At the scale at which people have embraced AI, the idea of intelligent customer support will redefine this segment, eventually improving customer retention.
In recent times, customer success has become an important metric for most companies and great customer success can be said to be influenced by customer retention. Studies have shown that many organizations have come to realize that customer acquisition costs between 5x - 25x more than customer retention. A lot of companies have shifted their focus to customer retention and are fueling their support teams to improve customer experiences.
Because of this, the quality of the service you provide has become equally important as the service provided itself. A great customer experience encapsulates everything from discovery and conversion to the most important point of concern in this blog - retention.
Surefire ways to improve customer retention
Build Trust Through Exceptional Service
In a customer experience trend report, it was found that about 50% of the respondents said that they would switch to a different product after just one bad customer experience. 50% could cost a business their entire livelihoods no matter how big or small the company might be. Therefore the foundation of great customer support lies in building relationships with your customers, building trust - and that starts from exceptional support. When customers know they can rely on your support team to solve their problems promptly and professionally, they're more likely to stick around.
The 4 pillars of exceptional product support
Personalized Onboarding and Interactions
Customers appreciate a personalized touch. And onboarding is a great way to leave the perfect first impression. People appreciate first impressions because they don’t know what to expect. Hence, the more you personalize your approach, the more your customers appreciate it and consider long-term relations with your product.
Here are a few ways in which you can personalize your interactions -
Leverage data to identify users - Make use of the data at your disposal to research your users, create custom cohorts, and craft personalized interactions.
Automate communication - Remove delayed onboarding and manual intervention and create workflows for specific member cohorts that can engage with users automatically under different situations.
Have 1-on-1 with more prominent clients - Assign individual customer success professionals to larger clients so there’s always a human touch to their needs.
Answer, anticipate, elaborate
Even customer support has become cut-throat these days, every organization wants to up their support game, and doing just the minimum isn’t enough anymore. Here’s a three-part model that works great -
Answer: Give the customer what they asked for.
Anticipate: Think about what question they are most likely to ask next, and answer that one, too.
Elaborate: Share a help document, a video, or other contextual information that might help the customer continue their work without needing to come back and ask again.
Collect and act on feedback
Your customers' opinions are invaluable. By actively seeking feedback and acting on it, you not only address immediate concerns but also demonstrate your commitment to improving. Use surveys, reviews, and feedback forms to collect customer opinions on their support experiences. Analyze feedback data to identify common pain points and areas for improvement. Finally, make necessary improvements based on feedback, and communicate these changes to customers.
You can also use the feedback as a way to empower your support team and improve how you offer support through continuous training and development to ensure everything remains up-to-date. Create feedback loops within the team to discuss challenges, discoveries, share customer insights, and work on what’s important.
Let customers help themselves
Along with the option to talk to support professionals, there should always be an option where customers can try to resolve queries on their own. Not all users like support interactions unless it’s necessary, and in such cases, your product should be equipped with self-help options like knowledge bases, community forums, and chatbots.
In a recent study by Zendesk, they found that younger consumers are used to doing their own research. The digital natives like Gen Zs and Millennials are especially careful to learn about products before they commit to a purchase. About 75% of them take their time comparing prices, reading reviews, and checking out different brands before they buy, hence accounting for their ability to solve their own issues before consulting a support professional. In fact, 30% of the new generation users identified “not being able to find the information I need online” as one of the more frustrating aspects of a bad customer experience.
Self-help and AI go hand-in-hand
Since generative AI came along, the landscape of self-help and research has evolved drastically. At the scale at which people have embraced AI, the idea of intelligent chatbots will seamlessly integrate with AI because, after all, a chatbot really is an interactive help center that directly interacts with the user. With the addition of AI to this, the bot becomes more intelligent, is able to handle complex questions, and furthermore reduces the need for support professionals to personally handle queries.
Leveraging Threado AI to improve customer retention
Threado AI has been designed for the new age of customer experience where people prefer figuring things out on their own. It’s been crafted to reduce human intervention while still giving you and your support team complete control over the bot.
Here’s how the AI bot can be an AI-led asset that escalates your support to newer heights -
Train your bot not just on knowledge bases, URLs, and PDFs, but also on community conversations so it has the context of public discussions too.
You can install the bot on community channels and let the bot auto-respond to queries. You can also embed the bot on a webpage or install it within your product.
Since you’ve trained your bot on content from various sources, it has all the knowledge it needs to answer questions efficiently. This saves you time from constantly digging out resources and reference articles since the bot also shares the links.
The bot having been selectively trained, only knows the things you want it to know, therefore, the answers are also accurately only referenced from the sources you shared.
Train the bot on your help centers, online knowledge base, and more
How to setup the bot?
Step 1: Signup for Threado AI and train the bot on online help centers, docs, knowledge bases, PDFs, and Slack or Discord community conversations.
Step 2: Setup the bot to make it your own by adding icons, brand colors, and default responses.
Step 3: Test the bot by asking questions from every source that the bot has been trained on. Once you’re satisfied with the answers, move on to the installation stage.
Step 4: Copy the embed code and paste it on the desired webpage where you want the bot to be, install the chat widget within the product for easier access to the users, and install it on specific channels in your community.
Threado AI isn’t meant to replace your support community but rather to help enhance the support experience by delighting your customers and giving more structure to product support through a comprehensive dashboard. This dashboard lets you see all the conversations with the bot and keep a close eye on “Open” and “Resolved” conversations. You can monitor the bot’s answers to make sure they’re accurate and manually Resolve or Open conversations.
These conversations can be thought of as support tickets and each one that’s closed can be marked as a Resolved ticket. Additionally, you can manually respond to queries that were unanswered by the bot and leverage these queries as probable gaps in your knowledge bases. Improve them accordingly.
The fact that AI has become so easy to implement has leveled the playing ground for smaller and larger companies alike. People are much more tech-savvy and consider product decisions based on convenience and responsiveness over anything else. Customer feedback leads to better reviews and reviews are the bedrock for effective marketing today. You are more likely to gain positive referrals if you use customer feedback to prioritize top-of-the-line service. According to a report, 89% of people think that quick responses are important when deciding which company to buy from. Incorporating AI isn’t just the easiest but also the most efficient way to reduce response time and still offer cutting-edge support.
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