Why Customer Service Needs to Advance with its Web Customers
The customer service industry has been tested the last few holiday seasons. Between longer work days, higher gas prices and a veritable Santa’s bag of stresses and strains more and more consumers looking online to take care of their gifting obligations.
We saw that more consumers did their shopping via the Internet last year than any prior Web-enabled holiday season simply because of the sheer convenience. Last year’s online shopping season sales surpassed $29 billion, up 20 percent from the previous year. This year’s online sales have already been projected to produce another solid shopping season, with many analysts predicting a 20% increase in online shopping sales once again – despite the overall gloomy projections being made for the brick and mortar retail environments.
The fundamental question is: Is your online customer service capability up to the task? In the face of rising traffic many operators still only use email to respond to queries or relying on site search engines to help consumers. With more consumers Internet savvy, online sites need to advance with new Web methods to create a better overall online shopping experience, one that is still humanized and simple to use.
With the holiday season looming before us, the online retail industry needs to raise its level of customer service for a better customer experience as whole by communicating with their customers in a way that all consumers can use and relate.
Responding to the Massive Online Holiday Spirit:
Why are more consumers shopping online? Is it to stay away from the mall crowds? Or is laziness, saving gas money so they can buy gifts or simply the convenience of shopping from home the answer? More people are passing on the “helpful” in-store sales person for the keyboard of their family computer. Does that mean the online experience should be heartless and mechanical? The reason the Internet doesn’t seem human is obvious; it isn’t.
Instead of being an extension of the holiday spirit with a cohesive human-quality customer service, the Internet has become a faceless tool that consumers force themselves to live with. Once online retail sites realize the value in providing consumers with a humanizing experience, they’ll build brand loyalty, higher sales, and an online experience that is worth staying home for on all shopping occasions.
Customer Service 2.0: Upgrade Quickly & Easily
The holidays are fast approaching. The best way to get your Web-based customer service up to human quality and familiar to consumers in time for the holiday season is to make it conversational, in the form of live web chat.
Most consumers prefer texting or sending an IM instead of picking up a phone or filling out a long customer feedback form. This type of customer service software is actually something that can be put together fairly quickly for this holiday season by installing live Web chat software into your existing customer service infrastructure.
There is another method that takes a little longer to set up so you might want to have this ready for next year’s holiday shopping season or even for spring/summer sales. This approach makes use of natural language processing agents can actually learn and thus understand what users are asking for and answer their questions in an automated fashion that seems almost human. Advanced systems can even selectively “take control” and lead the holiday question conversation, to clarify ambiguous search queries, or more extensively to “accompany” a visitor through any number of processes, such as signing up for a holiday discount promotion or obtaining an authorization for a return.
Poorly deployed examples of automated responses or live chat conducted by overworked trained service personnel yield either off-the-mark replies or, just as bad, forcing an answer that doesn’t fit.
If you’re going to humanize online customer service before the holidays are in full swing, consider installing live chat customer service first. After finding success with that method, look into adding automated response chat software with the ability to learn what your customers ask and the capacity to expand its knowledge base to provide complete answers automatically. No matter what online customer service application you use, you should seek a system that permits a seamless transition to a live representative to handle complicated matters and back again without disrupting the customer experience, including an automated response capability calls for planning and time. It is process that takes some weeks but once done, such systems can handle up to 80 percent of the typical questions a customer service group tends to get.
Remove the “Grinch” from Your Online Customer Service:
You can respond to the increase in online customer sales a number of ways. You can offer various discount promotions, you can provide a larger stock selection, or you can even change the site layout to a make online browsing easier. However, the change that’s going to produce real growth and develop a larger, more loyal customer base starts and ends with customer service. Hoping that online shoppers will find what they need by just utilizing search or asking them to fill out a questionnaire with an email response will only lose the sale. A humanized online customer support solution works whenever the customer needs it. Whether it’s as they seek items, compare them, go through the check-out process or deal with technical issues, like what color the wrapping paper might be, a humanized online customer service capability can make all the difference and take this holiday season from ho-hum to hooray!
Written by Robert Williams:
Robert Williams is the CEO of Conversive
source:http://www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-article/Holiday-Customer-Service-Online.asp
