A few weeks ago, I asked you to tell us about your experience working with customers to grow your relationship together. Not surprisingly, you had some excellent ideas.
First I asked: "What's the best way to grow with your existing customers?"
There was one hands-down winner in this category. 77% of you felt that offering them new products or expanded services would lead to the most success in growing your customer relationships.
Quite a few people additionally mentioned the idea of giving a gift to customers in order to entice them into more sales. Steph from LUX-Shoppen.Dk said,
"I recently started sending a free product, with each order that I shipped. I haven't promised this gift at checkout or anywhere on the website, so most customers get a very pleasant surprise. My current experiment is to find out if asking customers to share their experiences with our company, in return for the free product, actually has an effect, or if they would share it anyway."
Another respondent said, "We offer new users gift cards when they leave feedback after their first order. It's a win win!"
My next question was about measuring your success with growth initiatives.
The most popular answer was "direct feedback from customers." Well, you are using Olark for a reason! Interestingly, the least popular answers were "press & reviews" and "reduced churn." External reaction may not give you much of a read on customer growth initiatives, but I'm curious why measuring churn wouldn't be a great way to see if you are doing a successful job keeping and growing your customer value.
As far as direct feedback, we got some great ideas. One social suggestion: "After Olarking with a client, I have a personal bond and can connect with customers over Linkedin and / or Twitter after most interactions. It's not uncommon for those people to become brand evangelists, sharing the content that I post to my networks for years after our first touch."
Other comments included:
"Instead of just canceling an order, I can easily find out what went wrong. In numerous occasions this feedback has led to a better UX being rolled out by devs and I am also able to hotfix user concerns, which actually reduces the number of people who go through with canceling."
"It's easier to end a conversation via Olark than it is in person or on the phone. While still more personalized than email, I can efficiently get to know what a member's concerns are and then get back to then fast."
"A good number of queries about our service stem through Olark chats. People whom may only casually be interested in our services now have a way to get converted quickly by receiving targeted info directly for us right when they need it. It's not a coincidence that a lot of 'cancel my order' messages come from the phone whereas interested marketing qualified leads derive from chatting."
The last question I asked was "how has talking to customers directly helped you grow your customer value?"
Most respondents said "improving relationships," followed closely with "understanding pain points." A number also mentioned "upsell opportunities." "If there is a feature of the site that is not working client-side either from a technical failure or from a user experience perspective, I can easily pull in the support details (browser type, OS etc) needed for our devs to troubleshoot the issue if it is replicable and significant enough -- users will always be the best QA squad a website will have and Olark quickly brings them to life."
Finally, some of you just had some general suggestions to talk to customers.
"We mainly have two types of questions: (1) Technical customer service questions from existing clients and (2) Inquiries and RFQs from potential clients. We have a team of four operators - two teams with very different skill sets. Two of our team members work in customer service and handle all of the technical questions. The other two work in sales/marketing and will handle potential clients.
We have the open conversation system (not Round Robin) so this allows all of us to see a conversation. In order to assess who should jump on it, our chat box has instructions stating to the visitor "Please let us know the nature of your question(s)." So from the beginning of the first contact, we'll know who should be handling it. This has worked out very well so far."
"In 2013 our service of support using Olark was from 8:00 to 18:00. This year we offered it from 8:00 to 21:00, as many users connect to the platform at night."
"Using live chat - we think we're the first (and only) UK Theatre using it and it's help us avoid cart abandonment and answer simple questions. When questions are repeated, we talk internally about the customer journey to see how we can improve and reduce those questions."
Thanks for these great ideas to keep your customers and grow your business. Keep your eye out for August's survey, "What is Great Customer Service?"
