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The Definitive Guide To Customer Success

December 14, 2019

What is customer success?

Customer success exists at the intersection between customer experience and customer support teams. Success managers constantly work on improving their company’s product or service by anticipating challenges, questions and issues that their customers might have.

However, they do not just anticipate these problems – their primary task is to solve them in advance, before they start troubling existing or prospective clients.

In other words, success teams are tasked with boosting customer happiness and retention, reducing customer churn and improving brand loyalty.

Who needs customer success teams?

As we already mentioned, the cost of acquiring new customers has been growing rapidly in recent years, and the trend is likely to continue in the near future.

This means that all businesses that rely on people purchasing their products or services need customer success teams.

Why is customer success important?

Customer success is important because it allows your customers to experience the best quality of service and enjoy using your product. You may be thinking that customer success is just a fancy new term for customer support.

However, although the two terms bear many similarities, they differ in one important aspect. Customer success teams are proactive and customer support is reactive.

In other words, customer success attempts to identify and solve issues before they’re noticed by customers who contact your support agents for help. They continuously work on improving the customer experience by aggregating data from existing clients.

If this has you confused, there’s no reason to worry. We will now explain how to execute customer success concepts in your company.

How to execute customer success activities

Although businesses can differ significantly, every customer success team breaks down their work into five basic steps. These principles remain the same across all industries, but you may need to tweak their execution or focus on certain specifics to better fit the needs of your particular niche.

Step 1 – Outline clear objectives

As with anything else business related, planning is the mother of success.

Develop a customer success strategy that your employees can follow to ensure that your customers are always happy with the service that you provide.

Make sure that your strategy centers around the needs and desires of your specific customers. Don’t box yourself into a specific set of tactics either – feel free to experiment to find the best solution. Your customers will know when you get it right.

Step 2 – Educate the customers

In the ideal world, every customer would spend hours researching each product and finding the best solution. In reality, many customers don’t want to spend that much time on a purchase.

To ensure that your customers are always happy with their purchase, you need to anticipate the questions that they may have. Educate them about your product’s features and benefits.

This is essential if you’re selling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. Consider creating a knowledge base and implement a live chat on your website to allow your customers direct access to the support team.

Step 3 – Provide customer onboarding

Getting used to a new product or service can be very hard for new customers, especially if they’re used to certain standards.

To ensure customer success, you need to guide your customers through the initial steps. Provide them with all the resources, tools, or training that they may need.

This way, your customers will know that you care about them and accustom them to a certain standard of service. It will also allow you to proactively deal with the most common objections and questions.

Great examples of customer onboarding include step-by-step tutorials or one-on-one guidance with company representatives.

Step 4 – Facilitate communication between all departments

Customer success teams can’t work on their own.

They require communication and help from virtually all company departments. Your staff needs to behave a clear line of communication with customer support, product development, sales, and marketing teams.

This communication will allow them to identify the pain points of your customers and the weak points of your product. Marketing teams can collaborate with client success agents to develop promotional content that explains how to best use the product or outlines specific features that are often overlooked.

Customer support and customer success are two sides of the same coin. They need to discuss their interactions with clients on a daily basis to ensure a consistent quality of service across the board.

The best way to facilitate this communication and ensure customer success is to implement a CRM system, like Simply CRM. CRM platforms offer an all-in-one solution that provides all team members with access to the same customer information, which can be used to guide their everyday work.

Step 5 – Promote loyalty

Customer loyalty is a direct consequence of their positive experience with a brand. You need to make sure that your customers always feel they’re getting decent value for their money.

The easiest way to promote loyalty is to create a customer loyalty program, offering discounts and special deals for long-term clients or customers who are making more than one purchase.

However, be careful with your loyalty programs. Do the math before offering any discounts and only provide deals that your business can sustain in the long run. You don’t want your loyalty program to generate losses.

Source: Simply CRM

Learn the difference between IT Security and Cybersecurity

April 9, 2019

Many people think that they are just alternative terms for having a form of security on electronic devices. A group of others believes that they are complementary to each other and no system can continue if not connected for the safety and security purpose.

Cybersecurity and IT security are related to each other; they create excellent protection and efficiency when linked together. Despite similarities, there are key differences that distinguish both.

IT security

IT security can be understood as information or data security. It’s implemented to confirm the security and safety of all information created and available to an organization. The security process includes all electronics along with physical data.

IT security offers processes and methods to be in place to ensure that all information is protected. This prevents unauthorized intruding, misuse, damage or interruption of data.

The main objective is to guarantee that information remains of high integrity, encrypted and accessible. This is much needed to ensure that the quality of information is not compramised, along with ensuring that personal or valuable information remains confidential and only available to the authority.

IT security combines various forms of technology and strategies to guard all information and information systems. Physical data is often easier to protect in lockers, but digital data requires enhanced safety.

This data can be anything like personal credentials, logins, credit card details, etc. To access specific transaction details, one must assure about the 2-3 factor verification along with digital file signature for all electronic devices along with establishing secure individual and organization networks.

IT security norms allow data to be shielded while assuring the quality and truthfulness of the information. Incorporating security rules for information and systems reduce the risk of unauthorized access or misuse of confidential information.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity comprised of technologies, processes and handles intended to protect systems, networks, and data from cyber attacks. Efficient cybersecurity reduces the risk of cyber attacks and protects against the unauthorized stealing of systems, networks, and technologies.

Reliable cybersecurity can be achieved by implementing checks and balances among the three pillars: people, processes, and technology. This approach helps organizations to protect themselves from both organized attacks and general internal threats & data breaches, such as accidental infringements, human mistakes, etc.

Cybersecurity’s primary purpose is to protect digital data from unauthorized access received through cyberspace. Unauthorized access can be considered as cyber-attacks and there are n numbers of them to access a company’s data that corrupt or damage the integrity of the data.

Cybersecurity ensures that all confidential, valuable or vulnerable information cannot be downloaded, shared or utilized by an unknown person.

Cybersecurity controls and prevents this threat or attack to a company’s information. It allows the necessary precautions and protocols to be in place to ensure the safety of all electronic data. Hacking or corruption of data not only affects the quality of the data but can be expensive and time-consuming to fix. There are also the loopholes of what a third party can achieve by holding this information, especially if it is financial or highly confidential.

Hacking and unapproved access to networks can happen for many reasons. Cyber threats include downloading files from websites or other app resources that contain viruses. Having weak or easily guessed passwords or storing data in one place, such as the cloud without backups.

IT and cybersecurity walk hand in hand; both are crucial in protecting the information of your organization. Both security systems should be consolidated into your company to assure that all mediums being used are secure and protected against any threat, fraud or misuse.

If your organization needs any help or support in IT network and security, please call us today! We will assess and analyze every aspect of its security and provide you the best protection against the cyber threat and data breach possibilities.

5 Tips for Information Technology to Better Manage the Customer Experience

December 28, 2018

To help improve your IT service desk’s customer experience, there are five tips to consider in assessing and delivering a more appropriate level of IT support:

Know and catalog significant and commonly occurring service requests as “service encounters.”

“Your IT service desk should be able to describe what it does day-in, day-out without even thinking about it. But what about in the language of, and from the perspective of, the customer? What are the most commonly asked for and undertaken services? And are they actually viewed as services for customers or are they just a series of tasks/activities that are undertaken until it’s time to go home? A better customer experience starts with a change in approach and mindset – looking from the outside-in, rather than from the inside-out, with your service encounters built around the customer rather than the service provider,” said Sarah Lahav, CEO, SysAid.

Separate each encounter into its (1) before, (2) during, and (3) after stages, and identify where any of the common six “moments of truth” (MOTs) exist.

“These six MOTs are customer touch points in the first contact, greet, use, thank you or exit, last contact, and next contact. So, if you consider an end-user issue with a networked printer, the various MOTs in this example will include:
o The incident submission, perhaps via a self-service portal as a “before” interaction.
o Your requests for more information from, and updates on progress to, the end user will likely be part of the “during” stage.
o A personal callback, to check that the issue has been resolved, and the sending of a customer satisfaction survey are part of the “after” stage,” said Lahav.

Discover any other key interactions you know to greatly influence the end-user’s or customer’s emotions, e.g. what makes them happy or angry.

“These are likely to be additional MOTs. This could include the end user contacting the service desk “out-of-hours,” most likely just before they leave the office for the day, for an update – via the self-service portal, telephone, email, chat, or walk-up channels,” said Lahav. “If you think about how this happens with your service desk now – is it a consistent experience? And, does the end user receive a good customer experience?”

Within any encounter and stage, and for each moment of truth, know whether you have a suitable feedback mechanism in place.

“IT service desk customer satisfaction surveys rarely measure the customer experience. They are also often designed, and distributed, in a way such that end-user response rates are low – usually at 10% or less. To understand the customer experience, there also needs to be greater granularity and a focus on the things that matter most to the end user. Plus, surveys need to be kept simple! The best customer experience gathering mechanisms start with a binary “Are you happy or not?” yes-or-no styled prompt and then seek further, optional, information beyond this. For instance, digging into the reasons as to why there was a poor experience,” said Lahav.

If unsatisfactory, ask what can be done to eliminate, or mitigate, any issues to improve matters.

“In addition to the low response rates to traditional IT service desk customer satisfaction questionnaires, there is also often neglect to follow up (on both good and bad feedback, because of both offer opportunities for improvement). Which in turn drives the apathy end users might have towards your feedback mechanism (with this being in addition to surveys being too complex/time-consuming for them to complete). So, ensure that you proactively use the feedback information received from end users to make positive changes in how the service desk works and, ultimately, to the customer experience it delivers,” said Lahav.

Finally, these five tips won’t work if enacted alone. Instead, they need to be worked on in unison, ideally as part of an ongoing program or activity to better know, and manage, the customer experience as part of a continuous improvement initiative.

Source: Biz Report

Artificial Intelligence And Technology Emma Whitner

AI & Blockchain Technology- Learn the impact of combining these two Tech Solutions!

November 14, 2018

We have written so many posts on the impact of AI, IoT, and Blockchain individually. Now we will see the most in demand and disruptive technology combination called the AI & the Blockchain technology. Artificial Intelligence is not a technology at first place, rather it’s great to say it a concept that makes the idea of making humans more connected to the machines in a way that the machine behaves like if they are the humans and taking in charge of their jobs. So many people even technologists are in conflict with the idea that AI will kill so many jobs and will become more powerful in the coming years to fight with humans i.e. they think of a parallel world to the world of humans. Also, this is a great time to break the current blockchain cryptocurrency myth as too many people even from the technology world think that it’s only concerned with digital currency segment. Let’s break the trend in this post and understand it in that way.

rtificial intelligence offers innovation and a unique way of doing things with precision and perfection.

If AI is a unique way of doing things, the Blockchain technology is the building block on which AI systems can be made more robust, secured and of course timely in record accessing no matter how old the data is requested. The blockchain is actually a new file system for digital credentials, which saves data in an encrypted, distributed ledger format. As data is encrypted and distributed over several computers, it allows the creation of hacking-proof, highly robust databases which can be read and refreshed only by those who have permissions to do that.

Mixing AI & Blockchain Purposefully

The fundamental goal of blockchain technology is to keep all the records updated as per the request, all its processing, and all the authentication whereas the Artificial Intelligence helps in decision making through cognitive science, neural networks including machine learning, assessing, and going to help in simplifying the autonomous interaction. Blockchain and AI will make sure that there will be a free flow integration in the near future. Here are some of the important characteristics listed below:

Data Availability to All:

With enhancement made in the field of AI technology, it relies on the availability of data from the n number of sources. But, organizations like Amazon, Google, social media giant Facebook etc. have a large number of sources of data collection which can prove to be beneficial for a lot of AI processes, this data is not available to people in the market and these organizations utilize their own to speed-up their ads, insights and business intelligence.

With blockchain technology, you can easily handle this case by executing the concept of an end to end connection. Since it is an open, distributed ledger, the data can be easily fetched by anyone on the node in the network. Thus there will be a new evolution of free data or data for all. We at Kedjja, are implementing one such blockchain & AI based application for the hotel staff management and hence it will be a great way to find the staff in case of availability & more! If you want to know how it will work and further an implementation for your hotel/restaurant business, please contact us!

Blockchain & AI in the Big Data Management

Scaling of data matters a lot in the business analytics & intelligence. Let us discuss a case where we have collected tons of data and now we want to scale it for the business or business analytics. We are assuming that the data we have collected is around 1 ZB. There is one subset in artificial intelligence known as strong AI or artificial general intelligence that will perform this job via autonomous or self-learning agents also known as chatbots. These are trained to utilize that data in a physical environment & as a database storage media, blockchain technology can be used as it’s decentralized, distributed, secured, & can also store tons of data within.

Source: Emma Whitner

Artificial Intelligence Impact on Call Center Process

September 2, 2018

Hello Call-center owners! We know that Artificial Intelligence-based machine learning algorithms can understand how human agents identify and solve customer problems by learning & analyzing from the past data over time. So how wonderful it would be if we include an AI module integration or a support agent-like assistant powered by machine learning in the PBX call center phone systems such as 3CX & more?

The Artificial Intelligence module would know who the customer is, more on his/her recent or past activity, and the best way to answer his/her queries based on past inquiries.

That means: Customers get their questions answered quickly, in a self-service fashion with fewer inputs so that support person get more time, allowing them to provide one to one customer support and hence super fast service assistance! As a result, customers are happier, and happy customers = higher revenue= more money for the business!

The modern technology and this fast-changing world are getting more versed technically and this is an ongoing demand to make the business processes more compatible and streamlined with respect to time.

Thanks for reading this post and it would be great and appreciated if shared the same with your friends and colleagues.

Source: Kedjja AI Module Integration and PBX Phone System

How to Choose the Right Software for Customer Support Services?

July 13, 2018

Choosing the right support software is the first step to tackle after scaling your customer support team or simply realizing you’ve outgrown email as your current support solution. However, there is a ton of different support software out there.

Not only are the options pretty much endless, but every single help desk or support solution provider is obviously trying to put their product a step ahead of others. This means that they all look good at first glance, and choosing just one can be a pretty intimidating task.

The Process of Choosing Support Software:

Choosing the tool for you might seem complicated, but if you approach it in a structured way and involve your team into the process, it’s going to be much easier⁠—and hopefully also fun and constructive.

Here’s what you need to do on a very high level:

1) Figure out what you need as a company

The most important groups to think of when specifying your requirements are:

Your customers
Your support team
Your managers

2) Talk to your team

After you’ve put together a basic overview of your needs and future plans, you should also have a chat with other people in the team. The crucial people are obviously the ones who will be using the tool every day as well as those directly managing them.

However, having this discussion in an even bigger circle is great for unexpected but useful feedback and points, especially if you’ve cultivated an “everyone does support” culture in your company.

3) Put together a list of options

Go through as many unbiased review sites and listicles as you can, and just write down names of support software providers⁠—don’t worry about diving deep into features quite yet.

After doing your own research, ask your own network for recommendations. The best advice always comes from people that have actual first hand experience using these tools.

Who knows, you might be able to eliminate some options from your big list straight away⁠—or add some.

However, be careful to not take these recommendations too seriously. The fact that a solution didn’t work out for another company, doesn’t mean it won’t for yours.

4) Evaluate

You don’t even have to sign up just yet⁠—most serious providers have a list of features on their website or offer demo videos to show you what they have. This will help you see which tools immediately have (or don’t have) the things you’ve established you need for your team.Remove the options that don’t meet your criteria from your list. If the list is still long, you can also rely on your gut a little and get rid of the ones you feel are too complex, too expensive, or that you just don’t like the look of.

5) Play around and choose one

Now that you have your top options, it’s time to sign up and see how you like actually using them. Most awesome support software has a trial or a demo account you can use to get into it.Play around with it to get a feel of how it works and what the features you’re looking for actually look like.

If you liked the article, please share with your friends and colleagues. Thanks

Source: GrooveHQ

Three C’S of Customer Service Success

June 29, 2018

Emma Whitner Florida says there is an old saying in the real-estate industry: The three keys to success are location, location, and location. There is a similar take on the customer service world. The three keys to customer experience success are consistency, consistency and consistency.

So, let’s talk about the different ways an organization delivers a consistent experience.

The quality of the product or service must be consistent. Whatever the company sells must meet the expectations of the customer, every time. It doesn’t matter how good your customer service is, if the product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the customer will find another company that better meets their needs.
The different channels customers interact with you and your organization must be consistent. Today’s customers connect with the companies they do business with in multiple ways. The traditional way a customer communicated with a company was in person or on the phone. Then along came emails, then chat, then chatbots. And, then there are social channels and other messaging apps. This is all part of the digital revolution, and the modern customer expects to have a consistent experience regardless of the channel.
The attitude of the people who work at the company must be consistent. I’m not suggesting that everyone be a clone of each other. It is the positive attitude and the effort the employees make to take care of their customers that must be consistent. It shouldn’t matter if the customer talks to John one day and Jane the next, everyone comes to work with the plan to do their very best, every day. Regardless of who picks up the phone or responds to a message, the customer will always have a good experience.

5 Essentials of Great Customer Service

May 13, 2018

There is no greater value to any corporation than their customer service. Here are the top 5 needful customer service to be focused on:

1. Great customer service is caring.

Great customer service comes down to caring. Not only should the corporation care about the quality of their products, but should care even more-so about customer satisfaction. Companies should take the time to ensure the customer is delivered a product that works, and that the customer understands how to use and operate their product. Companies who pride themselves on great customer service take great value in creating referrals. To ensure this possibility, they make themselves available to their customers for any questions, repairs and or concerns, and if necessary offer to replace, compensate or refund what isn’t working.

2. Passion

Passion is the foundation of great customer service people and their organizations. Customer service is the “it” factor. It is passion which separates those individuals and organizations who excel from those who offer the customer the bare minimum to get by.

3. Communication

Solid communication is crucial when it comes to customer service. Communication requires effort, flexibility and a tremendous amount of patience and self-control on the part of the customer service agent. The customer, in most cases, should be treated as correct. And, customers are wrong sometimes as well.

4. Service-minded

Corporations that value customer service doesn’t just enforce procedures and shout instructions to their customers as an approach to problem-solving. It is the responsibility of each corporation to develop a culture of service and to see the undeniable value of serving those who purchase their products.

5. Willingness

The customer who is expressing a lack of satisfaction doesn’t become a more pleasant person when met with automated systems with unreasonable hold times, and one transfer after another once they have finally gotten someone live on the phone.

Customer service in the era of the Internet of Things

April 25, 2018

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already a reality in the commercial world and it’s getting bigger by the minute in the consumer space. The number of devices connected to the internet continues to grow closer towards the 20 billion connections that research firm, Gartner, predicts there will be by 2020.

In the enterprise space, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are one of the biggest growth areas in information technology, with the car industry one of the biggest adopters. However, the rampant growth of IOT holds significant ramifications in the consumer space, particularly when it comes to customer service.

People increasingly have to deal with objects – things – as well as other people. When that interaction goes wrong, or when people need assistance or simply more information, traditional customer service channels are not always up to scratch.

With all the improvements in customer service in recent years – improved contact center technology, chat lines, automated response systems and the like – consumer satisfaction with service levels have been dropping. A new report from research company Ovum, commissioned by LogMeIn, has identified a significant disconnect between what today’s mobile and always-connected customers have come to expect from customer service and what contact centers are delivering.

According to Ovum’s research, 48 percent of customers surveyed believe that the ability to reach the right representative has worsened over the last two years and as a result, 76 percent have stopped doing business with a brand following a bad encounter.

The findings also highlight that IoT technologies have a potential for helping with the technical resolution of customer issues. While the technology is not well understood by customers, they are evidently willing to use it if it means solving technical issues quicker. This presents a number of opportunities.

When asked whether they would be willing to connect their devices to the internet, over 50 percent of customers said that they didn’t believe it to be necessary, or that they would not be comfortable with connecting their devices. But 25 percent said they would be keen to do this if it would resolve their customer service issues faster.

On the useful benefits of connected devices, 63 percent of customers said that they would like to improve resolution rates for technical problems. Although not all of the surveyed customers are aware of what the IoT could mean for them, they all want to be able to resolve problems faster.

All of the surveyed contact center managers said they are aware of how the IoT can be beneficial to their organizations, and they understand that remote technical diagnosis is potentially a significant advantage. When asked about benefits of connected products, they stated that being able to optimize field service, chat directly to customers on a device, and carry out remote updates are all advantages that they would hope to gain.

Today’s highly mobile customers are empowered to seek out support from multiple touch points and have come to expect a response through those channels in minutes. It is possible, for example, to use a customer’s mobile phone to resolve problems in real time by sending images to the contact center representative, showing them exactly what the customer sees. It is an example of how the IoT is part of the solution to better customer service.

Such real-time visualization technology has the potential to shorten support times and greatly reducing product returns which end up with ‘no fault found’, which affects retailers’ and product manufacturers’ profit margins – consultancy Accenture estimates the cost of such returns is as much as US$9.4 billion annually.

Technology is constantly evolving. So is customer support. The IoT trend adds a new layer of complexity to customer support, but it also has the potential to greatly assist in the resolution of customer support issues.

Tag: Call center services