Tag: omnichannel

Culture of Innovation Inspires Strategic Outsourcing Partnership to Meet Top Global Retailer’s Commitment to Excellent CX

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Why iQor? 

At iQor, we place a strong emphasis on maintaining a customer-centric culture that motivates our entire team—from frontline workers to management—to strive towards meeting and exceeding the key performance indicators (KPIs) that our clients value most. We believe that our success stems from a combination of innovative thinking and open communication, two of our iQorian Values. As a strategic outsourcing partner, our goal is to fully understand the unique business needs of each of our clients and proactively suggest ways to leverage personnel and technology to achieve their objectives. Heart

We recognize that our success depends on building strong partnerships between our clients and our teams of frontline agents and supervisors, who work together as a cohesive unit to provide exceptional customer experiences. We value the contributions of all our team members and ensure that our work environments are flexible enough to accommodate both in-office and work-at-home employees, providing scalability and comprehensive endpoint security that safeguards our clients’ data and operations. 

Background   

Our client, one of the world’s largest retailers and online shopping experience providers, engages a rich network of BPOs to provide customer support services. iQor’s first assignment with this client was to provide customer care through omnichannel voice and chat. 

Our client manages all their BPO relationships based on multiple performance criteria. Their standards for customer experience are consistently high to sustain their global brand reputation.  

iQor’s emphasis on maintaining a strong customer service culture provided the inspiration to embrace our client’s CX standards. From our perspective, this was an opportunity to understand their unique business needs and proactively assume a leadership role as an innovative strategic partner within their BPO network of those providing omnichannel customer support services. Notably, several of the client’s other BPOs are Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders for Customer Service. 

Business Challenges  

As a leading global retail and e-commerce company, an extensive customer service staff—operating from work-in-office and work-at-home environments—is required to support our client’s millions of customers. Even with a robust network of BPOs, meeting the client’s staffing requirements throughout the year—and ramping during the holiday shopping season—was a challenge. 

Starting in Q3 2022, the retailer made clear to its BPO constituents the high priority it placed on meeting 95% compliance with their staffing requirement, measured in 30-minute intervals each week. Meeting these staffing levels would enable their BPO network to consistently service their customers in a timely manner, providing the foundation for excellent customer satisfaction scores that were essential components of the retailer’s ethos. 

At the time that iQor became one of the client’s BPOs, only one of them had previously met the client’s staffing requirement. This set the stage for us to aim high in our relationship with this client to leverage personnel and technology to achieve their objectives. 

Solution 

The Summit 

In September of 2022, iQor operations leaders convened a summit to evaluate our overall performance to date, predict our results if we continued to operate with no change, and determine specific actions that would move the performance needle the most for our client. 

Our objectives were to become our client’s strategic outsourcing partner by helping them reach their goals, and as a result, become their #1 BPO based on performance. This summit would be the event of consequence for iQor to achieve these objectives. 

The client participated in the summit and was enthusiastic about one of their BPOs proactively taking action to improve the probability of meeting their 95% staffing requirement. In concert with feedback from the client, iQor drafted and implemented a plan to meet staffing compliance. Additionally, discussions with our Workforce Management leadership team laid the groundwork for a new staffing plan. iQor kept the client informed every step of the way. 

Using iQor’s customer- and employee-focused framework as a guidepost, iQorians reviewed the client’s CX goals and determined actions for each of the client’s key metrics to meet those goals by specific dates. 

Post-Summit 

Twice each week during peak season, the retailer conducted round-robin calls with their entire network of BPOs to monitor performance. Achieving target staffing goals was always a priority topic. 

iQor took a leadership position in the round-robin calls by: 

  • Explaining how we regularly meet with agents to understand what’s working and what can be improved. 
  • Presenting how we use intelligent performance management tools to engage employees, leading to effective coaching and employee satisfaction. 
  • Proactively responding to client questions openly and transparently, without waiting to be called upon. 
  • Sharing new ideas and coaching strategies that could potentially benefit all the other BPOs, demonstrating our commitment to the client’s overall success. 

Most important of all, we followed through on all the commitments we made in those calls.  

Recognizing that our shared success stems from strong partnerships, iQor and our client developed and nurtured 1:1 collaborative relationships at the director, associate director, and senior manager levels. These relationships are based on open communication, earned trust, and sustained performance of key metrics.  

For example, when the iQor team noticed that our client was receiving more chat requests for customer service than they could handle, we informed them that we had 100 customer service agents already providing voice support who had been trained in chat as well. We recommended transferring them to chat to handle this unmet demand. It turned out to be the perfect solution. 

The retailer knows they have a strategic outsourcing partner they can count on with proactive CX solutions consistently offered in the best interest of their business. 

Results 

iQor’s proactive approach, flexibility, creative problem-solving skills, and outstanding performance put our client’s inspiring customer experience goals within reach and set new standards for the retailer. Additionally, iQor demonstrated that our custom CX solutions capabilities go far beyond omnichannel customer voice support and chat to meet the unique needs of our client. Heart

In each week’s round-robin calls, iQor’s workforce management solution received positive feedback from the retailer.  

The client recognized our accomplishments, commitment to their success, and entrepreneurial passion. Consequently, the client awarded iQor additional lines of business, requiring the deployment of additional customer service staff. 

100% Staffing Compliance During Ramps 

iQor achieved nearly 100% staffing compliance for in-office and work-at-home environments during the peak holiday season, outpacing the other BPOs in their network.

Increased Headcount 

  • 145% increase in nonpeak headcount from 2021 to 2023. 
  • 37% increase in peak headcount from 2021 to 2023. 

KPI Leader 

iQor became the leader in the client’s BPO network in achieving significant KPIs, including: 

  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT) voice and chat. 
  • Repeat contact rate (RCR) voice and chat. 

New Lines of Business 

Our client has entrusted iQor with two new lines of business: 

  1. Back office support for handling refund payment requests, which had a multi-thousand account backlog that iQor completely resolved. 
  2. Application assistance for delivery driver position candidates.

How Chatbots Can Transform the Customer Experience

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Using Chatbots to Improve Customer Support for the Modern Consumer

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into customer support delivery in many shapes and forms. Conversational AI can handle a variety of menial tasks, from visual search to automated messages in the modern customer experience. 

One of these AI-powered technologies in the customer service space is chatbots. The objective of chatbots is to help ease customer service pressures by offloading mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. 

With intelligent automation, chatbots are able to complete these routine tasks effectively by using algorithms driven by machine learning. This article discusses the scope of a customer service chatbot and how it can use AI to improve customer satisfaction as part of a digital transformation strategy. 

Benefits of Chatbots for Customer Support Delivery

Chatbots are particularly beneficial in customer service because they can handle high volumes of standard technical queries quickly and efficiently. They create more satisfied customers with consistent outcomes and reduced handle time. Likewise, chatbots help reduce or eliminate mundane tasks so customer service agents can focus on addressing more complex customer service needs and deliver more rewarding customer experiences. 

Through chatbot conversation automation, information can easily be collated into valuable reports for better analysis and decision-making. Ultimately, chatbots can help eliminate human error, reduce unnecessary spend, and increase productivity.

Why Are Chatbots Necessary for Customer Service?

BPOs like iQor that deliver customized solutions can deploy automation where it matters most for creating happy customers. Solutions that include chatbots can help do the following: 

  • Offer 24/7 customer service. If customers don’t get an instant response to their questions, they may take their business elsewhere. Chatbots allow customers to access support whenever they want, irrespective of their time zone or geographical location. 
  • Speed up problem resolution. Chatbots offer an instant personalized experience, responding to customers faster than human agents can. They can access databases and existing knowledge bases and provide quick answers to all sorts of questions. 
  • Provide multi-language support. Providing live customer support in different languages can increase costs. Chatbots can offer multi-language support and resolve customer queries in the customer’s language of choice, serving a broader customer base while reducing spend. 
  • Remain accurate and consistent. A sudden influx in customer support requests has the potential to increase average handle time (AHT) and leave room for human error. On the other hand, an AI-powered customer service chatbot ensures prompt responses with a high level of accuracy and consistency. 
  • Gather data. Human agents may find it challenging to recall all details shared in a conversation and satisfy the customers’ expectations. Chatbots, however, collect analytics on the fly and remember them forever. This helps them provide accurate data to customers. Chatbots remember what customers like and dislike and act accordingly when they get relevant requests. 
  • Offer better self-service. Chatbots can help direct customers to self-service options, such as web pages and documents, that customers can use to solve their problems themselves. Along with reducing the number of support tickets, this also maintains high customer satisfaction. 
  • Reduce channel sprawl. Customers often switch between different channels to get the information they want. For example, a connected omnichannel experience enables customers to start with a live chat option and, after some time, drop it for email support if they don’t get satisfactory answers. With chatbots, customers can use the same channel for the majority of their support needs. 
  • Lower interactive voice response (IVR) frustrations. The IVR devices used in customer service can sometimes be challenging for certain customers, especially if they don’t get a personalized response. BPO solutions that include chatbots can replace this technology and send customers to the appropriate response team without the need for a human agent. 

How Chatbots Can Empower a Customer Support Team

Research shows that 67% of global consumers have interacted with a chatbot in the past year. This means that more and more companies are using customer support chatbots to improve their customer service in remote work and in-office operations. 

Chatbots can provide 24/7/365 support and don’t need sick days or vacations. In this way, customers can reach support agents anytime and anywhere through messaging apps and mobile devices. 

According to Drift’s 2020 State of Conversational Marketing report, chatbot use has grown by 92% since 2019. The global chatbot market is expected to reach a value of $10.5 billion by 2026. 

It’s easy to see that conversational marketing and AI-based customer support optimize your customer experience and foster stronger and more satisfying interactions with your brand. 

How Do Chatbots Assist the Customer Support Team?

BPOs like iQor can develop custom CX solutions that include an AI chatbot to empower customer service teams resulting in less time spent on repetitive tasks. For example, a chatbot can help teams sort through and respond to customer requests. 

Here are some other ways in which an AI chatbot empowers customer support representatives to create meaningful experiences. 

  • Improving accuracy. Chatbots can send tickets to the right person in seconds while filtering out duplicates and irrelevant messages. They can also flag conversations that need more attention from human agents. This means that live agents can answer tickets more accurately, resulting in better service for customers. 
  • Speeding up customer service. AI chatbots can help customer service teams process many more requests simultaneously by automatically routing tickets to the right person and helping agents prioritize conversation threads based on their contents. This reduces wait times for customers, which can help boost their satisfaction and brand loyalty. 
  • Upselling and cross-selling. Even though chatbots can’t replace human beings, they can upsell and cross-sell customers by answering questions and suggesting related products or services. Chatbots can help sell everything from merchandise to travel packages to keep customer service agents focused on more complicated requests, such as refunding a purchase or offering technical support.
  • Self-service solutions. Although some customers prefer talking to customer support representatives, 70% of them would rather use a self-service document or site. Chatbots can help steer customers to self-service resources. This is a win-win with customers receiving support in their preferred channel and customer support agents spending their time working on more complex service requests. 

Additionally, chatbots can understand different languages because they run on natural language processing (NLP).  NLP is a group of technologies that enables computers to understand the tone and context of human language and interact naturally, making it easier (and faster) for humans to interact with them. 

Moreover, according to Intercom, 29% of businesses report having lost customers due to a lack of multilingual support. Being able to provide support in as many as 20 languages is a huge selling point for chatbots without the need to hire multilingual agents. Although there may still be a need for multilingual agents, multilingual chatbots can reduce the number of agents needed. This need is also influenced by the dominance of customers requiring multilingual support. For example, programs that support companies based in Europe may need to staff customer service agents in multiple languages.

How Much Time Does a Customer Service Chatbot Save?

A custom solution with a conversational bot like the ones offered at iQor can reduce the average handle time for customer service interactions. This key performance indicator (KPI) measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a support or service request. Improving AHT metrics by fulfilling customer needs with less time spent on hold, delays, or follow-up actions results in a better overall customer experience.

Suppose a CX program receives 30,000 calls per year. If the human agent spends an average of five minutes on each customer call, this equates to 2,500 hours on the phone every year. While some of these calls require human assistance, many contain questions that a bot can answer easily, reducing average handle time, which is a measurable saving. 

Indeed, a custom solution that includes a customer support chatbot can save agents hundreds of hours and enable them to focus on other more high-value tasks.

How Customers View Customer Support Chatbots

Research shows that customers are on board with digital transformation across their business. Customers actually like using chatbots due to how quickly they can get answers to their questions. 

Customer support chatbots are particularly useful for quick customer service and answering repetitive queries. 

According to Tidio, about 48.78% of female customers like chatbots and use them for communication when making online purchases. Meanwhile, 47.92% of men use chatbots if they can’t find answers to simple questions.

What Reasons Do Customers Give for Using Customer Service Chatbots?

Customers like using chatbots for the following reasons: 

  • Instant response. Customers can reach a customer service agent immediately and 24/7. 
  • Availability of information. Chatbots can provide detailed information right away. For instance, if a customer wants to know about a new product, they can get the information immediately instead of waiting for the agent’s response. 
  • Intuitive interface. Customers are very familiar with using messaging apps on mobile devices. They’re used to typing in questions and receiving immediate responses. 
  • Fast checkout processes. Customers appreciate that chatbots can conduct transactions faster than agents. 

Considering customers’ interest in using chatbots, businesses can use them to address many customer engagement opportunities. 

Best Practices for Deploying Customer Service Chatbots

When developing a chatbot as part of a digital transformation journey, iQor follows multiple best practices in forming its custom solution. 

Define Objectives

Determine the objectives for a chatbot to provide an interface for customers to make customer service requests. 

Will the chatbot resolve customer issues faster or gather more information about the problem? Will it be used for lead generation? Will it help customers find products? BPOs like iQor will make sure there’s a clear role for the chatbot from the beginning. 

Give It a Personality

Even when talking to a chatbot, people want some degree of human touch. The chatbot is an extension of the client’s brand and should have a personality so customers don’t feel like they’re talking to a machine. Meaningful chatbot experiences reinforce the brand and show empathy toward customers. 

Chatbot stats show that customers prefer interacting with bots with a persona and personality.  This enables chatbots to have more humanlike conversations, ultimately providing better customer care. 

Chatbot interactions should be evaluated with the same level of importance as interactions with human agents.

Have an Option for Directing to a Human Agent

Chatbots should be part of a seamless omnichannel experience with an option to switch to a human agent at any time if customers need more assistance. This enables customers to benefit from a consistent customer experience through the channel of their choice, while also ensuring they conveniently receive help from a human agent when needed.

Use Fallbacks

In some cases, a chatbot won’t be able to come up with a response to the customer query because it’s not programmed for that. Maybe the customer typed in a query that doesn’t match the chatbot’s purpose. 

For instance, when Siri or Alexa don’t understand what you’re saying, they respond with something to the effect of, “I’m not sure I understand.” All chatbots should have a fallback option for such cases. 

A fallback option such as asking the customer to clarify their query helps counter this issue to meet the customers’ needs. The iQor advantage takes this a step further to ensure customer needs are met by enabling live agents to jump in when the chatbot is unable to sufficiently address the issue. This creates an excellent customer experience without frustration.

Use Analytics to Improve the Chatbot

Solutions that include chatbots will also track the chatbot’s performance through analytics and use this data to make improvements. 

Analytics is a way of measuring the progress and performance of the chatbot through key metrics such as chat volume, number of conversations, and average message length. 

Just like any other form of software, chatbots need regular maintenance and updates. BPO’s like iQor will use data to make ongoing adjustments to ensure chatbots meet the individual needs of clients and their customers.

How Does Measuring Chatbot Performance Improve the Customer Experience?

Ongoing measurements of a chatbot’s performance are essential for ensuring the chatbot provides the best possible experience for customers. 

For example, if a customer support chatbot has an average response time of seven minutes, analytics can identify when there are peaks in conversation. The project team can plan accordingly to ensure sufficient resources are in place to reduce wait times and provide prompt service that improves customer loyalty. 

Final Words

All in all, a solution that includes a customer support chatbot can help automate mundane aspects of the customer journey while still providing an amazing digital customer service experience and freeing up agents’ time to work on creating more meaningful experiences. They also provide a collection of data on customer interactions to help inform and improve customer service.

Experience the iQor Difference

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
  • A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

How Self-Service Support Can Improve Customer Interactions and Build Brand Loyalty

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Self-Service Support Solutions for Superior Customer Service

In today’s digital world, a key component of customer engagement hinges on fast, accurate, and readily available solutions for customers. According to Salesforce Research, 63% of consumers expect companies to know their unique expectations and needs. Our digital age necessitates instant access to information, meaning customers increasingly want digital-first conveniences for more personalized and empathetic experiences immediately without wait times or obstacles in their way. These expectations from today’s consumers require companies to innovate and provide quick, accurate responses across channels to sustain a competitive edge, maintain customer satisfaction, and improve brand loyalty. This need for instant 24/7/365 support has the potential to overwhelm employees and lead to decreased employee engagement but can also serve as an opportunity for companies to adapt and better meet the needs of their customers and staff. Self-service support solutions offer convenience—giving consumers access to rewarding customer experiences while on the go and freeing up agents to address more complex inquiries.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor creates self-service support capabilities on behalf of our clients. In this post, we share our expertise and best practices for incorporating customer self-service options as one element of a comprehensive digital customer experience journey companies can employ as they evolve to meet and exceed customer expectations of today and into the future.

BPOs like iQor employ experts to design self-service solutions that preserve your most precious relationships with customers. Self-service capabilities facilitate online support without ongoing assistance from customer service agents to enable consumers to connect with your brand on their terms. Examples of these self-service options include digital frequently asked questions (FAQs), knowledge bases, online discussion forums, how-to tutorials, and flexible automation features such as intelligent IVRs, chatbots, and access to seamless omnichannel support so customers can escalate their issue with ease if more support is needed. Self-service features enable your customers to work on their own behalf to obtain quick and accurate answers while also allowing frontline employees to focus more time on high-value customer support engagement.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of various types of self-service customer support options iQor can personalize for your brand to create the best customer experiences your industry has to offer.

What Is Self-Service Customer Support?

Self-service customer support represents any activity in which the customer proactively acts on their own behalf without the assistance of a customer service representative. It has become a baseline customer service solution expected by most customers as their first course of action when seeking solutions to questions or concerns. It empowers customers to find answers to their questions through tutorials, FAQs, videos, knowledge bases, conversational AI and other support platforms without the need for a live support agent. These digital transformation self-service solutions typically combine automation of basic tasks like informing a customer of the status of an order, with more advanced answers that customers can access through knowledge bases, forums, videos, and the like. As part of an integrated solution to customer support, self-service options must be optimized for easy access both online and through mobile devices. Businesses don’t have to go it alone. BPOs like iQor provide integrated solutions based on experience and data to offer the most effective and comprehensive self-service approach for your brand.

The Benefits of Self-Service Customer Support

Customer self-service offers a wide range of benefits for customers, companies, and employees alike. They can be scaled and integrated into your omnichannel experience to ensure self-service options align with customers’ needs while delivering seamless interactions across channels to deliver efficient solutions so customers stay connected and engaged.

Optimized customer experience

According to Microsoft, a whopping 90% of Americans consider customer service an important factor when choosing a brand. Customers often prefer feeling empowered to answer their own questions on demand without contacting support. Self-service customer support puts them in control from anywhere, any time of day or night and doesn’t require wait times to speak to an agent.

Increased sales

Self-service solutions may also boost your sales since customers can resolve their own issues 24/7/365, making them less likely to abandon a transaction if they can quickly answer their own question. This positive experience with your brand can improve response rates to your sales offers and may prompt a positive review or recommendation. Data-driven self-service engagement builds brand loyalty through improved customer experiences that create more satisfied customers through consistent outcomes and reduced handle time, increasing Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

On the other hand, when customers only have the option to contact live agents for most inquiries, they can encounter high call wait times, particularly at peak times. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction and increase a company’s call abandonment rate.

Lower operating costs

Self-service options not only provide what customers want, but they enable you to do so for large numbers of customers at a fraction of the cost for live support. Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) can offer additional solutions when needed while live representatives enjoy more time to focus on assisting customers with complex issues, reducing unnecessary spend. These channel optimization strategies make the customer journey a win-win for your bottom line.

Improved employee morale and productivity

Self-service solutions can also help make your customer service representatives happier and more productive. Research has shown that live agents find as much as 40% of support tickets to be repetitive and mind-numbing. Implementing self-service support options and automated processes helps reduce the repetitive tasks and mundane questions human agents encounter and gives them more time to handle complex situations that require human expertise and compassion. Incorporate self-service options to deliver amazing customer experiences that make frontline employees and customers smile.

Competitive advantage

Finally, self-service solutions can help your brand remain competitive. Statista finds that 88% of consumers in the U.S. and around the world expect an organization to offer online self-service support. 

Additionally, Gartner predicts that automated personal technologies will be the default user experience delivery method by 2030. By then, Generation Z—those born between 1995 and 2009—will make up the largest portion of the customer base. More than previous generations, Generation Z digital natives have embraced the flexibility technology offers, choosing what to consume, when, and through what platform. By knowing their customer base and gathering data across channels to use automation where it matters most, brands can design better experiences to promote meaningful customer interactions.

Self-Service Platforms That Work

As one of the world’s largest business process outsourcing companies, iQor specializes in helping businesses assess data-based metrics to better understand customer preferences and needs and develop the most effective self-service options for their brand. The best self-service support strategies often include the following offerings, while also providing integrated resources backed by human support for customers to access with ease if needed. Self-service options that reduce effort and promote positive and accurate results with fast response times make for happy, satisfied customers.

1. Automated chat and messaging support

Intelligent automation customer experience solutions are an essential component of comprehensive self-service support offerings. In fact, 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions. Moreover, utilizing live agents to respond to each individual customer’s digital messages is costly, inefficient, and unrealistic.

To boost your return on investment (ROI), iQor has extensive experience designing, implementing, and managing intelligent automation customer experience solutions that provide cost-effective, efficient means of helping customers self-serve to resolve their own issues. Robotic process automation (RPA) software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to handle high-volume, repetitive, or slow time-consuming tasks reduces human error and enables customer-facing employees to focus on building more rewarding customer experiences. These cost-effective virtual agents that form an integral part of your customer retention strategy include simple and smart chatbots. Although both are able to complete similar tasks, smart IVA chatbots do so with finesse and personalization. Their differences become clearer when we compare how they complete tasks.

  • Simple chatbots handle basic, routine queries. They are available through live messaging tools and can be trained to follow a script to give fast answers to FAQs. Chatbots can simulate a conversational experience to a certain extent but are ultimately constrained by having to work from a limited script—lacking the ability to make contextual adaptations and learn over time.

Examples of support a simple chatbot can provide:

    • Generic product recommendations and availability.
    • Status of returns and exchanges based on inputs from the customer.
    • How can I reset my password? Provide basic instructions.
  • Smart chatbots or Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are more advanced AI-powered chat assistants that communicate with customers through their preferred communication channels via text or text-to-speech. Equipped with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, IVAs are able to understand and retain context to have more productive conversations. By combining cognitive computing and analytics, they give customers personalized responses through friendly and humanlike dialogues that align with your brand. Although they can’t resolve complex tasks, they can gather information to refer to later, help human agents interface with customers, and answer simple questions.

Examples of topics an IVA chatbot can assist with:

    • Personalized product recommendations and availability.
    • When will my order arrive? What is the tracking number for this order?
    • Reset passwords—can complete the task for the customer.

Utilizing conversational AI in these ways enables your company to proactively interact with customers through their preferred channels and receive immediate responses at their convenience to drive operational efficiency at scale.

2. Email support

Asking frontline employees to reply to every email can be a taxing and error-prone process. Many emails can easily get lost, particularly after weekends, holidays, and peak seasons. 

Integrating automated help desks and ticketing solutions into your workflow can help human agents gather, organize, and track support tickets through a dashboard. Adding rule-based routing to the inquiries can automatically generate a new ticket when a customer’s self-service attempts go unfilled, seamlessly escalating the request to prompt human engagement. The ticket will contain background information with the customer’s name, email address, and the history of their self-service attempt to ensure an integrated and satisfying experience when the customer speaks to a live agent.

3. Online knowledge base

Besides directly interacting with your site through a chatbot or IVA or sending an email, customers often use your website to find answers to their questions. A strong self-service strategy incorporates a well-organized and user-friendly knowledge base to help customers educate themselves on how to use your website, app, or product.

Your knowledge base can include:

  • How-to guides.
  • FAQs.
  • Video tutorials.
  • Pre-recorded classes and webinars.
  • Free product trainings.
  • Step-by-step instructions.
  • Glossaries.
  • Troubleshooting instructions.

The knowledge base should be clearly organized and accessible. It should include:

  • Categories such as “Account Settings” and “How to Use Our App” to facilitate easy navigation to desired content.
  • A search bar to help customers locate answers instantly, even when they don’t know the overarching category.
  • Different media such as text, video, audio, and annotated images to accommodate customers’ different learning styles.
  • Good SEO to make content easily accessible through search engine queries while also boosting your site’s ranking and attracting new customers.

4. Social media support

Although social media moderation is managed by human agents, it enables customers to access your brand’s support on their terms. It equips you to resolve customer concerns quickly and engage with your followers more effectively than would be possible otherwise. With social media moderation like iQor’s, you can maintain accurate information on your social channels for customers to self-serve for essentials like hours of operation, contact information, menus, service descriptions, pictures, and so much more. It facilitates a seamless, branded customer experience through social media channels at scale.

5. Interactive and community-based discussion forums

Another self-service option is an online community or public discussion forum where customers can interact and help each other. Empowering customers who are experts on your products to answer questions in a digital community is a powerful self-service model that builds brand loyalty. These online communities can be hosted on your website or through third-party platforms.

It’s important to monitor and reinforce the discussion forum with a support team or moderators to help guide customers who may not find answers to their questions or who need assistance navigating the community. Like the other self-service solutions on this list, interactive communities and forums should offer a clear option to contact live agents when the self-service tool does not offer solutions to a customer’s particular need.

Requirements for Self-Service Customer Support

An effective self-service customer support strategy gives customers control. It offers fast access to the information they need through intuitive and accessible platforms with clear paths to a live representative or omnichannel support if needed. iQor can help you develop a strategic self-service customer support solution based on your brand, budget, and customer needs.

When developing a personalized self-service approach for your brand we assess a variety of metrics to partner with you to create a solution that brings smiles to you and your customers. If you are going to strengthen your customer support through self-service options, these are some questions to consider.

1. What resources are necessary to implement self-service customer support?

Adding self-service customer support to your business model may necessitate the addition of new resources, some of which include:

  • Utilizing customer support chatbots and IVAs.
  • Creating a knowledge base and online community of resources.
  • Producing videos and blog posts for your knowledge base.
  • Employing subject matter experts to moderate online communities and help customers help themselves.

After listing the resources needed to implement self-service, consider the impact on your budget. You may find that outsourcing self-service customer support to iQor makes the customer journey a win-win for your bottom line.

2. How many of your consumers currently use customer support channels?

If you have the budget and your customers already use multiple self-service support channels (e.g., email, online chat, existing knowledge base articles, etc.), you are ready to consider implementing self-service options. Seize the opportunity to stand out from your competitors. Provide memorable and optimized customer experiences through unique self-service channels personalized for your brand.

3. How will self-service support impact live customer service representatives?

The primary goal of self-service support is to meet the demands of the modern customer who expects to have access to support through digital methods 24/7/365. iQor can help you meet these expectations while realizing the benefits of providing the quality experiences customers seek and reducing your costs for customer care. It’s our business to set up and manage integrated customer support experiences so you don’t have to create new processes, utilize new resources or train frontline staff.

Experience the iQor Difference

This post provides insights into self-service customer support and its role in providing a great customer experience. Many customers’ first course of action is to turn to a digital tool to search for their own solution before reaching out to a live agent. Brands must meet customers on their digital platforms of choice with the information they seek. With the expanding role of digital in the customer experience regardless of age, this model of support is going to prove invaluable in the years to come.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences through these and other support options. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers. 

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us directly to learn more about how we can help you create more smiles.

How Omnichannel Support Strengthens Customer Relationships

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Customer support has long been viewed as a cost to the business. This is no longer the case, however, and a customer-centric culture with omnichannel support is fast becoming a proven model that is being viewed as an asset rather than a cost center. iQor’s omnichannel support services use proven best practices to maximize results which we’re sharing with you in this post.

Customer support has changed a lot in recent years and merely having multiple customer service channels isn’t good enough for many customers. Today’s consumers no longer have just one or a couple of ways they want to use to reach your business. Social media, live chat, intelligent bots, mobile apps, email, and phone are just a few of the whole range of different platforms with which you can converse with customers.

What Is Omnichannel Customer Support?

An omnichannel solution aims to provide seamlessly connected customer interactions across various touchpoints. Omnichannel customer experience is a model whereby a business markets its products, sells them and provides customer support across multiple channels consolidated into a single, larger system. 

Omnichannel customer support differs from multiple channel support through integration so that all communications are aggregated. A customer can start their conversation on one channel, continue it on another channel and resolve it on yet another channel. This approach meets your modern customers’ expectations.

omnichannel experiences for customer support

Why Is an Omnichannel Experience Ideal for Customer Support? 

Omnichannel customer service is the adaptation of an omnichannel strategy to your company’s communication channels to provide a fluid customer experience. Social media, email, instant messaging, phone calls, and other channels are unified under one system. This enables customers to interchange channels without a drop in quality of service. 

Customer service agents have a sweeping view of all a customer’s interactions and can therefore respond to queries appropriately regardless of the channel the customer used.

For instance, a user may contact customer support via chat on a website. They can get a response via the same chat or talk to an agent without repeating themselves since the agent has the relevant context they need. Additional information can also be sent later through email or messaging; all made possible through omnichannel customer support. 

Does Your Business Need an Omnichannel Customer Support Strategy?

The importance of omnichannel support is easy to recognize from the customer’s perspective. When does your business require an omnichannel support strategy? A few scenarios that might necessitate this approach include:

  • To provide a better user experience — for example, when chatting on your app is lower cost and a better experience for your customer compared to other channels
  • To move conversations from public platforms such as social media to more private ones like email or SMS
  • To authenticate customers and share sensitive data

Omnichannel customer service offers you the chance to serve your clients conveniently and efficiently. This is just a glimpse of what omnichannel support brings to your customer service offering and why it is essential. 

Why Is Omnichannel Customer Support Important?

With omnichannel support, the customer can conveniently access services across various channels. This means that the customer experience and quality of service are consistent across platforms. 

Quick and Convenient Access to Data

An omnichannel customer support approach also means that agents can access customer data from a central system. The impact of having a central system is that they can quickly access the information they need without the need to get the context again from the customer. Agents can also share notes and questions they’ve received from the customer through the platform to offer better service. 

Improved Customer Experience

An omnichannel support solution also creates stronger relationships with your customers. The improved customer experience leads to enhanced engagement and customer retention, more predictable revenue, and higher brand loyalty compared to single-channel and multi-channel systems. When compared to single-channel businesses, ClickZ indicated in a report that customers with an omnichannel experience:

  • Show a 250% greater purchase frequency and customer engagement rate
  • Purchase 13% more
  • Were 90% more likely to interact with a brand with three or more interaction channels

Omnichannel customer support also means the experience can be customized across channels. This improves customer satisfaction, and since customers want effective customer service and a good experience, they will stick with companies that offer exactly that. 

Call Deflection Usage

Omnichannel customer support also provides a way for businesses to use call deflection to their advantage. With call deflection, a customer call can be diverted to another medium mid-call if it will benefit the customer by using a different channel. This unique aspect of omnichannel support means that customers can be presented with better options to address their concerns quickly. For example, an agent speaking with a customer can offer a link to download instructions that answer the customer’s question, reducing the call handle time significantly while satisfying the customer’s need.

Call deflection can be a gateway to better customer service, for example, when call volumes are high or the request is outside of working hours. Rather than wait until the next agent is available, customers can utilize digital channels to sort their issues before live support becomes available.

Best Practices to Consider

Omnichannel customer support can be a big improvement over a siloed customer care model, both for the customer and the support agent. Here are some best practices in providing it.

Understand the Customer Journey

Ultimately, omnichannel customer support seeks to make the customer journey as smooth as possible. An omnichannel customer journey is made up of the interactions between the customer and your business throughout the customer lifecycle. A customer’s journey is a treasure trove of data that you can use to improve the customer experience. 

Companies can position themselves to provide a better experience through mapping a customer’s journey with their brand. Knowing customer touchpoints and their intentions at each point of their journey allows you to refine your omnichannel experience and work towards providing customer service excellence.  

Respond to Customer Needs Quickly

Modern consumers expect fast responses to their inquiries regardless of the platform they have used. Without proper systems to respond to your customers, your customer service may give your company a bad reputation. 

A customer relationship management (CRM) system plays a vital role in your omnichannel customer service offering. A CRM unifies your customer interactions with all departments of your company while allowing agents to get a real-time view of all customer interactions. The customer support agents can therefore respond immediately to customer needs without compromising on speed.

A CRM also grants access to key metrics and other insights about your company’s customer support across various channels so that you can identify communication bottlenecks and work to resolve them. 

Study Customer Behavior Across Channels

Unlike in a multichannel system where communication channels are often analyzed separately, you need to observe customer behavior across the various platforms in your omnichannel strategy. How do you know which channels are effective in your omnichannel strategy? There are several ways to gain these insights, including:

  • Conducting surveys and collecting customer feedback
  • Studying the touchpoints to identify customer preferences and ease of access for each
  • Analysis of key customer support metrics such as customer satisfaction, average response time, and customer effort score 

Once you build a process to study this information, you’ll be able to identify the weaknesses in your current customer care strategy, improve your omnichannel communication, and ensure that the standard of service is the same across platforms. 

Overcoming Challenges

Omnichannel communication has evolved a lot recently. Systems have grown from phone and email-based systems to include technology like instant messaging, chatbots and mobile app support. Customer communication has also been improved through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to offer a better support experience. 

Omnichannel support has not been without its challenges, however. Some of these include the following.

Data Silos

Departmental silos are a significant challenge for both customer experience and collecting data. These silos may arise from different technology or processes across platforms, which means that the data is not standardized.

Therefore, the customer experience is not consistent across the omnichannel communication platforms. Companies can alleviate this problem by committing to collaboration across departments. 

Creating a Consistent Experience Across Platforms

Omnichannel customer support can be a challenge because there are many service delivery methods involved, and customer expectations also vary. Businesses may sometimes also offer different quality levels of service across various channels, which is not the standard that customers have come to expect.

Unifying Data

Since omnichannel support makes use of various brand channels, customer data is often spread out across different platforms. The information is often located in different databases, making it difficult to unify the data. Consequently, it is more difficult to analyze the data and get insights from it. A unified CRM resolves this problem. When agents can access customer data in one unified database it makes it easier to service customers, in turn giving agents more job satisfaction.

Ready To Implement Omnichannel Support in Your Business?

Despite the many challenges of maintaining successful omnichannel customer support, it has proven to be a valuable approach to providing a great customer experience. Many brands have overcome these challenges.

Ecommerce brands now not only use omnichannel marketing but many also have an omnichannel customer support system for their users. Customers have a variety of support methods to choose from whenever they need help, and these platforms are usually well-integrated for their convenience. 

Omnichannel support is not just for businesses on the internet — brick-and-mortar retailers are also using omnichannel strategies. Since shoppers use multiple channels to compare and purchase products as well as get customer service, retailers have had to adapt. They typically provide an omnichannel experience across all touchpoints. For some, customer service agents have tablets with a unified CRM to give personalized help while in the store and better serve repeat customers.

The financial industry is also an example of an industry that has successfully deployed omnichannel customer support. Customers can now get support via live chat, email, website mobile apps and social media, as well as by phone. 

Omnichannel customer support is here to stay. A multichannel approach isn’t enough anymore, as customers expect a seamless quality of service across platforms. Are you looking for help with omnichannel customer support? Let us help you provide your customers with intelligent omnichannel customer support systems over voice, email, chat, social and other channels to optimize their experience with your brand. 

Learn more about iQor’s omnichannel support.

Optimizing Revenue Recovery

Posted on by Blake Graves

Customer

Premier Credit Card Issuer

Industry

Financial Services

Services Provided

Analytics-Driven Retention and Omnichannel CX Solutions

The client’s inbound right party contacts increased by 180%

The Challenge

As the fastest-growing credit card issuer in the U.S., our client faces the delicate challenge of reaching out to thousands of customers a day to recover revenue and retain business. But as more and more U.S. households ditched landline phones, it became challenging for the issuer to contact them at the right time on the right number. This caused the issuer to run into a high number of invalid contacts and increased risk with automated outbound dialing.

The Solution

iQor called in our data analytics team to examine the issuer’s accounts and offset the difficulties of outbound dialing with enhanced compliance and inbound contacts. For example, the issuer was executing a high volume of calls on Tuesdays at 4:00 PM, but this was when its right party contact rate was at its lowest. Not only that, our team discovered that after four outbound attempts, the issuer’s return rate significantly dropped. We also found that agents weren’t leaving voicemail messages so customers had no way of being informed of their account status or how to return the call.

iQor worked with the issuer to adjust the dialing campaign to call at the best performing times, which improved contact rates. We also applied a voicemail message at the end of the fourth outbound attempt, which put a voice to that pesky ringtone and gave customers a chance to prepare for the request. When the customer was ready to talk, we routed them to our higher performing agents to ensure they received the best service possible and the best-fitting option for repayment

Goals Met

  • Limited outbound attempts to increase compliance
  • Targeted use of high-performing agents for better customer experience
  • Increased inbound contacts to recover more revenue

The Results

Our dialer optimization strategy saved the issuer thousands from wasted calls. By changing the number of dials per day and launching the voicemail scripting, the issuer’s inbound RPCs increased by 180%, all while remaining within regulatory compliance. And when we began routing inbound calls to agents with a history of high performance and conversion rates, the issuer’s roll rate improved by 2%, meaning more revenue was collected monthly.

15% reduction in dialer spend

180% increase in inbound right party contacts

2% improved roll rate

More About Our Amazing Data Analysts

Outbound calling without reaching RPCs comes at a high cost and produces a large amount of waste in resources, time, and energy. Our client needed a strategy that could target low-performing segments but didn’t know how to find the root cause.

Our data analysis discovered low-performance attributes by using machine learning to assign dialer groups into three different clusters. This showed how successful or not successful agents were at reaching their segments. We used common customer and account qualities across the program including, Risk Level, Credit Limit, Balance, Payment, Over Credit Limit Amount, Number of Cycles Delinquent, Last Amount Paid, and Collectable Balance. The cluster analysis exposed similar customer behaviors with 99.9% accuracy in which our data analysts studied and used to form the customized dialing solutions.

We applied our new strategy to the accounts that fell within the 60 Days Past Due and Multiple Account Holders segments, which had a 0.6% successful right party contact rate. The dialer treatment improved these low-performing accounts by limiting outbound attempts, driving inbound volume with personalized voicemail messages, and routing calls to high-performing agents.