While quality customer service is crucial for business success, it can be expensive too. Unfortunately, cutting down on your customer service costs can also cause a significant drop in service quality, costing your business even more.
Recent statistics show that UK businesses lose over £37 billion of their annual revenue to poor-quality service. So how can you keep your customer service and support costs low without decreasing service quality? The following tips can help.
- Implement the right self-service options
One of the most effective ways to reduce customer costs is to decrease how much time your workers spend addressing customer problems.
Remember that the more time employees spend handling customer problems, the less productive they will be attending to other areas of your business. That drop in productivity can translate into an avoidable cost.
However, self-serving options can help address this problem. The most commonly used self-service options are FAQs and interactive tutorials, which equip customers with the necessary information to self-serve or independently find relevant solutions.
Doing this reduces the need for customer service agents available 24/7, lowering the overall service cost. You can make a list of FAQs with their answers available on your business websites or pinned to your social media pages for easy access.
- Use chatbots for customer support
Some customers may ignore the self-service options or not find the necessary answers. So you can add a chatbot to your website as another low-cost customer service layer without needing physical agents available around the clock.
Chatbots are ideal replacements for agents, as they’re always online, never go on leave, and are immune to work fatigue. Plus, they can handle frequent customer issues without getting emotional. Modern AI-powered chatbots can also deliver customer service quality levels like real humans.
That means your customers will not know they’re chatting with bots, and your business will experience no drop in service quality. Even more importantly, chatbots are cost-effective and can collect important customer data for analysis.
- Offer proactive customer service
Implementing self-service options is a proactive and cost-effective customer service strategy, but it doesn’t end there.
Today, most customers go to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter when seeking resolutions related to products and service issues. Adopting the right strategies offers a good opportunity to reduce customer service costs.
Some of these strategies include using social media for important announcements, sending proactive emails, and keeping customers in the loop through your social media pages without waiting for them to ask questions first. You can reduce time-consuming interactions by updating customers regularly about service issues.
- Train your customer support agents to deliver their best
Regardless of what other cost-cutting measures you undertake, poorly-trained service agents can still cost your business lots of money, especially through avoidable mistakes they make. So, if you have a team, invest in their training to ensure they deliver stellar customer support.
Remember, they directly represent your business as they’re always on the frontlines to make your customers happy. Training them in the necessary skills to give their best in any interaction is important.
ChrissyJ xxx
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