How Can I Use Technology to Keep My Customers Happy?

How you treat your customers has a direct correlation to your bottom line. Happy customers mean more sales, long-term relationships, and referrals.

Customers are expecting more these days in the way of anticipating their needs and getting fast and easily available support. Those that don’t get the service they expect may end up going elsewhere.

But let’s let the statistics speak for themselves:

• 52% of customers have made a repeat purchase with a company due to a positive customer service experience.
• 67% of consumers say they’ll pay more for a great experience with a company.
• Increasing customer retention by 5% correlates to a 25% or more increase in profits.
• Customers that have a positive company experience are 5x more likely to recommend the company to their friends/family.

Keeping your customers happy doesn’t have to put a dent in your bottom line. Smart use of IT solutions can help you affordably improve customer response time, give customers more support options, and anticipate their needs.

Improve Customer Experience with the Right Technology

The customer experience is about ensuring they feel supported throughout their entire buying journey. This includes:

• When they are initially researching a product/service
• When they ask questions to inform a buying decision
• The sales/checkout process
• Shipping communications and timing
• Quality and helpfulness of the product or service
• Follow up communications
• Ongoing account nurturing

You don’t need an army of customer concierges to ensure your customers have white-glove treatment throughout their journey. Using technology allows you to keep them happy for little cost, which helps you improve your repeat sales and referral business.

Here are some smart IT-driven (and affordable) customer support strategies.

Add a Live Chat to Your Website

Customers today expect an almost immediate response when they inquire. If they send a message through your webform and don’t hear back in an hour or so, they could be off to a competitor’s site.

A way to give them that fast response is to add a live chat to your website. Many programs offer free trials and they are an inexpensive way to offer real-time support.

The ability to instantly get a response when they need it keeps customers happy, and it shows in consumer satisfaction levels for different types of support:

• 73% satisfaction level for live chat
• 61% satisfaction level for email
• 44% satisfaction level for phone

Chat technology has a sound notification, so employees can be doing other things in between visitors. Automated chatbots can also be added to answer common questions, then route to a live person for anything not pre-programmed.

Send Customers Targeted Information

No one likes to receive irrelevant information. If you’re a paint company that works with both industrial and residential clients and you send your industrial clients an email about home cleanup tips, they’re most likely going to delete it, be annoyed, and possibly unsubscribe to your emails.

You can avoid overwhelming your customers with information they don’t care about by sending them targeted and helpful content. By using tags in an email program like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you can match customers with the right information. Not only is this a free to low cost way to “give your team more hands”, but you will also see a 152% higher clickthrough rate, because your message is tailored to the recipient.

To set this up:

• Use a tagging system on your customer signup form (i.e. industry type)
• Create different email campaigns for each tag
• Dig deeper by automating the email sent by the action taken on your site or on the last email

Make It Easy for Customers to Reach You

The lockdowns during the pandemic have made communicating with each other more difficult in many cases, but it doesn’t have to be.

How would your customers feel if you gave them a dedicated chat channel where they could message, call, or video chat with your company if they needed anything? And it could be done from any device (mobile or desktop).

It could be that extra-special treatment that keeps them loyal for years to come.

Doing this using a tool like Teams or Slack doesn’t have to cost you anything other than a little time to set it up. Both platforms allow you to invite guest users to a specific channel.

You could use this with a large client as a way to give their employees personalized access to product support. You could also use it with subcontractors and clients who are all coordinating on a project with you to give them a way to efficiently share real-time information.

Use a Cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform to Facilitate Customer Response Times

Some small businesses rely on email to communicate with customers. But what can happen is that customer requests get lost as different employees handle various requests. Customers can also be left waiting for an answer to a question if they’ve emailed someone that’s out sick that day and no one else realizes it.

Cloud CRM platforms consolidate all customer support tickets, incoming communications, and account information in a single place. This means that anyone on the designated support team can be alerted when a customer emails or calls in and the customer can get a quicker response.

Additionally, all customer information and account history is stored in a single place, not spread out over individual devices. This can significantly improve your customer response time and ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Looking for Affordable & Effective Cloud Customer Support Tools?

Cleartech Group helps businesses get the most out of the Cloud for less. We can look at your customer journey and make recommendations where you can improve satisfaction and retention using the right technology tools.

Contact us today at 978-466-1938 or reach out online.