are able to easily pass important information to each other.

For example, if an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity presents itself through a service ticket, the service agent can easily see who the account manager is and notify them. Or maybe a sales rep is heading for a big pitching meeting with a customer. Being able to see that the same customer has raised some issues recently through customer service, will make sure they arrive better prepared.

Offer proactive customer support

If you’re able to identify and resolve customer issues before they become problems, you’re almost certain to pocket a customer in for the long haul.

Proactive customer support will allow you to exceed customer expectations, strengthen customer relationships and boost the value of your customers through both their business and their advocacy.

So how can you do this? Simply ask them!

Did you know that 87% of adults are happy to be contacted proactively by companies regarding customer service issues?

Companies that frequently check in with their customers can easily identify weak areas and correct them before customers become unhappy (and leave). The easiest way to do this is to collect feedback from your customers through a web form on your website.

A question as simple as “What can we do to help you?” will let you gather valuable insights and help your business understand what it should be doing next.

With SuperOffice CRM you can create and embed forms in any SuperOffice mailing campaign, in the Customer Center, or on any customer-facing website or landing page. All new information entered in a form is automatically registered in SuperOffice Service and a notification can be set up to alert the right person in your organization who is responsible for taking a follow-up action.

Image 4: SuperOffice forms will help you proactively capture customer feedback and data.

Engage with customers through live chat

Nothing connects you better with customers and prospects than real-time conversations while they are exploring your website.

To make an immediate connection, you can rely on live chat, which is quick, convenient and loved by customers because it’s 100x faster than any other digital service channel.

According to an eDigital research paper, live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

Live chat is also more efficient and more cost effective for your business.

Firstly, you can avoid “office hours only” availability and provide a more flexible option. This will let customers contact you when its most convenient for them and therefore offer a better customer experience.

Secondly, through chat you can respond to several customers at the same time. Being able to handle several customers at once means you’ll need a smaller team to handle service requests – cutting your support costs as a result.

Image 5: SuperOffice Live Chat will help you proactively engage customers when it’s convenient for them.

SuperOffice Chat is 100% integrated with the CRM software, allowing your support agents to connect with customers instantly and identify the problem areas or ask for clarifications so that no time is wasted. It’s also a great way to establish immediate contact with prospects who may be curious about your products or services.

Conclusion

Keeping customers happy in an ever-changing world is no small task.

To take your customer service offering from “meh” all the way to “great” – you need the right technology!

A customer service tool, combined with a CRM, will help your company increase speed and convenience for customers, as well as allow you to offer more personalized responses.

At the same time, it will provide your organization with a better management tool that will help keep agents focused and motivated and give a holistic overview of your customers.

This, in turn, can help you improve your offering and create all-round better experiences for your customers and better working conditions for your service teams.

Book a demo with one of our CRM experts and we’ll show you how SuperOffice Service can help you achieve your customer service goals.