13 Best Practices for Improving Online Customer Service

If yes, you must beef up security by restricting access to sensitive customer data and information like health records, payment card details, social security numbers, etc. Let’s dive into some high-quality interactive virtual assistants you can leverage. Active listening is part of showing empathy during customer service interactions. A customer journey map helps companies understand the entire customer experience—from discovery to advocacy and every touchpoint in between. When team members are working all by their lonesome, it’s more important than ever to regularly have friendly, non-work-related interactions with them. Occasionally message an employee to see how they’re doing or offer to grab a virtual cup of coffee with them.

• ECommerce is a classic industry that benefits from virtual customer service.
• Virtual customer service agents must have high-quality digital communication skills.
• And now today, about 80% of call center agents are working from home1.
• Taking these additional steps may feel tedious at first, but they are ultimately one of the best things you can do to ensure that your customers feel cared for.

And you can only be sure of realizing that feat by adequately training your outsourced team. Some chatbots — like the HubSpot one below — have multiple-choice options that users can pick from when asking a question. Chatbot designers are also looking into sentiment analysis tools that can decipher the emotions behind a customer’s message. The goal is to make chatbots as independent as possible so they can contribute to a customer service case as if they were a human rep. In this post, we’ll explain what interactive virtual assistants are, how they’ve evolved, and outline high-quality tools you can leverage in your own customer service processes. Outsourcing the customer service gives the in-office team the advantage of focusing on other critical tasks, including strategic planning for improvement and growth.

Successfully build and manage a virtual customer service team

Regardless of how tight your schedule is, ensure you squeeze some time to train your new virtual team. Training is extremely vital because the quality of customer support offered can be a break or make for your business. Finding the right virtual customer service provider is the second step, which involves researching various companies and comparing their offerings. This process includes evaluating their reputation, customer reviews, and the level of customization they provide.

Additionally, businesses may use analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of their virtual customer service operations and identify areas for improvement. Hiring virtual customer service can provide several benefits to businesses. Firstly, it enables businesses to offer customer support around the clock, regardless of their time zone. Secondly, it provides cost savings as businesses can hire virtual agents at a lower cost than in-house agents. Additionally, it can reduce the need for physical office space and equipment, resulting in further cost savings.

Reduce Cost

You must determine the type of service that your customers require and whether you need 24/7 availability or other specific features. In today’s business landscape, customer service has become essential to any successful business. Customers expect a hassle-free and prompt resolution to their queries and complaints.

• Today, you will be hard-pressed to find an industry that is not taking advantage of virtual customer service.
• This creates a better agent experience by reducing duplicate data entry and increasing agent productivity.
• Don’t be in a hurry to hire when searching for the right outsourced customer service representative.
• Today, advancements in technology mean that the best virtual contact centers serving the U.S. market are now located nationwide.

Since they cannot physically demonstrate how to fix an issue, they must also be excellent at breaking down processes and explaining them step-by-step to customers of all skill levels. Outsourcing your customer care needs to a virtual service provider means having an offsite data backup plan automatically in place. It also means you can rely on a network of customer service agents located throughout the country, eliminating your operational susceptibility to regional disruptions. While some international companies chose an offshore option to maintain 24/7 service, most companies are free to select virtual service in the United States and Canada.

One of the central challenges when managing a virtual team is keeping the team from feeling isolated. Onsite teams generally participate in quarterly team-building events, and while these activities are harder to coordinate with a virtual team, they are still important. It’s equally essential to provide perks, rewards, and opportunities to socialize and have fun. Ultimately, the best candidates for a virtual team are those who are self-motivated and self-managing, and used to keeping multiple balls in the air. It may seem counter-intuitive, but people who desire flexible schedules so that they can do more with their time…do more.

The first available agent on that team can then facilitate a high-quality verbal interaction, which may be preferable to some customers who appreciate the nuances of a spoken versus written conversation. Customer service software also gives businesses the ability to scale more intelligently and quickly because it automates communication at scale. We all have experienced the frustration of explaining issues to service representatives, just to be transferred to another department to describe the problem again.

It facilitates collaboration among team members, regardless of their geographical locations, and supports integration with popular video conferencing platforms. These small, relatively inexpensive things can make a big difference in your customers’ overall experiences and ongoing loyalty. If they’re already on your website, make sure they can find any answers they may need right from the page they’re on — e.g., with an embeddable support widget like Beacon.

Long gone are the days when offering your customers high-quality service at an affordable price point meant relying on the bargain-basement prices (and poor quality) of offshore service providers. Today, advancements in technology mean that the best virtual contact centers serving the U.S. market are now located nationwide. Leading virtual contact centers like Working Solutions focus on continuous education and what is virtual customer service development to ensure that agents are always performing at the highest possible levels. Though some traditional-minded leaders still cling to the idea that customer care must be delivered in-house, more are recognizing the many benefits of the virtual model. Truly considering the numbers of various statistics and the variety of virtual customer service benefits is definitely a step in the right direction.

Benefits of On-demand, Virtual Customer Service

You’ll have a lot of happy support agents serving a lot of satisfied customers. Virtual call centers also rely on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which allows users to make voice calls via a broadband Internet connection rather than analog phone lines. You’ll want a VoIP that’s easy to configure and manage, such as Zendesk Talk. No longer needing a central office space can dramatically reduce overhead costs. On the flip side, you may need to invest in some new technologies to facilitate a virtual call center.