You have just started work and your calendar looks packed for the rest of the day. There are several tickets in the queue and you start resolving them one-by-one. A frustrated customer reports an issue. You help the customer out and update the status of the ticket to “resolved”. Job well done.
No matter the industry, region or product — the true goal of all customer support teams is not just to provide assistance when a customer reaches out, but to deliver moments of ‘wow’ to each customer. However, as the importance of great support grows, so does its complexity. Customers can now reach out through emails, calls or live-chat, follow-up on social media, leave reviews on public forums and they expect regular updates to keep track of their issue.
Welcome to yet another app round-up where we have put together some of the recently added Marketplace apps. We are on the road to reaching 800 apps across our three flagship products—Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales—by the end of this month. And very soon, you will be able to view and access Freshchat apps on the Marketplace. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the dozen-odd apps that have hit the Marketplace these past few weeks.
Rocketium is a cloud-based software that lets users create, automate, and edit their own videos with text, images, voiceovers, footage, and motion graphics. When I added their brand’s email as an example in one of my articles, their CEO, Satej Sirur was kind enough to give us a thumbs up. Fast forward to today, here’s a detailed secret sauce interview on how customer support works at Rocketium, the tools they use, the strategies that have made them successful, and much more.
Implementing live chat in business websites increased average order value by 14%1 and website pages views per session to 263%. 51%2 customers prefer chatbots in customer support over emails, given they are easy to communicate to. Both these statistics project a very welcoming stance for the respective channels. But which one is preferred over the other? Will live chat benefit your business the most, or will a chatbot do the trick for you?
With new tools available in the market to customers and customer service professionals alike, the relationship between both has become both easier than ever, and the most confusing it has ever been. Customers can now spend minutes (or sometimes hours!) looking for the correct channel to address their questions, while customer support agents are tracking dozens of metrics in an attempt to understand the customer better.
When you ask any support agent what their day typically looks like, you are most likely to hear – “I first check my ticket queue, prioritize them based on severity, and start working on them. We usually have a team huddle to give a status update and discuss complex issues, if any. Then I get back to talking to customers and resolving tickets.” That might sound monotonous and fairly easy. But that’s certainly not all there is to customer support.
With over one billion active users, it’s no wonder that more and more brands are jumping on the bandwagon to use Instagram for business. Instagram has become a powerful marketing tool with over 25 million brands and over 2 million advertisers on the platform. Companies primarily show off their products to increase brand awareness and attract new customers.
Some customer problems need to be solved in person. A broken washing machine, a stalled car, or a leaky sink – these problems cannot always be fixed over a video call by an agent, with a manual in hand. Our customers asked us some time back if field service could be made easier. Some were using Freshdesk integrated with other tools to solve problems onsite for customers. But they wanted their workflows to be simpler. They wanted to know if the experiences could be made better.
It’s no secret that when it comes to volume, text has given way to visual content on social media platforms. Primarily visual social networks such as Instagram and YouTube continue to acquire more daily users1. These users are collectively uploading billions of visual content every day. Moreover, social networks with algorithmic feeds, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been prioritizing visual content over text-only content, which in turn earns image-based posts higher engagement.
Customers are growing increasingly savvy and as they do, their needs are changing. What you provide your customer with will obviously have to account for this change, and evolve accordingly. In fact, if you don’t make changes, your customers may end up leaving, especially considering your competitors do make changes to their support strategy to address the changing tides. Some of these factors are fairly small and make use of existing tools.
You decide to buy a phone. Do you go for the phone of your dreams even though it’s beyond your budget, or would you settle for a functional, but less-ostentatious one that fits into your budget? Do you wait for special offers so you can avail a discount, or get the device on credit? These are the kind of behavioral indicators that decide the types of customers and what aspect of a product/service appeals to them.
Two of the biggest customer support technology trends for 2019 are bots and omnichannel support. Bots are picking up traction as more companies are using them to help customers find information, to route queries to the right department, and to carry out transactions that don’t require a human agent.
In the past, support was just answering phone calls coming into a call bank. The customer didn’t expect anything other than getting the answer to their question, and as long as they did, they were satisfied. However, as support has grown more prolific, the bar for customer loyalty has become higher as well. Being able to measure and understand the quality of your support responses has also become more important.
Welcome to our monthly round-up, where we share with you some of the latest additions to the Freshdesk Marketplace. This month, we’re happy to announce that we now have 700+ apps on the Freshworks Marketplace across three products – Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales. There are more exciting updates coming your way, but let us start off by looking at the new apps that have entered the marketplace!
