RESOURCE CENTER

5 Steps to Find the Best Service Channels for Your Company

Perform a customer support channel audit, identify top use cases, and deploy your plan.

March 2022 | 7 minutes

More than any other consumer touchpoint, great customer service has the power to delight.

In fact, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services, according to the State of the Connected Customer report. With every connection to your customer service department being an opportunity to build brand loyalty, it’s easy to assume that adding more service channels or becoming omni-channel would be the perfect support strategy. The solution is a little more complicated.

Before your service team can start deploying new digital channels, it’s critical that everyone fully understands where customers engage with your business, across all channels and devices. Different companies attract a wide range of customers with a wide array of preferences. Some like to tweet from their phone, others like to email from their laptop. Choosing the right customer contact channels requires knowing which channels are best for your customer and then prioritizing.

Understand which service channels are best for your business.

Here’s a five-step plan to help you determine the best approach. A how-to worksheet is included below, so you can start to identify what’s missing and then begin to build a better customer experience.

Astro, a Salesforce character, looks through a magnifying glass and sees a satisfied customer getting customer service on their phone.

Step 1: Identify where your customers currently engage with your company.

At the beginning of the process, it’s all about collecting data. Start with a solid understanding of your traffic across desktop, mobile, and social — where traffic is coming and where people are dropping off. To do this, you’ll have to gather all of your digital channel analytics, engagement, and search terms.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget about common misspellings of your company’s name when gathering search and social data. You might uncover additional data about traffic sources you might miss otherwise.

Diving deep into your analytics is not only looking at your traffic, but uncovering how people engage with your content. Take stock of the pages people visit the most across your website, and what type of content is frequently shared. This will give you a baseline for what resonates with your audience.

On the flip side, evaluate the pages where people bounce or drop off the most. Why are they bouncing? Look at ways you can add some type of real-time support, like live chat, to allow customers to get support when they need it but that will allow your business to slowly introduce new channels to customers, preventing a large uptick of support cases.

For engagement levels, collaborate with your social team to understand how customers are trying to reach out for help. Does your service team have any insight into these engagements? Social media provides a wealth of information about customer preferences both across platforms and within them. For example, many companies have more than one handle on Twitter, but each handle may have different levels of engagement or reasons why customers interact with that channel. Be sure you understand where your customers are asking for help versus where they just want to share information about your brand.

Pro Tip: Understanding which channels customers engage with the most will help you prioritize where to increase agent productivity with chatbots later.

A Salesforce customer views the digital engagement dashboard showing work volume and messaging sessions by customer service channel.

Step 2: Compare your customer service channels with how people engage with your brand.

Explore the analytics and determine where your traffic is coming from — and whether or not your company has the right presence in these digital spaces. Do your traffic sources match up with the channels you provide with customer service? For example, if most of your traffic is on your mobile app, can customers easily chat with a live agent for support directly in the app? If most of your traffic comes from a mobile website, do you offer a seamless way for customers to connect with you through SMS or a messaging app, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp, or WeChat?

When considering your traffic, identify the percentages coming from the following places:

Desktop: website, secure login portal
Mobile: mobile app, mobile web
Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and so on

By collecting and analyzing your traffic data, you can prioritize channels based on what your customers need.

A service agent engages with customers on their preferred service channel, whether phone, chat, messaging app, or social media.

Step 3: Perform a customer service channel audit.

Now that you know where your customers are asking for help and how they’re coming to your offerings, it’s time to audit your customer service channels. Download the free checklist below to help identify any gaps in your service.

Print or share the accessible PDF below, and go through it with your team. Then come back for Step 4.

Customer Service Channel Checklist

DOWNLOAD FREE CHECKLIST

Step 4: Prioritize your customer service channel deployments.

Now that you’ve reviewed the data you’ve collected, you have a clear idea of how and where your customers already interact with your company. You also know which channels and features you’re missing. Now it’s time to prioritize next steps based on your findings.

Start with self-service.

If you don’t have a self-service portal or knowledge base, self-service is a great place to start. Give customers the ability to easily find what they need on their own. It’s a good way to meet expectations while freeing up agents to work on more complex issues. Once you have your knowledge base set up and have turned on the search feature, you can look at the data to see what customers are searching for the most. It’s the kind of information that provides a solid and highly relevant foundation for the deployment of additional channels later on.

Pro Tip: Once you have your library of knowledge articles live, use AI to surface the most relevant articles for customers to help reduce calls to the contact center.

Compare traffic data.

After you’ve set up your self-service options, the next steps largely depend on the analysis you’ve done. If you’ve found that the majority of traffic comes through your desktop website, deploy web chat first. If, however, you’ve discovered that the majority of your traffic comes from your mobile application, deploy your in-app live chat first. If you get a lot of traffic from social, connect your CRM to the social media platform with the most traffic first. Each company’s situation is different, but the information you mapped out in Step 3 will provide guidance to set priorities.

Satisfied customers review their account details on a laptop as a chatbot offers help with orders, password, or to connect to an agent.

Step 5: Identify top use cases and add automation with chatbots.

Once you have your top digital channels built out, make the most of those channels by deploying chatbots to assist with customer service. To do that, you’ll need to define the top use cases across channels.

Identify most frequently asked questions by seeing what questions are submitted most via chat, SMS, or messaging apps, or which FAQ pages are visited the most. You can also ask your managers to send a simple survey to your agents to understand what issues they’re most frequently solving.

You’ll often find that simple issues, like delivery status, password reset, or address updates, are easy to have a chatbot answer. Based on the work you’ve done in the previous steps, you’ll be able to identify which channels these top use cases are coming from most often so you’ll know where to start deploying chatbots first.

Next you’ll need to determine exactly how you want your chatbot to assist with the most common issues. There are four main ways chatbots can be programmed to engage with your customers. With chatbots you can:

Greet your customers with personalized messaging
Collect information upfront to help your agents assist the customer
Automatically answer common questions by accessing existing knowledge articles
Handle the case in full without transferring to an agent by following an automated process

Determining which approach to take with chatbots depends on the nature of the frequently asked questions and the level of comfort your organization has with chatbots.

Pro Tip: Start simple by deploying chatbots on one channel first. That way you can get used to how things work and resolve any kinks before deploying to all channels — especially if you are using chatbots to hand off conversations to a live agent.

Over time, your agents will start to see how much easier their jobs become when they have help from chatbots. Once this level of comfort is established, the process to deploy chatbots and train agents to work with them smooths out.

Give your agents a 360-degree view of the customer.

When you start thinking about deploying more digital customer service channels, it’s important to remember one key thing: Your agents should have a complete view of the customer on a single console, no matter what channel the customer is using.

For example, if customers most often comment on your company’s Facebook page, your social media manager may be the only one who sees their comments. And if the agent has no way of seeing these comments, it can lead to dissatisfying situations where customers are repeating themselves. Having a 360-degree view of the customer allows agents to have a better understanding of the customer’s history so they’re able to resolve cases more efficiently.

Once you’ve been through this channel check exercise, you’ll know with certainty where your customers are engaging with your company online. You won’t have to guess which channels you should deploy, because you’ll have data to back up your decisions. From here on out, you’ll be confident that your contact center has all the right channels.