5 Tips for Outstanding Customer Service via Messengers and Chats

Messengers and chats have changed the world of customer service. Customers prefer them to conventional channels, like telephoning and emailing, as it is an easy, quick and convenient way to communicate with companies. Here are five quick tips to empower your customer service via messengers and chats:

Provide easy access

When customers have to force their way through a website to reach out to a company, they get frustrated before the conversation even started. Make sure that your chat/messenger widget is available and visible on every page. Stand-alone channels in messengers should also be easily found and they should come with a company/product logo and name. There is a good practice to inform your customers and prospects about available communication options in the marketing materials.

Ask for a feedback

When it comes to customer service, there is always room for improvement. At the end of conversation, ask people to rate customer experience and use this invaluable feedback to perfect your practices. Customers also appreciate it when their opinion is valued and heard.

Keep it short

Less is more. Nobody likes to scroll through long messages. Instead of copy-pasting cumbersome texts, especially illustrated ones, provide links to materials where needed. It is convenient and helpful to have knowledge base, which is properly structured and contains all the necessary articles.

Use chatbots

How to offer customer service 24/7? How to provide the fastest response possible? How to cut down expenses on customer service? One word: chatbots.

These intelligent virtual assistants do all the donkey work while live customer service agents can focus on the most critical and extraordinary cases. There are two kinds of chatbots: decision-tree and AI/natural language processing-based. The latter can truly be personal and human-like. Yet, no matter how humanized the chatbot is, it is a bad practice to mislead customers about the “nature” of their conversation partner.

Go omnichannel

Different customers prefer different channels. This puts an obstacle for companies, as establishing presence on numerous channels, juggling them successfully while providing great CX is a sophisticated task. Those businesses, who mastered this art, are able to win customers’ hearts.

Integrating communication channels with a CRM solution will give you control over all customer service interactions. At the same time, customer data from the CRM system will help to provide quick and meaningful response. Thus, deploying a single source of truth in the CRM leads to outstanding CX. By the way, here is a webinar, where we’ll show how to create an omnichannel solution in Sugar to establish fast, consistent and customer-oriented service. Join!

What about you? Do you use messengers/chats for customer service, and what channel do you prefer as a customer? Please, share in comments.