Working at a customer support center is quite a tedious task. As a support agent, you have to deal with a variety of customers. You are supposed to handle customer inquiries as politely as possible, irrespective of your mood. Read on to know the various types of customers encountered at a support center:
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Customer support agents form the backbone of the customer service that you provide to your customers, so, it’s imperative that you prepare them in the most appropriate manner. Here are the best tips to make your support agents more productive and yield the best results through your customer service:
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Businesses these days, very well know the power of a strong customer relationship. They are ready to go above and beyond to live up to the customers’ expectations to build an emotional connection with their customers. Connecting with your target audience on an emotional level can actually help you boost the level of customer satisfaction and hence, gain long-term customers. But how do you do that? Read on to know:
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Lead generation refers to the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. It is very important to have qualified leads so as to have qualified leads.
Lead generation is all about brand awareness, pulling down leads and making sales. Therefore, employing the best lead generation strategies can prove to be beneficial for any business in the long run. Here we have piled up the best lead generation strategies that you can leverage to boost your lead generation:
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Net Promoter Score refers to a management tool that can be utilized to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and is correlated with revenue growth. NPS measures the loyalty that exists between a service provider and a consumer. The provider is the entity that is asking the questions on the NPS survey and consumer is the customer, employee, or respondent to an NPS survey.
Working of net promoter score:
The Net Promoter Score is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. Moreover the consumers are also categorized according to the score with which they respond:
i) The ones who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called Promoters, and are considered likely to exhibit value-creating behaviors, such as buying more, remaining customers for longer etc.
ii) Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled Detractors, and they are believed to be less likely to exhibit the value-creating behaviors.
iii) Responses of 7 and 8 are labeled Passives, and their behavior falls in the middle of Promoters and Detractors.
The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For calculating a net promoter score, passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score towards 0.
Companies are encouraged to follow the likelihood to recommend question with an open-ended request for elaboration, soliciting the reasons for a customer’s rating of that company or product. These reasons can further be provided to front-line employees and management teams for follow-up action. Moreover, additional questions can be included to assist with understanding the perception of various products, services, and lines of business.
Net Promoter System also requires a process called closing the loop. It is a process by which the provider actively makes efforts to convert a detractor into a promoter.
Proponents of the Net Promoter approach claim that the score can be used to motivate an organization to become more focused on improving products and services for consumers. A customer is able to leave comments in the surveys sent to them which allows a company to use the VOC (Voice of Customer) to ensure that company is meeting the expectations.
B2B lead generation refers to the process of finding new business customers. It includes various stages such as determining suitable target companies, approaching new prospects and eventual conversion from lead to customers. However, you need to know that generating leads isn’t easy and trying to acquire leads in the B2B space makes it all that much more difficult. B2B lead generation inculcates the following terms:
Prospects: It is a marketing term used for describing a potential customer. In case of B2B a prospect is a company interested in your product, service or brand. A prospect may not necessarily be familiar with your company.
Lead:
It refers to a company which meets the criteria you define as being valuable to generate new business. Leads can be:
i) inbound – generated e.g. through form fills or direct calls made to inquiry about products.
ii) outbound – leads can be classified as ones which sales teams may categorize based on certain conversations they had.
Customer:
A customer is a lead that now uses your products or services.
Inbound marketing:
Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services with the help of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Inbound marketing provides detailed information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers information they value through company sponsored newsletters, blogs and entries on social media platforms.
Outbound Marketing:
Outbound marketing is a form of marketing where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience. Rather than taking a passive approach, companies actively push their message to potential leads, whether or not these potential leads are actually looking for them at that time. Telemarketing is one such method whereby companies pro-actively call customers to offer their products or services.
1. Costly products:
Extremely high cost of products is also a reason for cart abandonment. If your products are costly, people will not buy them. In other words, if you are driving up the prices, the users may look elsewhere or consider buying it for less elsewhere.
2. Discount coupons
Discount coupons may not always lead to sales because when a website has discount coupons or promotional offers, the users go in search of the coupon code and come back only if they find one.
3. Forced registration:
It is true that the more information you have about a client, the better you can market and deliver your products to them. moreover, registered users are more likely to visit the site again and develop loyalty. However, many commerce stores try to get this information through a forced registration. Not all are willing to register, so, the sites that do not allow the users to buy goods as guest visitors see a high rate of shopping cart abandonment.
4. High or late listed shipping prices:
In today’s era, people buy online so that they can get the goods delivered at their doorstep and also get a discount at the same time. But high shipping costs increase the price and may even drive the customers away. In many cases, websites try and get the customers interested in a product and once they have placed a product in the shopping cart, they cleverly add the shipping cost to the total cost.
5. Complex checkout process and lack of payment options:
As a matter of fact, the checkout process is required to be as simple, smooth and quick as possible. Making a user fill out too many forms will make him/ her abandon the cart and leave. On the other hand, there are customers who want to buy products but are forced to abandon the carts because the e-commerce website doesn’t make provisions for their convenient method of payment.
1. Resolve all your consumers’ queries:
Most of the questions of consumers are born from their uncertainty of availing of your product. Their inquiries include everything including your prices, difficulty in setting your products up and other sorts of queries. Make it a point to answer all these questions right away even before the questions or objections have been cast out. Side by side an F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions) list will exempt any doubt or objection they may have that is hindering them to sign up as a business lead or a customer. When you offer a particular brand, product or service, you should expect consumers to throw all sorts of questions or even objections regarding your offerings.
2. Track your lead generation efforts:
Make use of conversion tools offered by different providers to track the conversion rates of your lead generation efforts via PPC. As a matter of fact, if you don’t track your conversions you won’t get the clear picture of your lead generation campaign and that can be harmful to your business. You can employ conversion tools offered by various providers including major PPC networks like Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising which offer conversion tools of their own to help you track your lead generation efforts.
3. Provide 24/7 assistance to the consumers:
By putting in a contact number or providing a live chat facility you can help dispel any doubts or apprehension your visitors may have about your product or service after clicking on your PPC Ad. Also, it helps people are find ways to distinguish the real service providers from those who are not and contacting them directly through phone or live chat. Convincing your visitors that you will be there for them whenever they need your assistance deepens their trust in you, thus, making it beneficial for you.
4. Show gratitude through a Thank You page:
Once all your required transactions have been completed, you may lead your visitors to the thank you page. This page can be utilized to:
i) increase brand awareness. to upsell other products or lead them to your social network group or community
ii) upsell other products
iii) lead them to your social network group or community
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.
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.
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.
Increasing your company’s customer lifetime value means:
i) increasing customer loyalty
ii) general profitability
iii) marketing allowance
In order to increase customer lifetime value:
When you want to build your business on loyal customers and brand evangelists, you have to do something that is beyond mass consumer expectations. As a matter of fact, people love to feel like they have the best thing, no matter what that thing is. Once they feel like it’s the best, they’ll do way more than talk about it.
Upselling means persuading a customer to buy something more expensive or an advanced version of a product. You sell a more expensive model, additional features or upgraded version of something. This adds value to the product.
Cross-selling, on the other hand, means selling a new or a different product/service to an existing customer. In other words, you’re selling additional products to the customer.
Both these strategies are highly effective and profitable when trying to boost the customer lifetime value (CLV) for your business, no matter, what scale or size.
You need to differentiate yourself from your competitors in terms of features, services, resources, or whatever else your customers will place some value on.
As a matter of fact, choosing the right incentive structure means your customers won’t be the only ones leveraging the rewards. Utilize your rewards system to increase customer retention, and boost your customer lifetime value without compromising your bottom line. Instead of discounts, offer exclusive products or value-added services. This will further increase your CLV by promoting customer loyalty and increasing profitability in the long-term.
Make it quicker and easier for your customers to get their questions answered. Go above and beyond your actual product and give them something that makes their life easier on a regular basis. In other words, you need to understand your customers, figure out what would make their life easier, and build it.
Providing shipping that’s free of cost is one of the greatest and most profitable sales promotions! Free shipping and return instill in the customers a sense of security that they won’t lose out if the delivered product did not meet their expectations and they wanted to return it back.
You can always incorporate the shipping cost into your product if you are worried about your margins. You may even think about offering free shipping when a customer spends over a certain amount.
Free shipping/free returns create customer security and make it hassle-free.
Flash sale campaigns are a great way to create a sense of urgency for the customers to buy. Many retailers are now adopting this strategy as a way to sell more products and get rid of surplus stock.
The more successful flash sales are ones that don’t last very long and 50% of purchases occur during the first hour of a flash sale, hence, helping the businesses clear the surplus stock.
Holiday promotions are the most enticing types of sales promotions as customers always like to spend more on the holidays, making it the perfect opportunity for you to get your brand out there and sell more products. You don’t have to overdo your offers, but enticing customers with slight discounts will always work in your favor. It basically requires your creativity to sell out the stock through holiday promotions.
This kind of deal attracts the customer to buy more of your stock. Giving them a discount if they spend more is one of the greatest types of sales promotions. It may further drive them in the right direction. You don’t have to offer a huge discount, but make sure it’s attractive enough to convert visitors into buyers.
Running a competition will not only help raise your profile but every person that enters will then become an email contact that you can try and convert into a sale.
Clever way of triggering sales promotions, isn’t it?
Well, if people are entering your competition, chances are they are interested in your products, so running a competition is a great idea for deepening that interest, particularly for start-ups.
Customers love discounts and stuff like that. Thus, rewarding your customers will help you build a solid base of loyal, long-term customers and it will entice people to shop more at your online store. Providing great customer service is crucial to the success of your business. These days offering a loyalty point system is a popular form of sales promotions.
In this case, the customer can gain points every time they buy and then use their points to get money off future purchases, or if they buy more, they save more.
Giving away freebies not only gives potential customers the chance to test out your product but also entices people to buy your stuff!
Now, the question arises, what to give away as freebies? Well! Branded keychains, bumper stickers, magnets, pens etc. are some options. Customers will appreciate the gesture, feel valued and will think of you whenever they see their branded gift.
Offering your products at a price lesser than the regular one is the most popular sales promotion strategy. Adding a discount to your products is possibly the best type of promotion. Customers love to grab a bargain, so it makes sense to offer discounts every now and then to boost your sales. Always consider your bottom line and be sure to not constantly have a sale, as people will just come to expect this as a norm of your business.
Offering digital or virtual coupons is an effective sales promotion technique that will make the promotion seem more exclusive and will give the customers more of a push to visit your online store. You should send coupons to loyal customers who have spent a certain amount. You could also consider sending coupons to visitors who have experienced bad customer service. This may help convert them back to happy customers!
Price match promise has become one of the most popular ways to promote your brand these days, particularly if you have a lot of competitors trying to leverage the lucrative market. It allows your customers to shop with you and will be safe in the knowledge that if they can get it cheaper somewhere else, you’ll refund the difference and keep your words. There’s nothing to lose for them and it means that you still get to keep a solid, long-term customer base.
