3 Strategies for Reducing Customer Inquiries
Many businesses have customer service departments that are tasked with handling customer inquiries. However, if your business is large enough, you might get overwhelmed by the number of inbound customer inquiries. Businesses cannot afford to lose customers due to subpar customer service so many of them are finding ways to reduce the number of queries they receive so that the ones they do receive can be dealt with in the best way possible.
Using Self-Service Portals
Many customers have simple questions and want these questions answered before they make a purchase. Most of these questions can be answered using well-designed self-service portals. These portals can be built into the help section of a business’ website and should give customers clear, straightforward, and accurate answers to the questions asked.
If the portal is designed as it should be, customers will not have to call, send a message, or get in touch through a business’s online chat portal.
Being Proactive
One of the best ways to reduce customer inquiries is to remove the need for inquiries in the first place. When being proactive, businesses should provide customers with any information they might need before they need or ask for it. To do this, businesses must start by identifying at which points customers might ask for more information. For many businesses, that milestone is after a product has shipped.
Naturally, people get anxious when products are being delivered as they want to know where their products are as well as the exact data and, if available, the time they might be delivered. Amazon does this by sending text messages that show when a package has been shipped and gives people a link where they can track their shipments. This way, Amazon avoids receiving millions of messages asking the same thing. If you want to learn how to set up Amazon delivery text message updates for your business, a guide on how to set up Amazon delivery text message updates for your business is a great place to start.
Reducing Duplicates
People are often impatient which means if they do not receive an answer within a few minutes, they try to get in touch with the business using the same or another channel such as social media. This results in a contact center receiving the same question from the same customer. This not only increases the number of inquiries in the system, but it might confuse the customer if they receive answers from different agents as well as push up the cost of dealing with one inquiry.
To minimize the chances of this happening, a business must make a customer know that their question has been submitted and then try to answer as soon as possible. In addition, businesses can group questions from the same customer so they are dealt with as one batch instead of many batches containing the same question. By doing this, the number of inquiries can be reduced while improving customer experience at the same time.
Since most businesses cannot avoid getting inquiries from their customers, the best thing they can do is try to reduce the number of inquiries they receive. Doing this not only reduces the load on their customer service agents but also saves time and money, and improves customer experiences and satisfaction.
