Efficient Customer Service Doesn’t Have To Be Impersonal

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“Good. Fast. Or cheap. Pick two.”

In project management, that statement illustrates the tradeoffs you have to make when creating something—if you want it cheap and good, you’re going to have to wait a while. Want it fast and done well, it’s going to get pretty pricey.

But in the contact center world, a similar saying would be: “Fast or Personal. Pick one.”

But what if you didn’t have to choose between the two? What if you could deliver warm, personal service that makes customers feel known, without spending any more time (or perhaps even less time) than you would do in your average conversation?

In this webinar, Gladly’s VP of Customers, Mike McCarron and Stella Connect’s Head of Partnerships, Alex Richards, discuss how companies can deliver a great, personal experience, without sacrificing on the speed and efficiency of your contact center.

For those short on time, here’s a quick preview of some of the strategies they talked about (but we highly recommend watching the full webinar for all the great tips and discussion).

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Make it easy for agents to know your customer

Your customer support team are the face of your company to your customers. Empower them to personalize each customer’s experience by making it easy for them to see and leverage key context and information about your customer.

“You don’t want your agents spending 60 seconds or 90 seconds digging up customer data, their ticket history or things like that.”

A single timeline. Make it easy for agents to pick up right where your customer last left off by unifying every conversation they’ve had with you—regardless of the channel it took place on—in a single thread. That way, your agents don’t waste time hunting down and merging tickets, and your customers feel remembered, while saving themselves the effort of repeating themselves.

Easy access to customer details. Arm your agents with key details about a customer, like their loyalty status, their recent purchases, or the important relationships they have in their lives. It’s a little window into your customer that allows your agents to understand them better, and deliver a more personal experience suited to them.

Closing the feedback loop

Another key step to personalizing service is to understand your individual customers’ experience. And how you do that is by following up with them, while their experiences are fresh, to understand what went right (or what could have been done better) to give them the best experience.
“Using feedback effectively boils down to understanding your customer and putting yourselves in their shoes.”

But getting feedback shouldn’t be done mechanically, or so you can tick a checkbox to say you’ve done it—it should be done with the human in mind, with a clear, actionable strategy on how to use that feedback to make the experience even better next time.

Human approach to getting feedback. Filling up a survey is an added step for your customer they don’t have to take. Appeal to your customers’ senses with a clean, sleek survey that isn’t cluttered with too many words, and that accurately reflects your brand’s warm, personal tone.

Coaching and training. Besides a human approach to feedback, taking a human approach to coaching and training agents is important too. Being able to tie feedback to a specific agent, for example, can help you better understand how and when an agent should be celebrated for great service, and which areas you can work on with them.

Personalizing at scale

Now more than ever the ability to deliver personalized service in your contact center has become an invaluable investment for companies—because your agents are now not just supplementing your service, they’ve become the only avenue for customers seeking service or help.

“The only interaction a customer has with a brand might very well be with their customer service team.”

The way to deliver personalized service, fast, is to leverage time-saving technology and streamline workflows, so you can do both, and do it at scale as well.

Leveraging AI and machine learning. Look for ways to help your agents find the answers they need fast. Gladly, for example, leverages machine learning to suggest the best answer to a customer’s question. That way, an agent can respond to a customer in a matter of clicks, freeing them up to focus on personalizing the experience rather than searching for answers.

Easy, efficient collaboration. Collaborating with colleagues—whether in the contact center or outside of it—often takes place across various messaging platforms or email threads. That makes for an inefficient way to collaborate, and means companies lose a lot of key context about how and when an issue was resolved. But being able to streamline that collaboration and collect it in one space where everyone can see and contribute helps cut down on time wasted repeating themselves, or keeping track of multiple threads.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the great tips and best practices. Get the full story with the webinar.

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