Digital Customer Service Innovations Every Business Needs

The adage “the customer is always right” may no longer hold true these days, but providing good customer service is still one of the key pillars to a business’ success. It doesn’t matter if your business has the best products and services in the industry—if you don’t treat your customers right, they won’t come back. Worse, they will tell everyone about the poor service they have received from your business.

However, providing great customer service is not always easy. Fortunately, countless tools can help your business improve customer service in the most efficient and cost-effective ways possible, starting with these ones:

1. Social media monitoring and archiving tools

Using social media is one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to connect with your target audiences. However, managing multiple social media platforms often requires full-time attention since social media is available 24/7, something that not all businesses can do without the help of digital technology.

Fortunately, tech has evolved up to the point that website capture solutions are now a common thing. This type of technology allows companies to archive and monitor online conversations and social media activity on all of their business accounts. As a result, you are better able to prevent inappropriate behavior on social media, create solid evidence in case of litigation or compliance issues, and archive every post, comment, reaction, and share for future purposes.

2. Chatbots

As screens get bigger, the patience and attention spans of customers grow shorter. Today, most people expect businesses to reply to their messages within 24 hours at most to consider it good customer service. Anything longer than that, you can expect negative feedback to come your way. After all, digital conversations are instant and convenient. Customers believe it should be easy for businesses to reply to their messages ASAP (when in reality, it is not so easy).

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to reply to customer messages right away or sometimes even within a reasonable time frame—unless, of course, if you have a full-time customer service staff. This is especially true for many small to medium-sized businesses. For this reason, businesses—even the larger ones—are leveraging chatbots to provide instantaneous replies to customers even when there is no real human around to respond.

Chatbots are an AI (artificial intelligence) feature that can talk to customers as if they were real humans. They have the ability to provide answers to customer queries and even troubleshooting tips for certain issues by analyzing what the customer is saying. Although not infallible, chatbots are the next best thing when employing full-time customer service staff is not possible.

3. Feedback management systems

Gathering, analyzing, and utilizing customer feedback is imperative to business improvement—be it positive or negative feedback. But similar to any other type of customer correspondence, managing feedback is often difficult without the right tools in place.

This is where feedback management systems come in. By utilizing this kind of system, your business can streamline the feedback management process from collection down to utilization. Furthermore, there are some systems available today that have the ability to analyze customer feedback and provide responses in real-time, all without human intervention.

4. Social media automation

If your business does not use a social media automation tool yet, you are certainly missing out on a lot of advantages. Why? Because social media automation tools can help boost your online presence, enrich your content, and improve your customer response rate, all while reducing the workload on your marketing staff. And if you are a small business with a limited workforce, this tool is quite essential.

5. Help desk ticketing system

Consider this scenario: a customer contacts your business about a product or service issue. The customer service representative transfers the customer to another representative who has no idea about the issue, or the issue is not resolved within the day. The customer has to call back and explain the problem all over again. Either way, it is an extremely frustrating situation for the customer and inefficient use of everyone’s time.

To avoid this problem, you can utilize a help desk ticketing system, which essentially saves the details about the issue so that every representative involved can stay in the loop and the customer can easily see the progress of their ticket in real-time.

Maintaining great customer service is a never-ending process. But with these digital tools and systems in place, making sure that every customer receives high-quality and consistent service. The experience becomes much easier, faster, and more cost-effective than ever before for the customer.