Having a large, engaged audience is the goal of any business.However, for many of us it can be one of the most difficult factors to incorporate into a cohesive strategy. This is due to the fact that, while we may have designated times within our week set aside for work, clients aren’t constrained to our schedules in the same way.
With that said, being unable or unwilling to deliver a prompt response to those hoping to interact with your services can quickly make or break a business; creating a situation where the growth of your company becomes a double-edged sword.
On one hand, the success of a business in most industries can be determined by how large or affluent their audience is. Therefore, a business that is seeing exponential growth is a business that is finding success within their field. On the other, however, the strain that your clientele’s needs can quickly put on a fledgeling company may become untenable in a very short amount of time.
With this difficulty in mind, that is not to say that there aren’t options available to those looking for both market success and a sound night of sleep. These break into two distinct categories: Digital and Human customer solutions.
Getting Assistance
Maintaining the effective performance of your business, keeping your clients happy and maintaining a healthy balance between work and life for yourself and your colleagues. These are the challenges faced by any experienced business owner. However, with more advanced web-based solutions and apps being developed every day, it has become far easier for the savvy manager to keep track of these obligations while still preserving the efficiency of your endeavour.
One of the biggest mistakes made by entrepreneurs looking to dominate the worldwide market is assuming that every facet of their company needs to be taken on alone. While it is true that fully autonomous decision making does have its benefits, this situation will quickly become unmanageable once your business begins to find its footing.
This is especially true when customer service is brought into the picture, as even a minor fault in your online system can be enough to shatter an otherwise fully-functioning startup’s upward trajectory. Human error is inevitable, especially when you don’t have the staff to facilitate your workload, which is why bringing in outside help can be the deciding factor between success and foreclosure.
Call Centres/ Offshore Customer Service Teams
How to Make Your Business Stronger with Outsourcing
While less cost-effective than many means of consumer interaction, call centres allow your audience the ability to discuss their concerns or queries with a human being; giving a more robust consumer experience than is available through software services. As many call centres involve a 24-hour roster of employees, your audience is also given the chance to have these interactions on their schedules, without you having to answer confused or confusing calls in the middle of the night.
Third-Party Plugins
Essential Third-Party Plugins for Your WordPress Site
Open Source Platforms such as WordPress now offer a large, diverse range of plugins that sync your website with your external third party management systems. These can become invaluable tools for those that are looking to generate sales through their website, as they allow you to simplify and streamline the sales process both for you, and your customers.
When utilising a customised third-party application, it’s likely that you will be able to integrate these with your website through integration tools such as Zapier. This system was built to help you connect different online tools and help them talk to each other, offering you the ability to integrate and automate most of the tasks required of your custom solutions.
However, for those that don’t have the time nor means to manage these various services themselves, utilising a web developer may be an ideal solution.
Web Developers
5 Tips for Hiring a Great Web Developer
Collaborating with a web developer is a fantastic way to maintain full control over your business, while allowing an outside team of specialists to ensure that the online portions of your daily tasks. An experienced web developer can streamline the user interfaces of your digital presence, fixing issues that you may have missed or not had the expertise to handle alone in the process.
While an excellent option for startups, given the minimal cost compared to hiring on additional staff, these services have resounding benefits for larger companies as well; allowing employees to focus on work within their field of expertise without fretting about digital disruptions.
Another similar method is to hire an offshore team to act as your customer service representatives or troubleshooters for common queries. These teams often work off provided scripts, ensuring that each customer that calls is getting a valid response from a human being. If the questions become too complex, they can simply be passed on to your on-site team to be dealt with in a more conventional manner. This means that your customers are getting the service they expect, without you having to exponentially increase your overhead costs.
Customer Relationship Management Software
All Aboard The Tech Train!
While customer-based automation can cause issues when overused, the benefits of software-based assistance should not be overlooked. Customer relationship management software (CRM) covers a wide variety of software solutions, all targeted toward automating areas of the user experience.
This can include:
- Collecting consumer data, which can be used to analyse your customer behavior; highlighting potential issues that need to be addressed and suggesting alterations to your future strategies.
- Interacting with your consumers, allowing you to create broad troubleshooting and information content to assist users when using your service.
- Sales automation – letting you seamlessly lead consumers toward conversions without necessitating manual interactions. This is especially useful for ecommerce stores that necessitate a large amount of sales.
When developing your strategies around CRM software, it’s always necessary to find a balance between the benefits of manual interactions and automated messages. The majority of sales and troubleshooting options will not necessarily benefit from your input, however, when selling a service, users are known to feel more comfortable discussing their purchase through human-to-human interactions. This is also a large part of building customer loyalty, as it can be difficult to connect with a business without being able to discuss its services.
Each industry is different, and will therefore necessitate varying strategies to operate effectively.
However, the options above have hopefully given you some ideas about what is available to your business; offering you a way to streamline your consumer interactions, without the undue cost of a lost night’s sleep.
