COVID-19: How Messaging Is Lowering Call Volumes

Shruti Khaitan of Freshworks discusses how messaging is helping contact centres better manage overwhelming call volumes.

In the last few days, the way work happens has changed for all of us. For customer service teams who are on the frontline of every business, this means providing fast, transparent, and verified support to customers and handling growing support volumes on phone and email amidst staffing shortage.

As customers everywhere are expecting quick and reliable answers to their queries, messaging is becoming the norm for customer communication.

WhatsApp alone has seen a 40% increase in usage during the COVID-19 crisis. Fast, proactive, and transparent support is what customers need right now.

And they need these on digital channels they are already on — taking support to them rather than bringing them to support.

For example, wellness company Mecca Brands is using chat to mitigate the impact from low store walk-ins, and several educational and healthcare companies are embracing messaging and bots too to provide quick and reliable support.

How Else Can Messaging Help?

Here are four examples of how messaging can help support your contact centre in these challenging times.

1. You are keeping your customers on hold because of large volumes

• Handle volumes by diverting phone enquiries to channels like WhatsApp
• Route chats to the right messaging agent by automating basic questions

2. Your team is feeling burdened because of the staffing shortage

• Automate workflows for enquiries, assessments, orders, appointments, and more on WhatsApp with chatbots that are simple and easy to deploy
• With an asynchronous chat product that retains conversation history and with response-time expectations, your agents can navigate between multiple channels like email, phone, and chat.

3. You want to proactively help your customers

• Reach out to your customers with proactive notifications, reminders, and updates about assessments, deliveries, resources, and more.

4. You want to make remote work for your CX team

• Route conversations to the right messaging agents based on their availability and skill level.
• Get team productivity up with quick replies, bulk actions, contextual information on the customer, reports, and real-time dashboard.

5 Ways You Can Use Messaging to Personalize COVID-19 Communication

Here are a few more examples, which this time look at the benefits that you can obtain by implementing an asynchronous messaging platform.

1. Be where your customers are

Be there for your customers wherever they are — your website, app, or on channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook Messenger.

Open channels based on what’s popular in your region and with your customers.

WhatsApp, for example, is the leading chat app in 112 countries, and 68% of WhatsApp users prefer the app to communicate with a business.

2. Handle growing volumes with bots

Automate commonly asked questions with bots that provide instant answers to questions.

Also, you can launch a conversational bot when you want to collect customer information to either help them with the right response or route them to specialists in your team. Fetch data and send it back to apps you work with.

3. Divert traffic from phone to chat

Divert customer communication from phone to chat with WhatsApp IVR Deflection.

Let bots on WhatsApp handle volumes and route conversations to your team if needed.

Reduce operational costs, increase the numbers of resolutions, and keep your team more productive.

4. Proactively reach out to customers with dependable information

Segment your customers based on their purchase or service history, geography, any other behaviour important for your business.

Also, send proactive notifications, reminders, and messages on your website, mobile app, or their WhatsApp screen.

5. Make it easy for customers to self-help themselves

Curtail high volumes and help customers help themselves and quickly resolve their issues with FAQs on chat.

This blog has been re-published by kind permission of Freshworks– View the original post

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When an entire contact center team switches to working remotely, seamless coordination can be a big challenge. To overcome this, greater communication between management, agents and their customers is key. A remote call center cannot truly function without empowering homeworking agents with the right tools.

That’s why we’re pleased to offer you our Freshchat platform with chatbots free, for three months.