Always available to your customers

Available six or seven days a week: more and more web shops are making it possible. It asks a lot of a small team to provide service from morning to night. This lesson shows what possibilities there are for large and small webshops to become optimally reachable.

Available six days a week, from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.? That's 84 hours a week. Hours within which you want to be there for your customers, even though you have no idea at what times they will contact you.

Even with two full-time employees, you're running out of time to be available at the times the customer needs you.

Online shoppers' focus is less and less often on the lowest price and more and more on service.

Once you invest in reachability, you invest in new and existing customers. You make sure you are present before you lose a customer.
Always optimally accessible: even when you are enjoying a vacation, you want customers to be able to come to you.

An external service desk is a common and professional solution. These customer contact organizations often offer opportunities to work with 'shared agents': a cost-effective solution because you pay per call.
You are available full-time and only invest in the moments when customers contact you. During peak times or when you don't answer the phone, a customer can still contact you.

You have the choice of customer contact at different levels:

• reception
• customer service
• technical support

Reception
A remote receptionist will speak to your customers, take down messages and refer or transfer people.

Customer Service
Customer service is set up to help customers immediately with questions, comments and/or complaints.

Technical support
A technical help desk will speak to your customers when there is a computer malfunction, for example, as soon as someone has questions about how a product works, and give advice on purchasing products.

Is it better to manage your own service?
Of course, every business owner feels that they themselves know best how to provide the best service. Nevertheless, experienced and trained contact staff can contribute something extra.

We offer some tips on how to outsource and still get the level sky high

Call script
Pay sufficient attention to the preparation of a call script; this describes, among other things, how a customer is welcomed.

Tone of voice
Choose your own tone of voice, so the customer feels like he is in direct contact with your organization.

Training
Choose a contact center where employees can attend training. Many parties offer the option of digital or classroom training.

Frequently Asked Questions
Compile a list of frequently asked questions. Share this with the contact center and/or post it on your website.

Single point of contact
Avoid long menus and ensure that customers are transferred as little as possible.

Listening back to conversations
Ask the contact center you will be working with for the ability to listen back to conversations. You can use this to fine-tune your frequently asked questions from time to time, refine the script and gradually improve your service.

Sales desk
Don't just train contact staff on how to answer questions. Experienced employees are able to detect latent needs and thus can promote cross- and upselling.

Are you considering outsourcing customer contact (in part)? Then prepare yourself and consider what is valuable to your organization.

Answer the following questions for yourself:
What does your ideal outreach look like in terms of?

• phone
• chat
• email
• Facebook Messenger (Webcare)
• Snapchat (Webcare)
• WhatsApp (Webcare)
• Twitter (Webcare)

When do you want to be available:

• Is it about complementing your own presence?
• Want service outside business hours?
• want to provide service during vacations?

What service do you offer your customers?

• reception
• customer service
• sales
• technical helpdesk
• multilingual

Tip
Are you considering multilingualizing your customer service as you see more and more purchases from across the border? Then also take our class "Doing Business Internationally.

Chatbots

In addition to using an outside agency, it is also possible to use chatbots or flowbots outside office hours. This can be a cheaper and, at times, even more efficient solution for business and consumers. Through the bots, you can speak to customers and automatically direct them to the information they need (also in different languages). This blog post can be shared about the possibilities of chatbots and flowbots.