In today’s highly competitive and fast-paced world, customers are looking for an exceptional experience from brands and businesses. Expectations from this experience mean not losing out on valuable time, money, and patience, which is the most important of all. Brands and businesses must have patience while resolving customer’s concerns and delivering great experiences to all customers.
When a customer seeks help from the customer support team of a brand, there are two crucial things that he/she expects.
Quick resolution to the problems
Fast response by the company/brand when help is needed
These two factors, i.e. fast response and resolution matters the most to customers. They can make or break the customer experience offered by a brand. How a brand handles customer support can be the difference between long-term customer loyalty or the rate of customer attrition.
Some facts and figures about customer service that businesses and brands can overlook
The following figures and numbers reflect why delivering customer service are indispensable for brands.
89% of customers would like to make a purchase again after a positive customer service experience.
For customer loyalty towards a brand, 3 out of 5 customers feel that good customer support is crucial for them.
90% of people in America consider customer service as an important factor to determine whether they want to do business with a company or not.
Investing in a new customer is almost 10-25 times more expensive than investing in a new customer.
When better customer experience is delivered by a business, the revenue generated increases by about 4 to 8%.
Excellent customer service is not just helpful, but a key differentiator between brands. Even those few seconds in providing a response to the customers matter a lot. Everyone wants to provide a good customer support experience and no one would like to keep customers waiting for their queries because it is a crucial parameter that impacts customer loyalty, sales, and revenue generation for any business. Customers look forward to an omnichannel customer engagement solution.
The rise in the Number of Tickets Since the Pandemic:
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that started last year has impacted and forced many brands to switch to an online mode of working. This is especially true for businesses in the field of e-commerce, grocery, food delivery, learning, education, etc. After the pandemic began, a record engagement from customers has been witnessed. The number of tickets for customer support of different businesses has gone up, but the customer support teams have resolved customer issues faster and the response time has reduced drastically.
Despite having many tickets, almost one-third of companies (businesses) have got faster in resolving customer queries. The American non-profit educational organization Khan Academy has witnessed a 1200% increase in inquiries from parents and a 750% rise in contacts from teachers.
Reasons why Companies have Actually Started Resolving Customer Issues Faster since Last Year:
Response and resolution times reduced across all channels:
The brands and businesses that managed to reduce response and resolution times across all channels were able to do it for different channels such as social media, call, email, apps, and web channels.
When customers call for any questions or concerns, the contact centre agents can only respond to one ticket at a time.
The agents cannot switch back and forth between different channels or multiple chat windows.
Most customers prefer support over the call since it is a direct means of communication with the agent.
However, support on call is not the most effective way to handle and tackle the huge volume of pending tickets.
Contact center agents are becoming more efficient at resolving queries or complaints:
With the kind of software and tools available from Cx Infinity, the omnichannel software solution, agents do not have to spend much time working on monotonous, tedious, and repetitive tasks such as filling of forms, sending responses to customers having a common issue, routing tickets to the right agents, etc.
Agents get more time to concentrate on solving more problems of customers, thus they are able to provide faster responses and dropped resolution times.
Businesses responding faster to customers have witnessed an increase in agent efficiency of 72 percent in the past one year.
This efficiency percentage has been calculated based on the average number of tickets closed per agent.
Companies who have become more efficient in resolving queries much faster are relying heavily on blended agents, who have the potential to work across multiple platforms.
The average number of blended agents that function across multiple channels have increased to 71 percent in companies responding faster to customers.
This percentage increase is almost 22 percent higher than other companies.
Self-care helps resolve customer challenges because they become tickets:
There are several questions in the minds of customers, the answers to which many of them can be easily obtained by them directly.
Self-care has an indispensable role to play for businesses and brands.
The use of a self-care option enables customers to get their queries resolved without even talking to an agent.
The use of self-care options by companies means fewer ticket backlogs, faster resolutions, and reduced waiting time for customers.
The use of a self-care option also means that customer support agents can focus on more complex customer issues rather than the easy ones which can be resolved by the customers themselves.
