Excellent customer service can differentiate between a good business and a great one. One of the most important things your company can provide is a positive experience for its prospects and clients. The way a contact interacts with your company can impact whether or not they buy your products or use your services. Companies lose approximately $75 billion per year as a result of poor customer experience issues.
One of the most important criteria in creating a fantastic customer experience is responsive and dependable communication. However, detailed and personalized communication can be costly and time-consuming.
Indeed, most mid-sized businesses lack the resources to create each individual client communication or respond to each inquiry manually. This is where automation can help.
There are numerous options for automating many of your external communications, whether your clients prefer to communicate with your company via text message, email, or another tool.
Determine Communication Points
A company may want to communicate with a client for a variety of reasons, including responding to inquiries, sending appointment reminders, welcoming a new client, sending order notifications, and managing invoices.
The first step is to determine what type of information your company most frequently communicates, which platforms should be used to send this information, and how these platforms can be automated.
For example, a restaurant chain that provides delivery may wish to send automated text messages when an order is received and when it is ready for delivery. When payment is received, an online retailer may want to send an email or text message.
It is critical to assess your company’s offerings, identify customer touch points, and identify the best opportunities to “set it and forget it.”
Set up triggered Based Messages
Automated communications aren’t just sent out of nowhere; there must be an action that initiates the communication. Triggers can result in one-time communications, an onboarding series, or a special offer with the goal of increasing re-engagement.
- One-time Communication – A retailer sending a message (email or text) to confirm receipt of an online order and a delivery timeline or a hospital sending automated text reminders 24 hours before a previously scheduled appointment are two examples of one-time-only triggers in action.
- Onboarding Series – An onboarding series is designed to educate customers about your product or service while also encouraging deeper engagement. It frequently begins with a welcome message inviting you to create an online account, order a product, request information, or subscribe to an email or text notification list.
- Re-engagement – Automated re-engagement communications have the greatest variety of potential triggers. These communications could be sent: On a subscriber’s birthday, a subscriber who has not opened an email or a text message for a long period of time, a subscriber who has abandoned an online cart or stopped using your service, to a subscriber who has who RSVP’ed for an event.
Choose and Integrate the Right Tools to Drive Customer Engagement
Customers are constantly switching back and forth between online and offline channels, and they expect companies to take a personalized approach throughout the entire omnichannel journey. However, keeping track of multiple channels and ensuring they work seamlessly together can be difficult. The ability to connect your internal tools and platforms to understand what data to use and when to trigger appropriate communications is essential.
This necessitates the integration of as many platforms as possible.
Process automation platforms enable your company to connect multiple business apps, reduce manual tasks, and improve internal efficiencies.
TWILIO SMS Integration
In today’s world, one channel is never enough to capture the attention of a client. That’s why we wanted to help business owners out there in automating their customer service. This will give customers satisfaction and perception and make them feel like they are being “taken care of.”
Due to a variety of factors, human service agents are unable to work while remaining accurate and dependable at all times. Artificial intelligence-based technology, on the other hand, helps to reduce or eliminate the possibility of making mistakes. Service automation is convenient and is quickly becoming an important aspect of providing high-quality service to customers without the need for large crews.
We highly recommend using Twilio SMS Integration. Twilio allows making and receiving phone calls and also sending and receiving text messages using its APIs. Programmers can implement Twilio APIs in their code and create all sorts of applications involving phone calls and SMS. Its services are available via HTTP and are billed on a per-use basis. It is simple to incorporate into our application for the creation of features such as SMS authentication, OTP, SMS marketing, and more..
Finding the best tools for your company will necessitate some research and investigation, which may include establishing a trial or proof of concept to ensure you’re on the right track. It is critical to ensure that your company can integrate everything you require into a single platform for ease of use.
1. Use AI & Chatbots to Save Time and Money
While many electronic communications appear to be one-sided, chatbots allow for two-way conversations in real-time.
Artificial intelligence is used by chatbots to understand customer requests and respond to relevant information. Bots can handle more than three-quarters of customer interactions, including answering frequently asked questions automatically.
Most bots are currently programmed by humans to follow a set of rules — such as triggers — and arrive at the correct answer to an inquiry. Using this artificial intelligence capability as part of an Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) platform will allow your company to communicate with its clients more efficiently and effectively.
2. Monitor Effectiveness and Refine Your Plan Accordingly
So, how do you know if your automated process is functioning properly? Analytical tools can help you monitor your performance and find the answer.
Automated process intelligence dashboards track campaigns and measure progress against key performance indicators (KPIs) while also allowing you to set and track metrics in one place.
It is important to note that metrics should be tailored to individual channels.
Some of the most important metrics to consider for email and text messages are open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, and abuse reports. Tracking key conversion events will help you understand which channels and messages are ultimately driving the desired outcomes as you gain more intelligence on your initial metrics.
Benefits of Automated SMS
- Efficient Communication – Normally, customer service agents can handle multiple live chat sessions at the same time, but as new sessions arrive, the quality of the chat suffers. It will also take them longer to complete all of them. That is not what customers expect or desire. A well-implemented automated live chat system can handle hundreds of sessions at once.
- Improvement with Time – When automated customer service tools are installed and activated, the algorithms improve over time as they learn about the processes they handle. After a while, it learns and recognizes patterns, as well as critical situations, and gains the ability to deal with them.
- Proactive Support – According to a recent study, roughly 80% of your customers expect you to already know their contact and product information. You can learn about their problems before they even know they have them, thanks to automated customer service. Artificial intelligence-based support tools enable service agents to scan and monitor an infinite number of customer interaction streams on the website in real-time. It then offers them assistance without waiting for them to arrive. This type of proactive support ensures that your customers are satisfied.
- Reduced Cost – An automated customer service system not only saves time but also saves money on the support system. It saves you money in more ways than one because you won’t have to:
- Give salaries to the support crew.
- Spend money on hiring a support crew.
- Give salaries to the support crew.
- Buy equipment for the support crew.
- Invest in training the support crew
When it comes to saving money, time, and increasing support efficiency, automated customer services are extremely beneficial. However, if you want to build a great customer support system, you should not leave everything to the machine. They necessitate ongoing improvement, upgrades, and control checks. Real people are required for this. Automation can produce amazing results, but it must be done correctly.
Most individual platforms have their own analytics system, but CRMs and customer engagement platforms that automatically pull data from other analytics sources can provide a higher-level overview as well.
Overall, automating certain parts of your client communications plan enables your business to focus time, energy, and resources on developing better products or services and cultivating a stronger relationship with your customers.
Are you interested in learning more about automating your customer communications programs with MaddLogic? Contact us today!