4 Types of Apps That Can Improve the Customer Experience
With Black Friday and the holiday shopping season around the corner, consumer-focused businesses can look forward to increased sales and boosted website traffic, as people scan the web for the best deals and great gifts to purchase for their loved ones (and maybe themselves!)
At the same time, though, all this increased traffic means you’ll have to interact with more customers than usual. Providing a great experience is paramount; not only to generate sales, but to turn a one-off buyer into a repeat customer. Better still, research shows that three-quarters of consumers are willing to spend more with a brand that offers a great customer experience.
The question, of course, is how to excel in delivering a great customer experience while also navigating more orders and queries during the holiday season. The answer? Technology. Below, we’ll explore four amazing application types that can help you improve the customer experience during the holiday season and all year round!
Offer Customers 24/7 Support With A Live Chat App
As a consumer yourself, you’re probably familiar with live chat applications. These applications appear as little windows in the corner of your website or mobile application. They make use of automation, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to present your customers with a robot customer assistant, who can help them with simple queries should they have any.
Because the customer assistant is digital, it can be available 24/7, which is great for helping out late night shoppers or customers in another country. A lot of these apps have great customization capabilities, too. You can decide on the tone of voice, the questions the bot can help with and much more.
Moreover, for any questions that the bot can’t answer, you can program the live chat app to either transfer the customer to a real customer service representative, or take down their contact details for someone in your business to get back to them later.
Harness The Power Of Mobile Marketing
Want to let your customers know about the latest deals you’ve got on? Or maybe you’d like to get some reviews for your TrustPilot page? A great way to do this is through automated mobile marketing applications.
These apps enable you to reach your customers through SMS texts. You can send texts for a range of things: letting customers know about promotions, sharing discount codes, asking for reviews or even a new product launch.
Remember, of course, that under data protection laws, you’ll need to make sure your customers have actively subscribed to receive text messages from your business. Otherwise, you could end up in the firing line for abusing their personal data.
However, for any customers that have opted-in to receive marketing materials from you, text messages are a fun, quick way to drum up engagement. Plus, many of the apps out there are super intuitive and easy to use, enabling you to create campaigns months into the future and automate the entire texting process.
Make Use Of Customer Relationship Management Software
Client relationship management software aims to simplify the process of attaining and retaining customers, offering features that enhance customer support, sales and engagement. The best-in-breed of these tools help you segment your customers based on various factors, so you can create detailed customer profiles and better target different audiences.
Be Savvy With Knowledge Bases
A knowledge base is an easy-to-use repository of FAQs that customers can navigate to find information they need about your products and solutions. Don’t worry about having to fill out loads of answers to proposed questions. Great knowledge base application uses artificial intelligence to automatically populate your FAQs and keep them up to date.
Knowledge bases are great for customers that want to purchase from your business online, without any human interaction. You might be surprised to find that almost 9 in 10 customers want to be able to find answers online without interacting with a person from the business.
Wrapping up
Superior customer service is a competitive differentiator in today’s world. It’s vital to leapfrogging competitors, attracting new customers and maintaining old ones.
To grow your business to new heights, you must combine personalized, human services with next-generation applications that can deliver fantastic customer service at speed and scale.
Whether your customers want to speak to a chat bot, browse a knowledge base or interact with you over text, the more options you have, the better. This is how you’ll appeal to the majority of the market.
Of course, knowing you need customer experience applications and deploying them successfully are two very different things. For small and medium-sized businesses without an IT team, or who only have a couple of members of staff, looking to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) is the best way to unleash the power of customer experience applications in your organization.
That’s where we come in. Contact us at Unbound Digital for help with supercharging the online customer experience.