Consider this from a customer perspective. It’s the difference between “They helped me” and “They cared about my needs.” Besides this nuance, serving customers includes selling, while customer care would ordinarily refer to helping people who have already bought your product. 

Benefits of Good Customer Care

Showing that you are not only ready to offer advice but are willing to care about people’s experiences with your business leaves customers feeling they’ve had a positive customer experience. They have greater confidence in your organisation and feel as if they have a personal relationship with it. 

This, in turn, means they will have greater brand loyalty. Why walk away from a company that has shown it cares about you in exchange for a competitor you do not know? Great customer care experiences keep people coming back for more. Respect engenders respect, and caring makes people more likely to reciprocate. This means:

• Improved customer lifetime value
• Enhanced business reputations
• More business from referrals
• Social proof in the form of positive reviews

It’s no secret that caring doesn’t just make customers feel good; it also helps your business succeed. As an added advantage, few businesses are walking the talk. They will all claim that they care, but the evidence to support this assertion is often lacking. This could be the key to outdoing your competitors. 

Customer Care Tips

Do Not Be Over-Reliant on AI

Too many businesses prioritise cost savings over real customer care. AI, they say, can handle your customers’ needs beautifully, but this rarely happens in practice. Replace people with automated systems at your peril. 

Automated answering services do not always understand voice prompts, and bots do not always have the answers people need. Even when AI somehow gets things right, nobody is going to credit it with genuinely caring, even if it has been programmed to say all the right things.  

Choose the Right People

Being able to speak to a person will boost your image in the eyes of most customers, but choosing the right people to field their calls will be important. They must:

• Be able to listen actively and respond appropriately
• Have emotional intelligence
• Have excellent product knowledge
• Know how your business operates
• Follow up on promises made

In short, the people you choose must be able to represent your business as well, or better, than you could if you answered every customer call yourself. They are not only customer care agents but also business ambassadors. 

Empower Your Agents

Caring means being responsive and solving problems quickly and decisively. Having nice people talking to customers on the phone isn’t enough. Allow them to initiate and track workflows. 

Be sure they know who to refer complex problems to and how long it will take to achieve outcomes. Keep them informed about company policy so that they know what they can and cannot do. 

Remember, when people call customer care, they are not talking to agents. They are talking to your company. Make sure your business is as ready to care as your agents are. There are companies that have wonderful customer care agents while still providing less-than-effective service. 

Whatever You Do, Don’t Leave Them on Hold

After talking to bots (53 percent of people admit to shouting at them), being left on hold is among customers’ pet hates. If you really want to grind those gears, add a recorded message saying, “Your call is important to us” or “We are experiencing high call volumes.”

True, there will be times when call volumes are higher than expected. For example, you may be experiencing downtime due to an IT glitch. The point is that your customers do not care about your problem. They want their issues addressed, and they don’t want to wait. 

To keep customers feeling cared for, you need a scalable solution. When call volumes spike, more operators come online. When it’s business as usual, you have enough people ready to help with no redundancy. 

Customer Care and Customer Service: Give Your Customers What They Want

Automated and self-service options offer savings, but they are a liability if they cause you to lose customers and damage your reputation. You certainly can implement customer service automation, but you can never automate real customer care. Allow your customers to remain in control. Make it easy to speak to a human whenever they need to. 

This can be incredibly difficult to do effectively in-house. Even the largest companies struggle to create and manage cost-effective yet service-efficient and caring customer support services. People must be recruited, trained, and managed. Technology helps with data gathering, performance management, and efficiency but proves costly. 

That’s why businesses turn to us when they want to show customers they care. RSVP offers scalable customer support services to businesses of every size. We boost sales and customer satisfaction and create experiences that tell your customers you really do value them. 

You want to offer the best to the people to take care of your company’s most important asset: your customers. We represent the gold standard in customer service and customer care outsourcing. Let’s join forces. Call us to find out more. 

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The post What is Customer Care, and How is It Different from Customer Service? appeared first on RSVP Call Centre.

What is Live Chat?

For chat to truly be “live,” it should connect customers to people: your customer service agents who are ready and waiting to give your customers speedy and efficient assistance. However, it’s important to note that live chat isn’t the same as interacting with a chatbot.

Bots can be helpful in guiding customers through routine interactions, but they aren’t really “live.” Owing to their many limitations, they shouldn’t be presented to customers as though they are anything other than bots, and there should always be an option that allows them to talk to a real person instead.

How Live Chat Works For You

Apart from offering your customers an easy way to get in touch, live chat can help you to gain valuable insights. Since the information is stored, it can be analysed, and that can teach you important things about your customers’ likes and dislikes, what they want from your business, and where they’re experiencing a degree of difficulty or confusion.

It may seem temptingly convenient to centralise customer interactions and use your live chat platform as the primary place where customers can contact your business. However, you should still allow your customers to choose how they prefer to interact. 

Here’s the good news: live chat needn’t be just another addition to the many channels your team has to monitor. It can make going omnichannel easier for you – especially when the software integrates with other communication channels, for example, social media platforms, email, and SMS.

Live Chat Features

Apart from having all the chat tools like file sharing, chat tags, notifications, and the ability to transfer chats when necessary, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of what may seem like a fairly simple feature. As we already mentioned, your live chat platform should be able to integrate other channels and it should offer you useful data analytics, but that’s not where it ends.

Some live chat software options offer the ability to switch between languages, and have accessibility features that help the visually impaired to listen instead of read. Want your live chat to be on-brand? Customisability makes it possible. 

As you can see, choosing a live chat product shouldn’t be done in haste. Check out what features are offered and compare your options, especially those all-important analytics features, before taking the plunge. 

Benefits of Live Chat For Business

You’ve probably spotted some of the benefits live chat can have for your business already. Let’s pick these out and add them to the list in the process. 

• Increased customer satisfaction
• An extra chance to influence customer decisions
• Fewer abandoned carts
• Higher conversion rate
• Lower bounce rates
• Better user experiences for website visitors
• A reputation for great customer service (when done well)
• Fresh insights about your customers from your customers
• Integration with automated systems like “canned” responses or bots save resources
• Potential to reduce customer service costs e.g.  by integrating other communication channels
• A tool for monitoring your support team’s key performance indicators, e.g. response times

Benefits of Live Chat For Customers

So, how do your customers feel about a well-executed live chat? It turns out it can leave them feeling very positive about their experience and your business. Here’s what they like.

• Near-instant responses to their questions
• Interpersonal interaction even when shopping remotely
• Ability to get insider help and expert opinions
• Able to communicate without moving to another platform/device
• Personalised service based on their individual customer profiles

Getting Live Chat Right: Best Practices

As you’ll have seen, there are many benefits to using live chat, but they only apply if you get it right. For example, have you ever tried a business’s live chat only to find that nobody is on duty? Did you really save your question for the next day or try talking to the bot? Most people won’t. 

This example brings us to our first best practice: live chat has to be “alive.” That means fast responses from human agents, ideally, around the clock. Sounds like a problem? We’ll talk about solutions soon. 

If you really don’t see your way clear to keeping live chat “live” all the time, make sure that you don’t just leave your customers hanging on for an agent that never appears. Offer them an alternative, even if it’s just an email address. Program your bot to respond to frequently-asked questions and direct customers to any resources they might find helpful. It’s not ideal, but it helps.

Your agents have to be pretty sharp too. That means that they must be well-trained, courteous, friendly, expressive, and able to type fast and accurately. You can script some common responses, but your agents need the skills to know when scripted responses are appropriate. And, even though your customers can’t hear their voices, they will soon pick up on “tone.” Positivity is a must. 

Apart from all this, your live chat customer service agents need to be able to give concise answers in straightforward language. After all, customers want advice that’s relevant, easy to understand and actionable. And, since they’re representing your brand and making sales, your live chat agents must have a high level of professionalism and a knack for salesmanship and service. 

Does best-practice live chat sound like an almost-impossible goal? It doesn’t have to be. Let’s take a look at solutions next. 

So, What’s The Solution to the Live Chat Dilemma?

Let’s first sum up why implementing live chat according to best practice could be challenging:

• Your customers expect it to work around the clock
• They want instant responses
• Customers want to talk to real people who give the right advice in the right way
• They hate talking to bots

You can see where this is going. Even supposing that you’re willing to have a live chat customer service team on standby around the clock, overcapacity is a waste while understaffing will mean long waits for your customers – if they’re willing to wait at all. Then there’s the training and management of your customer service team to consider, and the myriad of skills they must master in order to be effective. 

Should you just give up on benefitting from live chat customer service? The answer is a very definite “no.”

Imagine this scenario. You have a single touchpoint that grants you access to a flexible team of skilled customer service specialists. They already know your business well, and they have superb communication skills. The team scales up and down on auto based on how many people are needed at any given moment, and it’s definitely online around the clock. The work gets done well; your customers are happy; and you get valuable intel.

Realising all the benefits of live chat customer service is not an impossible dream, and turning it into reality is as simple as using RSVP’s live chat support services. Build great customer experiences with RSVP. Let’s talk about your live chat support needs today. 

The post What Is Live Chat and What Are Its Benefits? appeared first on RSVP Call Centre.

Even the biggest firms take advantage of the benefits of outsourcing. Human resources management, accounting, and marketing are common outsourced areas. But can you really outsource customer support in such a way that your clients feel nurtured? The answer is “yes,” but, as with any form of outsourcing, you do need to be very careful about who you contract to tackle the task. 

The Case for Outsourcing Customer Support Services

When you really care about your customers, you need to ensure that help is at hand around the clock. Call volumes, the number of emails, and direct messages via social media that require answers can vary. Ensure that everyone gets help fast, even at peak times, and you’re left with employees who don’t have enough work to do off-peak. Give them other work to do, and they lose their focus. 

But customer support staff volumes aren’t enough to get the job done well.  You need the right people to help your customers. Every detail must be perfect. Product knowledge, tone of voice, listening skills, and a genuine willingness to help will all contribute to your customers’ impression of your company and its service. If promises are made, they must be kept, and no matter who your customers speak to, agents must have access to software that tells them about every detail of the customer’s journey with your company so far. 

Your support agents must also communicate with you, especially if several customers seem to have similar issues with your product. After all, communication is a two-way street. And, with an in-house customer service department, you now have one more area to manage, supervise, and control. Apart from requiring you to invest resources, it takes a lot of your precious time.

All of these issues point towards outsourcing this area of your business to the right company. You’re looking for an agency with top-notch, highly motivated, and articulate staff who will speak to your customers just as if they were your employees. Make the right choice and you’ll simplify what can be an extremely complex area and delight your customers with the great service they’re receiving. 

Customer Support Outsourcing: What it Entails

Since you’re reading this, you’ve already taken the first step towards outsourcing customer support: you’ve identified a need, and you’re doing a little homework before taking the plunge.  

The next step is to look at companies offering customer support as a specialised field on its own.  Important questions to ask include: how long they’ve been in business, whether they can handle customer support across multiple channels, how they select and train agents, and how they plan to keep you in control. 

After all, your customers are the reason why your business exists, so you do want to keep tabs on things even though you’re outsourcing. A business that loses touch with its customers risks failure. You’re looking for better customer service, better communication and information-sharing, and greater efficiency than you already have in-house. 

The Gold Standard in Outsourcing Customer Support

At RSVP, we know that our customer support services are exceptional, so in this portion of the article, we’ll look at the reasons why we say so and how that benefits you. We believe that our methods place us head-and-shoulders above the competition, and that’s just what you want for your business too. 

Whether we’re looking at social media moderation, fielding calls, or responding to emails, our personnel are always on the job. As a result, your customers benefit from immediate attention on their preferred communications channels. Even more importantly, every contact is recorded using our advanced Customer Relationship Management software. That means our support agents never miss a beat when orchestrating a remarkable customer support experience – and the information is all there for you to see.  Leverage our analytics to find out what your customers are thinking and experiencing. It’s an opportunity that’s worth its weight in gold!

When operatives are assigned to your account, they receive training that makes their messages on-brand, and their information surgically targeted to solve customer issues efficiently. Most important of all, they’re able to convey the image you want for your business while being ready to connect with your customers by leveraging empathy and emotional intelligence. Every interaction will be one you can be proud of, and our goal is to ensure that every customer we help on your behalf walks away feeling like they’ve received superb service. We do the work. You get the credit. Your success is our success. 

How to Get Started With RSVP

It’s natural that you would like to get to know more about us before making a final decision to choose RSVP as your customer support solution. Contacting us is the next step to take. Once we’ve discussed your customer support needs, we’ll tailor a solution to fit you. Along the way, you’ll have plenty of time to see why we’re communications experts, and you’ll see why what you get from us is much more than just customer support. 

It’s your chance to get invaluable insights into how real customers experience your products while ensuring that each of them credits your company with VIP service. If you’re ready to ramp up your customer service levels with our outsourced customer service and support, it’s time for you to reach out to RSVP.

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The post Our Guide to Outsourcing Your Customer Support appeared first on RSVP Call Centre.

You probably have an off-the-cuff answer to the question “What is customer support?” But the answer might include some elements you hadn’t considered. So, before we look at outsourcing a function that many businesses see as a necessary evil, let’s look at what it is.

The Million Dollar Question: What is Customer Support?

Most of us will be aware of customer support as a service that helps clients to make the right choice of product, and assists with any difficulties clients might experience with buying or using it. But customer support continues to have a role throughout the time your customers use the product, up to and including disposing of it or discontinuing its use. Will they upgrade to a new iteration of your offering? Customer support plays a role here too.  

Your product or service solves a problem for consumers. Looking for an alternative solution takes time and effort. They’d far rather stick with you than start researching alternatives – provided you gave them the customer support they need. So, even when it comes to disposing of an item, they’re more likely to fulfil their need by upgrading to something new you can offer than they are to walk away. 

You’ve probably heard people say that they’re willing to absorb higher costs because of perceived quality and good service levels. Building and maintaining these perceptions requires a company to know what excellent customer support services are and offering them.

What About Chatbots?

Let’s not overlook automation. Chatbots and help menus can go a long way toward helping your clients find basic support solutions. But anyone who has navigated endless help menus, and has tried rephrasing questions so that bots can actually understand them, will know just how frustrating that can be. If you were to be asked what customer service support is, and the only answer you have is a bot, that’s not going to look good for you.

Don’t get us wrong. Bots can be useful. But if your customer wants to talk to a human being, there should be one available, and it shouldn’t be too hard to reach them. The human element puts your customer in the driver’s seat, right where they want to be. They want to phrase their questions as they please. They may even want a little sympathy, especially if they started with a bot before giving up in despair.

“We Don’t Have Time for This!” How to Outsource Customer Support

Your business started with a great idea. You won hearts and minds. But when it comes to customer support, you can’t be blamed if impatience sets in. Queries range from those requiring the most basic of answers including asking whether devices have been plugged in, for example, to the anomalies nobody’s quite sure how to deal with. But deal with them you must! 

That this diverts time and resources away from your core business is an obvious truth, but outsourcing customer support isn’t just a matter of finding someone to answer the phone or check emails. Choose the wrong people for the job, and your business’s image will suffer. 

Let’s face it: your customers want to feel special. Whether it’s fair or not, your entire company, up to and including the CEO will be judged on the strength of the person who dealt with customer support queries. At RSVP, we know just how important it is to create the impression our B2B clients want – and that means so much more than just picking up the phone. 

Steps for Outsourcing Customer Support

We’ve already ascertained that you don’t want just any Tom, Dick, or Harry representing your firm. We’ve touched on the limitations of Bobby the Bot. So, what steps should you follow when outsourcing customer support? 

Not to put too fine a point on it, you want a company that takes your business seriously. One that has your customers’ interests, and your interests, at heart. You need a company with highly-trained communicators who will talk to you as well as your customers. You need so much more than “someone to answer the phone.” 

That’s because you absolutely must know what your customers are saying, what problems they have, and what questions they raise. Meanwhile, your customers need to feel as well-nurtured as if they’d spoken to someone at management level: someone with both technical and people-oriented skills. There’s no denying that price-points matter, but you need to know that your money has been well spent. It’s a strategically important business decision. Here are five steps to follow in order to make it. 

1. Get in touch. Evaluate the service you received when you did this. 
2. Ask key questions. Will an outsourced customer service company offer 24/7 service? What languages can they support? How will they ensure that customers experience their service as “yours?”
3. Find out about other companies that use the service and contact them to discover whether they are satisfied. 
4. Discuss your requirements including call volumes, as well as the training of operatives and how they will handle customer enquiries they aren’t qualified to solve. 
5. Evaluate the terms, conditions, and cost of the service. You aren’t looking for the cheapest, but you are looking for the best quality at a reasonable cost. 

Advantages of Outsourcing Customer Support

As your business grows, you’ll have less and less time to give “support functions” your management team’s personal attention. That doesn’t just mean customer support. “Support functions” embrace everything you do that makes it possible to do business effectively, but that doesn’t form part of your core business. These peripheral, but essential activities distract you from doing what you do to make money, while at the same time making it possible to remain in business. They could include items like accounting, payroll, HR, and (you guessed it) customer support. 

Without them, you can’t function, but they don’t fit in with the single thing you do best, whether that’s offering cloud-based software or handy home gadgetry. The solution? Outsource these support functions to companies that see them as core. You do what you do best, and they support you by specialising in what they do best and doing it on your behalf. 

You enjoy the opportunity to concentrate on your core business. You get specialists to deal with things you don’t want to specialise in, and you might even save costs along the way. 

Baulking at the notion of opening a 24/7 customer support helpline? Wondering how you’ll staff it, oversee it, and distil useful information from its activities? RSVP has the answers. Customer Support isn’t something you can afford to take lightly. Our mission is to help you to be the best you can be by giving your customers the best support services imaginable. We go the extra mile for you and your clients. Contact us today to discover industry-leading solutions to outsourcing your customer support needs.

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