Enhance Customer Support to Attract, Keep Influential Consumers

Retailers hoping to succeed in today’s market need to appeal to an influential and powerful group: millennial and Generation Z consumers. To do this, they need to provide top-notch customer support.

These demographics already wield enormous spending power, and will continue to do so for years. Retailers can go a long way toward captivating these consumers by delivering excellent and personalized support. By implementing the latest customer support technologies and enhancing processes, retailers can see benefits such as repeat business and increased loyalty.

Here are six ways retailers can deliver a modern and personalized customer support experience:

1. Optimize support for smartphone users.

Consumers, especially younger ones, prefer using mobile devices to download apps, stream videos, and access social media. They also buy lots of merchandise via their mobile devices, and texting is often their mode of choice for communicating.

Retailers can use the latest technology to provide enhanced support experiences for mobile users. The potential benefits include faster information sharing between customers and support agents, more conversational interactions, and quicker resolution of issues.

2. Provide instant messaging support.

Many younger consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via messaging rather than phone calls. To provide better customer service experiences, retailers need to support messaging that’s instant.

Ideally, companies should provide 24-hour availability via mobile chat, digital chat agents, or some other means, and give support agents the training and tools required to route and prioritize messaging so they can resolve issues quickly.

3. Offer self-service options for issues that are easy to resolve.

Research shows that consumers experience a sense of satisfaction with themselves when they can resolve issues on their own, without needing to speak with customer service.

Features such as frequently asked questions (FAQs) on websites enable consumers to look for possible solutions before needing to interact with a support agent. Also, this approach can allow contact-center agents to focus on addressing more complex and urgent requests.

4. Deliver quick response and resolution to issues.

By providing fast service, retailers can go a long way toward earning or strengthening customer loyalty.

An online survey of 1,044 U.S. consumers, conducted by Dimensional Research in 2018 and commissioned by Zendesk, showed that 65 percent of respondents said they expect customer service to be faster compared with how it was five years ago. And 89 percent said a quick response to a question is an important factor when deciding which company to buy from. It’s important for retailers to know when contact centers are likely to experience high volumes of customer service requests, enabling them to be prepared to route and prioritize calls appropriately.

5. Optimize for connectivity on social media.

A lot of Generation Z consumers and millennials use social media sites to interact with companies, and are eager to share experiences they’ve had with brands with their networks.

Retailers have a huge opportunity to leverage social media channels by interacting with consumers in real time, which can help them earn loyalty with valued customers. It’s vital to have a plan for handling customer inquiries on social media to help enhance support.

6. Personalize the experience.

Customer support representatives should have immediate access to customer information when a call or chat begins. The call-center platform should be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to make such data available as soon as it’s needed.

Retailers, by adopting modern call-center technology and processes, can excel by delivering the kind of support that consumers will appreciate —and reward with repeat business.

Anand Janefalkar is founder and CEO of UJET, Inc., a real-time customer communications provider that makes it simple for any company to provide intuitive, modern-day support.