Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

As with any customer support channel, there are tried-and-true ways, as well as less effective ways, to offer live chat to your customers.

Over the years, we have seen an explosion of different communication channels. With this rise, the real challenge lies in choosing the right communication that suits your business. It is also important to look out for emerging trends in customer communication and start adapting to them. As businesses scale, it becomes even more challenging to be able to communicate effectively with every customer. To survive in this competitive market, one critical factor is enhanced customer communication.

How well do you really know your customers? It’s the question we asked in Part 1 of this blog series and answered with why it’s important in maintaining and growing your B2B (business-to-business) customer relationships. But what about prospective, or future, customers? Is it worth the time to get to know them as well? Yes, it absolutely is. And for some of the same reasons as we talked about in Part 1.

Most companies realize that providing robust self-service options to their customers no longer falls into the “nice to have” category—yet creating and maintaining self-service that keeps up with ever-changing customer preferences and business needs can seem daunting. But as Trustpilot has discovered, making content easily accessible, improving agent efficiency, and harnessing actionable analytics can lead to the kind of self-service that drives scalability.

How well do you really know your customers? In a B2C (business-to-consumer) environment, it is very rare to know your customers since the focus on each interaction is generally on resolving one issue or ticket at a time. Often, the very first contact the company ever has with a customer in that environment may be through a call center, where they have a simple request like asking for an update on their order.

While the general use of customer relationship management software (CRM) has become the industry standard, it hasn’t always been this way. Over time, as customers have come to expect a more efficient experience, companies have turned to various ad hoc solutions to manage their customer service offering. Now, it’s not enough to know just a few things about your customers.

Uncomplicating the customer experience can be especially challenging for companies with complex ecosystems: think of buyers and sellers within marketplaces like eBay or Reverb, or the web of interconnected business owners, drivers, and customers on the receiving end of food or furniture deliveries.

The COVID -19 pandemic has overstretched customer support teams across all industries. Many organizations faced a massive influx of customer requests for help, and in most cases, they were not resourced to respond appropriately. Now more than ever businesses need a customer engagement platform that enables their customer support teams to do more with less.

Conversational AI technology is going to be transformational as the possibilities seem to be growing with the spurt in the reach of digital devices, soon augmented with AI-enabled conversational interfaces. From fetching data to answering questions, conversational AI can mimic all that a human agent does but in quicker time, giving users immediate access to information or providing immediate responses.

Previously, on the “Chatbot Best Practices for designing a Conversational Experience with Workativ Assistant” blog, we would’ve delved into the things to do before designing a dialog flow for a chatbot and how to set up the actual dialog using Workativ Assistant’s Dialog Designer and test it. In this blog, we’ll be looking into what all we should do before setting up an automated workflow using Workativ Assistant’s intuitive 3-Step Automation Designer.