e-gray-blog - Tumblr blog

[e-gray-blog]

Discover an easy way to combine several messengers into one.

[e-gray-blog]

Live Chat for Healthcare and Wellness: Best Practices

The global healthcare industry experiences an ongoing shortage of personnel, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic of COVID-19. Digital solutions are one of the most effective ways out of the situation since they provide means to aid patients remotely and take customer interactions in the sphere of wellness and healthcare to a new level. Such telehealth technologies as live chat widget embedded on a clinic’s website can act as both a cost-effective substitution to call center support and an instrument for connecting doctors and patients regardless of their physical locations. Here's an overview of how live chat for healthcare is assisting the business to overcome current challenges and be better prepared for what is to come.

Easy appointment booking

For patients, a simple procedure of booking an appointment can turn into a nightmare during the busy hours of a clinic’s call center. The time wasted on hold can hardly transform into increased customer loyalty or satisfaction. Here, live chat can provide enterprises with a convenient booking process: a single agent processing doctor appointment requests can schedule 3–6 times more of them in the same timeframe as when answering voice phone calls. Furthermore, the full transcripts of these chats can be easily analyzed for data (client's email and appointment details) and used to automatically create and send reminders to patients on their upcoming visits.

Personalization

The key to increasing live chat satisfaction lies in personalization. For healthcare providers, live chat can be the most suitable platform for timely and personalized support. Since an agent can see details of a website visitor profile right next to a chat conversation, they know what webpage they view and from what geographical location, while for existing customers this is complemented with details of their previous interactions and clinic visits. All of this makes it easy for an employee to understand the nature of an issue or what kind of support a client needs quicker and supply them with a tailored answer.

Keep response time short

Live chat has all that is required for real-time (or almost real-time) customer support, and the key here is to establish a unified set of workflow rules across the team that cover the subject of an appropriate time of response. Almost a fourth of customers confirm that long wait times in live chat are their biggest frustration. Generally, 1–2 minutes is viewed as fine timing, and sales reps together with customer support agents should aim to reply to incoming inquiries or ongoing conversations within such a period. Such an approach is instrumental for healthcare providers in developing relationships with their patients and providing the best service possible.

HIPAA-compliance

For a healthcare facility, it is important to protect customer privacy and operate using solely HIPAA-compliant communication channels. PHI or protected health information encompasses diagnosis, demographic information, treatment guidelines, and test results, and should be transmitted only via secure means of patient-doctor interactions. Businesses may use live chat to deliver HIPAA-compliant customer assistance. A secure chat platform guarantees that client data is kept safe and that customers' personal information is secured. The requirements to be HIPPA-compliant include these aspects: auditable — transcripts of chats are saved and can be reviewed later; the data is stored in data centers that employ appropriate security measures; built-in encryption — the text of patient conversations is encrypted during the transmission and storage; recipient authentication — all communication must be directed to and reached by the intended recipient only and no email sending of transcripts is available due to this.

Summing things up

Businesses can make the most of their live chat platform and deliver the greatest service to their clients by following the best practices described above. Live chat is an essential tool for organizations, and by utilizing it correctly, firms in the industries of healthcare and wellness can create relationships with customers while providing the finest customer service possible.

[e-gray-blog]

How to Use Live Chat for Helpdesk Support

Live chat is a tool for instant customer support via an interactive widget on a company’s website. The solution enables enterprises of all sizes to deliver instantaneous customer service, quickly resolve inquiries, and make customers happier. And what’s true for any other software solution, is also true for live chat — the proper utilization of it delivers the best results. Read our article to discover useful tips on how to use live chat for customer service and get only five-star ratings all the time!

Install live chat in all the right places

Consider on what pages of your website the advantages of live chat will have the greatest impact. This is especially important for a small business or startup — don’t announce real-time to every customer if your team size and budget won’t allow it. Perhaps, a live chat widget can be available for registered and logged-in customers or VIPs and regular ones only. Today it is easy to make a live chat widget available only on certain pages of a website or even use several widgets monitored by different team members.

Don't leave consumers waiting

Live chat is all about instant real-time conversations. It is important to maintain a response time in-between 1–2 minutes to match the expectations of your clients. Don’t think that people will hang on your website just as they do on the phone, waiting for a customer rep response. It is more likely that, having received no answer in the initial several minutes, they will close the tab and go look for alternatives to your product or services.

Add a human touch

To provide a successful live chat support experience it is critical to make customers feel important and cared for. Greeting customers by name and tailoring responses to their inquiries is great for boosting brand trust and loyalty. Require your agents to constantly keep a cheerful tone, especially when dealing with dissatisfied customers, who already have their reasons to have dark shades in their perception of the brand. 

Don’t neglect automation

Live chat software offers a plethora of solutions to streamline and automate the process of customer communication. The most simple ones include template responses and hotkeys for fast replies, while chatbots and smart AI-powered assistants take the game to the next level, effectively solving plenty of customer inquiries on their own, without involving human agents who can focus on more pressing and difficult tasks.

Train team regularly

Live chat is a helpdesk channel with distinct peculiarities that set it apart from email or phone. Establish guidelines on how to greet customers, properly name products and services, solve issues and explain certain situations. Then, discuss those rules with other team members and agree on strictly adhering to live chat etiquette and escalation process for extra difficult issues. This will ensure a consistently great experience for customers during every interaction with brand representatives.

[e-gray-blog]

Top 6 Customer Service Platforms for Small Business

Providing high-quality customer service is essential for attracting new clients and retaining existing ones. In the modern market, defined by high competition, an outstanding level of customer service is hardly achievable without implementing a dedicated solution — a customer support platform. These tools help to streamline daily operations, decrease their costs and help employees work more efficiently. When the number of options available is too big, it can sometimes be as bad as when it is too small, so let’s zero down on some of the most prominent tools, which are trusted by businesses around the world and are known to deliver on their promises.

LiveAgent

For many small and medium-sized businesses in the telecoms, SaaS, and e-commerce sectors, LiveAgent has become a preferred client platform. It includes a fully functional helpdesk and ticket management system, embeddable live chat, as well as call center capabilities — all within a single intuitive interface. With nearly 200 integrations with various business software and social media platforms available, LiveAgent can be easily adapted for any workflow. After a 14-day free trial, businesses can select one of the pricing options, starting at $15 per agent per month.

Help Scout

Used by many well-known companies, Help Scout provides a comprehensive customer service solution that helps organize customer communication and comes with reporting features, an integrated knowledge base, iOS and Android mobile apps, and APIs for integrations with many other popular business platforms. Help Scout boasts an easy installation process and scalability, which makes it a good choice for dynamically growing companies. A unified customer data view provides quick access to a customer’s profile, history of conversations, and website activity. After a free 15-day trial, a business can choose from one of the three pricing plans that start from $20 per agent per month.

Zendesk

Designed for businesses of all sizes, Zendesk customer support platform’s central feature is Agent Workspace, which is a dashboard where agents may conduct several linked discussions and chats inside the same support query. This and other functionality of the platform enable staff to take a more customer-focused approach in their daily work and provide faster and more personalized service. The platform offers a variety of subscription packages, ranging from standalone Sales or Support solutions (from $19 a month) to a more universal Zendesk Suite option (from $49 a month).

Kayako

Focused on small businesses, Kayako customer service solution is a complete help desk platform for building customer loyalty and trust. It has everything that is required for seamless day-to-day operations, including shared inbox, sales pipeline, live chat, self-help knowledge base creation tools, and much more. Kayako’s trademark SingleView feature allows users to see site visits, purchases, shipping history, previous customer service inquiries, self-help searches, and article views in a single convenient window. After a 14-day free trial, companies can choose one of the pricing plans, starting from $125 monthly per agent.

HubSpot Service Hub

Arguably one of the most popular customer service systems, HubSpot Service Hub, supports businesses in creating strong relationships with customers while enhancing sales and support teams' productivity. The solution includes a shared inbox feature for merging email, live chat, WhatsApp, and other channels conversations into a single interface. It also comes with AI-powered analytics on team performance, highly customizable customer survey tools, and automation features for setting up template replies. The cost of HubSpot’s customer service solution varies based on the number of users and features, with a minimal $45 monthly fee for the annual plan.

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a customer support platform that assists businesses in improving customer service and growing revenue. The software provides helpdesk, ticket management, automation, and performance reporting functionality to enhance the team’s sales and support activities. Thanks to the support of numerous communication channels, such as email, social media, live chat, web forms, and phone, Zoho Desk allows companies to achieve an omnichannel level of interactions with their clients. The platform provides 3 tiers of monthly pricing: Standard plan at $14 per user, Professional at $23 per user, and Enterprise at $40 per user.

[e-gray-blog]

Social Commerce: Useful Tips and Best Practices

Today, social media marketing activities aim to cover all stages of the customer journey, from initial brand discovery to an actual checkout. Social commerce, which refers to selling goods and services via built-in shops in social media and messengers, is getting more popular among companies of all sizes and industries. In the article, we’ll explore proven practices that can help master social media selling to increase brand awareness, sales, and long-term relations with customers.

Get to know your target audience

It is important to align your social commerce approach with the interests and preferences of your target audience. Use analytical tools that most social platforms provide to get insights on your customers' demographics, geography, and web engagement patterns, as well as to understand what formats and subjects of content work best and gain the most impressions and clicks.

Personalize interactions with customers

Research shows that the majority of customers have high expectations of companies to be aware of their preferences and respond far more favorably to personalized offers. With this in mind, brands should utilize social media and messenger channels to connect with customers through direct messages and comments, providing exclusive benefits and offers to loyal clients.

Schedule your content

To enhance engagement, align your social media activities with festivals and current events to make them as relevant as possible. After a new product’s release, schedule a media campaign that includes posts, stories, and live videos to promote interest in it and motivate users to engage and ultimately make a purchase.

Work with user-generated content

Communities play a super important role in social commerce. Partnering with brand advocates and micro-influences (social media personalities who are well-known and have strong social trust in a close circle of followers) can be just as (or even more) effective than more expensive advertising campaigns with high-profile celebrities. Also, use the abilities of social CRM systems to monitor the social media landscape for brand mentions or comments and be prepared with a quick reaction to any of them, both negative and positive ones.

Employ an omnichannel approach

To broaden its reach, a company should strive to be equally present on all platforms that are popular among its target audience. Surely, the growing number of social media and messengers makes it difficult to achieve. Here, the solution lies in using an omnichannel messaging platform that allows a company to connect multiple social media accounts and merge customer conversations into a single easy-to-use interface. Mobile apps that such messaging platforms often provide are another way of how they allow to effectively manage customer communications on the go.

A social commerce strategy is a must-have thing if you’re serious about maximizing the potential of what social media and instant messengers can do for your business. Adopt the practices described above and aim for consistency in customer engagement on social media to see long-term growth in audience size and sales.

Summing things up

From what the recent expansion of social media and messengers shows, brands are only just beginning to realize their possibilities for improving sales and customer engagement. As these platforms develop and refine their functionality, introducing the latest solutions in the field of AI and augmented reality into a smartphone in everyone’s pocket, companies would have even more opportunities to create unique digital shopping experiences, regardless of their market niche or type of product. To some brands, missing out on these opportunities can be equal to simply handing their customers to a more flexible and agile competitor.

[e-gray-blog]

Social CRM: Essential Features and Best Practices

Companies utilize social CRM to gain business advantages and improve direct communication with customers who only think about a purchase, are in the process of making one, and have done it already. As a result, such systems need to incorporate a number of features to help companies achieve their goals.

Customer profiling

Social CRMs should be able to compile information from various customer profiles across networks to provide a thorough overview of their activities, interests, and prior interactions with the business. Additionally helpful are customization features that let users organize and display customer data from a specific set of platforms.

Social listening

An important aspect of social CRM is its capacity to gather data by monitoring what people are saying about a business on social media in their stories, posts, and comments. In order to enhance customer service and public opinion of the brand, analyzing the results of social listening is helpful for enhancing marketing, selling, and support.

Multichannel integration

To achieve full coverage and efficient communication, a Social CRM should support all major channels used by the business’s target audience. Omnichannel integration also makes it easy to view the history of correspondence between the company’s employees and customers in a centralized manner.

Performance analytics

Without having accurate data available, it is nearly impossible to evaluate how Social CRM helps business (and whether it helps at all). In light of this, a Social CRM system must have robust analytics features. An ability to access and evaluate data on your customer demographics as well as their activity across channels is essential, just as the tools to monitor staff performance: average response time, the number of closed tickets daily, and so on.

Social CRM practices

Implementing a Social CRM system and setting up integrations with social media and messengers is halfway to success. The next one is to use it in the best possible way to achieve results.

Find new ways to interact with the audience and track how they react to different approaches to defining the best tonality and communication forms. For example, contests and surveys in social media can be great options for two-way communication with customers, while personalized promotions via messengers can be useful to return those clients who haven’t made any purchases recently.

Monitor mentions of your business. Expand social listening to more than simply @-mentions of the company’s account, including products and key employees’ names. By doing so, you will be less likely to miss any social media conversations in which you may engage and demonstrate your knowledge, customer service, and client-oriented attitude.

Provide real-time assistance to customers sharing their issues with any aspect of the company’s services on social media. With Social CRM, an assigned support agent gets plenty of insights on such cases, including customer details, purchase history, and preferences, and can provide prompt help, without asking numerous clarifying questions.

Create targeted campaigns and promotions based on the insights provided by Social CRM. Since the system gathers and arranges plenty of data across numerous communication channels, it all should be put to good use — create segments of customer audience based on several parameters and develop targeted campaigns or promotions, which can show higher efficiency compared to a more general approach.

Show your fans that you care. Client-created fan groups in social media are invaluable for growing brand exposure and trust among customers. Social CRM makes it easier to discover such pages and you are only left with a decision on how to strengthen the loyalty of these clients. For example, it can be sharing their activity in the brand's official channels, special offers for the most active members of communities, or inviting them to participate in the development of a new product or service.

[e-gray-blog]

5 Whys to Employ Live Chat for Your Business

Almost three-fourths of all consumers use live chat as the most satisfactory method of communicating with a company. They enjoy the instance and convenience of a website chat, along with personalization offered by a support team who can easily understand what they browse or want. As a result, companies get many advantages from installing a live chat widget on a website, from attracting new customers to developing long-term relations with existing clients.

Let’s take a look at some of the main benefits of integrating live chat into your business site.

More sales opportunities

A great number of people face doubt during shopping on any website. They may have a lot of questions about the product they recently put in a shopping cart, unsure about sizing or delivery options, and a live chat is the best way for businesses to address buyers' concerns, from common to more peculiar ones. 

According to Forrester research, 77% of consumers in the U.S. stated that before making a purchase online they need to talk to a real person. Moreover, a chat widget on a website demonstrates to customers that their time is valued by your business, which also builds trust and positively impacts brand loyalty.

Conversion rate optimization

It is no secret that a lot of website visitors abandon their cart during the checkout process due to some type of payment failure, website issues, additional shipping or other fees, or a return policy that doesn’t align with their expectations. Live chat allows customers to connect with support representatives directly from the payment page (or otherwise), so they do not need to call or write an email. When the problem is solved in an efficient and quick manner, the visitor is likely to return and make more orders in the future.

Coached shopping experience

Brick-and-mortar stores still provide a better shopping experience in comparison to digital shops. There is always someone behind the counter who may assist shoppers with their needs. Most buyers on the web are alone on e-commerce websites and have no one to guide them. Live chat is here to solve that problem with instant assistance at every stage of the customer journey, from pre-purchase advice to payment. All of these bring in new customers and interest for your business.

Customer loyalty

Live chat shows the highest level of client satisfaction in comparison to other channels, such as phone or email. It comes with great speed in getting an answer from the support team and provides a more convenient experience since any request can be easily forwarded to another operator (more knowledgeable in that particular area) and the client doesn't even notice that. Hence, customers who are satisfied with speed and service are more likely to return and become long-term customers.

Ample analytics

A business has to know its target audience and get analytics insight for future growth. Live chats have a variety of analytics tools to help you monitor the performance of your support staff, as well as understand where your visitors are coming from, what web pages they frequent most, what actions they perform, and what questions they ask. All this data can be used to improve the aspects of your website and business as a whole, such as product pages, items’ descriptions, registration process, delivery options, and so on. 

These are just some of the benefits a  business may get by installing a chat widget on their website. In case you are considering employing live chat for e-commerce or other business verticals, check out our comprehensive guide on choosing a live chat.

[e-gray-blog]

Advantages of CRM and messengers integration

Because of their growing popularity, instant messengers are one of the best methods for businesses to reach clients and offer individualized real-time help. CRM system integration with messengers can assist businesses in optimizing the work of staff, improving customer satisfaction rate, and boosting conversion. Thanks to combining conversations from many channels into a single chat window and providing understandable customer data, such integration can make a significant change in the efficiency of customer communication process. Let’s take a look at key benefits of CRM and messenger integration. And keep in mind that none of these benefits require staff expanding, raising traffic volume, support or sales expenditures.

Personalized customer experience

Every customer's personal information, including purchase history, shopping preferences, contact information, and prior support tickets, is stored in a CRM system. It is easier to customize their user experience when you have access to this information during a conversation with the client via CRM and messenger integration. For instance, if a customer purchasing a pair of jeans asks for style guidance, a salesperson can instantly offer relevant options from brands and in the sizes the customer previously ordered, reducing the need for clarification or additional questions, thus enhancing the customer's shopping experience.

Collecting customer data in a CRM system is also helpful for tailoring marketing campaigns. Individual audience segments can be created based on factors like demographics, geography, and purchasing habits, and then these customer groups can then be engaged with customized offers and discounts through their preferred messaging platforms.

Real-time communication & feedback

Instant messengers allow real-time communication that is way faster than emails and has a more convenient format than phone calls. By integrating messengers with a CRM system, support agents can process client requests and communicate with them right away while taking advantage of features like the sales funnel, contact history, sales goal setting, and forecasting. Integration with CRM makes messenger communication more convenient for employees while remaining as instant as when chatting directly on messenger. This improves conversion and customer satisfaction rates by enabling sales or support staff to concentrate on a client's problem and respond to their query promptly.

Cost reduction

CRM integration makes it possible for current teams to operate more productively, handle more leads and support problems in less time, and streamline and partially automate communication via messengers. All of this means that a company can boost conversion and revenue without adding staff or traffic volume by optimizing its resources. Since integration enables processes to be automated, such as work with Deal cards, staff members need to put less effort into routine duties and focus more on improving relations with prospects to boost conversion and regular clients to increase purchase frequency. With CRM and messengers integration, sales representatives can communicate with customers across several channels using a single chat widget.

Extensive analytics

CRM systems include a variety of analytics tools that can be used to monitor sales performance, lead processing, and customer service standards. Utilizing CRM's analytical features and keeping uniform data across all communication channels are possible thanks to CRM and messengers integration. For instance, the integration makes it simple to track metrics like the average response time, the number of concurrent chats per user, the popularity of specific support requests, and conversational keywords. All of these make it easier for managers to enhance marketing initiatives, support team workflows, and sales tactics.

Security

There are more risks that a sales representative takes a company’s client base with them if they contact customers through personal accounts, using their own devices on messaging applications. Integration of messengers and CRM decreases such security concerns and prevents unwanted access to client information. Most CRM systems use two-factor authentication, have numerous access levels, and log every user action, which offers administrators more control over who may read a customer's information and communicate with them.

Omnichannel communication

A customer who had a previous WhatsApp chat with an e-store's assistant may get in touch again about the same issue using Viber support channel. Without CRM and messengers integration, the support agen responding to Viber request would have to search through chat history with the customer in CRM to find past WhatsApp conversations while keeping the current Viber chat going. When there are a lot of tickets, such a workflow is unlikely to deliver outstanding customer assistance. This problem is efficiently resolved by messengers and CRM integration, which keeps all prior conversations from different channels together into a single interface, along with customer details. This enables an agent to swiftly pick up information from a previous inquiry and offer more personalized customer experience.