Chapter 3: How You Drive Customer Engagement for Service
SVP, Product Marketing, Service Cloud
In any time of uncertainty, customers want human connection — especially during a health crisis. Seventy percent of consumers say that the organisations that showed care and empathy during the pandemic earned their loyalty.
As your business stabilises, how do you ensure that your service team continues to create meaningful connections with customers? How do you make every interaction feel personalised and unique to them? Discover the different ways to engage customers and meet new expectations for customer support.
Global Product Growth and Innovation Evangelist, GetFeedback
Connect technology, teams, and data to get a 360-degree view. Marketing, commerce, sales, and service teams work together from a single platform with a complete view of the customer. This helps your team stay agile and deliver more personalised experiences. For example, if a high-value customer reaches out, agents already know about an existing deal. They can handle the issue with care and alert the right team for additional support.
For field service providers, a single view brings together customer information, asset management, maintenance plans, equipment lifespans, and warranty coverage. Agents contact customers prior to milestones to schedule maintenance or order replacement parts for proactive service.
Team Lead for Customer Success, connectRN
The top reasons customers contacted companies during the pandemic were to check or confirm operating hours, make a purchase, or verify account information. Provide consistent support across social, email, chat, and mobile, including WhatsApp, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. From a single screen, agents monitor these channels and respond quickly to questions and concerns as they happen.
Use chatbots to extend service by helping customers with common questions, such as order status, while freeing up agents to focus on more complex cases. You can enhance your chatbot to handle transactional requests like refunds, too. As you program your chatbot, ensure that the welcome message indicates that customers are interacting with a bot and not a human. If a case requires live agent support, have bots collect case details for handoff in the same chat message.
Analytics Manager, Aegon
As contact volumes fluctuate, self-service is an invaluable tool to deflect cases and get customers the answers they need right away. Update your self-service channels in these ways:
- Channel menu: Use a simple widget or code snippet to integrate a fixed channel menu on your help centre or website. Show available support channels to customers or direct them to a web-to-case input form, a community, or a knowledge base.
- Help centre: Analyze frequently asked questions across channels to create help centre content. Update your help centre to include a dedicated section with regular updates on your company’s response to the crisis.
- Knowledge articles: As processes change, knowledge articles keep customers up to date. Optimise content for SEO. Pair chatbots with your knowledge base for an even better self-service experience. Subscription meal delivery service Sun Basket is combining automation and self-service to help customers quickly and manage high support volumes.
Communities and portals: Quickly launch a community or portal with declarative builders and out-of-the-box templates. Include knowledge articles and access to important information for customers to get answers quickly. Field service providers can also enable customers to make and change appointments. This reduces call volume and is convenient for customers.
If a customer requires additional support, set up omni-channel routing to classify and push cases to the right agent based on skill set, availability, and workload.
Implement intelligent workflows on your help centre or portal to guide customers through step-by-step processes. This may include initiating a return or reporting a stolen or lost credit card.
For field service customers, respect social distancing by offering to transition to a video chat with a dispatcher, agent, or mobile worker. They can walk customers through simple processes and troubleshoot remotely. Then, follow up with additional instructions and request feedback to improve virtual support.
Chapters
How CEOs Are Leading Companies In Times Of Uncertainty
SVP, Product Marketing, Service Cloud
He’s an experienced Vice President of Product Marketing with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry.
More Resources
