5 Ways Technology Can Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Rates

Customer support has a bright future with an abundance of new tools and technology, but sometimes you may not know when and where to use it all effectively. Many of these technologies will build on the success of the other, which means you’ll need to take care when approaching any of them.

Besides, you may not even know which of these technologies can help your brand boost customer satisfaction. One bad step could send you reeling, and take you backward. But you don’t have to navigate these waters alone. In this post, we dissect five ways that technology can help improve your customer service and satisfaction rates.

1. Modern Messaging Engages

You’ve probably repeatedly heard about live chat over the last few years, and with good reason. It has a 73% customer satisfaction rate and is one of the go-to technologies for customer support. But it’s also old news. If you’re still getting on board with live chat, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Modern-day messaging has taken a different track. Yes, it’s still “live,” but that’s not where it is unique. These added features give it another layer altogether, taking the experience to a whole new level.

– Allows for unique, comprehensive expression
– Helps build one-to-one relationships
– Enables problem-solving in one place
– Creates the ability to provide service across any channel at any time

All of this relies on the innovative use of Rich Communication Service (RCS) messaging. This allows you to send data-laden messages in real-time, which wasn’t possible until recently.

Think of it this way. Previously, you could send Short Message Service (SMS) messages. They were primarily text-based and had limited capabilities. You could help solve problems, but what happened if you needed to send a form, picture, or something more complex? You had to switch to email, which meant more hoops to jump through.

RCS messages allow you to send the data right away on the same platform.

technologyThis means modern messaging is more powerful than ever, and it’s an integral part of multichannel or omnichannel support. Instead of switching between platforms to deliver results, you can do it all in one place – and it’s readily accessible to your customers.

2. Chatbots Automate Your Messaging Efforts

While messaging is undoubtedly powerful, it requires an active user on the other end. That may be feasible during working hours, but what about holidays, weekends and other times you may not be available when your customers need help?

Complaints and issues happen in real-time, so why should your customers have to wait for support? To fix this, you can either shell out overtime and holiday pay or invest in chatbot automation to help take your messaging to the next level.

Chatbots may sound scary, but the technology is already seeing impressive results. The click-through rates are phenomenal, and customer engagement is far ahead when compared to email marketing. And this isn’t just about open and click-through rates. Brands that use chatbots are seeing impressive revenue results as well.

On average, brands that use chatbots see 10% more revenue from loyal customers, a 5% increase in customer satisfaction and 43% more engagement on social media. With results like these, it’s hard to find a reason to not use chatbots to help with customer engagement and satisfaction. There are already plenty of prototypes and working chatbot builders, even on the Freshdesk platform.

3. Analytics Empower Your Improvement

It’s vital to use analytics to power your customer support and fuel improvement over time. Failing to use these analytics is just a bad idea. So how can tracking analytics help?

For instance, take the CSAT (customer satisfaction) score. This is a metric that every support team needs to measure. It gauges how effective your customer service efforts are and places each customer on a scale from negative to positive. If your customers are not satisfied, then you can take steps to improve their experience. Over time, this will boost your satisfaction rates and help you boost customer loyalty.

Technology that enables customer surveys and feedback make collecting and analyzing this metric simple. But without that help, you’d be driving blind. There are plenty of ways you can use analytics to improve your customer support at every level. The sooner you start tracking, the faster your organization will be able to improve its customer support initiatives.

4. AI Empowers Your Analytics

As businesses collect more and more information and rely more on analytics, there will come a point when you reach critical mass. To collate and understand more data, you’ll need to start automating even more. This is often another scary process because it brings up another topic that many businesses don’t understand: Artificial Intelligence.

Many think of this as a job-killer or think it will bring about Terminator-like scenarios where machines become our undoing. But AI isn’t anywhere close to that. Most AI these days is really just machine learning. This is a process that merely combines human input with a computer’s ability to quickly process data. So you’re still very much involved in the process.

As analytics become more complex in their applications, the computing and analysis necessary to yield accurate conclusions grow with them. But it also grows your competitive advantage. That’s why more and more businesses are turning to AI to help keep track of everything from their warehouses to customer support initiatives.

Spending on AI is expected to exceed $59 billion by 2025 and will continue to grow. In some ways, the future is already here – and AI for customers support isn’t all hype. It has a place and will continue to push improvements and innovations.

For example, here are a few ways that AI is already helping bring about innovations in the customer support industry.

– It makes it easier to track CSAT analytics for medium to large companies
– It empowers and enables personalization efforts
– Shortens customer support with quick insights
– All-hours support and improvement tracking

As AI grows further, you can expect it to make an even bigger impact on your ability to satisfy the needs of your customer.

5. Brand Monitoring Allows You to Cater Your Support

Many companies don’t see brand monitoring as a necessary practice, but as more customers turn to social media and reviewing sites to levy complaints, it’s starting to grow in importance.

Listening to what your customers say online helps you detect weaknesses and proactively address customer concerns. Failing to do this might mean an exodus in your customers. Just look at Bethesda’s recent stumble in the news if you want proof. Plus, brands that are leading the charge in brand monitoring are already seeing results. They’re mostly tracing social media, but 64% claim this is effective for them – and some are even using it to outwit their competition.

So when it comes to tracking customer perception of your brand, it’s best to turn to an online helpdesk that can superpower that support. This will give you the ability to automate, send social media complaints, and create tickets for your service representatives.

When done correctly, you can ensure that you resolve customer issues quickly, and your support team will be able to spend more time-solving customer issues directly. As your support gets better over time, customer loyalty will start to rise, and your brand will rise with it. When all of this comes together, you’ll have the perfect storm of technology to help you improve customer satisfaction and build a better brand in the future.