CUSTOMER INTERACTION MANAGEMENT

Customer Interaction Management Software

Make customer interactions easy with Freshdesk. Engage with customers from across the globe,

and effortlessly keep tabs on all your customer conversations.

The importance of customer interaction for a business

Customers have high expectations when they choose to engage with a company or a brand. They will want their demands and requests to always have top priority, with problems being resolved at the earliest.

For the company, it presents an opportunity to garner a loyal customer base who will want to be associated with the brand for a long time. Let’s look at how it benefits a company, to be in complete control of their customer interactions.

To improve brand loyalty

The only way to turn customers into loyal advocates of your brand is to ensure they always have positive experiences associated with you. Whether it’s a serious support request or a casual social media encounter, it’s important to stay in the good books of your customers at all times. This way, you can establish a loyal customer base and also propagate excellent word-of-mouth for your company.

To foster a community of engaged users

Community forums provide a platform for customers to ask questions, suggest ideas, share experiences, and most importantly, interact with other users. Customers, therefore, will be in a position to help each other instead of constantly having to reach out to your support team for every minor concern. Long-time users of your forums can also help new customers get on board quickly and understand the product better.

To learn about customer habits

The way a customer interacts with your company can be very indicative of a lot of factors. By doing the right amount of research, you can analyze and understand their habits and their pain points. For example, based on the questions they’ve asked on the forums, you can perhaps see which part of your product they’re using most actively.

To improve the end-user experience

Based on the customer habits you’ve identified and analyzed, you can take better, data-driven decisions. You can focus on areas where you need to improve the end-user experience with your product, and make necessary changes/modifications. For example, if your users are having a subpar checkout experience, you can work towards making the payment processing more seamless.

To reduce churn

Retaining existing customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. Most companies today, especially the ones that follow a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, experience high levels of churn. To stop this from happening, companies need to rethink and reassess their customer interaction strategy, and ensure that the conversations they have with customers, translate into customer satisfaction. Consistent positive experiences will reaffirm the faith they have in your company, and they will want to be associated with you for longer.

Creating a strategy for customer interaction management

Training your support team to deal with a diverse set of customers

Your agents can only have good customer interactions, when they are given the training required to handle all types of customers. Irrespective of their nationality, or the channel they reach out with, agents should be able to easily grasp what they are asking for, and provide them with the best and most relevant answers.

Navigating difficult conversations

Often, your agents will run into angry/unsatisfied customers who will vent their frustrations out on your support team. It’s important that your agents can navigate their way through these difficult conversations without losing their cool. They should be empathetic while trying to understand the customer’s problem, before suggesting the best way forward.

Sending out personalized responses

Adding a personal touch to your customer replies will give them the impression that they’re talking to actual humans, instead of receiving automated responses over and over again. Rather than excessively using canned/automated responses, your agents should learn the art of balancing customer conversations with the right amount of personal touches.

Aligning how teams work on different channels

Customers on social media might expect a different tone in their responses compared to those who reach out via email. Support agents should understand these nuances before typing out their responses, and ensure their customers aren’t left feeling awkward with an unnatural response that isn’t suited to the medium they have reached out on.

Reacting to customer feedback

Based on how customers respond to your service, you can identify bottlenecks in your engagement strategy, and work towards streamlining it. For example, if customers expect support in their native language, you can invest in a helpdesk solution that will allow you to provide multilingual support.

Choosing the right customer interaction management software

To manage your customer interactions effectively, you need to pick the best helpdesk software that will give you an edge at every step of the customer interaction cycle. Here’s why Freshdesk is the perfect choice for you.

Unify communication channels

Freshdesk is an omnichannel helpdesk where customer queries from multiple channels like email, phone, chat, and social media come into a single, unified location. Your agents will be able to handle all these channels seamlessly through a single window. They will also have access to the history of the customer’s previous interactions, and will be able to get complete context around their issues and usage patterns.

Engagement through community forums

Forums help customers engage with each other and discuss their problems without contacting a company’s support team for every minor hurdle. By having these conversations, users can educate themselves better on the different product use-cases. With Freshdesk’s community forums, you can moderate conversations and remove unwanted topics. Your product managers can take note of important topics like new feature requests, and prioritize the product roadmap accordingly.