Customers are the lifeblood of any growing company. Their
return business brings reliable income and their referrals help you widen your
reach. According to the Adobe Digital Index Report, 40 percent of an American
business's revenue comes from repeat or return buyers, who are only eight
percent of a business's overall visitors. This means a small percentage of your
customers are helping you pay the bills every month.
By nurturing that eight percent and hopefully watching your
repeat customer base grow, you can keep your monthly cash flow strong.
Fortunately, there are multiple tools you can use to better interact with your
customers, while also keeping your response times short. Here are a few tools
that are designed to support your customer service efforts.
Community
Apple has a large group of brand loyalists who recommend
their products to other customers and interact on forums to resolve common
product issues. Studies show that this type of community attracts customers who
want to be part of the crowd. You can generate similar buzz by setting up an
online community on your own website. Nabble
gives you the code you need to incorporate a forum on your own website, then
invite customers to join the conversation. In addition to helping each other
through any issues with your product, the information posted on these
communities will also provide valuable information to your team members, who
will peruse the forums on a regular basis to identify any customer needs that
should be addressed.
Email Reply
Today's mobile workforce is always on the go. Yet the need
to manage incoming tickets doesn't go away. Instead of staffing a call center
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, a business can use Desk.com's reply by email feature to reply to incoming case
notification emails. If a customer is having problems logging into an account
and you're away from your computer, you can reply to let the customer know
you'll be on the case as soon as you're back at your desk. You can also use Desk.com's email feature to automatically
turn those emails into cases, complete with assignment to a particular
technician and prioritization.
Service Level
Monitoring
With so many brands using analytics to monitor operations,
businesses must follow their lead to remain competitive. Several data analytics
solutions are available to help businesses monitor how their products are
performing. One of those tools is a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which acts
as a contract between service professionals and the customers or clients that
do business with a company. Heroix
Longitude specializes in SLA monitoring and reporting solutions, storing these
contracts and monitoring how a business's technology meets stated standards.
Once in place, Heroix will help a
business see how often a system was functional and the causes of any outages or
degradations in performance.
Gamification
One way to push support representatives to work harder and
smarter is through the use of gamification tools. FreshDesk's Integrated Game Mechanics turns technical support into
a game, rewarding top performers through the use of a leaderboard. The winner
gets a virtual trophy and the pride of being number one for the specified
period. Competition can boost performance in ways no other motivators ever
could. For added incentive, you could add on a tangible reward like a gift card
or free afternoon off to the top performer each month.
Supporting customers isn't always easy, but with the right
team in place, as well as the right tools to help them do their jobs well,
you'll be able to handle any situations that arise. When customers see that
they can get support for the products or services they buy from you, they're
more likely to return and refer their friends.
Credit: www.inc.com
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