With Black Friday and the holiday season on horizon, businesses are eagerly anticipating a boom in their sales graph. While rigorous efforts are put into marketing and product distribution, there is one critical aspect often left in the shadows – customer support.
Amidst the frenzy of customer inquiries, support tickets, and heightened expectations, support teams tend to feel overwhelmed, taking a huge toll on customer experiences.
Customer support requests increase by 5-10 times as you inch closer to the holiday season.
But what if there is a better way to deal with customer inquiries? What if your support team can provide relevant resolutions in real time without feeling overburdened?
This blog post is your guide to achieving just that. It highlights 5 proven strategies to prepare your support team for the holiday season and more importantly, ensuring superior customer experiences.
1. Empower Customers to Self-Serve
67% of customers prefer to self-serve over speaking with a support representative.
Providing remarkable self-service during the busy season is like catching two fishes with one hook. Not only does it give your customers more control to solve issues themselves, but also takes a huge load off your support agents.
However, with business data often scattered across multiple repositories, it isn’t straightforward. This is where robust cognitive search technology comes into play. Combining the core subsets of AI, including Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), it unifies disparate content sources to ensure effortless access to the most relevant information. What’s more? It deciphers user intent from the query to deliver contextual and personalized results.
2. Streamline Your Knowledge Creation & Management
Customers prefer knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. (Forrester)
One of the best ways to enhance self-service experiences is to maintain a consistent and coherent knowledge base. It helps streamline communication, reduce response time, and ensure that your customers have easy access to relevant information.
Yet, the challenge arises when the influx of support tickets overwhelms your team, leaving them with limited time to create valuable knowledge articles. Enter Knowbler, the cutting-edge knowledge-centered customer service product.
Fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLMs), it empowers support teams to automatically create, review, and share knowledge seamlessly within their workflows. Some of its robust features include:
- Capturing case information and converting it into well-structured knowledge articles using best-in-class pre-defined templates
- Auto-generating titles and summaries for knowledge articles while ensuring clarity and relevance
- Gauging the performance of knowledge articles based on different parameters (uniqueness, title relevancy, link validity, and metadata) with a built-in reporting module
- And the list goes on….
Read “SearchUnify’s Knowbler Takes a Leap Forward with Large Language Model Enhancements” to learn more about its latest features.
3. Automate Repetitive Queries
By 2027, chatbots will become the primary channel for customer service in a quarter of all businesses.
Answering the same questions again and again can feel like running on a never-ending treadmill for your support team. Implementing an intelligent virtual assistant can be a real game changer in this scenario. It can handle routine inquiries while offering your customers swift and round-the-clock support.
But how would you ensure that your customers receive personalized and quality conversational experiences? Introducing SUVA (SearchUnify Virtual Assistant)! Powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), it delivers relevant, contextual, and intent-driven responses at scale. Moreover, its innovative FRAG™ framework approach enables it to produce factually correct answers, eliminating the burning challenge of hallucinations.
To learn how SUVA’s LLM-fueled capabilities are way ahead of other GenAI chatbot players, click here.
4. Encourage Collaboration Among Your Support Teams
“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.” – Joe Paterno
Imagine this: A support agent diligently works on resolving a support ticket, but suddenly, they hit a roadblock. They find themselves stuck at a particular point, and unfortunately, there’s a lack of collaboration within the team. In isolation, this agent faces challenges in tapping into the collective knowledge or expertise of their team members, potentially leading to delayed resolutions.
To avoid the setback, tools like Agent Helper become the backbone. It facilitates Intelligent Swarming, a collaborative framework that helps address issues by routing them to the best-fitting support agent right from the start. It also empowers support agents to collaborate with SMEs to troubleshoot issues that they aren’t familiar with, thus expediting the resolution rate.
5. Anticipate Customer Escalations Proactively
A single customer escalation can cost a business a whopping $10,000.
The holiday season means a surge in purchases, and so does the likelihood of customers expressing their concerns and complaints. Unable to solve them on time will not only affect customer experience but also leave the business in the chaos of elevating costs.
While you may not completely tame escalations, you can surely minimize your cost and customer risks by streamlining the case management process. How you may ask? Step into the spotlight – the Escalation Predictor!
It is a robust AI-powered escalation management system that taps into a variety of factors such as case sentiment, case scoring, case priority, product group, delta time, comments exchanged, etc., to identify the cases that are near the red mark. Armed with this insight, support teams can prioritize crucial cases and devise proactive strategies for effective and timely resolutions.
Unwrap Customer Satisfaction This Holiday Season!
Mastering exceptional customer experiences amidst the seasonal peak of inquiries may seem daunting. However, with the right strategies and tools, you can transform the challenge into an opportunity for unparalleled success.