Technology has always been a boon for any customer service effort. After all, it significantly increases the capabilities of agents, letting them better serve their customers’ needs. And for a startup business, this can be a big boost.
But with the number of different tech coming out every year, it can be hard to decide which ones to invest in. So, let’s take a look at some of the ones you should consider. We will also show you how you can get more out of them through Virtua Solutions’ help.
Startup Customer Service Technology no. 1: Customer Service Analytics
We begin the list with the tools that help you better understand your customers. Analytics tools come in a wide variety of flavors. However, the technology you would get can cover the six different types of analysis you want to do. These are:
- Customer journey analytics: This studies the purchase journey. It might involve you gathering data from different interactions you have to better understand each separate journey.
- Customer service experience: The second type studies how your customers feel about their engagements with your brand. You also look into their overall satisfaction.
- Customer engagement analytics: This is often divided into two categories. The level of engagement customers have with your products and with your brand as a whole.
- Customer loyalty and retention analytics: You would also want to learn more about how well you can keep customers after the initial purchase.
- Customer lifetime analytics: Combining the above metrics help you understand what value a customer can bring over the course of their relationship with you.
- Voice of customer analytics: Beyond the numerical statistics, you should know what your customers have to say about your brand.
Note that these analytics functions might either be contained in one tool or spread out to several ones. Nevertheless, you want to develop a system that would bring all these analytics data together for ease of use. Additionally, you want that system to integrate into your other customer service tools so that they can use that data more effectively.
Customer Service Technology no. 2: Customer Engagement Hubs
When interacting with your customers, your startup company often needs to deal with multiple points of engagement. And doing this for several hundreds of customers can make tracking and facilitating them hard. That is where customer engagement hubs become an essential technology to have.
Image from Bahwan Cybertek.
Customer engagement hubs are an architectural framework that brings together all your service systems. Its goal is to help you interact with customers more optimally and better serve their needs. Using them, you can deliver a more personalized and contextual engagement.
There are three main reasons you would want to invest in building an engagement hub for your company.
- Orchestrating omnichannel engagements: You want to keep pace with your customers as they switch to different channels when engaging you.
- Integrate and operationalize customer data: To get the most out of the customer data, you need to use it effectively. A CEH will help you bring all the data together and employ it for your strategies.
- Maximize marketing technology investment: The CEH will also help you get the most out of all the other marketing technologies you use. This system also lets you bring in future tech that you might invest in easily.
These reasons showcase how an engagement hub will be an indispensable tool for a startup. As such, you would want to develop your own as early as possible.
How Your Startup Business Can Build Its Customer Engagement Hub
One thing worth noting is that every business has specific customer engagements. Hence, the hub that you develop will also be uniquely yours. Nevertheless, there are several general building blocks you need to have.
A Design-First Approach
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When trying to engage customers, there will often be gaps in what they expect you to provide versus what you can actually provide. When developing your engagement hub, you need to identify these gaps. Then, determine how the hub will cover these gaps for a more comprehensive customer experience.
Analytics
This is one application where the above customer analytics technology comes into play. Your engagement hub should integrate all that customer data and give you a 360-degree picture of customer interactions. From there, it needs to provide you with a way to process that data for decision making.
Omnichannel Capabilities
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Doing omnichannel customer engagement isn’t just about serving them across different channels. You would also want to bring all those channels together into a whole experience. Thus, your engagement hub should help you to quickly move from one channel to the other while keeping the conversation with the customer going. It should also offer the next best option for their convenience.
Focus On The Core
With the number of engagements, your hub can become too complex. Avoid that by streamlining it and focusing only on the main points of engagement. We at Virtua Solutions can then help you by handling the other engagement points and day-to-day operations. With our help, your hub can effectively handle larger customer engagement volumes.
Leverage The Cloud
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Another piece of technology your startup business should bring into your customer engagement hub is cloud technology. With it, you can expand the hub’s capabilities In particular, it gives you greater flexibility in interacting with customers and meeting their needs.
Customer Service Technology no. 3: Hands Off Help
One of the biggest trends in customer service in recent years is the growth of hands-off help customers. These are the ones who know what they want and how to get it. As such, they are less likely to ask for assistance from service agents.
Image from AQ Services.
Nevertheless, you still need to help them on their customer journey. For that, invest in technology that will help them make their journey easier. This includes things like voice search and chatbots that can quickly provide them with the information they need. You also need to invest in mobile technology to give them more flexibility in obtaining this info.
Identifying The Hands Off Customers Of Your Startup Business
But just adding these pieces of tech is not enough. For them to be successful in their purpose, you need to direct them to the right customers. This is where identifying these hands-off customers becomes vital.
Image from QSR Web.
Here, you would want to rely on your customer service agents’ intuition. Often that indication will show up when you first engage them. They will simply decline your offer to assist them. In such a situation, be ready to direct them to the appropriate self-help portal. Understanding their preferences through customer analytics will help you determine what exact channels these would be. From there, you need to ensure that there are no bottlenecks in their journey.
Boost Your Startup Business Customer Service With These Technologies
Investing in these technologies will undoubtedly be a big leap on your part. And once they are in place, your startup business needs a customer service team that can use them to the fullest. We at Virtua Solutions have a long experience with these and are ready to help. Sign up with us today.