The world of business has always been fiercely competitive, and the online digital world has only made it more so. Customers are more demanding and sophisticated, and expect faster response times, fewer issues, and ways of addressing problems themselves. While this means more challengers for UK retailers, particularly those with an online component, it also means an opportunity to improve the customer experience and increase brand loyalty and sales.
Omnichannel Support
These days, customers expect more than merely phone or email support. SMS, social media, chatbots, and other means of reaching you are a big plus for consumers, as they can contact you according to their personal preference. With service desk software, you can integrate multiple channels in one platform, meaning two things:
- Customer queries and issues are handled no matter how they come in
- Customers can follow up on different channels, i.e. start a query via social media and follow up with an email later on.
This kind of seamless integration can vastly reduce frustration for customers, speed up resolution times, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Personalisation
In the previous item, we touched briefly on personalisation and catering to customer preferences. Personalised shopping experiences have become a major component of online retail. UK shoppers expect online stores to know their preferences and purchase history, recommend relevant items, and even anticipate future needs. This is where a service desk with customer relationship management (CRM) software built in can offer a major advantage. With CRM integration, your service desk team can access detailed information about customers, including previous support interactions, which means a smoother customer service experience overall. If you also use an AI chatbot in your customer service portal, the AI can be tailored to draw on this data to make more personalised responses.
Response and Resolution Times
Today’s UK customers require speed and efficiency when it comes to their shopping experience. If they encounter an issue or difficulty with their purchase process, they can get frustrated and leave their shopping cart abandoned… or worse, never come back. By automating ticket routing and assigning priority based on the severity of issues, you can make sure that customer queries don’t get lost in the shuffle. A service desk with smart routing also helps ensure that tickets get routed to the agents most able to immediately help them. Knowledge bases and AI chatbots can further reduce resolution times by allowing customers to seek out solutions without the need for human support agents getting involved.
Data-Driven Customer Insights
To remain successful in business, UK retailers need to continue adapting and learning, and having a service desk system can help tremendously with that. A service desk can collect mountains of data and use analytics to reveal issues such as difficulties with checkout, problems finding certain products, and more. Analytics can also help you identify shopping patterns, which can help you anticipate customer needs, custom-tailor recommendations, improve product descriptions, and much more. By using hard data to guide your decisions, you can gain a substantial edge over your competition.
Scaling
One of the biggest problems UK retailers face is the massive surge in customer queries during major shopping periods, i.e. Black Friday, Christmas, clearing sales, and so on. These scenarios often require a dramatic scaling up of customer support capabilities. In cases like this, a cloud-based service desk can be a godsend. Features such as automated ticketing, chatbots, flexible agent allocation, and more can help keep your customer service process running smoothly even when there are massive spikes in activity. Automation features can be especially useful, as they free up human agents to work on more complex, sophisticated issues that can’t be handled by an AI.
There are some other tools that can prove useful in improving the customer experience as well. We’ve already mentioned automation and self-service portals, which takes pressure off human support team members. Some software also offers internal collaboration tools, so different teams can work together to resolve complex customer service tools in a more timely fashion — leading back to faster resolution times and increased customer satisfaction.
Service Desk Solutions
Just as with any business tool, it’s important to find a service desk system that has the features you need. You should also take into account things like scalability, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. There are a number of popular service desk software solutions on the market. Zendesk is among the most popular, known for its strong omnichannel support and easy-to-use interface. Freshworks offers sound automation and self-service features, often considered an affordable entry-level choice. There are also platforms such as Zoho Desk, which is strong in CRM integration and data-driven insights and analytics.