5 Customer Service Trends Your Team Should Adopt

- Hey, this is Tom with Nextiva.
In this video, we'll talk
about a few proven strategies
to better your customer service and drive customer loyalty.
No matter the size
of your organization, reaching out to new customers
and keeping in touch with your current customers
should be two of the main focuses of your team.
There's a lot of ways you can stay
on top of customer engagement,
so we're just gonna focus on a few tactics
that have been proven to work for any size business.
One of the first trends companies are adopting today is
an omni-channel approach to tracking customer information.
But what does that mean?
Basically, whenever a customer contacts you
in a store, over the phone, or online,
your entire team has access to the same information.
This approach provides a first-class experience
to all of your customers
no matter how they interact with your business
and puts the customer at the center of every interaction.
An example of an omni-channel communications platform
is Nextiva, which manages every customer interaction
in one place.
If this sounds like how you'd like to operate your business,
check out nextiva.com,
and we'd love to show you around.
Having live customer support ready to answer
customer inquiries is a staple of every business.
Taking this even further is empowering your agents
with in-depth knowledge of your business
and services that they can offer.
But how do you do that?
This is where having a CRM can come in handy,
as it gives all of your agents the information
they need to know and understand your customers.
A CRM can be even more valuable if you're able to
integrate your cloud phone system right into it,
so calls and customers can be tracked automatically
In a world of automation,
hearing a friendly real person is always refreshing.
So equipping your team with a cloud phone service
and CRM can bring them closer to customers,
especially while working remotely.
Building off of live support,
adding a chat bot to your website is a quick way
for your customers to reach out
to someone within your company for questions.
They can also hear back instantly
with predetermined answers
or direct the customers to an agent that can better
answer their more in-depth questions.
With this, customers no longer have to send out an email
and wait to hear back.
Tools like SnapEngage, Pure Chat, and Olark are all good
options to consider when looking for website chat.
However, make sure you find a chat solution
that works best for your business.
We also think it's important
that your live chat software integrates with your CRM
to better support your customer service efforts
no matter how the customer contacts you.
Social media support is growing more popular every day.
It's important to note that every customer
interaction is an opportunity to impress.
Make sure that you're giving your all.
You've undoubtedly gotten business advice stating
that you need to have your company on every platform,
but it's important to recognize where your customers
are likely to contact you and focus your energy there.
If you're a small business, keep it simple.
Using Facebook Business Manager, TweetDeck by Twitter,
and pay attention to the comments
left by your online audience.
Engagement certainly happens when customers contact support
and open a ticket,
but what about other interactions, such as social media?
You need to be able to jump on those too.
When a customer tags your company on Instagram,
replying to them can create an unexpected
yet welcomed customer experience.
People will come by your website
and open a ticket with questions,
but with the growing popularity of social media,
many people turn toward your page for answers.
When a customer complains or reaches out through these apps,
it's an opportunity to personalize the response
in a way that your competitors may not be doing.
Listening to your customer's feedback
and having the ability to act on it will help you
go beyond the good and bad reviews and dig even deeper
and find what caused those reviews to begin with.
If you use surveys and other methods
to receive customer service data, you can do even more.
One easy way is to add a space for customers
to explain why they gave you a particular answer.
Then detractors can tell you why they're dissatisfied.
You can use that knowledge to fix problems
and offer solutions.
By prompting customer feedback,
you can uncover simple actions that can improve
your customer experience even further.
For a more complete list of strategies you can use
to keep your customers engaged in your business,
be sure to visit our blog posts
linked in the description below.
And if you want weekly info about connected communications,
remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel
and turn on notifications to stay in the loop.
Again, this is Tom with Nextiva.
We'll see you next time.