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Benefits of co- browse technology: I

By now all of you are quite familiar with co- browse technology. Apart from being a great tool for the success of a website, it offers a number of benefits to the companies and sites inculcating this technology. Some of those benefits have been mentioned below:

1. It improves support accuracy:

Co- browse technology helps to improve support accuracy by seeing exactly what the customer is seeing. Through screen sharing you can actually see what steps he is taking, what errors he is getting, reasons responsible for that error and more. Co- browsing helps ensure complete resolution as you’ll be solving the issue together with your customer.

Query resolution through co-browsing
Query resolution through co-browsing

2. Higher conversion rate:

Co-browsing lets the agents have a look at the customer’s browser tab to guide them through your website and support them with the buying process. Resolving purchase related queries during this process helps clarify their purchasing decision which results in higher conversion rates and thus higher revenue per call.

High conversion rate
High conversion rate

3. Increased customer contentment:

The attention span of visitors is very short and so is their patience level when they are online. So, they appreciate being helped quickly and efficiently, and having their issues resolved instantly. Most communications channels available show that customers demand fast fixes for their problems. Co- browsing is one such technology that can be used to provide quick fixes to customers’ problems. Companies can successfully meet their customers’ expectations by using such services that provide fast customer service.

Customer contentment
Customer contentment

4. Reduction in call handling time:

Another advantage or benefit that co- browsing offers is the reduction in call-handling time. This further increases agent utilization and reduces costs. Co- browsing involves sharing screen space online and being able to have a look at the customer’s screen which results in more involved and motivated agents. In other words, this technology actually helps to shave off all the time spent articulating what is on the screen, what the customer did previously, and what the customer should do next as it makes chats and calls more efficacious.

Reduced handling time
Reduced handling time

 

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Strategies for generating B2B leads online: I

In the previous post we talked about B2B lead generation and its components. Now let’s take a look at the strategies that can be employed to generate leads online:

1.Email marketing:

It refers to sending a commercial message to a group of people (typically potential or current customers), using email. It basically inculcates the use of email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be carried out using:

  •  Transactional emails: These emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications’ primary purpose must be to confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender, along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional messaging.
  • Direct email: It involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products).
  •  Mobile email marketing: It develops large amounts of traffic through smartphones and tablets.
Email-Marketing
Email-Marketing

2. Social marketing:

This type of marketing involves leveraging social media to generate leads online. Businesses can use it to generate and nurture millions of dollars worth of leads. As a matter of fact, one of the most obvious ways to generate B2B leads from social media is using LinkedIn. Since social media is an integral part of content marketing, and to some extent, search marketing, so, your blogging or info graphics can be extremely successful if you are active on social media platforms.

In order to integrate social networks into their marketing strategies, companies have to develop a marketing model. One such model includes the following steps:

  • Selection of the correct social networks to use
  • Setting out a financial plan for hiring social media brand managers or consultants
  • Designing organizational structures to manage the social network in the companies’ market
  • Selection of target markets
  • Selection of the products, services, brands or company messages that you plan to promote
  • Performance measures for the social media strategy such as evaluation, data analytics, etc.

 

Social marketing
Social marketing

 

 

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How to leverage PPC for lead generation: II

1. Ensure relevance between your PPC ad and landing page content:

When online users have queries related to a particular topic or want to know more about a product or service, they search the required information using specific keywords. Also, if your ad is focused on the desired certain keyword or topic, it is expected that your landing page would provide more information about that particular keyword or topic. The users would definitely be turned off if your landing page content talks about everything else except what’s mentioned in your PPC ad. Therefore, your content should be optimized in such a way that it entices landing page visitors to become a lead or a customer.

PPC ads in accordance with content
PPC ads in accordance with content

2. Employ convincing tools to support your ad claims:

For effective lead generation support your PPC advertising campaigns with evidence. This will help you gain the trust of your target audience. You may employ convincing tools such as customer testimonial, slideshows, white papers, and eBooks. these tools could support your claim as a reputable product or service. You can also feature prominently trusted seals from organizations or agencies that will increase your credibility, gain your targeted audiences’ trust, and convert them into long-term customers.

ebooks
ebooks

3. Entice your visitors with giveaways:

You may entice your visitors by including rewards and offers that you would give them in exchange for their sign-up information to a blog or newsletter. These giveaways may include webinars, ebooks, videos, presentations and more. Make sure that these rewards and offers are well-designed to give your web visitors something of value that will tempt them to know more about your brand, product or service. Also, it is suggested that you place your offers near your lead generation form, with customized graphics and text that will convince people to make a response to a particular call-to-action.

Free webinar
Free webinar
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Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: III

1. Arrange weekly meetings:

Arrange regular meetings for knowledge sharing. The basic idea is to discuss and understand the overall experience of your support agents with your clients. Try to understand what obstacles they face while they carry out a live chat with the website visitors, what kind of tricky questions customers may ask and how to resolve their queries. Agents can uncover important techniques of live chat support in this knowledge sharing process. This can aid in improving their overall performance.

Meetings
Meetings

2. Club videos with training sessions:

As a matter of fact, humans are visual learners. They tend to learn things more effectively if taught through graphics and videos. You don’t need to spend extra bucks on video tutorials. There are thousands of useful videos available on YouTube which can be utilized for this purpose. This is one of the best customer service training ideas that gives tremendous results.

Videos clubbed with training session
Videos clubbed with training session

3. Help them know their actual roles:

Yet another concept of your training should be to help your chat agents understand the actual role they need to play in building customer relationships. Educate them about the lifetime value of a customer as well as the consequences of a bad customer interaction. Let them know how the quality of customer support impacts on sales conversion, customer retention, and brand image. Once the support agents have this basic understanding, they will be more efficient in providing top-notch service.

Knowing respective roles
Knowing respective roles

4. Train them practically:

Practicing something practically helps you learn it better. Team up all of your agents and assign them different chat scenarios. Encourage them to try their best to deal with those given situations. Give them enough time to understand the whole support process, your products/services and most importantly, how to manage the live chat software. These practical sessions are very important to cultivate a capable workforce.

LIve chat tutorial
Live chat tutorial
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Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: II

1. Review your live chat agents’ performance:

Make it a point to review your live chat agents. Their training should include mock chats, secret evaluation and much more. Apart from that, distribute customer success manuals amongst your agents where all important tips and techniques of online customer support have been mentioned in written format. This will help them to go through the important tips whenever they have any doubts.

Customer support training
Customer support training

2. Inculcate tech support along with live chat:

In order to create a power-packed support environment make use of live chat features such as canned messages and links, the ability to push files and screen sharing and co-browsing. Also, train your agents to go slow and ask short, simple questions to get to the root of problems and to make solving them easier and faster. More important than training your agents to provide tech support is ensuring they have the resources they need readily available. Ensure your tech support agents are provided with canned links for knowledge based articles, how-to tutorials, videos and other resources they need to help customers resolve issues or problems instantly. Make sure the agents know how to find the resources quickly and then send them to the respective customers whenever they need them.

 

Tech Support
Tech Support

3. Help them to be platform experts:

LIve chat agents need to have thorough knowledge of the platform they are working on and the tools they are dealing in. When chat agents are familiar with the tools they are utilizing while assisting customers, they perform tasks with a higher level of confidence. Task your agents providing both a customer and organization friendly experience when chatting. It’s important to be fully trained on all customer and agent facing platform features. For this purpose,  customers might be presented with a pre-chat survey while initiating a chat request, which gives the ability to choose the reason for wanting to communicate.

 

Platform skills
Platform skills
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Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: I

Today’s era is an era of digitization. These days the purchasing decision of any customer is not only based on the quality of your offerings but also on the quality of your customer service and support. Customer support refers to the process of building a healthy relationship with your customers by convincing them that you value them and you are there whenever they need you.Thus, the quality of your support service can improve or destroy your brand image and ultimately your business revenue. So, you need to train your live chat agents with the right customer service skill. Here, we have mentioned some of the customer service training ideas!

Good customer service
Good customer service

1. Good product knowledge:

Educate your support agents about the products and services you provide. Good product knowledge not only improves the support speed but also helps to build a much stronger, long- termed relationship with the customers. If your chat support agents lack the knowledge of products and services you are dealing in, they will tell customers to hold for a while for finding the solution or transfer the chats to a more knowledgeable person, which becomes time-consuming. Therefore having proper knowledge shows confidence and builds trust amongst customers.

Product knowledge
Product knowledge

2. Good writing skills:

Live chat provides instant assistance to anyone visiting your site. Customers utilize the live chat option as it is the fastest way to interact with companies in case they have any queries. A key component of a live chat interaction is the agent’s ability to exercise good writing skills. Utilize the auto spelling and grammar check feature of your live chat platform to ensure efficacious agent communications. Tell them to keep sentences short and to the point. Agents must be able to write as if they were talking on the phone in order to keep the conversation flowing by mixing free form and canned messages. Interject the customer’s name while chatting to personalize the conversation and take care of punctuations.

Chatting skills
Chatting skills

3. Refrain from taking things personally:

There are instances when the customers are not in a good mood and they interact in an unexpected manner. Teach your support agents not to take those things personally. Complaints are gifts from the customers. They contain customer insights and are a great way to know what exactly are their opinions about your offerings and support quality. Tell them not to lie to the customer. If they don’t have the answer just admit it. Ask your live chat agents to spend some more time with the website visitors and dig personal info like customer’s hobbies, liking and disliking and so on. In this way, the conversation will be friendlier and the person on the other side will feel comfortable and relaxed.

Friendly customer service
Friendly customer service
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Qualified and unqualified leads

The sole aim of individuals involved in digital and outbound marketing and sales is to segment leads into, one of two categories – qualified leads and unqualified leads. Leads can switch from one category to the other with the aid of nurture campaigns.

A qualified lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in a product or service and meets general buying criteria.

Qualified lead
Qualified lead

A qualified lead is a person:

i) with need, budget, and purchasing authority.

ii) Working for a company that meets your customer profile for being a customer.

iii) With a buying timeline that falls within the time horizon of the sales representative’s commission plan.

It only takes a few minutes for a true sales professional to qualify a lead. And lead qualification can be done anywhere at a busy tradeshow or on a golf course, provided you have an efficient marketing team.ave completed, or are in the process of

Basically, qualified leads are the ones which have completed, or are in the process of completing your nurture campaign cycle.

Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing

Qualified leads are in control of their own buying cycle, completing self-education research who have brainstormed and listed their exact needs in a solution. They have a clearly defined budget to work with and are researching solutions within their means. In addition to this, they have low churn rates because they close on their own terms.

Buying cycle
Buying cycle

On the other hand, unqualified leads are the ones who have not been nurtured enough to close their sales cycle. They are often unsure of what your company offers and don’t know what they’re looking for in a solution. Unqualified leads may also be the ones for whom your product or service is out of their price range. Though it is possible to convert unqualified leads into customers, the churn rate is comparatively high.

Unqualified leads
Unqualified leads

 

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Best customer retention strategies: Part VI

1.Make sure no engagement is left behind:

One of the best things that you can do to improve your customer retention is to adopt a policy in your company that no customer engagement is ignored and a response is sent as soon as possible. There are a variety of tools out there like Mention, Hootsuite, and Sproutsocial which are all great for monitoring social media. You can leverage these tools to increase your customer engagement rates and gain higher exposure.

Customer engagement
Customer engagement

2. CRM:

Customer relationship management (CRM)  refers to practices, techniques, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM helps improve business relationships with customers resulting in customer retention and driving sales growth.

CRM systems are further designed to compile information on customers across different channels.

 

3. Set up an exclusive club for your loyal and highly active customers:

As a matter of fact, people like to feel special and considered important. So, that’s exactly what you should strive to do in order to achieve customer retention.

Setting up an exclusive VIP club takes time and money but will help you stand out from the crowd. Also, if done well, and optimized, will bring you positive returns.

Benefits for high performance customers
Benefits for high-performance customers

4. Make the most of social media:

Social media, today, is undoubtedly the most efficacious way of engaging with customers and retaining them. It can play a vital role in building more meaningful connections with customers, so they stay with you longer.

You can keep your customers updated and let them know about your latest offers. Moreover, you can also provide benefits like digital discount cards for following you on these platforms.

Social media
Social media

5. Upgrade your customer experience:

You should keep upgrading your website. You further need to consider these aspects while enhancing your website features:

i) redesigning your website

ii) considering solutions for device compatibility

iii) optimizing the load time

iv) providing easy navigation to customers

v) offering transparency and much more!

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How is live chat better than phone and email support?

Live chat has become a turning point in a customer’s shopping ride and while making purchase decisions. It really gratifies the customer to such an extent that just having a live chat icon at your website boosts the confidence of the customer. He is happy that just like in a real store front, here at the website also there is some one “live” to help him out, in a fix.

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Here’s why you should opt for omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel customer service

An omnichannel customer service is the best way to provide the customers with a seamless shopping experience, no matter wherever he/she is shopping from. This type of customer support includes channels such as FAQ web pages, mobile applications, social media and more. The basic idea is to let the customers avail assistance through their preferred channel of communication. Omnichannel customer service not only enhances the quality of customer support and provide you happy and loyal customers. There’s a lot more, that it can do for your business. Read on to know:

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