Category Archives: Customer Support

The Most Important Customer Support Stats for 2018

July 23, 2018 | Categories: Business, Customer Support | by Debbie McCormick

customer support stats

Customer support has changed exponentially in the last few years. Better technology, more informed consumers, and higher expectations for fast access have all shaped how support is handled in businesses today. In the last year alone, the relationship between customer support and customer experience have become much closer, and have made a much larger impact.

According to a Walker study, by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Companies and organizations will need to continue to adapt their support and experience strategies to keep customers engaged, informed, purchasing, and happy with the brand. Those who fail to do so will face more difficult competition in the market, as other brands are paving the way to success through positive customer experience. In fact, next year alone, it’s projected that 89% of businesses are soon expected to compete mainly on customer experience.

What’s to come is a direct reflection of what’s already been learned, and customer support is no different. Here are some of the most influential customer support stats of 2017 that will have an impact on what’s to come in 2018 and beyond.

Salesforce has reported that: 

  • 75% consumers expect a consistent experience wherever they engage (e.g., website, social media, mobile, in person).
  • 56% consumers willing to share data to receive faster and more convenient service
  • 70% of consumers say technology has made it easier than ever to take their business elsewhere.
  • 52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to them.

Deloitte has reported that:

  • 62% of companies view customer experience delivered by the contact centers as a competitive differentiator.

Gartner has stated that “companies that implement customer experience projects begin by focusing on ways they collect and analyze customer feedback. This is a great starting point for meeting your customers’ expectations.” They’ve reported that:

  • In 2018 more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations.
  • By 2020 a customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human, so make sure to give your customers the direction and tools they need to accomplish tasks themselves.

Internet Retailer has reported that:

  • Companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.

Zendesk has reported that:

  • 50% of customers think it’s important to solve product or service issues themselves.

In 2018, companies should make it a top priority that their customers can easily find answers to their questions, and solve their issues through personalized, self-service support options. Organizations that take customer support and customer experience to heart and make a real effort will have more effective strategies in the marketplace and will stand out to consumers.

In short, businesses this year need to:

  1. Get set up with personalization
  2. Offer self-service, multi-channel support
  3. Use smooth UX and UI to provide a pleasant experience
  4. Know and understand your customers

Zingtree decision trees help organizations of all shapes, sizes, and industries to improve their customer experience and support channels. Build online, interactive trees that allow customers to self-solve, are easy to customize and personalize, and offer businesses the ability to collect valuable information to better understand their customers.

Get a free trial started or get in touch with our team to learn more about how we can help.

This article was originally published on January 2, 2018.

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Balancing the Digital & Human Experience in Customer Support

July 10, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support | by Debbie McCormick

Technology has enabled us as business owners, operators, and supporters, to make huge strides of progress on many fronts – operations, management, research and development, and customer service included. With all of its great power and potential, going fully-digital in many senses still isn’t perfect, however. Additionally, people are at the heart of every great idea, project, and communication, but using strictly human labor isn’t cost-effective, productive, or a good use of resources.

Finding that perfect balance between digital and human experience in customer support (and beyond) enables companies like Zingtree to really optimize the customer experience. We came across a brief, yet thought-provoking article by customer service industry leader, Shep Hyken, that discusses this delicate balance between providing an efficient digital experience and a more connected human experience. In his piece for Customer Think, he explains a specific, yet commonly-found example of how the balance needs to be adjusted:

I was on a website looking for a camera for my notebook computer. The chat box popped up, asking if I needed help. I typed in a question about the camera and the response was about what computer I was interested in purchasing. I had no interest in buying a computer. The digital experience had gone awry.

As consumers today, we’ve all experienced a mishap as a result of poor customer experience implementation. Whether it’s being mistakenly routed to the wrong department or something as serious as processing a payment incorrectly, these digital-meets-human experiences tend to leave a bad taste in our mouths. On the other hand, adopting a wholly digital or human-based support system can’t really cover every base. In another example in his article, Shep Hyken discusses why this is:

If a customer needs support, a chatbot may not have all the answers. The best chatbots have been programmed to understand when it doesn’t have an answer or the customer is confused. At that point, the chatbot moves the customer from the digital experience to a human experience, as it seamlessly switches you to a human to continue the conversation. That’s the way it should work – just at the right point, moving to the human experience. That’s balance.

This type of balance is a big reason why we created (and use) decision trees for our own customer support and experience purposes; they help us take advantage of a best-of-both-worlds scenario. In fact, here’s a common scenario in our customer service efforts where the balance has been perfected:

  • Our customer heads to our website to get technical help.
  • A decision tree appears, asking for relevant background information. End-users simply click a few buttons.
  • Once the decision tree is finished, a chat box appears, which includes the Q&A from the decision tree session, and has all the details for their problem.
  • We talk with our customer directly in the chatbox to answer as many questions as possible.
  • We can send any related materials, helpful resources, and step-by-step instructions from our own knowledge base.
  • We are able to send a full transcript of that conversation directly to our preferred CRM tool.
  • An automatic reminder to follow-up with that customer can be set at any time.

Identifying points of friction in these customer-related processes is important. With this knowledge, we’re better able to strike the delicate balance between digital experience and human experience, allowing us to care for our customers in the most efficient, effective, and non-intrusive way possible.

Read the full article by Shep Hyken on the Customer Think blog here.

Any questions on how to find your perfect balance of digital and human efforts in your customer support experience? Get in touch with us anytime to talk shop – we’re always happy to help you find a way to better serve your customers, and save more time and money in the process.

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These 5 Simple Call Script Techniques Can Easily Win New Customers

June 28, 2018 | Categories: Call Centers, Customer Support | by Tiffany

Do your agents strictly follow the call script and stay unshakable in what to say next when they receive an answer form a prospect or a client? Or, do they remain flexible, use a call center script as a handy helping tool, and react to the responses according to the situation? The best call script techniques are ones that work best for a particular agent and brings in the most appointments, scheduled demo calls, and sale deals.

A call script is an essential tool that helps to conduct a successful call campaign, it is necessary to train your agents the way that they’ll be equally comfortable talking to their clients with and without the call center script. Moreover, a call script can help to onboard new agents quickly, especially once it relates to outsourcing your call center-related activities. Sales representatives at CrazyCall are certain that a script builder is an amazing tool when it comes to conducting a proper conversation with a prospect. One of CrazyCall’s sales reps, Jacob, explains:

“You never know what to expect from a person that you reach. They might get interested in your product since the very beginning of your conversation. Thus, you need to be ready to answer all kind of and to as many questions as possible. On the contrary, there are times when you contact prospects and they express their unwillingness to discuss anything with you straight away. You need to be ready to hear “no, I’m not interested” and that is, to my mind, the phrase that might confuse sales reps the most. That’s why it’s important to know what your answer should be way ahead. In this case, the script in front of you is your rescue”.

So, what are those call script techniques that really work?

1. Stay flexible.

Follow a call script but be prepared to adjust your conversation at any moment. A call center script is a tool that a sales rep or a customer success agent can lean on but not rely on entirely. Call script techniques help to keep the structure and a flow, and can forecast some of the possible questions and answers, but surely not the whole conversation.

2. Don’t be a robot.

When following a call script, avoid speaking as if you were a robot. Even though you’ve been applying this call script hundreds of times before, you need to sound as natural as possible. You need to appear interesting, enthusiastic and utilize your soft skills to maintain an engaging conversation. Nobody likes hearing stock phrases that are boring and have no personal attachment. Thus, along with the call center script never forget about your sales presentation skills.

3. Use personalization.

Unless you are cold calling and know nothing about your leads except their phone numbers, use personalization in your call scripts straight away. First of all, refer to your contacts by their names. This way you’re bringing in some familiarity and trust to the conversation. Next, try to analyze what their pain points might be, basing on their position, a company they work at etc. Your leads need to have a feeling as if your offer and an entire conversation have been customized exclusively for them.

4. Don’t panic!

Did a prospect answer “yes, I’m interested” but you chose the answer “no, I’m not” in your call script instead? While he keeps talking and asking you questions, you’re trying to go back on track in your call script and find the correct answer? Take a deep breath, listen to the questions and answer them. You’ve done it so many times before, you’ll manage now, too. Even though most of the call script builders are very intuitive and are easy to navigate, nobody canceled a human factor. Again, the call center script is a tool that is designed to help you around and not to replace you!

5. Be prepared to hear “No.”

Rejection might be the most confusing answer of all. In this case, a call script is the best recipe. You don’t have to come up with anything weird or sound unnatural, just do the following: read what is written on your call script. For such special cases as a rejection, you need to prepare a well-thought answer that you need to test several times beforehand. In case you’ve no answer ready, simply improvise. It’s always better to respond to anything rather than agree to the rejection, and say “OK, have a great day!”

To conclude, call center scripting has been one of the best tools that help to conduct a successful sales pitch, a demo of your product, a cold or warm calling. However, don’t follow the call script blindly. Instead, put your ears open and stay flexible at all times. Listen, hear, and use personalization to achieve the best results with your call script. In the end, it is a tool that helps you to improvise and be ready for any kind of a situation.  

 

Olga Milevska

Olga is a Content Marketing Specialist at CrazyCall. When not writing on inside sales and customer success, she manages global marketing at PLUGin – Polish Innovation Diaspora, organizes Startup Weekend Wroclaw or traveling around Europe. Her other Interests include new technologies, innovations, startups, writing, and arts.

 

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Adding Personalized Customer Service to Your Call Center

June 25, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support | by Tiffany

We recently had the pleasure of contributing a guest article on the CrazyCall blog about some of the best ways that call centers can inject more personalization into their daily customer service practices. We’re so excited about being featured on their site, we wanted to share with you. Here’s just a quick excerpt from the post, but you can read the full thing on the CrazyCall blog.

In an era of always-on access, providing fantastic customer service in a call center environment is a must. To stay ahead of the competition, keep buyers, and win over new customers, non-stop customized access is necessary. One huge factor that many call centers, sales teams, and businesses may be missing? Personalized customer service.

Offering personalized customer service is about treating people as people, not as “the customer.” It’s also about empowering them through self-service with a personal touch. This leads to customer loyalty, confident agents, higher sales, and better competitive advantage.

If you’re a business with a devoted call staff, a sales team looking to improve, or a full call center, here are some ways to add more personalization to the mix.

1. Take advantage of automation

Personalized customer service is becoming a reality through advancements in automation. A recent Forbes article discusses how “leveraging AI in the contact center increases the effectiveness of customer service departments by freeing up more time for frontline representatives.” What does this mean? Automation saves agents enough time that they can spend more time with customers that need one-on-one care.

Some uses for automation are to:

– intelligently route customers to the correct department
– collect necessary data before hopping on the phone
– share information in real-time between agents or teams

This is possible with the help of chatbots, CRM integrations, scripts, and other automation tools.

Head to the CrazyCall blog to read the rest of our article >>

Like what you read? Share on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn or drop us a comment below.

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How to Send Email from Decision Trees

June 15, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, How To, Integrations, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

send email from trees

One of the most frequent requests we get from customers is about sending email. We’ve spent a lot of time to make this process as simple as possible.

With Zingtree, you can use Email Nodes to send email in two ways:

  • Automatically, with no end-user interaction.
  • Showing a pre-defined form for the end-user to enter a message.

Emails can include everything you need:

  • The Session transcript.
  • Variables entered during the session.
  • Images and formatted text.
  • Attachments.

Sending  Emails Automatically

Emails can be sent automatically, with no end-user interaction. Start by creating an Email Node as follows:

  1. Click Tools, then Add Node.
  2. Select Email Node as the node type. The Send Method should be set to Send Automatically.
  3. The Email Node editor appears.

  4. Add a Page Title (mostly for your reference when using the Zingtree editing tools)
  5. In Send Email to, enter the delivery email address. You can enter multiple recipient email addresses separated by commas.
  6. Enter a subject and a message. The message can include images, formatted text, or placeholders for variables. For example, if you collect a variable called name, just add #name# into the email body for it to appear.
  7. Check Include Session Data in Email to include the Q&A transcript, and any data collected in the email. You can also check “Securely deliver session data via Link”, which will provide a link to the session information, instead of including it in the email body.
  8. In After Sending, choose a node to go to next. Or, choose Go to URL, and enter a URL to launch instead, like this:
  9. Click Save Changes when finished.

How to Create an Email Form Node

Your end-users can be presented with a stock email form, which looks like this:

You can make a node that displays this form by creating an Email Node as follows:

  1. Click Tools, then Add Node.
  2. Select Email Node as the node type. The Email Node editor appears.

  3. IMPORTANT: For the Send Method, select Show Form Before Sending.
  4. Add a Page Title (mostly for your reference when using the Zingtree editing tools)
  5. Add text for the Send Message button.
  6. In Send Email to, enter the delivery email address. You can enter multiple recipient email addresses separated by commas.
  7. You can enter a default subject or message. These are pre-filled in the email form.
  8. Check Include Session Data in Email to include the Q&A transcript, and any data collected in the email. You can also check “Securely deliver session data via Link”, which will provide a link to the session information, instead of including it in the email body.
  9. In After Sending, choose a node to go to next. Or, choose Go to URL, and enter a URL to launch instead, like this:

  10. Click Save Changes when finished.

Summary

These two methods are the recommended ways to send email, and should be used in place of any other methods.

As always, if you have any ideas to share with us on this or any other features, please let us know!

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5 Massive Time-Saving Benefits of Interactive Decision Trees

June 4, 2018 | Categories: Business, Call Centers, Customer Support | by Tiffany

Decision trees can be great time-saving tools when implemented well. In any industry use case, fleshing out a complex process into a simplified and easy-to-understand version of itself is, by far, one of the best ways to save valuable resources. Because there’s no coding necessary to get up-and-running, decision trees save even more time for businesses, retailers, and call centers looking to streamline everyday processes. When put into practice, decision trees help to cut down on time spent navigating:

  • call center conversations
  • customer support efforts
  • internal processes
  • finding products on eCommerce sites
  • and more

While the scenarios vary, the results are similarly incredible. We created Zingtree decision trees ourselves in order to reduce the time spent on our own internal processes and support efforts. After implementing decision trees for customer support, we saw way fewer support tickets (about 25% less), spent about 15 hours less every week answering support tickets, and customer satisfaction markedly improved as well. Over time, this has lead to a savings of around $30,000/year.

We’re not here to focus on the savings in terms of money this time, however important it may be. Where the real savings truly lies is within TIME; and as we all know, saving time is saving money. Here are a few of some of the major ways that our online decision trees save organizations incredible amounts of time.

1. Providing self-help.

Consumers young and experienced alike have spoken: self-help solutions are the preferred solutions. While your standard phone and email communications are still incredibly important to offer, providing platforms to customers that allow them to self-solve problems and answer their own questions goes a long way where time-savings is concerned. Not only do the end-users or customers save time by being able to quickly route themselves where they need to go without waiting in a digital line, this interactive format saves businesses time that would have otherwise been spent helping that customer out. Interactive decision trees make self-help incredibly simple. You can create custom knowledge base materials, troubleshooters, interactive FAQ pages, tutorials, and more to embed directly on-site so customers can get the answers they need quickly.

2. Reducing back and forth.

Where emailing back-and-forth or playing phone tag with a customer for hours (or days!) used to be the norm, customers and businesses alike have started to value their own time more. Decision trees are an amazing tool for reducing – even eliminating – the back-and-forth typically found in service-based or consumer-facing industries. Because you can create an entire guided experience with active tracking and data collection, decision trees allow you to always be caught up without any manual effort. For example, if a customer can’t self-solve a support question using an FAQ decision tree, the information is automatically passed into a complete transcript for a support agent or team member to address. You can even share this transcripted customer info with any CRM tool that your company uses (Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.) to save time importing and sharing.

3. Finding answers faster.

Did we mention that saving time also relates to finding the information you need quickly? For customers in any industry, easy access is key. Interactive decision trees allow you to surface what customers need at a particular time, effectively cutting back on time otherwise spent searching around for the right answer. Introducing guided trees directly into an online site or eCommerce store is a proven way to enhance the customer’s journey from product/service discovery to final purchase. Allowing end-users online to quickly navigate to what they need improves the customer experience and helps to promote even more sales.

4. Collecting data securely.

Being able to collect customer information and other critical data in a secure way online is everything these days. With so many new rules and regulations surrounding data privacy, interactive decision trees remain a perfectly streamlined and secure way to collect and analyze data. Decision trees provide an easier, faster way to get information directly from customers, using data entry forms, feedback, and other methods of tracking. With integrations that make it possible to collect information and validate it all at once (for email, phone, and USPS address), our decision trees are a safe and simple option for gathering pertinent customer stats.

5. Generating powerful reports.

We’re firm believers in following the numbers; when a process is actually simplified and optimized, you can take notice using performance data. A full Analytics & Reports section in our decision tree toolkit makes it possible to generate actionable, value-driven reports on critical areas. In these various reports, you’ll be able to see the effectiveness of your decision trees and quickly locate common issues, making products and services even better over time.

With accurate analytics on-hand, you can see exactly how decision trees are being used and where areas of improvement may lie, so you can continuously optimize to save even more time. Other important reports include:

  • Results — measure how effective your decision trees are
  • Session List — see how long end-users are actively using your decision trees
  • Traffic Map (shown above) — view a breakdown of traffic to each part of your decision tree
  • Node Popularity — see the most frequently visited and clicked on nodes of each tree
  • Data Totals — access a full summary of data collected from a decision tree

 

When you implement internal and customer-facing processes that are easy-to-use, understand, and improve upon over time, the time-saving benefits come naturally. Hundreds of companies around the world are already using Zingtree decision trees to save time, money, and other valuable resources while providing a user-friendly platform – even us! Check out our gallery of decision tree examples to see more real-life use cases on how decision trees are the perfect time-saving solution for businesses.

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How to Pick the Best Live Chat Solution

April 19, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, Customization, Intercom | by Debbie McCormick

We’re huge fans of live chat – at Zingtree, it has been a terrific way for us to get to know our customers and their needs. Not only is live chat proven to be the most sought-after way to contact a company, it also is a sound way to respond to site visitors and potential customers in a quicker and more personalized way. With many viable solutions out on the market, it can be difficult to narrow down your options to find the best possible one for your use case. For Zingtree, Intercom chat has been a gamechanger (you can read all about how we use Intercom and what it’s best features are here).

To nudge companies in the right direction, Practical eCommerce came up with a list of live chat features that should always be at the top of the list. Here’s just a sampling of their article that we thoroughly enjoyed:

Phone, email, and web support still rank as important when it comes to instilling trust. But the presence of live chat exceeds them all — even if shoppers don’t use it. Compared to other methods of communication, 92 percent of consumers prefer communicating via live chat. Roughly 80 percent prefer communicating via social networks.

Via MarTech

Here’s why live chat appeals to shoppers.

  • Quicker than any other method.
  • Allows visitors to multitask.
  • Instills trust.
  • Helps reduce the language barrier.
  • Can be implemented proactively.

The list that Practical eCommerce included is a great checklist to keep in mind when shopping around for a live chat support tool. From the complete list, we hand-picked some of the top live chat features you need to look out for:

  1. Canned responses
  2. Knowledge base or frequently-ask-questions integration
  3. File upload support
  4. Support and agent ratings
  5. Visitor tracking
  6. Chat tags and keywords
  7. Analytics integration

Self-service support is hugely popular among the majority of consumers – the ability to integrate with knowledge base customer support tools, like interactive decision trees, tutorials, and FAQs, is the perfect way to streamline support efforts and link online support systems together better. We use it ourselves to make sure that our support presence is simple, straightforward, and always helpful. Whenever customer data is collected through a decision tree form, this information can be stored and sent directly to the live chat window in order to fill in information gaps, as well as give you a better understanding of who you are talking to and what issues they are dealing with.

Keep reading on the Practical eCommerce blog for the rest of their recommended live chat implementation features, and get in touch with us to talk about how to get the most from your live chat and knowledge base integration.

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5 Essential Customer Support Tools That We Love

April 18, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support | by Bill Zing

customer support tools

As a B2B company, we’re no strangers to providing service and finding customer support tools that can improve how we identify issues, stay in contact, and share important information with those who need it within the company. As it’s well known in any industry out there, poor customer service experiences really do stay with the customer, and they can essentially erase all of the hard work and effort it took to get them in the door in the first place.

A recent survey reports that customer service is the number one priority for small business owners, and we at Zingtree are no exception. We’ve experimented over the years with the best ways to help combat support issues that can lead to even more damaging, long-term problems and promote better understanding, access, and customer experience.

Below are 5 incredible customer support tools that every support team can easily master, leading to more efficiency, streamlined communication, and happier customers.

1. Intercom

Perfect for: being more available to your customers 

Intercom has a complete suite of messaging-first products that all modern internet businesses can use to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle — covering acquisition, engagement, and support. In essence, Intercom offers an all-in-one communication platform for live chat, email support, targeted messages, and more. We use Intercom for all of these great uses, which helps us stay connected with our customers as they are on our website, and set up automated emails for specific segmented customers to deliver tailored content.

Some of Intercom’s best features include:

  • An operator bot that can send qualified responses to customers in live chat when you’re away.
  • A flexible API so you can customize with integrations, keep everything in sync, and aggregate data more easily.

Here’s more information on how Intercom and Zingtree work together for even more customer support power. 

2. Basecamp

Perfect for: organizing internal teams and projects

Basecamp is a real-time project management system and team communication platform rolled up into one nice package. Used primarily for resource planning and long-term scheduling, it has awesome features for teams to keep track of project priorities. Whenever we get a new feature request, we log this straight into Basecamp, along with the contact info of the customer; and, as we do updates, we also use the platform to notify every customer who requested the feature. Not only does this process breed loyalty, but Basecamp makes it easy for us to log and organize all of our feature requests. We keep a continually evolving roadmap of what to do next, and it’s 99% customer driven.

Some of Basecamp’s best features include:

  • A full schedule display to see every to-do, timeline, and deadline in a calendar format.
  • The ability to forward important emails from your inbox straight to your account, where it can be discussed and specifications can be laid out.

3. Reply (by Buffer)

Perfect for: social media listening and support

Reply by Buffer is a fabulous tool that displays your tweets in what they refer to as “a real-time tweet inbox” that lets you streamline social media conversations in one centralized location, and then assign tasks and respond. While they boast the ability to connect social messages from Facebook and Instagram as well, we’ve primarily used it to keep things moving on our Twitter account – a real lifesaver when you’re working with someone on an issue or question.

Some of Reply’s best features include:

  • Automatically identifies any past conversations you’ve had with a user, so you never forget a detail.
  • GIF, image, and emoji support to keep things light and provide more context when needed.

4. Zingtree

Perfect for: building out the ideal knowledge base

Our very own Zingtree toolkit is also a powerful customer support tool to add to the list. Providing a fully-interactive environment for guiding customers through troubleshooters, FAQs, product support, process guides, and more in a simplified way, it’s perfect for support teams in companies of all sizes. There’s no technical know-how or coding required to get set up with using decision trees for support, and can be embedded directly into any website using just a small piece of HTML – even in emails! We use Zingtree internally to manage our knowledge base of information, as well as set up demo requests, and even provide end-to-end technical support.

Some of Zingtree’s best features include:

  • Robust integrations with email, live chat, CRM, and Helpdesk systems like Zendesk, Salesforce, and others.
  • Collecting data, feedback, and other key information from customers to streamline the support process.
  • Analytics and reports that can help track the performance of a decision tree, examine traffic patterns, point out demographic data, and more.

Here’s more information on how Zingtree integrates with other customer support tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, and more. 

5. Calendly

Perfect for: simple and straightforward scheduling 

Calendly is your source for ending the dreaded email tag loop, allowing you to share availability for meetings or appointments of any kind just with a quick link. Our business revolves around building relationships; we want to make sure each potential user knows how to extract the most out of Zingtree, and to get their implementation questions answered before they really start building decision trees. By automating the scheduling of meetings and demos, we save a lot of time in back-and-forth, get to know customers well, gather up great ideas by talking to people, as well as receive fewer support requests in the long run.

Calendly is integrated into our “Request a Demo” decision tree, which gathers information from our clients. In our calendar, we get a nice summary from the Zingtree session of what each prospective customer is looking for, which helps us set up the most relevant demo beforehand.

Some of Calendly’s best features include:

  • Integrates with most major calendar services, like Google Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud.
  • Detects which time zone a user/invitee is in and presents them with the correct one.

Here’s more information on how Calendly and Zingtree work together to create a more seamless user experience. 

 

Check out some of our other great posts around improving customer support:

 

Any questions on getting started with Zingtree customer support tools for your business? Get in touch with us!

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Making Your Knowledge Base Interactive with Decision Trees

March 13, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support | by Tiffany

A knowledge base of articles and resources is often at the very heart of a customer support strategy. An effective knowledge base will house materials that can help customers self-solve, troubleshoot issues, and better understand the details about products/services without the hassle of calling up your company on the phone or waiting for someone to get back to you via email.

Your typical customer support knowledge base includes categories of articles, tutorials, guides, how-tos and other helpful materials that can help to break down your products and services, and other important processes. Presenting this kind of information as readily available, bite-sized pieces, consumers are better able to help themselves; and, in turn, become more loyal to your company. In fact, stud­ies show that self-service support is considered a good, useful idea to 75% of con­sumers – 91% of those said that they would use an online knowl­edge base if it were easy to find, con­ve­nient to use, and (most importantly) applic­a­ble to their needs.

Why Interactive is Better

Decision trees are the ultimate tool for creating interactive knowledge bases that can serve internal or external purposes. Set in an interactive environment that can be embedded into any website or page, decision trees are an ideal way to help customers without the need for live agents or long support articles. Interactive knowledge bases allow you to:

  • Make content more engaging and easy to absorb
  • Support frictionless data collection
  • Automate support efforts to save time and money

For companies who have deployed Zingtree, like Applian Technologies, an interactive knowledge base is saving an incredible amount of time and money on support efforts – in their case, implementing a decision tree-based knowledge base saves over 15 hours every week on support communications and $30,000 of valuable human resources.

Our own Zingtree knowledge base is fully-interactive and built within our decision tree platform. Take a look at it here, or a quick peek below:

Our Best Tips for Building a Knowlege Base

Getting up-and-running with an interactive knowledge base shouldn’t be a huge project if you already have basic support articles written out already. There are a few key tips we like to share with support teams to get them started with an effective, highly-optimized knowledge base.

  1. Take what’s already out there and make it even better. We built a complete Gallery of decision tree examples, including many FAQ and troubleshooters, to help businesses adapt and create the best trees they can. You can also take a look at our own interactive knowledge base for some helpful notes, and those of our successful customers.
  2. Keep things as simple as possible, and provide concise questions and short answers. The short-and-sweet approach is largely appreciated by customers of all types, so it’s important to keep their time in mind when you craft up the copy for every support piece.
    Here’s an example of how not to write something:
    Q: Would you like to receive help on registration or product support?
    A1: I need help with Registration
    A2: I need help in Support.Here’s an example of how to clean it up for simplicity:
    Q: How can I help?
    A1: Registration
    A2: Support
  3. Use visuals, videos, diagrams, GIFs, and other types of media where it would be helpful for customers. Using photo-based media and adding relevant videos to your questions is a great system for communicating more with limited space.
  4. Collect customer data and feedback where it makes sense. With our decision tree platform, you can easily analyze where your customers are navigating to most on your knowledge base, where they are getting stuck, and even collect feedback on specific trees to make them better over time.

 

Want to see some first-hand, real-world examples of interactive knowledge bases (and other types of decision trees) on the Zingtree Gallery. 

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3 Simple Ways to Show Customers That You (Really) Care

February 15, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, Customization | by Tiffany

While February is typically reserved for the romantics of the world and sharing appreciation to those in our lives, we believe the practice of showing people that you care should be a year-round effort. For businesses in industries from retail to technology and everywhere in between, customer appreciation and true customer care are vastly important to long-term successes.

From a purely bottom-line perspective, happy and loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase on average. From a more human point of view, happy and loyal customers are more informed about the product, satisfied with the results or experience, and get far more use out of a purchase. So, what are some simple ways to insert more customer care into your over-arching customer support strategy?

1. Pay attention to their feedback (and make it easy for them to provide it).

Customer feedback is golden – for every customer who complains about a product or service you’re offering, 26 other customers remain silent. Every part of customer feedback should be carefully considered, analyzed internally, and taken into action when needed in order to really show that you are listening to what your customers have to say. To show your customers that you are really listening would be to:

  • Ask for their ideas. Find a way to kickstart a discussion and open up their ideas with clever questions that can open the feedback they provide.
  • Reward their suggestions. No one incentive is ever recommended, as it largely depends on the type of company in question. Some offer cash, vouchers, discounts, or other value-based incentives.
  • Send them a ‘thanks.’ Always send a thank you! Your thanks will show your customers that you care about how they’re enjoying the product or service and thank them for choosing you.

With the right tools and platforms in place to collect this valuable data – like an embedded feedback form or survey – you’ll be able to take the guesswork and manual effort out of the gathering, analyzing, and taking action on customer feedback.

2. Personalize and humanize the service they’re getting.

When providing a service, you should always make the customer feel as if it is personal to them. This can be as simple as using their name during contact or through online communications; it’s about going the extra mile to make sure they know they’re being heard. This can be adapted and worked into customer service training programs, used when crafting your customer-facing newsletters, and tapped into during any other customer interaction that may be had.

Going hand-in-hand with personalization is the concept of being human – at no point should the customer feel like they’re talking to a robot when on the line with your customer service team. If you have one basic call script and a team of agents reading from the same one, but no one includes any personalization or humanity into the interaction, the customer will likely walk away feeling disconnected. 

3. Always ask, never assume.

Rather than assuming what your customer might expect from you, it’s far more effective and engaging (and less risky) to ask them. Research shows that businesses are wrong more than 50% of the time due to assumptions, which will easily result in an annoying customer experience that could have easily been dealt with from the very start of any interaction.

Ask questions, gently nudge for more information, and listen intently to the response. If you reach out for further help with new product ideas and other suggestions and actually put those into practice, customers will know that you care and that they have an impact on (and direct connection to) your business. The real way to show customers you care about them is to take action to improve their experiences; show gratitude by proving you’re listening, and take the feedback to your advantage to work toward a better future.

Many of our own customers have submitted feature requests, brand new use cases, and incredibly helpful suggestions that we’ve taken to heart and implemented over the course of many, many decision tree updates over the years – it’s been a win-win situation for ourselves as a growing and evolving product, and them as customers gaining more value every day out of what we offer.

If you’re looking for an easier way to personalize the customer experience or allow your employees to connect and collect better data, see how a decision tree gives you full flexibility in the way your customers are being cared for. If you need more guidance, our team is more than happy to assist you – reach out to us for more advice!

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