3 Ways to Refresh Your Customer Contact Channels

Ready to see what radically personal customer service looks like? Sign up for a free demo with Gladly today.

With more brands for shoppers to choose from than ever before, companies need to periodically review their active customer contact channels and ensure they’re not just meeting customer needs, but also supporting their business goals. Here are three hacks to shift your channel mix in a direction that better suits both your business and customer needs.

Why You May Need to Refresh Your Customer Contact Channels Mix

The more customer contact channels you have available, the more ways customers can contact you and receive the help they need. This is good news for customer satisfaction because it means more opportunities to handle issues quickly and resolve problems efficiently.

However, it’s not always possible for growing brands to be everywhere at once. By taking inventory of which channels your customers favor and refreshing them accordingly, you can:

• Lower costs. Support agents can only be on one phone call at a time; however, they can take on multiple chat or SMS messages simultaneously. As a result, these higher concurrency channels can be less expensive to manage.
• Save on staffing. By shifting phone call volume to, say, email, you leverage the benefits of templated responses and reduce the need for real-time ones. This leads to more efficient handle times, which, over time, means more streamlined staffing resources, lower customer wait times, and higher customer satisfaction.
• Optimize team utilization. By refreshing your customer contact channels, you can put newer agents on written channels (for which they can quickly get standardized answers from your consolidated knowledge base) and tenured agents on voice messages and calls (which involves more training and thinking on your feet.)

With these benefits in mind, here are three hacks for refreshing your customer contact channels to unlock greater customer satisfaction.

3 Hacks to Refresh Your Customer Contact Channels Mix

1. Offer Chat and SMS

Chat and SMS are both fast and convenient ways for customers to get help 24/7, with no waiting on hold required. While chat works great for desktop users, customers on-the-go may prefer the convenience that SMS offers. Having both options available lets you cover your bases.
The key is to make it easy for customers to find both chat and SMS options on each page of your website by adding clear icons. This way, when customers are clicking and browsing, there will be no doubt whether they can get the help they need.

2. Prioritize Help Options in Order of Preference

Because our eyes naturally move from left to right and with a vertical flow, make sure to organize your help options in order of preference from left to right and top to bottom. Keep each help option distinct (e.g., splitting up calling and texting into two different boxes, even if they’re the same number) and clearly set the stage for what customers can expect (e.g., business hours).

Framebridge’s support page does a great job of laying out all the different help options.

Pro tip: Lead with self-service as the first help option. This cuts down on the number of emails and phone calls service agents will receive, and studies have found that customers generally feel greater satisfaction after independently resolving their low-complexity issues without having to contact support.

3. Add a Click-to-Call Option

Rather than just adding a phone number to your website footer, make it clickable so that customers can just tap it to text or call on their mobile devices. (Again, lower customer effort correlates with higher satisfaction, which, in the long run, drives customer loyalty.)

Tapping on Warby Parker’s “Call” icon triggers a dial option.

You’ll want to implement this feature within your app as well. With many apps only offering email forms as an option to contact customer service, delivering the same web experience to your app creates a more seamless customer journey and further optimizes your channel mix.

It’s high time to refresh your customer service contact channels to streamline resources while offering customers a better experience. To drive conversions and loyalty even further, join our community for more top industry-leading guidance.

PRODUCT

Experience the platform as a Gladly support hero with a guided tour

Start tour