Customer experience is always crucial for successive business growth. Just imagine you are running a business and entirely depending on your customer but aren’t aware enough about your customer service as well as customer experience! Is this the right way? Of course not. Then what is it?
Well, in this we will discuss how to ensure better customer experience through effective customer experience software and other related parameters like How important is the customer experience? How to improve the customer experience? And so on.
Let’s enjoy the piece.
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What is customer experience?
Customer experience can sound simple but it can be as deep as it goes. You will also be able to find a whole Wikipedia page on it, no kidding! But simply put, customer experience or CX is the interaction and experience of your customers throughout their customer journey with your business. It can stretch from the first contact to becoming a happy loyal advocate.
The experience of your customer totally depends on you and your customer service. Just like any other relations, if you give both time and effort you will be able to gain some really loyal customers. But, if you ignore them or treat them poorly, they will not think twice to turn their back on you and start doing business with your competitors, which is obviously not profitable.
How important is the customer experience?
Customers can be an important asset to all businesses. In the best-case scenario, they can be very loyal towards your brand while ignoring your competitors and also be a great advocate spreading words of your great service to everyone. But the truth be told, not all companies can provide “Good” or “Excellent” customer service.
According to the study of the Temkin Group, the statistics of customer experience rating scoring “Good” or “Excellent” is going down each year, which is obviously not a good thing. The expectations of the customers are getting so high day by day that even the top companies are struggling to cope up with it.
No matter how “Good” or “Bad” the customer experience rating of your company is, you can always improve it.
How to improve the customer experience?
Just like we said, no matter what the rating is of your company’s customer experience, it can be improved! But for this improvement to happen you obviously have to come up with a good strategy which will satisfy not all but most of your customers. Including live chat software into the strategy from the beginning can be quite a good start.
For starters, keep your strategy simple, and as time passes start to improvise it by adding things to it.
1. Automated Response
Not every issue is critical or important, some do not even need your customer service agent to solve it. For those kinds of “Not So Important” queries, the automated response can be the best solution. If your agents start to take all these calls on “Not So Important” queries, meanwhile someone with a serious problem might be waiting for a response.
2. Save Time of Your Customers
Time is a valuable thing for all of us, your customers are no exception. In the age of the internet and social media, some customers just like to get in touch through text messages on various social media platforms.
If they can reach your brand through social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, then it definitely boosts your impression. Also by doing this you will also not force your customers to do what they are not comfortable with.
3. Assemble a team of experts
Not everyone is capable of talking with a customer. The person talking with the customer needs to be confident and obviously know what to say and do in certain situations. If you already have a group of employees for communicating with your customer then make sure they have good customer service skills. Which includes empathy, listening, communication, and language skills, as well as company expertise.
4. Train Your Agents Well Enough
A well-trained customer service agent will never fail to impress the customers while setting an excellent impression of your brand. But no matter how well you train them they will get stuck, and in order to relieve them of such embarrassment, you can also create a help document for them.
It can come in really handy for your agents and also allow them to answer the questions of customers more quickly. This will definitely increase the rate of customer satisfaction along with trust and loyalty.
5. Having a perfect software
Talking about a customer experience solution, the first and most important thing that comes to mind is the customer experience platform. There is a lot of good or best customer experience software out there, offering a variety of features that can be very overwhelming by just simply going through it all.
Don’t worry, as you won’t have to do that extra work of finding great software as we will be recommending you a perfect software for your business later on.
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The Best Customer Experience Software
The features of the best customer service software that are actually useful to you are going to depend on your business perspective. If you are a one-man company or a startup with one or two people along with a base of customers that is in the single digits then an email may do just fine. But the moment things start to get bigger, it also starts to get complicated.
Finding quality customer service software for small businesses with the perfect features requires a good amount of time and money as an investment. This also varies upon the factors such as company values, the number of funds you can spare, most importantly customer base and their expectations, and last but not least your company’s manpower.
As we all may have known, the customer plays an important role, the features of the customer service software must come in handy while communicating with your customers as well as you feeling hassle-free. It’s not that bad only focusing on customer satisfaction while choosing the best-featured software.
There are a lot of software with various features out there, but are they all important and useful? Just to answer this very question we have researched and gathered some important pieces of information about the best customer service software.
But before digging in, let us discuss What Makes a Good Customer experience Software? Well, the truth be told, it depends on the type of business you have and the type of customers you are targeting. There is a lot of software with a bunch of features that might not benefit you, while software with fewer features might come in handy.
But, you can always find out what type of software you need for your business if you look through some simple things.
Easy to use
Make sure that the software you want to set up is easy to use for everyone. The software obviously has to be smart, efficient and intuitive so that it can really help you thrive in your business. While you are at it, also make sure that the software is modern-looking and enjoyable from both your customer’s side and your agent’s side, which will obviously make daily workflow more smooth and easy.
Effectiveness
See how smartly the software can handle and solve a problem and how effective its features while handling this certain task. Also, test if the software is a self-efficient tool or does it require other software to make it incredible. You can also go through its integrations as those extra add-ons can sometimes come in handy.
Value For Money
No matter what good or handy features the software might offer you, it is very important to determine whether it is worth the money you are paying or not. Make sure that it is really a thing of your need, not just a luxury item that you will show off. Will the software actually be beneficial for your customer and your customer service agents?
Now, which one is the best customer experience software then? Let’s see
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk is a simple, affordable help desk software for exemplary customer service. It is the best solution for you if you are a Bootstrap SAAS startup, have a WordPress theme or plugin business, and eCommerce business. You can easily track conversations and improve responsiveness with easy-to-use, built-in functionalities like shared inbox, CRM, Live chat, Reporting, Knowledge base, and a lot more integration.
ThriveDesk is so easy to use and understand that anyone in your company can become a support-pro quickly and without difficulty. The team can collaborate and provide support efficiently with canned replies, auto drafting, collision detection, tagging, and much more. As of now, ThriveDesk is the best Zendesk alternative in the market you can count on.
Features
- Shared Inbox: Help your team collaborate better with a shared inbox. No more forwarding, CC-ing or following up on emails
- SaaS Solution: Complete solution for bootstrap SaaS startup.
- CRM: CRM that provides a 360º view of all your customer data in one place.
- Live Chat: Provide instant support to real-time visitors with the Live-chat Assistant.
- Knowledge Base: A knowledge base that serves as a data repository can be readily referenced at any point in time.
- Email Signature: Set up rich-text-friendly signatures that your whole team can use.
- Multiple Workspaces: You can use separate workspaces for multiple brand and switch between them easily.
- Offline Messaging: Offline messages are created as tickets that can be addressed when the team is available.
- Help Desk Ticketing System: Collaborate on tickets privately in real time and provide a smooth, seamless experience for your customer.
- WordPress Integration: ThriveDesk is the most versatile startup help desk plugin for WordPress.
- Automated Replies From The Knowledgebase: Save time by providing your customer with pre-populated replies for specific questions.
- Chat Bot: Cut operational costs and be available for your customers 24/7.
- Proactive Messaging: Send notifications, updates, and other personalized messages to keep customers engaged.
- Conversations Reporting: Understand your team’s bandwidth and the biggest issues faced by your customers with Conversations Reporting.
- Communities: Community space for creators, influencers & businesses.
- Reporting: ThriveDesk’s Reporting tool helps you make data-driven decisions to support and delight your customers.
- Integrations: Powerful alone, but better together with more integration.
Pricing
- Basic: $15 per month up to 2 user
- Standard: $39 per month up to 5 user
- Plus: $99 per month up to 10 user
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Conclusion
Managing a business and maintaining a good customer experience rating can be quite a tough job to do if you consider not getting any professional help. And by professional help, we obviously mean customer service software. These softwares are built for only one purpose, that is to help you thrive in your business.
Like we have said even the big companies can not provide “Good” or “Excellent” customer service, it is better not to worry about it and just keep on working on it. We have included all the tips and tricks so that you can raise your customer experience rating in no time.
And obviously, it is not a bad decision to get software for your customer service. Our recommended software, ThriveDesk can be an incredible addition to your company as a great helping hand. It has all the important features that will leave your customers satisfied as you thrive on the other side. So at the very end of the day, when you will receive a good rating of your company’s customer experience, you will definitely feel warm and cozy inside.
