Your primary goal is to ensure that the answer is always a solid “Yes”.  

One crucial step to enhance customer satisfaction is seamless communication. You need to a robust omnichannel communication strategy to make sure every interaction the customer has with your team is efficient and productive. According to a Salesforce study, 40% of customers won’t do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channels.

This is where advanced communication technology like UCaaS can be useful.  

In this blog, we will understand in detail about how you can maximize customer satisfaction with the help of a UCaaS solution.

Omnichannel Communication Strategy and UCaaS

An omnichannel communication strategy is a customer-centric approach that can help you ensure a seamless and consistent experience across any channel a customer might use to interact with a business. This includes channels like phone, email, chat, and social media. The goal of an omnichannel strategy is to create a unified, personalized experience that meets your customers’ needs, regardless of the channel they choose.

A UCaaS solution can help you establish a strong presence wherever your customers are available.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based service that integrates multiple communication tools into a single platform. This way, your agents can communicate with the customers through voice calls, video calls, texts, and email, all from one dashboard.  

Here are the popular components that make up a UCaaS platform:  

1. Voice calling 
2. Video conferencing 
3. Messaging 
4. Collaboration tools 
5. Cloud Infrastructure 

These tools come together to create an ecosystem for a smooth customer journey. Right from the beginning when the customer is trying to reach you with a query or complaint, they get the option to select the most convenient communication channel. Once connected, your team can use the collaboration tools for better and faster resolution. 

Now that you understand omnichannel strategy and UCaaS, let’s look at how you can leverage it to enhance customer experience:

1.  Provide Seamless Support Across Channels

Whether for an inquiry or problem resolution, your customers need you to be easily reachable. They commonly expect to connect over a call, text, and email. Sometimes simultaneously. Other than that, your agents also need multiple platforms for efficient problem-solving.   

A UCaaS platform can help you accomplish this by delivering a truly omnichannel experience. For example, a customer can initiate a chat, escalate to a video call for visual assistance, and then receive follow-up information via email, all in a single conversation. 

By adopting an omnichannel customer experience approach, you can unify interactions from various platforms into a single, centralized view. This provides your teams with easy access to a complete customer history, enabling them to deliver consistent and relevant support across all channels. 

Read Our Blog: Omnichannel Contact center

2. Empower Agents for Personalized Interactions 

Personalized interactions are key to building strong customer relationships. Knowing more about a customer (their personal details, problem history, preferred communication channel) can help your agents form better connections with them. According to a Segment study, 52% of customers agree that customized services make them happy.    

The best way to personalize interactions is by giving your agents access to customer information in real time.  

Best-in-class UCaaS solutions like Acefone come equipped with the ability to integrate with popular CRM software. This helps your agents view customer data while they make or receive a call.  

Additionally, built-in collaboration features like call whispering and barging can help them seamlessly connect with experts. This especially comes in handy for complex inquiries, ensuring customers receive accurate and timely solutions. 

3. Increase First Call Resolution Rates 

First Call Resolution (FCR) measures the ability to handle and resolve customers’ support requests the first time they interact with your team. Resolving queries in the first interaction signifies efficiency and demonstrates that you value the customer’s time. It also reduces operational costs.  

UCaaS solutions can significantly contribute to increasing first call resolution rates. You get features like skill-based routing, screen sharing, and co-browsing.  

Through skill-based routing, you can efficiently direct callers to the appropriate department or agent, reducing wait times and improving satisfaction.  

Other than that, screen sharing, and co-browsing enable agents to visually guide customers through complex issues, enhancing understanding and resolution speed.  

4. Provide Self-service Options 

Customers today increasingly prefer to solve problems on their own. According to a recent study, 73% of customers prefer to have self-service options. Beyond customer preference, self-service also benefits your support teams. By enhancing their help center and providing easy access to information, they can solve problems quicker and improve customer satisfaction.  

With UCaaS solutions, you can seamlessly implement self-service options. Features such as smart, multi-level IVR systems can help your customers reach the right information or agent faster. By offering clear and concise options on the IVR menu, you can reduce call wait times and empower customers to resolve issues independently. 

5. Improve Agent Performance 

In order to provide a good customer service experience, you need to constantly track agents’ performance and implement improvement measures. However, without a proper system in place, performance assessment can be challenging. This is due to limited visibility into call data, agent behavior, and customer satisfaction.  

UCaaS platforms can help you solve this through detailed analytics.  You can get detailed reports on call metrics (durations, average handle time, abandonment rate, etc.), agent performance, CSAT, and more. By analyzing these insights, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. This data-driven approach enables targeted coaching, skill development, and process optimization, ultimately leading to enhanced agent performance and customer satisfaction. 

6. Risk-Proof Your Communication

A failure-proof system is essential for maintaining trust, ensuring seamless issue resolution, and protecting your brand’s reputation. It allows you to provide timely and consistent assistance, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, it minimizes operational disruptions and helps meet compliance requirements, reducing risks associated with service downtime or poor customer experiences.

UCaaS-ify Your Customer Experience in 2024  

UCaaS can be a powerful companion in elevating customer experience. You can manage omnichannel support, personalize interactions, improve first call resolution, offer self-service options, and optimize agent performance. This can help you create a seamless customer journey, build lasting relationships, and gain a significant advantage over competitors. 

If you are looking for a comprehensive UCaaS solution with futuristic tools, Acefone is the right fit for you. Our next-gen interactions suite containing the interactions hub, contact center studio, API connect, and campaigns is designed to help you deliver a wholesome experience from a single platform.  

The post How to Improve Customer Service Experience With UCaaS appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

His specialty lies in advising FTSE 100 & Fortune 250 companies on assessing, measuring and re-designing their customer experience. Pennington was one of the first pioneers of good CX, seeing that there were ways to attract customers but none to keep them happy.

“Back around the turn of the century CX was just in its infancy, it was dominated by research businesses that told you the problems with your customer service,” he said. “But not how to fix them. Advertising agencies were creating amazing campaigns to build demand, but creating expectations that could not be delivered by the operation.” 

According to him, there was a big gap in the market for a firm to take the research and advertising data and translate that into deliverable experiences. 

“While it is true that just because there is a gap in the market it does not necessarily mean there is market in the gap, fortunately, our hunch turned out to be true,” he said.  

He has since gathered two decades of experience in CX, working across the world for top companies. We asked him for some quick advice he could give us from his vast repertoire. 

What strategies do you follow while creating a business plan for the operations group?

I focus on real-time in-year deliverables where we can engage as many individuals a possible across functions and where we can demonstrate line of sight business along with measurable improvements. I make sure to focus on the quarter ahead but with an eye on the longer-term cumulative goal. Ensure that your deliverables are customer-outcome focused.  

So, start with what you want to achieve, by when, then create the plan of actions. 

Based on your experience, what are some common mistakes that businesses make that hinder their customer service?

Many believe that CX is very complicated, that it is an expensive undertaking and that it is a project. In reality it is a never ending journey of changes and adjustments. 

They spend too much time fixing recurring problems rather than redesigning the experience based on the known issues. Data, information and research are too often used as reasons not to act. The phrase, “we need more data” means it is not turned into actionable change; too many times the default is to create a huge program and then to wait for the 2-3 years it might take to deliver on that.  

In the meantime the world has changed, you need to make hundreds of tiny changes that require little or no governance. When it is a collective cross functional approach making lots of tiny changes that will really evolve your CX/EX to the next level, in the words of Nike “Just Do It!” 

How do you implement your strategy at the ground-level, when dealing with a frustrated customer for example?

I take them back to basics. I destroy the often-held myths that hold leaders back from fully embracing the huge commercial wins available from integrating CX/EX as PART and only part of their business strategy and business solution toolkit.   

By doing this I give people the confidence that they can succeed, then I go ahead and prove it to them. Now you have a fully engaged sponsor. 

Remember that CX is not an input, it is the output of activities inside your company.  We are in the memories business in CX, and this is about designing positive ones, attention to detail is critical to success. Remember customer centricity is rarely if ever the answer, it is about dialing up the CX component of your business strategy to the right level for your brand position. 

Acefone’s Virtual contact center solution allow for you to collect and access all the data you need. Our manager portal allows for managers to listen in on calls, advise the agent privately and get downloadable data on agent performance. Furthermore, the system can be tailor-made for your needs, your customers and your agents. Call us today to get a free trial and plans starting as low as $19.99. 

About the expert:

Alan Pennington is a CX expert and one of the world’s Top 25 Global CX Thought Leaders and Influencers for 2019, 2020 and 2021.  

He began his career at the Royal Mail where he was retail director and eventually became commercial director of its subsidiary call center business. He was then managing director of UK-based management consulting firm, Mulberry, after which he began freelance, working across the world with companies like Emirates, Vodafone, Reed Elsevier, City & Guilds, British Council and Aviva. Currently, he sits on the board of SuiteCX in an advisory role.  

His specialties are customer experience management, CX strategy, CX team development, education and deployment, CX experience design and measurement, CX organizational design, CX coaching and Advisory.

The post The key to good CX is to use your data well: Alan Pennington appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

We spoke to Carsten Ley, expert extraordinaire in project management, change management, business transformation and customer experience. After leading large-scale project implementation across Europe, Latin-America and Southeast Asia for companies like Deloitte, Volkswagen, Rolls-Royce and Lazada, Ley founded a management consulting firm of his own to take his method to others.  

His firm, Asia PMO, focuses on helping companies efficiently implement company objectives, build a team-oriented environment, get clients quickly and improve customer experience. Ley is now passing his knowledge on as a certified project management professional, public speaker and podcaster. He is also an internationally known keynote speaker, management trainer and coach. 

We sat with him to pick his brain and get some of his top tips on customer experience and strategy, a subject for which he was elected as one of the Top 150+ Global Customer Experience Thought Leaders and Influencers of 2020.  

Fulfill your customer needs flawlessly

Ley believes that when it comes to customer experience, there is no room for error.  One must anticipate the needs and issues of consulting customers based on experience and advise them before things get urgent. However, in the event that this hasn’t happened yet, he has a step-by-step method. 

“First you need to listen and understand the underlying frustration,” says Ley. “Fix the issue as soon as possible personally, and then make sure that a similar issue will not occur within the organization again.”

Develop a good CX strategy

Ley also attributes good customer experience to good CX strategy. He believes that companies, especially startups, should build their teams, products, services and processes with future customers in mind. 

However, the pandemic with its requirements of social distancing and no contact eliminated the possibility of a human touch as we knew it. Ley believes that despite these circumstances, adding any sort of personal touch to an automated process is a huge plus.  

Apart from customer centricity, Ley is also a proponent of developing a great employee experience and keeping up with new technologies and communication channels.  

“It is very important especially for frontline and customer-facing employees to have them (customers) in a situation in which they feel good and empowered to fully focus on customers,” he says. He believes that CX professionals should never stay the same and keep reinventing themselves to stay up to date

Personalize the situation even when automated

One of Ley’s most important rules of thumb is to remember that while AI makes lives significantly easier, one must still do their best to give their customers exactly what they want and need.  

“Automate with personalization,” he says. “Do not forget that you deal with individuals who have different journey and communication needs.” 

With Acefone’s contact center, you can use the best of AI to design CX that is unique to your customers. Using the manager’s portal, your managers can ensure that every customer has the best experience they can have with your company. Call us now for a free trial and plans starting as low as $19.99.  

About the expert

Carsten Ley is the founder of Asia PMO, a management consulting firm specializing in project management, experience management and business management. With over two decades of experience in the field, Ley is also a keynote speaker, giving talks on the above subjects across the world. Ley is based in Vietnam from where he runs his firm. 

The post Fulfilling a customer’s needs also depends on the process: Carsten Ley appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

SaaS or Software as a Service is a solution that can benefit both of these teams. Not only does it ensure better collaboration between sales and support agents but it also helps them work in tandem by providing them easy access to data stored on the cloud.

It doesn’t matter what industry you are operating in, SaaS can be used almost anywhere, and is always a secure place to store your valuable customer data. 

This article will explain exactly what SaaS is and how it can help you sync your sales and support team for the benefit of the wider business and customer satisfaction.

What is Software as a Service?

Put simply, SaaS is an online-based service that can host your servers and databases. The information stored online can be used on any device that is connected to the Internet. You can also control which employee gets access to your data, making for a more secure work environment.

SaaS is accessed through a subscription service, which means that you don’t need to install it on specific machines—anyone can access the application so long as you give them access.

This means that with SaaS, there is no need for expensive hardware or maintenance packages. Which in turn means, you don’t need to hire IT professionals for its maintenance as the same is also done by the service provider. 

Moreover, SaaS solutions are simplified for day-to-day use and don’t require in-depth technical knowledge to operate.

Not just that, SaaS is perfect for businesses with either a completely remote workforce or a mix of remote and office-based workers. The nature of the tool makes it simple for workers all over the world to collaborate through conference calls, shared spaces, instant messaging and much more.

How can SaaS sync your sales and support teams?

There are a number of ways in which your sales and support team can work together with SaaS solutions. Even if they aren’t in the same space physically, they can still collaborate effectively and nurture amazing work relationships.

The solution offers a unified online portal that gives your team access to centralised information and features. Not having to toggle between windows or screens helps employees to deliver coordinated and personalised service to the customer and add value at every stage of the purchase process.

Here are just a few of the ways in which you can use SaaS software to create a synchronised sales and support team.

Ready to streamline your Outbound Call Center and support operations? Discover how SaaS solutions can help your teams collaborate seamlessly—start transforming your customer experience today!

Automation tools

SaaS integrates well with a plethora of automation tools which make following customer journeys simple and ensure that nothing is missed along the way.

For example, with a VoIP phone system, you can use the online portal to set reminders to follow up with customers at certain points in their buying process. 

You might want to have an initial sales call, and then follow up with your support team calling the customer to see if they have any questions. Alternatively, you could schedule a support call after a customer has made a purchase to see if they need any assistance. With SaaS all of your applications can be connected, so a call can automatically be scheduled into your CRM system and will be visible to any other member of staff.

By using automation you can ensure that each and every customer gets the same level of service. Automation also ensures that opportunities are not missed by keeping all your teams on the same page since your system reminds everyone of the tasks they need to complete. 

Use analytics to spot trends

The beauty of SaaS is that it allows you access to detailed analytics about your business. With a hosted phone system, everything, from call costs to waiting times, is available to you and accessible from anywhere, anytime. 

SaaS also enables analytical reports on your agents’ behaviour and performance. You can receive scheduled agent performance reports on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis directly in your email. 

These reports help you identify trends and even bottlenecks.  And the analytics can be used for better decision-making on everything—from marketing to sales and even customer experience. 

So, for instance, you can use the statistics to see exactly where calls are coming from and whether your waiting times are acceptable to customers. Armed with this information, you can put more money into the routes that your calls are most likely to come from to increase conversions. 

Or, you can use the information on popular call times to ensure that you have more support staff on hand to resolve queries during busy periods.

With SaaS, you can also send automated surveys out after a sales call to get details on customer satisfaction and identify any room for improvement. This information can be processed directly into your CRM and you can use the analytics to define training opportunities for staff or give them compliments on great service.

No matter what type of SaaS solution you are using, you can use the shared information and customer insights to easily build advanced dashboards with relevant information on all aspects of your team’s performance. 

Use recordings for training purposes and security

With a VoIP phone system, businesses can use features like call recordings and monitoring to help coach new and existing staff. Whether staff is in the sales or support team, they will all benefit from training—and using real calls from actual customers is a great way to do this. 

The call recording feature comes with a hosted phone system and can be accessed easily within the online portal. These calls can serve as examples of good and bad customer service, helping new staff learn and develop.

For example, your support team may listen to a sales call and notice an opportunity for the sales team to refer to customer support or vice versa. This collaboration will inevitably lead to increased profitability and productivity too.

Along with call recordings, you can also use automated transcribing software to ensure you have a record of all your sales interactions in writing. These transcriptions can be emailed automatically to the customer with a range of different SaaS applications so that both customers and staff can refer to them if needed.

An automated transcript software reduces the manual effort for your team and also reduces the chances of any errors. Agents can simply look back at the transcripts and ensure they take the relevant actions from each call. 

Hold team meetings to discuss progress and increase productivity

Team meetings are a great way to encourage collaboration across your team members. They provide executives with a space to share ideas, update each other on the progress of specific leads and identify opportunities for collaboration.

Using a SaaS solution, you can hold conference calls or video calls with your team members across the world. There is no limit to the number of people you can invite to your team meeting so you can ensure that everyone is involved in the most important conversations. 

Remote team meetings can be just as productive as in-person meetings. You can circulate an agenda before each meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Staff can join in from anywhere in the world and can connect as long as they have a stable Internet connection. Additionally, they can access meeting recordings and catch up in case they’re not able to attend it. 

By including everyone, you can go one step further to sync up your sales and support team. 

Productivity can also be increased by using SaaS features to the best of their ability. The solution gives you the chance to automatically sync your contacts with any business tools or shared workspaces you may use, giving everyone access to the latest information.

Customer calls can be automatically scheduled, leads can be passed from support to sales to nurture, and customer information can be pulled up in any application. This means you can take a consistent approach across your sales and support team, and avoid looking unprofessional owing to duplicated calls.

Use SaaS to sync your sales and support team

This article has highlighted just a few of the ways in which SaaS technology can synchronise your sales and support team. 

By connecting these teams and ensuring they can all access the information they need from your database, you can enhance their productivity and increase customer satisfaction. 

The many features available to you, such as video conferencing or automation, help you deliver stellar customer service by increasing the consistency and reliability of your operations.

With SaaS, getting your teams on the same page won’t be difficult—their virtual connections can be just as effective as their physical meetings. Hosted phone systems, a part of the SaaS family, provide crystal clear internal as well as external communications. 

The post Effective Sales Onboarding: How SaaS can Help Sync your Sales and Support Team appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

An ATM (Automated Teller Machine) was the first self-service technology introduced to us. It replaced the people who usually dispense money at banks or help us check our account balance. 

In fact, the self-service technology market was USD 16.06 billion in 2015 and is expected to exceed USD 42 billion by 2023. This is a CAGR of 13.2% from 2016 to 2023.

Sounds whopping, right?

Well, this prediction shows that there are several advantages to using self-service technologies, as has been seen subsequently. Some of them include:

• Saving resources: By implementing SSTs, you can save on precious resources needed to service the customer.
• Adaptability: Self-service technologies are usually adaptable to changes in the working atmosphere. In most cases, it is just an up-gradation of the services on offer.
• Connectivity: Most SSTs use networked systems, allowing operators to reach out to remote places without additional staffing.
• Reach more customers: A single integration can handle customer traffic while saving on costs involved in servicing customers.
• Better profits: Although there is a cost involved in rolling out SST points across a network, in the long run, they do lead to better margins for the operators.
• Fast service: Companies that use SSTs deliver faster and better customer service than those using the human interface.
• Better customer satisfaction: Organisations implementing SSTs tend to report a more satisfied customer base than those who do not use the technology.

Thus, the adoption of self-service technologies brings better productivity and operating environments for businesses of all sizes and scales. 

Furthermore, since most SST points do produce repetitive actions, it helps automate the process in the first place compared to a manual set of operations.  

Best practices of Self Service Technology

Long gone are the days when customers would wait to seek solutions to their questions. Now, they demand instant answers. Consequently, contact centers need to stay available 24×7 to solve their queries.

Self-service allows customers to find information, request services and resolve issues on their own. Here are the top five best practices of self-service technology:

1. Easy to navigate self-service options

If a customer cannot locate the self-service options quickly, they would resort to other communication means like the telephone, email, etc., to resolve their issue. This would defeat the purpose of SSTs, which is to reduce the dependency on human resources to a significant extent. 

Therefore, you should:

• Integrate self-service: into the operation of company websites. Just placing a link prominently that specifies where to locate a self-service point would help a great deal.
• Design the self-service point: so that it is a continuum of the services provided by your organisation.
• Implement search engine optimisation techniques: to target people who are more likely to use the service portal most of the time.
• Support pages must be ranked: and indexed on the website of the company. This makes it relatively simpler and easier for customers to find the portal when the need arises. 

2. Empower customers, make SSTs easy to use 

Businesses that have been successful in implementing SSTs tend to be the ones that have focused on designing user-friendly service portals. 

In simpler terms, make your users feel confident and safe in transacting through self-service points. Displaying a large amount of information on the self-service portal would only lead to indecisions and a lack of trust in such systems. 

Here are a few recommendations you can practice to promote the use of self-service in your organisation:

• Focussing on design simplicity: This empowers the customer to choose self-service over any other medium, thus reducing the need for human agents.
• Infrequent use of the service point: would make the little time spent with them telling on customer experience. This would mean using a system that does not need a learning time and can be used immediately at the site. 
• Always follow the 80/20 rule: It implies that 80% of the customers are consuming only 20% of your content. Thus, focus on creating this 20% of the content more user-friendly and accessible. This could also lead to misplaced priorities, but it helps in addressing the pain points the most. 
• Design for probabilities: In simpler terms, offer the options and choices that are more likely to help your consumers. 
• Use images and icons: to create a better recall and identification of services. Leverage AI image creators to save more time.
• Device compatibility: goes a long way in using self-service portals, for they can be used on various platforms. Therefore, ensure your user experiences a seamless journey on different devices.

3. Understand the issues faced by the users

This might seem an easy-to-follow step, but service providers often overlook the issues everyday users face in a hurry to implement the system. 

The most common goal of self-service technology is to ensure users’ convenience. Therefore you must design your self-service portals in a way that benefits your customer. 

Here are some of the common touch points when it comes to using an SST portal. 

• Create an incident: The customer would like to report an issue or raise a case on behalf of another customer.
• Raise a request: The customer might require a new product or service. 
• Employee request: This typically includes the employees of an organisation raising issues with the HR department most of the time. 
• Get help: When a customer cannot resolve issues with the help of the self-service portal, there must be a provision to have an operator intervene. 

4. Readability issues with content on SSTs

Ensure that the content on your self-service portals is easy-to-read and understand. Not to forget—keep the use of technical jargon to a bare minimum.

Additionally, enrich your content with graphics, visuals, and relatable videos to better interact with the audience. In fact, according to the Wyzowl survey, 69% of users prefer video over text. 

Overall, your portal must be interactive and easy to navigate. Craft it in a way that the user can get the desired results in minimum visits and clicks.

5. Analysing and receiving feedback

You must analyse every transaction done on self-service technologies and take steps to improve the interaction on future visits to the kiosk. In addition, the customer experience must be evaluated either through direct interaction with them or measured using metrics kept as part of the transactions. 

The real question: is human to human interactions redundant now?

It would be wrong to say that self-service technologies have made human-to-human interactions redundant. It’s critical to understand that self-service is an extension of the human interface and not a competitor to customer services. 

Essentially, we need to create a culture that seeks to enhance user experience significantly and at all times. And self-service is the right step in this direction.

It allows you to offer your customers the valuable information they are looking for. And in return, it awards you with higher conversion rates and more satisfied customers.

The post Top 5 Practices to Offer Better Self Service Technology appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

However, this isn’t the case!

If you don’t offer any post-purchase service, you could be at risk of losing a potentially loyal customer. Some customers may also be dissatisfied with the care they receive after the sale, making them return the product, and you losing the sale. 

The post-purchase experience is integral for keeping your customers happy and ensuring they make repeat purchases with your brand. 

This article will explore how you can enhance post-purchase experiences and their effects on your sales and customer satisfaction rates.

Automated emails to enhance the post-purchase experience

Automated emails are a great way to enhance your customer’s post-purchase experience. You can trigger emails to be sent at different intervals and make sure that you remain on your customer’s minds whenever they need your service. 

There are a few different ways to use automated emails to keep customers informed and build trust: 

Order confirmation emails

Once customers have made a purchase, they want an immediate response confirming their order. Without this, customers might think that their order has not been processed correctly and may either purchase the product again or go elsewhere.

Order confirmation emails serve a few different purposes. While they tell a customer their order has been successfully placed, they also inform the customer of the next steps. You can detail the whole delivery and dispatch process in this email so as to be transparent and manage customer expectations. 

These emails enhance post-purchase experiences by providing customers with all the information they need about their order. Moreover, they also provide an opportunity for you to introduce other offerings of your business to the customer.

While thanking customers for their business in these emails, you can also direct them to similar products and encourage them to purchase again. You can even include incentives such as discount codes for their next order. 

Whatever you may choose, you shouldn’t miss this opportunity to start building a rapport with your customer. 

Shipping notification emails

Shipping is the period where a majority of customer complaints arise. Therefore, sending notification emails ensures that the customer is kept informed about the status of their order. 

These notifications provide timely updates on the progress of their delivery and help reduce the number of customers reaching out for updates. 

You can also add different support options in your emails to further enhance the post-purchase experience and ensure customers see you as a trustworthy and transparent business. 

Add links to different support options and connect customers directly to your agents from their email. If you have a hosted phone system, you can ensure that customers are always responded to, regardless of the channels they use. 

With a hosted phone system connected to your CRM, you can pull order status and share this with the customer. This saves your agents time and makes customer service run more smoothly.  

Delivery confirmation emails

Upon successful delivery, you can trigger automated emails to check in with the customer and gain their feedback on the delivery process or offer further support. These can include how-to videos for their purchased product. 

Such emails show initiative from a business to reach out to the customer with more information about the product. It also helps to reduce the number of calls about common queries. The customer will see this as a testament to your service offerings and feel that you care about their experience with your product.

By gaining feedback from the customer while the order is fresh in their minds, you can gain highly actionable insights on your delivery process. This can help inform future developments and benefit future customers to

Follow up emails

Once the customer has had a few weeks with their purchase, you can trigger a follow-up email to check in with them. This follow-up can include complimentary items that the customer may want to purchase with their current product or suggestions on new products that may interest them. For follow-up emails, custom coded email templates offer several benefits that go beyond what drag-and-drop or generic templates can deliver, and ensure every follow-up email reflects your brand exactly.

By using gentle reminder emails, you ensure that you keep in touch with each customer and stay at the top of their mind when they are out for their next purchase.

Automated calls to follow up with customers

Another way to follow up with customers is to use automated calls. These calls can be used to suggest new products, check if the customer has any questions, or simply to build a relationship.

Follow-up calls can be scheduled right from your hosted phone system, and auto-dialers make this process easier than ever. Without the need for manual dialling customers, your agents can use automatic dialers and get connected. Hosted phone systems also allow them to see all the relevant information about that customer.

Automated calls create goodwill with your customers and show that your business is willing to put in the time and effort to deliver to them a great experience. These calls build up trust and ensure that your sales agents are more accessible to customers, making it easier for them to make repeat purchases.

Naturally, when customers are speaking to your sales or customer service team more often, there is more opportunity for sales to be made. This ease allows customers to become familiar with a brand, creating a satisfied customer who is more likely to make repeat purchases. 

When combined with emails, automated calls can make a fantastic addition to your post-purchase strategy.

Enhance your post-purchase experience with automation

It is easy to enhance your post-purchase customer experience when using automation. By sending simple emails or making follow-up sales calls, you can build strong relationships with customers and increase your sales output!

Your hosted phone system is fitted with all the necessary tools to make this a reality. With it, you can schedule messages, make calls, note important information and so much more.

The post Enhance Post Purchase Experiences for Customers with Automated Emails and Calls appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

According to Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service Report, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company.

Needless to say, customer satisfaction should be the topmost priority of every business, regardless of the kind of products and services they offer. Customer satisfaction has time and again proven to be one of the biggest Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for businesses.

That said, it is difficult to measure true customer satisfaction. However, one of the best solutions to this issue is to directly ask them using customer surveys.

What are customer surveys?

A survey designed to understand the customer’s perception of an organisation is known as a customer survey.

It includes various questions related to their thoughts about the brand’s products and services, their purchase experience with the brand, whether they think the products are appropriately priced and what their overall perception of the business is.

These surveys can be a set of multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions or a mix of both.

One of the most widely used methods of surveying customers is to collect their feedback via text-based formats. IVR surveys in text format are also becoming increasingly popular.

These are simple and easy to understand messages for the customers, with several ways to record a response or collect feedback from them. IVR surveys also help a company maintain a better track of its customer data.

Using features like bulk SMSes or SMS blasts, a wide range of both current and potential customers can be interacted with at the same time.

An introduction to IVR and text surveys

Text-based surveys are one of the most convenient methods of communication between a business and its customers. These surveys help in maintaining a collection of customer feedback, facilitating opportunities to elevate the customer experience.

Indian’s have a diverse range of mobile devices. While the majority, over 800 million people are now active smartphone users, there still exist users of older phones. The good news—text IVR surveys can be conducted on both, smart as well as normal mobile devices.

Businesses can conduct different types of surveys to obtain data. Some examples of commonly used surveys to collect feedback on a macro level are:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys: NPS surveys are used to get an idea of how many customers are willing to promote a brand they have used. These are mainly used to test a company’s customer loyalty
• Post-purchase surveys: As the name suggests, post-purchase surveys are essentially done right after purchase to understand the customer’s overall buying experience
• Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys: These surveys help businesses understand the efforts that a customer had to put in to complete a purchasing cycle

Features like bulk SMS (Also known as SMS blasts) can be used to reach a large audience at the same time.

How do customer surveys help build customer satisfaction?

Customer surveys help businesses achieve many goals. They’re able to identify service gaps and pain points for customers and fix issues accordingly. Moreover, companies can reach out to aggrieved buyers and offer compensations, discounts and vouchers to make up for any inconveniences.

Additionally, surveys also help businesses predict customer needs and demands and alter their offerings to suit the same. Thus, organisations are able to proactively devise better strategies and stay ahead of their competitors.

Explained below are five of the many ways in which text and IVR surveys can help with a business’ customer satisfaction goals:

1. Customers feel valued and appreciated

The distance between what your business is delivering and what the customers expect can be effectively bridged with the help of text surveys. Acting upon customer demands and ensuring your customers feel valued, both help in boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The disconnect between what is expected and what is offered can be removed once buyer feedback is collected regularly. If buyers know their ideas and expectations are actually taken into consideration, they are more likely to do repeat business with your company.

Frequent IVR text surveys can be sent out to several customers, at the same time, using the SMS blast service.

These surveys are one of the simplest and least obstructive methods for collecting and maintaining customer data and feedback. They cut through the marketing clutter of unending voice calls and promotional emails.

In fact, this data can also be used to offer personalised services via IVR technology.

2. Increasing customer engagement 

In today’s time, when practices like social distancing are overshadowing most offline interactions for the entire world, keeping in touch with customers is one of the most important steps that a business can take to work on its customer engagement levels.

89% of customers worldwide expect organisations to give them the opportunity to express their thoughts and opinions in the form of feedback. Following up on a post-purchase basis, demanding regular feedback and checking in on customers can all be done via text messages.

For this, tools like automated IVRs come in handy. These IVRs do not simply automate the calling process, but can also pre-determine quality of leads, thereby improving conversion rates.

Additionally, companies can reach out to leads using SMS blast services and inform them about upcoming discount offers, sale offers and other such events.

3. Strengthens company-client relationships

A business-client relation is based on trust, which can be fragile. While the former can make mistakes in fulfilling exactly what is expected, the latter may be left dissatisfied despite all the services they are offered.

However, in such a scenario, there is no way that the business does not address the issues of buyers. Unhappy customers will not just leave, but may also negatively talk about your business to friends and family, or post it on social media.

By using text surveys, businesses can follow up with customers to find unexpected loopholes. Once followed upon, these can be fixed with repair measures to smoothen the overall sales process.

4. Proactive customer engagement

Traditional customer interactions relied heavily on prospects reaching out for information. Proactive customer engagement, on the other hand, is when a brand maintains constant interaction with buyers throughout their purchase journey.

During proactive customer engagement, a brand tries to resolve customer concerns even before a purchase decision has been made.

A proactive customer experience can be created only when a business tracks and analyses customer data. This data can be easily collected through the use of text-based IVR surveys.

5. Listening to customer demands

Polls are an interactive feature offered by IVR systems. Customers can be asked simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions or those with multiple choice. Such interactive feedback collection methods can help businesses gain deeper insights into what a customer wishes from their favourite brands.

Buying experiences can be improved with the incorporation of feedback measures that use hyper-personalisation techniques. Different sets of interactive text surveys can be designed for different sets of audiences, sent using SMS blasts.

Such ways of communication not only help improve the customers’ perspective about a company but also help strengthen the business-buyer relationship.

Conclusion

As advanced technology becomes accessible to buyers and sellers, it is the perfect time to create highly customised IVR surveys for your business—one’s that not only ask questions specific to your products and services but also help with efficient management of customer data.

Therefore, right now may be the best time for every business to look into its customer service techniques, understand every scope that there is for improvisation, and immediately get to work!

Try Acefone’s cloud telephony solutions today.

The post 5 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction Through Text IVR Surveys appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

Buyers want to interact with you in a convenient, effective and meaningful way.

And to meet these ever-evolving customer expectations, you must have a sound engagement plan in place. In fact, it should be your prime objective, aligned with your business vision. 

Customer engagement is an essential part of a business strategy that ultimately contributes to the overall brand experience. If you successfully engage with your buyers, they are more likely to prefer you over other brands.

So, what is a customer engagement strategy?

A customer engagement strategy, essentially, is a business approach to building long-lasting relationships with your buyers. It involves understanding their journey and experiences with a brand across multiple communication channels, both online and offline.

An excellent engagement strategy enables you to offer seamless experiences to your audiences and ultimately, increase your sales. Doing so is indeed fruitful for both your audience and your business.

It isn’t surprising then that 72% of businesses claim that improving customer experience is their top-most priority. It helps them focus on value creation and get ahead of their competitors.

Put simply, it promotes a worthwhile end-to-end customer experience and efficient support.

And why is customer engagement important?

Regardless of the size and industry of your company, customer engagement tools have evolved as a crucial benchmark for all businesses. Now, engagement is about using different communication channels to engage with leads and exceed their expectations.

The importance of enhancing customer engagement can not be overlooked. It allows you to:

• Boost customer loyalty: Brand loyalty can only come if you successfully deliver excellent customer service. Offer hyper-personalised experiences to your buyers and they’re likelier to return to your brand for repeat purchases in the future.
• Increase revenue: The businesses that invest in better engagement processes and ideas achieve a higher customer satisfaction rate. This, in turn, results in increased revenue.
• Creates a competitive edge: Focusing on creating a well-planned strategy helps you deliver a consistent customer experience, create business differentiation and attract new leads.

Additionally, the implementation of an efficient customer engagement model is the key to business success. Without it, brands will find it hard to grow and survive in such a competitive market.

7 valuable tips to build a foolproof engagement strategy

Buyers expect brands to understand their needs, desiring to be consistently engaged and assisted every step of the way. If you wish to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels, look towards the latest technology and new-age ideas.

Here is a collection of the most effective ways you can develop a great engagement process and build a loyal client base.  

#1 Use an omnichannel approach

‘Tis the digital era; netizens nowadays initiate their interactions with a brand on one channel but continue their conversation across multiple platforms. 

Thus, providing a consistent experience across all touchpoints is critical.

An omnichannel approach consolidates all user interactions across different channels such as websites, social media, phone calls, applications, or retail stores onto a single platform. Doing so helps brands engage with clients in a uniform, brand-compliant fashion. ntegrating tools like The QR Code Generator (TQRCG) into this strategy enables seamless transitions between online and offline touchpoints, making it easier for customers to access information, promotions, or services instantly.

Moreover, buyers wish for a holistic experience with brands, irrespective of the number of touchpoints involved. Offering an omnichannel experience decides if you have an effective engagement strategy in place or not.

#2 Promote real-time engagement with live chat

Kevin Stirtz, the author of one of the famous books ‘More Loyal Customers’, once said,

“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time, or we’ll lose them.”

Live chat is one such channel that allows your agents to interact with buyers by answering their queries in real time seamlessly. It facilitates a strong agent-buyer rapport by enabling instant resolutions. Often, agents are even able to share their screens or send links to guide clients.

Thus, a live chat platform can help you establish stronger relationships.

#3 Utilise chatbots to automate your customer engagements

Using chatbots as part of your customer engagement strategy can have a significant impact on your business. Research by Business Insider revealed that 80% of companies claimed they are either using or planning to use chatbots by 2021.

Chatbots can be used across all communication channels, including social media platforms, mobile apps, e-commerce websites, and instant messaging applications. They are increasingly being used for improved interactions.

#4 Enable co-browsing to provide live engagement

Businesses are increasingly focusing on visual engagement solutions such as co-browsing to cut through the clutter of marketing conversations and connect emotionally. 

In fact, according to Forrester’s research, browsing ranks first among other interaction channels, with a 78% customer satisfaction rating.

The revolutionary co-browsing technology enables agents to interact in real-time with a client’s browser, acquire a firsthand understanding of the problem and give an appropriate solution. It assists in resolving technical difficulties or complex form-filling to submit an application successfully.

#5 Encourage personalised conversations with video chat

Video chat solutions can be one of the most advanced and powerful tools in a brand’s arsenal of engagement tools, helping them deliver exceptional customer service. As part of modern call center software features, they’ve already established their contribution to the delivery of real-time conversations.

These solutions reduce the number of touchpoints and enable smooth real-time interactions with clients around the world. Additionally, face-to-face personalised discussions allow you to discover problems quickly and provide compelling answers.

They are, put simply, vital for a successful engagement strategy. 

#6 Improve your customer engagement on social media

A social media marketing strategy can improve an organisation’s interactions with its audience, updating the latter about the latest offers, and driving repeat purchases. 

According to GlobalWebIndex, 54% of social browsers use social media to explore products.

You must use social media platforms to increase online engagement, and increase your social media followers, differentiate your brand, develop stronger relationships with your customers, and ultimately, enhance brand loyalty. Used appropriately, social media platforms can give a massive boost to your business.

#7 Collect feedback to improve your strategy

One of the most critical components of a successful customer engagement plan is to get regular feedback. It is important for a business to know if buyers are happy with their products or not.

Not only does this help you register their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, but it also helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses. You can then alter your offerings, your interactions and even your campaigns accordingly. 

Key user engagement metrics to measure user activities

Measuring user engagement with the correct metrics is essential because it offers meaningful insights into your audiences’ perceptions of your brand. 

These insights provide critical information about your products and if your service is resonating with your users. You can even design your future roadmap based on these metrics.

The following are the key user engagement metrics for measuring user activity:

1. Active users

This is a significant metric that measures the percentage of active users who use your product on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It assists you in understanding the trends that your users seek in a brand.

2. Customer retention rate

The customer retention rate metric tells you whether your audiences are sticking to your brand. 

A greater retention rate indicates that your users are more likely to use your product in the future. Measuring user retention can help you increase user engagement across all touchpoints in your product.

3. Core user actions

It evaluates if your customers understand the core messaging and can use the functionalities of your product. If they are using the key features, it implies that your service is actively engaging your users.

The bottom line

For a brand, creating a meaningful customer engagement strategy must be the top priority. If you want to survive in an ever-evolving, hyper-competitive market, you have to understand your customer’s expectations and establish effective communication with them.

Therefore, implementing a suitable engagement model will help you build stronger agent-client relationships, better conversion rates, and, lastly, enhance your business’s bottom line.

The post How to Build a Powerful Customer Engagement Strategy For Improving the Overall Brand Experience? appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

Amid these changes, there were hindrances that halted human progress. Some of the more prominent examples being the Black Death in the 1300s, the Spanish Flu of 1918, and World War II which played out between 1939 to 1945. 

However, out of difficulties, miracles grow. 

The Black Death decimated the social concept of feudalism and gave way to new goals of rationality and education. The Spanish Flu jolted various governments to concentrate their efforts and resources on public access to healthcare and international coordination on public health issues. 

WWII saw women stepping up to perform jobs originally assigned to men, thus breaking social barriers and enhancing female participation. 

Today, we find ourselves amid another similar event—the COVID-19 pandemic. After several months of national lockdowns, people across the world have adopted different ways to adapt to the new normal. 

One such way was the digitisation of everyday activities. 

The new normal

The global pandemic threw two major challenges in the path to normalcy. 

1. The imposition of lockdowns to ensure social distancing and quarantines: This prompted companies to shift their operations from offices to homes. But even as people retreated to the confines of their personal spaces, they had to keep up with daily activities like their jobs or education. To break the monotony, people started finding new ways to do old activities.
2. The necessity of contactless interaction: Since surface and air contamination was seen as a major reason for the rapid spread of the infection, people could no longer go to the mall or even a mom-and-pop store to buy their groceries. Transactions had to be contactless, leading to a boom in digital payments.

We had long known the benefits of the digitisation of society—better access to healthcare, education, freedoms in business. COVID-19 helped accelerate this change. And amiid the pandemic, reaching these digital customers became the most pressing problem statement for every organisation.

Rise of the smartphone

Smartphones had long begun their advent into our daily lives. While technological revolutions kept making them more user-friendly, a majority of people still thought of them as a media entertainment device.

This changed with the pandemic. 

With people stuck inside their homes, maintaining social distancing guidelines, communication of all forms—education, business, informal—moved to a virtual platform. 

People began to rely heavily on their smartphones. More importantly, with everyday activities like attending virtual classes or virtual meetings, smartphones rose in stature. 

As per industry reports, smartphone growth is expected to reach its highest level since 2015 with the YoY figure touching 7.7% in 2021. This growth is expected to sustain in 2022 reaching 3.8% on a YoY basis. 

This surge in the smartphone industry is attributed to increased use of Internet devices, delayed smartphone purchases in 2020, and the introduction of 5G communications. The sustained growth is an indication of the ubiquity of smartphones in the digital age. 

Let us look at some numbers that show the rise of smartphones:

• After a slump in purchasing for 2020, total smartphone shipments are expected to reach 1.38 billion units in 2021. This trend is expected to continue in 2022 with the figures touching 1.43 billion units
• The smartphone industry is expected to rise at a CAGR of 3.7% for the next five years 
• With the introduction of 5G, consumers are excited to try new technology. As a result, 5G shipments are expected to grow up to 130% in 2021

Flourishing mobile experience

Following a lockdown-induced decline in smartphone sales across the world, the smartphone industry has risen again to meet the demands of modern consumers. 

Stay-at-home orders paved the way for the development of several smartphone applications that provided quick, easy, and safe solutions to necessities like ordering takeout food, teleconsultation or groceries.

While these habits had to be adopted during the pandemic, their continued usage signals the evolving expectations of mobile customers.

Let us look at the different ways smartphones became essential tools during the pandemic:~National lockdowns forced people to find alternative channels to study or work remotely. Usage of video conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Classrooms shot up in the past year (reaching as high as 6M+ daily app sessions for Zoom in March 2020). The ease of these applications posits that they will continue to be used much after the pandemic subsides.

1. The benefits of telemedicine had been common knowledge until the pandemic provided the impetus to make it a reality. Virtual medical appointments were enabled through various teleconferencing apps safely and easily. As per industry surveys, 62% of customers are likely to continue with virtual appointments even after the pandemic ends.
2. Social distancing rules accelerated digital payment adoption. No-contact payments and online shopping rose hand in hand during the pandemic. There was a ten-fold increase in contactless payment through apps like Amazon Pay, Android Pay, and Apple Pay. Experts claim that this practice shall continue for the convenience they provide.
3. Despite the initial rumours linking 5G with the virus, it made a big splash in the tech world. The superior communication technology is expected to grow significantly over the next few years, driving the purchase of 5G-enabled smartphones. Reports indicate that 5G smartphones will total 539M units worldwide in 2021, approximately 35% of the total smartphone sales.

All in all

The pandemic forced people to switch to digital alternatives for everyday activities. While the initial days seemed bleak, modern innovations like the smartphone quickly got the world back on track. 

Manufacturers paid special attention to the user-friendliness of such technologies, which in turn enhanced their mass appeal. This may just be the onset of the mobile communication revolution. 

The post The New Reality of Mobile Customer Experience appeared first on Blog | Acefone.

One successful strategy to keep service levels high is by improving your customer response times. Doing so helps you resolve customer queries speedily and efficiently, effectively allowing you to win and retain more customers than your competitors.

This article will delve into how your business can use modern technologies, like hosted phone systems, to exceed customer service expectations and deliver results in a prompt manner. 

Use free phone numbers to encourage inbound calls

Businesses must make themselves easily accessible. This can be achieved by establishing a contact center. Without this, your customers might have to resort to a whole range of independent communication methods to reach you—SMS, emails, calls and the likes. 

A cloud contact center platform combines these disparate mediums into a unified platform for easy access to information. 

One way you can encourage inbound calls is by using toll free numbers. These numbers are free to call, giving customers an incentive to reach out to your business.  

Having a free phone number attached to your hosted phone system makes your business appear more professional and service focused. However, the solution will only work well if you have the staff to deal with the volume of inbound calls your free phone number will bring in.

Transition to a hosted contact center

Hosted contact centers are a great way to ensure you offer optimum service to inbound callers. With minimal set-up costs, cloud contact centers enable your agents to connect with customers from anywhere in the world. 

Hosting your contact center also lets you hire talent from across the globe. Since your operations are not limited to just one geographical location, it will help to have team members from different time zones and countries. Your contact center can then serve callers 24×7. 

A hosted contact center facilitates quick support delivery, as callers can be transferred to the right agent without any delays or errors. This cuts out all the long email threads and enhances the client’s experience with your brand. 

And the benefits don’t end there. 

A sophisticated contact center software lends agents the ability to access interaction history and deal with concerns contextually. Thus, reps don’t have to repeatedly ask the same questions. They’re also able to update records as and when the interaction progresses so that the next agent is equally prepared to handle the matter. 

Managers too are able to ensure top-notch performance with tools such as scheduled reports, and call monitoring, recording and whispering. And metrics such as average handling time, CSAT and first call resolution help improve the efficiency and productivity of the entire team. It’s not just calls that can be monitored in real-time, though—managers can also monitor social media and live chat feeds.

Incorporate chatbots and live chats

The benefits of live chats are two-fold—they improve your response time by giving customers quick responses and increase the time a customer spends on your website, giving them an opportunity to learn more about your offerings.

Live chats can be managed right within your hosted phone system, so your staff don’t need to switch between programmes and risk missing a message. Having everything in one place is not only convenient for them but also ensures clients receive consistent messaging across platforms. 

Offering an additional medium for query resolution also helps you keep incoming call volumes at a manageable level and also enhances the customer experience. There is nothing worse for clients than waiting in a queue on the phone when they could have got an answer online.

Use hosted phone system features to improve customer response times

Hosted phone systems offer customers and agents a range of modern features that enable easy connections and speedy resolutions. 

One such feature is the IVR (Interactive Voice Response). An IVR system allows businesses to record messages that help customers navigate through the different service offerings and choose the right department. Thus, businesses are able to enhance response times and first call resolution.

Hosted phone systems can integrate seamlessly with many CRM systems too. CRM and third-party integrations help agents record customer preferences and share them in real-time.

Other team members will be able to access this information and use it to better support customers in the future.

With such features available to help make customer communications quick and easy, it is no wonder that many businesses are turning to hosted phone systems.

Enhance customer response times and win more customers

The range of features available in a hosted contact center set-up greatly improves agent efficiency and business performance. By using your cloud phone system cleverly, you can enhance customer response times and deliver great customer service with every call. With everything they need at their fingertips, your team can work together from anywhere in the world and provide seamless customer experiences.

The post Keep the Conversation Going: How Improving Customer Response Time Can Win You Customers appeared first on Blog | Acefone.