The last quarter is when organizations engage in high-performance efforts to optimize the yearly figures and capture the overall success of the entire team over the previous 12 months.
The end of the year might give you the push you need to take your company to the next level. With seamless customer support strategies and solutions in place, you can conclude the year with ringing cash registers and satisfied customers who will gladly return the following year.
Here are a few customer service solutions you can put in place to make the fourth quarter of the year your best yet. But first, let’s get a few things straight.
Customer Support vs. Customer Service: What’s the Difference?
Customer service refers to all the resources that a company may offer customers to help them get the most out of your products or services. Customer service, maintenance, and other operations that cater to customers’ needs are examples of these resources.
Customer support is considered a subset of customer service that focuses on technical and product assistance in layman’s terms. These phrases are frequently used interchangeably, but it’s essential to understand the distinction.
Customer Support Solutions to End the Final Quarter Strong
1. Invest in Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel assistance is essential for providing seamless customer care experiences. It enhances the customer experience by avoiding communication roadblocks that arise when information is compartmentalized between departments.
By expanding beyond single-channel or even multi-channel capability, users will be able to switch between channels effortlessly.
Without omnichannel assistance, consumers may be transferred from agent to agent until they reach someone who can finally give them a clear response. Worse, there may not be a comprehensive record of their past contacts, requiring them to start over every time they contact customer support with a follow-up inquiry.
2. Focus on Customer Feedback
To deliver outstanding customer service to outshine the previous quarters, you must first understand the customer’s needs, experiences, and pain points.
For this, you must guarantee that your consumers have numerous options to provide their feedback. This may be accomplished using phone surveys or an email feedback form. Aside from surveys, you can also set up a complaint system to allow your consumers to voice their concerns.
This will tell you all you need to know about their positive, negative, and ugly interactions with your brand. This gives you a clear picture of what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. Connecting it to the topic at hand, you’ll need all of the input you can get from this year’s clients, old and new, to fine-tune your customer support strategy for the busy “BER” months.
3. Create a Regular Feedback Loop to Keep Your Team Updated
Once you’ve begun collecting client feedback, make sure you share it with other teams on a consistent and frequent basis. This enables you to fine-tune and enhance your strategy over time.
Your plan should not be set in stone. Implementing customer support solutions is simply the first step in a long process. Your approach will evolve and alter dramatically, as it should. It should be updated regularly to reflect industry changes, the most recent CX best practices, your customers’ demands, and your company’s objectives.
Regardless of how excellent your product or service is, providing exceptional and unforgettable customer service will set you apart.
4. Increase Staff Support
Employee retention is critical to enhancing your company’s customer support arm. According to research, employees stay longer when they are satisfied and appreciate the company they work for.
Given the expected increase in workload over the ensuing months, this is a critical component of ending your final quarter strong. Suppose you want to crunch numbers and meet this year’s objectives. In that case, you need happy and committed customer support personnel prepared to go above and beyond to contribute to the customer experience.
Efforts should thus be put toward potential identification and development programs, as well as a well-thought-out career plan framework.
However, to create happy, engaged customer service employees, we must first ask ourselves the following questions. These will help us determine where we stand in creating an excellent work environment that results in stellar employees.
- Do your employees look forward to going to work?
- Is performance affected by mood throughout the day/week/month? Do you understand why?
- Do you have any unnecessary policies in place to “manage” your employees?
- Are any of your recreational activities growing stale?
5. Put a Customer Appreciation Routine in Place
Every day should be designated as Customer Appreciation Day. What can you do to demonstrate your appreciation for your customers? Consider some more conventional techniques, such as providing attractive discounts on products and services, giving clients gifts on their birthdays or other significant occasions, or even sending them customized mail. Making your existing clients feel valued makes them more likely to choose you when they arrive on the Christmas and New Year’s Eve shopping list.
6. Prep Your Team for the Extra Customer Service Requests
Is your customer service department prepared for the increased workload? With revenues at least doubling–and often rising as much as 10x–during much of Q4, is your customer service department prepared for the extra workload?
According to a recent Arise research, more than a third of consumers (37%) anticipate a response within one hour, and nearly all (80%) expect a response within 24 hours.
7. Enable Self-Service for Customers
Customers want answers, but some don’t want to go through a human agent to get them. In fact, according to a Microsoft report, 86% of customers prefer self-service over dealing with a corporate representative. Make sure your firm is set up so that consumers can have this option for the upcoming months.
8. Boost Operations With AI Support
Smart technology is available to assist your customer care representatives in performing to the best of their abilities. It is not about replacing humans with machines; instead, it is about leveraging AI-powered chatbots and technology to increase productivity and offer a consistent quality of service with simplicity.
Chatbots, for example, maybe used by your team to address basic live chat inquiries and even to ask chatbots for information internally. This enables your clients to obtain more detailed replies in a shorter period.
Final Thoughts
There are several ways to assess the effectiveness of your customer support solutions. Just be careful not to overwhelm your long-term outlook with metrics that don’t measure the right things that enable you to make a genuine impact on your business’s bottom line. With these eight excellent customer support solutions in mind, your company should have no problem maximizing your end-of-year numbers.
CrewBloom is the leading provider of professional and reliable customer support services in the Philippines. We help businesses all over the world connect with top-rated support and sales talent. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services!
