Whatever your sector, if you deal with any amount of customers then it becomes more of a necessity than a choice to deliver the best customer service experience possible. While a satisfactory customer experience should be aimed for inside an establishment, your business might extend beyond this and may not even be physical at all.
In many cases and as your company grows from a startup into a small business, the time comes where you will need to implement some kind of customer service initiative or a mixture of some that are available in order to provide the easiest process possible for any consumer.
Some of the best and most used customer interaction experiences include:
- Live Chat
- Ticketing
- Call Center
Live Chat is a relatively new feature that has become popular with larger companies while ticketing is good for handling a large volume of queries and utilizing a call center to handle customer service over the phone is still a widely used method.
Live Chat – Are You Human?
Talking to someone in a chat window is one of the simplest ways to deal with an issue that might arise both from a customer and a company perspective. The quick and synchronous nature of Live Chat means that details of an issue can be conveyed in a timely fashion where urgency might be important. Some Live Chat programs also incorporate the use of AI Bots at the start of interaction before it is passed on to a relevant human associate.
Live Chat can benefit small businesses especially as the customers that engage in live chat systems are less likely to abandon shopping carts and having questions answered by a human during a purchase is likely to increase conversions. Systems like click4assistance provide such features as analytics, real-time monitoring, and video chats as well as chat functionality through reactive and proactive communication channels.
Ticketing – Take a Number
An older yet very effective form of customer communication, ticketing systems are an excellent method of handling a large volume of queries. By allocating reference numbers, urgency indicators and categories to a particular query, ticketing makes it very easy to understand the severity of any issues and identify any ongoing or urgent problems that require more attention.
Similar to a standard form, a ticketing system makes it very easy for customers to raise or enquire about an issue and has become the communication form of choice for companies that deal with a large volume of queries on a daily basis such as video games developers. In situations such as limited staffing for small businesses then this is an excellent option over standard email queries.
Call Center – Hold Please
Utilized as a customer service tool since the very beginning of its invention, the telephone has been a standard form of communication between a company and its customers for well over 100 years. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that the call center was created to handle a mass volume of customer queries, in the UK, with the first successful call center being opened in 1973 by the Rockwell Corporation for Continental Airlines.Since then, call centers have boomed and a recent survey found that phone communication is still preferred by 61% of people over newer technologies. While call centers can be used for handling queries, their use as a lead generating and marketing tool for business promotion has become more prolific over the past 20 years and you don’t need to own your own team but can rather hire a call center company for a relatively small monthly fee and the amount directly related to how small or large your business is, with most call center services even offering e-receptionists; an excellent alternative over an expensive full time employee when starting a small business.
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