Companies spend billions of dollars each year on aggressive loyalty marketing strategies to retain and attract customers, even though customer loyalty is difficult to assess.
However, how you treat your customers before, during, and after a transaction has a significantly higher impact on customer loyalty and retention than how much money you spend on expensive marketing methods. While you may provide top-notch customer service without using specialised technologies, growing organisations frequently encounter limitations. Simply put, customer service software is software that collects, organises, processes, and documents help requests.
In this week’s edition of Tech Tuesday, we’ve included a comprehensive guide to understanding and selecting the best customer service solutions to help you get the best match for your business needs.
Let’s begin!
Podium
Podium is a communications platform that enables companies with a local presence to connect convenientlywith their customers at critical touchpoints to help them strengthen their business. Through its SMS-based platform, Podium enables over 100,000 local businesses to communicate with their customers on the platform they use most frequently: text.
With a focus on ease, speed and convenience for customers, Podium enables local businesses to gain reviews, collect payments, communicate with customers and capture leads – all from a single inbox. Since March 2020, when the first lockdown began, Australian businesses have sent over six million messages and received over 200,000 reviews through Podium.
For more, click here.
Adyen
In its role to continuously provide businesses with solutions to enhance their customer experience, the global financial technology platform Adyen rolls out dynamic customer service tools, such as Unified Commerce. Unified Commerce is a tool which gives businesses a single overview of their operations, customers, and payment data. We’ve learnt that truly experience matters to Australian customers, with shoppers citing an appreciation for retailers that provide a seamless shopping experience across all touchpoints.
As shoppers continue to favour the in-store experience, retailers need to match the physical store experiences as much as possible online. Unified Commerce effectively helps businesses improve their customer service experience and increase customer loyalty. By providing businesses with a single reference point, they have better and more actionable insights into customer behaviour and preferences.
Learn more here.
Genesys Cloud CX
Genesys Cloud CX is an all-in-one cloud customer engagement solution that unifies customer and agent experiences across all channels, including phone, email, chat, text/SMS, and social channels. It is an experience orchestration and composable platform that makes engaging with prospects and customers simple by integrating interactions across all channels into seamless conversations, empowering teams to provide exceptional customer experiences.
Genesys recently launched Cloud AI Experience, which combines an industry-leading CCaaS platform with modern innovations around digital, AI and WEM and an API-first approach. This new solution is designed to help organisations optimise customer journeys through smarter personalisation, automation and prediction.
With Cloud AI Experience, organisations can easily integrate real-time data and signals to orchestrate proactive engagement across customer touchpoints. Customers are met with new levels of care, and employees are equipped with smarter tools and insight to improve every interaction. Genesys Cloud CX enabled Service NSW agents to address and manage customer concerns across various channels via a single interface, delivering empathetic CX.
Infobip
Infobip Conversations is a cloud contact centre solution (CCaaS) designed to improve customer and agent experience through seamless omnichannel interactions in a unified and simple workspace. It allows businesses to converse with customers over some of the most popular industry-standard channels.
Infobip Answers enable businesses to create and deploy a smart virtual assistant that supports customer service and sales by building connections with chatbots for quick and efficient human escalation without losing context. These channels bring another dimension to a business’ up-sell and cross-sell efforts, lead generation, and assisting clients.
For more details: Automate Your Way to Superior CX: Build a Chatbot
Zebra Technologies: Workforce Connect
Employees can deliver an optimal customer experience when equipped with the right tools. Zebra Technologies’ Workforce Connect offers a unified enterprise device that allows hindered retail store associates to become effective problem solvers. Through it, critical workflows are streamlined into one place, on one device, delivering the right information at the right time.
For example, customers can notify via text when they arrive for curbside pickup, and the platform can notify associates. Access to the right information empowers store associates to think critically and offer effective solutions to the shoppers on a case-by-case basis. This translates into a more personalised retail experience which adds value to customer interactions. This is particularly important when operating in a highly competitive market.
Workforce Connect consolidates all critical workflows on one platform, enhancing visibility and worker connectivity and enabling faster response time. This enables store associates to communicate internally to request additional help in the front or back of the store. Self-help kiosks equipped with Workforce Connect can also allow shoppers to alert nearby retail associates for help. When tending to shoppers’ queries, store associates can use the platform to locate the right expert in real-time to offer the shopper the necessary information.
Besides Workforce Connect, Zebra’s Reflexis solution can help retailers elevate their execution in every store and distribution centre by optimising labour and their store associates’ experience to transform the collective team’s performance into a superior customer experience.
More here.
Pendula
Pendula is an Australian scale-up organisation that has built the world’s first proactive customer retention platform. Businesses from across industries, including telecommunications, health and energy, rely on Pendula to drive strategies to upsell and cross-sell to their client bases through the lens of customer service.
More here.
ipSCAPE
ipSCAPE’s cloud contact centre technology provides advanced multi-channel inbound functionality that is used by customer service teams across many industries, including Government, Retail, and Healthcare.
The solution seamlessly integrates with CRMs such as ServiceNow, through a CTI adaptor enabling organisations to leverage telephony capabilities within the CRM and provide personalised customer experiences. This integration allows customer service agents to be equipped with the interaction history of customers to utilise in their conversations. ipSCAPE’s solution can be implemented within weeks, with the CTI adaptor to be integrated in days.
More here
Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice’s Email User-Generated Content (UGC) Review Collection invites customers to leave authentic reviews, photos, and videos, for online and offline purchases, plus service interactions. These review requests are key to driving UGC, providing product coverage, fresh, relevant content, and SEO value.
Through gathering and fostering consumer content, Bazaarvoice enables consumers to make purchasing decisions via authentic UGC. Additionally, it creates a simple avenue for consumers to provide feedback and thoughts on a product or experience. The simplicity of information that Email Review Collect offers pre- and post-purchase makes it a significant customer servicetool.
Website: https://www.bazaarvoice.com/
Freshworks
Freshworks makes ridiculously easy-to-use marketing, sales, support and IT solutions. Businesses can leverage Freshworks to deliver delightful customer experiences through products such as conversational AI chatbots that help take customer engagement to the next level. These advanced chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), and speech recognition to offer a personalised experience that mimics human-like engagement.
With the capability to understand the intent and learn from user behaviour, chatbots can solve simple issues with zero human contact and offer 24/7 assistance and support in the customer’s native language. This eliminates wait times and enables instant responses, even during surge times.
Learn more about Freshworks’ conversational AI Chatbots here.
Salesforce Genie
Consumers today expect offers from companies always to be personalised; however, delivering these experiences remains a significant challenge due to siloed data. Research reveals that companies, on average, use almost 1,000 separate applications to run their business — leading to disconnected digital experiences.
Salesforce Genie, a real-time data platform, enables businesses to turn data into customer magic by delivering seamless, highly personalised experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. It takes billions of data points about customers in real time and creates a single source of truth that updates every millisecond.
For more information, see here: https://www.salesforce.com/products/genie/overview/
Doddle
For online retailers, providing great customer service post-purchase is crucial. Doddle powers pick-up drop-off (PUDO) points for Australia Post, offering efficient and convenient alternatives to standard home delivery. Rather than customers experiencing the frustration of a ‘sorry we missed you’ card, retailers who make use of Doddle’s PUDO technology can provide their customers with a range of delivery options, allowing them to decide whether to receive their parcel at their doorstep, by picking it up on their way home from work at their local grocery store, or a secure parcel locker.
More here.
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