Messaging Best Practices For Customer Service

In today’s digital world organisations are always exploring opportunities to improve their customer experience. Customers all have different communication preferences, so it is critical organizations employ an omni-channel communication strategy. With so many different touchpoints on the customer’s journey, communication needs to enable customers to interact over the channels they prefer. Whether your use Bulk SMS, Agent Chat or Whatsapp Business, the following tips should be considered for all mobile marketing platforms.

Define Objectives

Defining your chatbot objectives is important, as the design of the flow will enable you to collect all the essential information so that you can provide relevant service to customers.

What is the main objective – marketing, lead generation, or customer support?
Who is your target audience – new, existing, or returning visitors?
Support Hours – 24×7 support or specific hours?
Is it to help customers find a product, purchase it, or find information?

While defining your goals, remember to always plan how to enhance the conversational experience.

Automation

Automate as much as you can – but not everything. The key is to find a balance, and a common strategy is to employ a bot as the first contact channel for FAQs and transfer more complex conversations to human support.

Analyse common queries and issues to help identifying the FAQs and design your chatbot. A great way to start creating content is by integrating it with your existing knowledge base, which will reduce the need of maintaining information on multiple systems.

Automate: Identify common issues, FAQs, and help centre content.
Simplify: Guide customers by using quick replies – it will improve the experience.
Personalize the flows: Customise the questions asked (product, city etc.) to provide useful context for the agent.
Give customer options: Sometimes customers just want to speak to a real human, so it helps to have a “Chat with an Agent” option. If you can glean some information upfront like a name, it would help personalise the conversation.

While automation helps with efficiency, it’s still important to keep it as human as possible. It is valuable to introduce some human characteristic in your chatbot to keep the conversation more human-like.

Provide support over your customers’ preferred channels

When customers get support via their preferred channel, they have a much better experience. Customers opt to communicate in whatever channel is most convenient for them, be it via your help centre, mobile app, or social channels.

Ensure customers know how: Make it simple for customers to figure out how to message you – if not, they will move on.
Keep it simple: Do not add every social messaging channel that may not be popular in your region.
Highlight messaging channels: Add relevant logos or icons, such as the WhatsApp button, to make your website more engaging and obvious.
Add a survey: Embed a customer satisfaction survey in the conversation and learn any customers’ pain points and how to improve.

Gather important customer information up front

Collecting some key information at first contact will provide agents with context and used to route the customer to the right funnel.

Customer Information: name, contact info, issue, or product – all extremely useful for context – and efficient routing. The bot can capture this up front.
Conversation history: Agents can see the entire conversation history, useful to provide more personal support.

Put the right person in the right seat

When it comes to staffing customer service positions, choose individuals that best fit the customer service role. Live chat involves real-time ongoing (often concurrent) conversations, so staffing your team differs from traditional support staff.

Enrich your chatbot with a personality

Inject some level of personality into your chatbot and reflect your brand values into the conversation style. Defining your audience will help designing an intelligent chatbot and determine the conversation style. You can then use brand images and emojis to keep the conversation human-like, making it more natural and engaging for your customers.

If your brand is more professional, humour may be inappropriate. You need to maintain a balance between your brand personality, and the chatbot’s persona.

The bottom line is..

Messaging enables businesses to deliver on customers’ increasing expectations, meeting customers where they prefer. Customers can effortlessly resolve their issues on a channel already entrenched in their everyday lives. And companies are moving towards messaging for the same reasons customers do: it’s quick, personal, expedient, and secure.

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