Many customer service departments face challenges in keeping pace with the many email and chat inquiries they receive on a daily basis.
Currently, customer service departments handle inquiries in the order they are received. This means that some customers end up waiting days or weeks to get a reply to a question that may not be relevant anymore.
But when you group inquiries based on urgency, you can prioritize inquiries from frustrated customers or those who need quick responses.
This prioritization reduces waiting time, lowers the risk of worsening critical issues, and makes it easier to turn bad experiences into good ones.
While some generic questions can wait, requests from customers who need to cancel or reschedule their appointments are often urgent. If no one from your department respond to such a conversation before the date of the appointment, you risk losing money and wasting valuable resources.
Generally, templates work well for responding to simple customer inquiries in a quick and efficient way. But building and maintaining them can be both costly and time-consuming.
Once your department has decided to develop a set of templates, it is a good idea to periodically review when and how often these templates are used, and how effective they are at resolving the customer's issue.
This approach makes it easier for you to create even more efficient templates and discard those that are rarely used or prove to be inadequate.
While templates serve as a first line of response to customer inquiries, there are instances where they fall short, and the intervention of human agents is necessary for a more nuanced resolution.
But even though this may heighten the inquiry handling time, text analytics can help provide an overview of why some conversations are longer than others. For instance, there is a significant difference between long conversations due to complex queries, lack of employee knowledge, customer frustration, or something entirely different.
Once you have identified the root causes to longer conversations, you can proactively coach your employees or refine your approach to handling them in the right way.
Ultimately, this approach will enhance both customer and employee experiences.
There are times where customer service departments receive the same questions from customers. For instance, there might be periods during which many customers reach out about missing order confirmations or specific product-related questions.
In many cases, it pays off not only to be reactive through your support but also to be proactive by sharing this information with other departments.
This proactive process allows the other departments to tackle issues effectively by writing better self-service articles, optimizing your company’s billing procedures, or improving your order confirmation steps.
As a result, your company can effectively address customer concerns before they make a call. And ultimately, this can lead to increased customer satisfaction, a reduced number of inquiries, and an improved self-service experience.
Data itself is not very valuable if you do not know how to use it in the right way.
By linking conversational AI to your inquiries via email, text, chatbot, or online banking systems, you can quickly gain insights into which processes make sense to automate. The automation decision depends on several factors such as your company size, area of expertise, and current processes.
Conversational AI technology is an excellent tool for enhancing both quality and efficiency across your conversations. This is because it can collect, quantify, and analyze large amounts of data, and it can enlighten you on where to invest your time, money, and resources to get the best output.
There are several considerations worth taking into account before you start working with text analytics.
Generally, when implementing behavioral changes, it is important to focus your efforts on individual use cases one at a time. This approach helps you gradually build habits and behaviors, which lays the foundation for creating even better experiences.
Are you curious about how you can gain even more value from your customer conversations via phone or email?
We are always ready to initiate more valuable discussions that can assist you in achieving your dreams and ambitions.
