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The way that companies handle customer communication has changed dramatically in recent years. Prior to the World Wide Web, the only way for a customer to contact you was by phone or direct mail. Today, new channels have emerged and as consumers become more tech savvy, businesses are now finding themselves engaging with their customers through a wide range of digital platforms, such as web forms, email, self-service, forums and social media networks. The biggest challenge to serving your customers in several communication channels is response time. Customers demand immediate service and slow response times of “within 24 hours” are no longer acceptable....
Customer service today means serving customers "in the red zone." Besides my former beloved 1986 red Honda Prelude, most red things for me fall into a negative category. Think sunburn, red alert, STOP sign, SOS.
The red zone is different for different people and different every time. And that’s the whole point. Sometimes it’s because expectations are set so high with a direct line and then fall short and disappoint, as in my London business travel experience. And sometimes it’s because the bar is set so low and a brand still fails to make the cut, like the slow moving lines at the Post Office and just as you’re the next person (and of course pressed for time), the next open window closes so the agent can take a break... But it’s always in-the-moment and real for the customer.
In other words, customers are normal, garden-variety social, emotional creatures that now have a bullhorn to broadcast their (dis)pleasures with your brand. Humans have always been social, emotional creatures so there’s nothing new here. What is new are the channels and media we have access to at any given point on any given day and the larger pool of connections we can stay in touch with via our social networks/communities. And still there are so many brands that fail to incorporate this new reality into strategy, operations and customer service. In the latest study conducted by Twitter, they found that by responding to customers on Twitter, customers are 44% more likely to share their experience, 30% more likely to recommend the brand, and the responsiveness will positively increase CSAT by 1 point....
Today's customers are having their service expectations reshaped by advances in consumer technology, and will become increasingly frustrated when having to engage with brands that don't perform to the same levels as their best practice competitors, according to Sabio, which has outlined 2016's top technology trends for more effective customer engagement.
Sabio's Head of Consultancy, Stuart Dorman, says that offering more intelligent service and making it easier to engage can make a huge difference, not only by helping organisations to optimise operational performance, but also in terms of freeing up customer time so that they can actually spend more of their lives doing what they actually want to do. 64.180.55.243 This article is copyright 2015 TheWiseMarketer.com.
Among Sabio's top trends for more effective customer engagement
Research confirms and we know this intuitively, positive customer experiences will keep our customers coming back. No one wants to continue doing business with a company after a bad experience, poor customer service, wrong product shipments that aren’t quickly rectified, or for any number of other reasons that can ruin a consumer’s attitude towards a brand.
According to research by Accenture, 72% of consumers have switched brands after a poor customer experience. Of the 11 industries that were surveyed, retail consumers were most likely to switch after a negative experience (30%).
And perhaps just as bad, 73% of those who switched said they would not consider doing business with the brand again....
Social media is still a young platform when it comes to customer service. Both customers and companies are in the “figuring out” stage, where both parties are trying to understand how best to communicate with each other.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that social media platforms have their own “rules of conduct” and “language”. Learning social media etiquette is an extremely important aspect of customer service on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Equally as important is learning how to best manage your communications over various social media platforms.
With the right mixture of tools and a willingness to keep a tab on all conversations with customers, you can ensure that maneuvering your way around various social media channels and communicating with customers is as effective and efficient as possible.
Companies need to focus on three key qualities in order to deliver highly relevant customer experiences at scale, according to Accenture. And those who succeed significantly outperform the market.
The company has shared the information in an interactive infographic culled from a study called Digital Transformation: Re-imagine from the Outside in which it outlines the issues. The full report is also available for download...
Hitorically, financial services companies have not been on the frontier of innovation. On the contrary, in the current era of digitization, too many companies think they have enough time to adapt to this new environment. In many boardrooms ‘digital’ is still associated with selling products over the Internet or cost-cutting. But this is only half the story. Digital transformation impacts the entire enterprise. It is about the way a company assesses risk or how it automates its service functions. It is how sales are supported digitally by tablets, for example.
A recent Mckinsey report stated that for the simple financial products, digital channel use in Europe will rise to an average of 35%. Moreover, the total cost reduction could run up to 20% percent when the benefits from digital transformation are factored into the equation. That is why it is important that financial services companies start assessing what digital transformation could do for them....
When a product or service doesn’t work as promised, some people get angry. Really angry.
Cloud contact center provider Five9 released a report and infographic today looking at “customer rage” and what companies can do to prevent it. Turns out 85 percent of consumers will retaliate against a company if their customer service needs are not met. 49 percent of all consumers will stop doing business with that company, and 18-34 year olds are three times as likely to vent their frustrations on social media.
53% of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter expect a response within one hour.However, if a customer makes a complaint to a brand using Twitter, that figure goes up to 72%.These stats come from the latest research by Lithium Technologies and perhaps contradicts the previously held notion that just 11% of people expect to receive customer service via social media....
In my recent post, I talked about the need for Agility, Authenticity and Passion along with the “four C’s” which describe the pillars of great marketing today. Let’s take a look at some examples of great marketers and great companies who are putting these pillars into practice.
Customer-centric. Customers are in control. They decide how and when to connect with you and your company and they vote with their online voice, dollars and attention. Customer engagement – an elusive achievement — is the number one asset to a business today and the number one goal for marketing to pursue. Customer engagement is only possible when customer’s wants and needs are put at the center of everything we do....
Delivery has come a long way since the early days of ecommerce, but some online retailers are still failing to offer a range of delivery options to suit their customers' needs. As stats from a new Multichannel Retail Survey show, customers are demanding more flexibility in delivery options, and retailers need to offer this to increase conversions. Our survey found that 50% of respondents had abandoned a purchase online due to unsatisfactory delivery options. So which options are customers looking for, and who is offering them?...
“We’re craving the nondigital even more these days, the authentically human interaction,” says Jerry Seinfeld, explaining (I would argue) not just live standup comedy’s appeal but the appeal of almost any great customer experience. “We need to see some schmuck sweat.”
Authentic human interactions make the cash register ringA lthough Seinfeld’s fee is notably higher up the keynote speaker’s pay scale than mine, like Jerry, I consult and speak about the customer experience and customer service. And to my way of thinking, the Seinfeld Customer Experience Theorem is directly applicable to almost any business....
Domino's and Bank of America show that having humans handling social media doesn't mean they'll act human.
Last week, Domino’s stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand’s Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote “Sorry for your bad experience” response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.
And yet the error was actually a mistake made by a human, according to Domino’s. In much the same way as Bank of America screwed up last month by having a social media team sounding a lot like robots, a Domino’s employee mistook the compliment for a complaint. The employee then, it would appear, gave the default response for social media complaints. Domino’s, to its credit, tried to regain its footing by taking it in stride. The rub with brands in social media is that they’ll need humans, who are prone to make mistakes....
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Organizations the authors describe as “flat-earthers” look at customer experience from the rational and physical perspective — focusing on how quickly a delivery is made or how quickly a phone call is answered, or the objective quality of the product. The authors contend that more than 50% of customer experience is about how a customer feels. Here are the seven imperatives for moving to the next level of customer experience, as defined by the authors....
Twilio, the developer-centric communications platform that successfully IPOed earlier this year, published a new study today about how consumers want to use tech to talk to businesses and brands. The study, which the market research firm Vanson Bourne performed for Twilio by surveying 6,000 consumers in Europe, Asia and North America, shows that nine out of ten consumers would like to be able to use messaging to talk to businesses. The majority of businesses, however, don’t yet have the infrastructure in place to do so right now. Given that it’s Twilio’s bread and butter to provide this kind of infrastructure to businesses, it’s worth taking the results with a grain of salt, of course. What they do highlight, though, is that while consumers overall prefer messaging over face-to-face interactions with businesses (and millennials even more so), businesses haven’t quite caught up to this new world yet....
Thanks to Twitter, businesses are closer to consumers than ever before. Tweets haven't replaced phone calls and handwritten letters, but they've become a popular way for consumers to vocalize their questions, praise, or complaints -- all in plain view of anyone who can find the conversation online.
But customers don't just expect you to read their tweets about you -- they also expect you to reply. According to charts published on Search Engine Watch, 70% of surveyed Twitter users expect a response from brands they reach out to on Twitter. Of those users, 53% want that response in under an hour.
It's important to have a solid strategy for responding to tweets so you can keep your customers happy and drive engagement on Twitter. Should you include a link in your response? How much punctuation (?, !) should you use? Are emoticons off the table?
To help inform your Twitter response strategy, LeadSift gathered data on answers to these questions and more, and culminated them into the visual below. Consider this data in the context of your own brand voice and what you know about your buyers' behavior to develop an action plan when responses come rolling in. And hurry -- your customers are waiting.
What if you had a big blue phone on your desk, and whenever you needed to, you could pick it up and instantly be connected with a smart and caring tech support expert (from your internet provider, your web host, the airline you use the most...)?
What are the chances you'd ever consider switching to a competitor that didn't offer similar service just to save a few bucks?
The current model of big company support is to throw undervalued, undertrained, underpowered human beings at perplexed customers, frustrating and disrespecting them enough that they shrug and give up.
Hootsuite Media, a Canadian maker of social media software, is offering a new tool that allows companies to handle complaints on Twitter by sending the customer a special phone number for fast service.
An infographic from SproutSocial suggests that only 1 out of 5 customer inquiries on Twitter and Facebook get any sort of response. This is a huge shortfall and for a business the consequences can be a loss of custom, poor audience retention rates, and reputation damage for that brand’s customer care approach.
Currently, the average response time to a customer query is a terrible 11 hours. That’s more than enough time for a customer to take their custom elsewhere and plenty of time for that customer to develop a negative opinion of a brand. People like to be heard and acknowledged, so a business should use social media tools to facilitate that....
LivePerson, a provider of digital engagement solutions, today announced the results of its second annual Connecting with Customers research, a comprehensive global study examining trends in online behavior and consumer expectations. The survey revealed that 69% of consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that provides live, human assistance at critical moments, and 82% indicate their perception of a brand improves when live chat is available.
Most significantly, the research shows the window to win or lose brand loyalty is a mere 76 seconds. Consumers expect access to real-time help within 76 seconds, and if they don't get it, they choose the slower, more frustrating option of email or abandon the site entirely, according to the research....
When a product or service doesn’t work as promised, some people get angry. Really angry. Cloud contact center provider Five9 released a report and infographic today looking at “customer rage” and what companies can do to prevent it.
Turns out 85℅ of consumers will retaliate against a company if their customer service needs are not met. 49℅ of all consumers will stop doing business with that company, and 18-34 year olds are three times as likely to vent their frustrations on social media....
A new study from social software provider Lithium reveals 53 percent of consumers expect a brand to respond to a tweet within an hour. That number jumps to 72 percent of consumers expecting a response if the tweet is a complaint about the brand or its products.
Lithium commissioned Millward Brown Digital to conduct the study evaluating consumer expectations when interacting with brands on Twitter. Surveying 501 respondents who claimed they actively engaged with businesses on Twitter, the study found a brand’s response time to tweets can significantly impact the brand’s overall reputation.
When asked how quickly a response is expected from a brand on Twitter, 65 percent of the survey participants said they want a response in two hours time or less, with 20 percent expecting a response in 30 minutes or less....
...If you read the profiles of many of the heads of customer service on LinkedIn (or the service areas of their company’s websites), you might be forgiven for concluding that they were almost all focused on the lofty goals of “exceeding customer expectations” and/or “creating customer delight”. Maybe your organisation claims the same.
But ground-breaking recent research by the CEB (the organisation that brought you “The Challenger Sale”) makes a strong case for all this talk of delighting customers being a stupid and – for almost every company on the planet bar a few shining stars – ultimately unprofitable strategy. As anyone who has had cause to phone O2’s customer service line (note: other mobile phone companies offer an equally awful experience) will recognise, I think most of us would be prepared to sacrifice the occasional opportunity to have a truly “wow” experience in return for not ever having to suffer any more of the much more common “doh!’ experiences....
Did you wake up one morning and think, “I wish I had a phone that would not only allow me to text and call, but play games, get directions, read books, allow me access to all social media and take pictures?” Not likely. You wanted an iPhoneteens_working because Apple put it on the market.
Jim Clifton, CEO at Gallup, says this is no small point. Our economy isn’t waiting for consumers to want to start purchasing things again; it’s waiting for entrepreneurs to create demand.
Growth doesn’t just happen, and it’s not necessarily driven by demand. Growth comes from innovation and from entrepreneurs who create demand. Just look at the iPhone....
An inevitable consequence of the push to achieve sales through multiple channels is that businesses must also be prepared to deliver multichannel customer service. But is social there yet?
An inevitable consequence of the push to achieve sales through multiple channels is that businesses must also be prepared to deliver multichannel customer service.
Poor levels of service can ruin the overall shopping experience and mean that the customer is lost forever, so online, in-store, mobile and all other channels must work together to deliver an excellent overall customer experience.New research from eDigitalResearch examined how consumers prefer to contact companies and then compared the various response times and satisfaction levels.
The survey asked more than 2,000 UK respondents how they expect to be able to contact a business - 92% selected email, followed by telephone (71%) and by post (45%). Fewer than one in four (22%) said live online chat and just 11% said social media....
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![How to Respond to People on Twitter: A Simple Guide for Businesses [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/7Xf82CfJ2__elZJ5H5j4NDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Can you handle the 24 x 7 customer service challenge? Apparently, 21% off businesses can't.