If you’re a customer service leader in 2023, your job has become a lot more complicated. Shifting business priorities, with a renewed focus on reducing customer churn, net revenue retention, and a drive toward profitability, have turned the spotlight on your department. Customer retention has never been more important—but you’re also being asked to cut costs, run more efficiently, and improve service quality, all at the same time.
Customer expectations are higher than ever, and that’s not changing anytime soon. As brands compete for market share, customer service is now a differentiator, with 32% of customers saying they will stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience.
Oh, and don’t forget about emerging technologies disrupting the industry. Or that employee engagement has never been more important, or costly. And that your business still wants to scale into new geographies, or bring new products to market. Plus, you’re now being asked to bring the voice of the customer to other departments—and be online 24-7. The list goes on!
Efficiency. Adaptability. Availability. Quality. Accuracy. Insight. Engagement. Automation.
You’re fighting a hard battle on every front.
But hey, you didn’t come here to hear about your problems, you want the solution. The answer probably isn’t as complicated or as magical as you’re expecting. It might even be why you got into CS in the first place: to create effortless service experiences for customers that allow them to build a connection with your brand and remain loyal to it.
2023 is the year of customer loyalty
The real-world value of customer loyalty is no secret. It reduces churn, leads to higher lifetime value, helps you demand a better price for your product and services, and distinguishes you from your competition. But building loyalty can be difficult, and requires a thoroughly modern approach to service.
“Building customer loyalty requires an evolution of the service mindset,” says Tue Søttrup, Dixa’s Chief Customer Experience Evangelist. “We have to check our old beliefs at the door. It’s a move away from the contact center and ticketing age where support was passive, transactional, and CS was viewed as a cost center or, worse, a necessary evil.”
“What we see today from the world’s best service organizations—the ones that create raving fans—is experience-centric service. Building loyalty means building great relationships, and every good relationship starts with a great conversation,” says Søttrup.
Experience-centric, conversational customer support is quickly becoming the new standard for businesses that care about their brand and their bottom line. According to PWC, “65% of all consumers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.”
How to build a customer loyalty machine
Conversational customer service (CCS) is the answer to many of the problems that customer service departments face today. CCS helps service organizations fine-tune the balance between quality and efficiency and is able to drive revenue, while reducing costs. An experience-centric, conversational approach provides a uniquely human touch to service and reduces customer effort to increase loyalty. At the same time, it also reduces agent effort to boost efficiency.
Modern problems require a modern approach. If your business is ready to transform the way you engage customers, you’ll need more than a shift in mindset. You’ll need the right tools to get the job done. The kind of conversational service that drives effortless experiences can be tricky to pull off if you’re stuck in an antiquated platform.
At its core, any conversational customer service platform requires 6 fundamental pillars. At Dixa, we invented conversational customer engagement—and we still lead the pack when it comes to a purpose-built conversational customer service platform. Here’s a quick look at what your tooling stack needs, and what Dixa has delivered here in early 2023.
The 6 pillars of conversational customer service
1. Automation
At its best, automation is much more than simple deflection. Modern businesses need to be able to help customers solve problems, 24/7, without going wild on staffing costs. Automation serves customers by giving them a toolbox to efficiently solve problems without waiting for an agent, and it serves your business by ensuring fewer contacts and shorter waiting times for customers that do need an agent’s specialized help.
With Dixa’s new chatbot, integrated directly into your Dixa Messenger flows, you can master the art of automation, while creating the perfect customer experience. That means that you can serve the chatbot on your terms: for example, launching it only to non-VIP customers or only after business hours. And with effortless, context-rich handoffs from bot to agent, you can tap into your support team’s expertise when a bot isn’t enough.
To learn more about what automation can do for you, check out how Dixa customer ON used our bot to decrease wait times by 40% even in the face of sky-rocketing contact volumes, increasing their self-service rate to upward of 70%. Slick shoes, too!
2. Built-in channels
Multiple platforms and plug-ins can create disconnected service experiences—those annoying moments when customers are forced to repeat themselves when your systems can’t keep up. You need a single point of service to keep the conversation going with your customer, while allowing them to connect with you across whatever channel they choose.
At Dixa, we’re built for conversations, which means that every channel is built natively into the platform, so the experience is great for both agents and customers alike. In 2022, we added more channels to the Dixa platform than ever before. With a brand new flagship messenger, plus, SMS, Twitter, and Instagram, Dixa is leading the industry in native channels.
3. Agent empowerment
Hiring, training, and supporting a world-class support team is a tough job. You can make it easier by allowing agents to focus on the customer while proactively building their skills and developing talent. Great tooling reduces barriers for creating great experiences, while next-generation QA provides insights for agent growth, shorter training times, and higher engagement.
Dixa is designed by CS professionals for CS professionals. That means we know the pains that can go hand-in-hand with working in customer service, whether you’re a leader or an agent. To combat these, we’ve built the Dixa Agent Hub, so agents can have a more enjoyable and efficient working experience, with customer conversations, context from past conversations and outside tools, knowledge, and more, right at their fingertips.
In addition to this, we’ve just released a bunch of quality of life improvements for agents that make their day-to-day tasks easier to accomplish—improved offering, conversation sorting, conversation previews, file previews, and more. You can read more about these improvements here.
We wholeheartedly believe in empowering agents to grow their skill sets and mature in their roles, and, as part of this, we’ve launched our new analytics tools that make it easy for agents to track their impact and performance over time. And, with new team and individual dashboards, it’s never been easier to keep an eye on how your team is doing (or to compare to past periods).
4. Knowledge
Using a deeply-integrated self-healing knowledge base means that customers get the same accurate answer whether they’re talking to a bot, an agent, or doing their own research in an FAQ. Integrated feedback loops keep knowledge flowing and up to date, even as the world changes.
We’ve spent the last year rebuilding our native knowledge base offering from the ground up to make it even more powerful. It’s now available to all customers and can be managed directly in Dixa. That also means it’s easier for us to leverage the power of knowledge across the platform.
And for starters, check out our new Smart Conversation Replies feature that uses the power of OpenAI’s chatGPT to create a personal reply to a conversation based on your public knowledge base articles. By using knowledge as the backbone of our automation strategy, we ensure accurate, on-brand answers to customer questions—delivered at the speed of AI.
5. Data insight
You need to understand performance at all levels of your service department, plus have a handle on what’s driving support volumes, emerging trends in customer questions and sentiment, not to mention feeding valuable insights back to product and service teams.
Extracting value from the goldmine of customer support conversations is what Dixa Discover is all about. At the end of 2022, we launched a huge upgrade to our in-app analytics, and we’re not done yet. January saw the release of an all new Queues Dashboard which provides valuable insight into customer experiences through data.
Plus, we’ve also just launched Custom Conversation Attributes — a powerful new way to learn more about the context of the conversations that you’re having with customers. This feature allows you to attach information to conversations in new ways, so you can track things like “contact reason” in great detail. Plus you can now make it mandatory for agents to add Attributes, making sure that you have data integrity. Finally, you can now filter by custom attribute in our in-app analytics, giving you a whole new perspective on your data and your customers.
6. Flexibility
Your platform shouldn’t hold you back from responding to changing business conditions—and neither should your IT team. Low and no-code solutions allow you to respond at the speed of business, whether that’s opening up a new market or launching a new product line.
Dixa also makes it easy to test, iterate, and improve your contact center management. It’s easy to A/B test your flows using our filter nodes and any external data you like. Route customers by something simple like contact source, or get fancy and route by number of orders, lifetime value, or completely at random. Then use tags to compare segments in analytics and test for outcomes like handling time, waiting time, or CSAT.
We’re also improving contact management and excited to announce that you can now merge contacts across contact points — with more improvements coming soon!
Building a customer loyalty strategy for 2023
It’s clear that securing customer loyalty is the name of the game for businesses in 2023. If you’re looking to bring your A-game, be sure to reach out to one of our Customer Success Managers or book a demo today. Watch your business results improve as you innovate on your customer service strategy and introduce conversational customer service with Dixa.
Press “play” to learn more about Dixa’s Conversational Customer Service Platform