Live Support, Ticketing or Chatbots? How to Choose Your Customer Service Solution

“Dee-dee-dee-dee-deeee da-daaa-da-daaa da…. You have progressed in the queue. A customer service representative will answer your call in approximately 40 minutes… Deeeee-deeeee…”

The exasperating sounds of being on hold with a company, especially for what you know will only be a five minute call. Just as you hate being on the receiving end of these calls, so do your own customers. Don’t be that business. With the range of technologies and outsourcing available to you today, there is zero need to frustrate customers. Do it better with a mixed-service solution.

Want to know just how important customer service is? Up until this year it was the number one factor driving customer satisfaction with Australian ISPs. That is behind speed and reliability – until this year! That means that customers were happier with better customer service than the actual service being provided to them, and we all know as Aussies how slow the internet can be at times. Oh, and by the way, Internode was the top-scoring ISP for customer service in 2019, with 5/5 stars.

Customers care about customer service

Customers like getting prompt replies, knowledgeable help on the other end of the line, and someone who at least pretends to care. How this is most achievable is over the phone, with an Australian call centre that’s well staffed around the clock. Although outsourcing a call centre is a valid move, it’s less desirable for customers.

However, having well-trained customer service agents on the ground, 24/7 in Australia is a costly exercise. Instead, there is a secondary, more budget-friendly solution – but it takes a careful degree of balance to get it just right.

A mixed technology solution

Thankfully, there are plenty of options out there now for customer service. You can implement ticketing solutions on your website (which are either replied with a phone call or email), or better still, a call centre, a ticketing solution and a chatbot.

Chatbots are great in that they are a computer application doing the heavy lifting for you – without a person needed until perhaps later down the line. You can get a chatbot for your website or even your Facebook page, as more and more people turn to social media for customer support.

However, getting a good chatbot and feeding it the right information (and choices) is critical to not frustrating your customers more. The same way we get fed up 10 menus deep on a “dial 1 if you know your account number,” “dial 57 to hear the menu in German,” and “dial 9 to hear this menu again,” we will get fed up with a chatbot asking too many seemingly obtuse questions.

Choosing the right chatbot and training it well is an exercise in patience, knowing your customers well, and knowing when to hand off to a human operator. Advanced chatbots are infused with machine learning technology which can help gain a greater understanding of your customer needs and how to answer their questions to the best degree, with the least amount of frustration, as well as the least amount of human interaction needed. In fact, with a great chatbot, you can’t even tell that you’re not talking with a human – and/or don’t know when the handover to a real human has occurred.

Get the right solutions for your customer service

Whether you are a small business simply looking to reply to Facebook and WhatsApp messages as soon as your customers get in touch, or a busy company that deals with customer support all day long, we can help find the optimal mix of customer service solutions for you.

We start by looking at your business requirements, your current customer service setup, your budget requirements, and the complexity of inquiries. We then strategically develop a plan that can help improve your customer service – leaving your customers happier overall, gaining repeat business, and even ongoing recommendations from customers. Customer service is no longer simply a bodies-on-the-ground problem. It’s a problem that can be (half) solved by the application of new technologies that are now accessible for all businesses. Give us a call or send us an email to learn more about how we can help your business get better (and smarter) with technology-enhanced customer service. You owe it not only to your customers, but to your bottom line, too!

Julia Sinclair-Jones

Tech writer and ex-software developer with a penchant for travel, techno, and data. Spreading the word of secure, manageable, optimised IT solutions for everyone.