Phone-only customer service no longer suffices

Times change constantly, and so do the demands placed on your customer service! Compared with a written letter, or a visit to the office, the telephone was a godsend, but in 2017 it can be done far more efficiently. It has to be done more efficiently, in fact: many customers these days are reachable via the internet 24 hours a day, and expect this of your company too.

This does not mean the telephone has to go straight out with the rubbish. While calling, your employee is directly connected to your customer. That can be very valuable: after a personal meeting it is the next best thing. A possible problem can be resolved straight away, and the customer appreciates that a human being is dealing with him or her.

Personal, but time-consuming

This strong point also has a disadvantage: because of the personal contact you spend relatively a lot of time helping one customer. That is fine when a customer has a complicated question, or urgently needs help to change something. What you do not want is for your staff to spend half the day answering simple questions. The requests then pile up, and a queue arises. Compare it to an hourglass, where the narrowing slows the flow of the sand.

Your customer also takes time for a telephone conversation, and a recorded message – with the well-known routines – does not exactly contribute to customer satisfaction. The waiting irritates the caller, and your staff get this on their plate! You can expand the customer service to remedy this, but it is wiser to raise efficiency.

Contact squared

Online contact gives customer service more time, breathing space and the possibility of serving several customers at once. Customers' questions also do not have to be handled in the order they come in. Online requests are slightly less urgent than a telephone conversation (although a fitting response is just as necessary!).

The faster you respond the better, of course, but customer service has the time to set priorities. During busy periods the online customer service is a good deal easier, and cheaper, to scale up. Per hour you might handle four requests for help by telephone; online you process around twenty.

Go online

Online there are various possibilities for getting in touch with your customers. Email is a fine way, but perhaps a bit impersonal. The customer can have the feeling that their message disappears into a ‘black hole’, if there is no response for a while.

A more direct form of communicating is Live chat. In one-to-one chat conversations your customer service can deal with several customers at once. Because of the direct contact, Live chat resembles the telephone most, but a good deal more efficiently. Of course you do have to be able to keep an overview, but Watermelon has thought of that.

Everything in one place

Watermelon collects all incoming questions in one program. Emails, messages in Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and chats. All conversations and customer data are stored, so that every employee can carry on straight away where the previous one left off. Nice for your staff, but certainly also for the customer, who does not have to explain what the problem is for the umpteenth time.

Because requests for help come in centrally, a customer service with Watermelon can work around 40% faster. Watermelon is working hard to expand the number of channels, so that in future your customer service can also be reached with Apple iMessages and WhatsApp.

Watermelon is accessible via desktop, and (soon) gives your staff the possibility of conferring via chat. Handy if (part of) your staff work from home, for example!

Helpful chatbot

It can be even more efficient with the Watermelon Chatbot. Thanks to artificial intelligence this system learns to interpret and answer questions independently. The number of conversations the chatbot can hold at once is practically endless. The Watermelon Chatbot answers up to 85% of all questions before a customer service agent gets involved: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is quite a few telephone conversations you no longer have to hold! On top of that a chatbot can tell the customer step by step how he/she can solve a problem themselves. Customer satisfied, without your customer service being burdened!

Staff can take the conversation over at any moment, and get a signal when the chatbot cannot help the customer properly. Besides the chatbot, there is also a suggestion bot. This helps your staff give answers faster to questions the chatbot recognises, by setting standard answers for them. If the conversation starts with a difficult or unclear question, a member of staff takes the conversation over from the chatbot. If there are then questions the chatbot does understand, it makes your staff's work easier. One good turn deserves another!

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