With the coronavirus outbreak, customer experience teams across the globe are having to rapidly adapt amid ticket spikes, customer cancellations, market volatility, and increased uncertainty. Each week, the world is changing, and business simply isn’t business as usual. Most teams responding to customers are transitioning to a work from home environment, putting additional strain on their ability to respond to customers effectively. For many of us, that means learning and adjusting as we go.

Every second your customer spends waiting on hold with support is a second they’re closer to switching to your competitor. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, long wait times top the list of what makes for a bad customer service experience. However, there is a solution to those delays in service, one that customers increasingly expect: automated customer service.

When most people think of live chat, they think of customer support. But it’s also a sales rep’s secret weapon. That’s because chat provides a direct line between a rep and their prospective customers. Sales teams can use chat to generate leads, improve sales conversion rates, and identify upsell opportunities.

With all the uncertainty around COVID-19, we’re contingency planning, and we know you’re probably doing the same. We’ve compiled a list of our product features and ideas to help your team continue to work effectively. Best of all, most of these utilize tools that are already included in your subscription.

With so many new customer communication channels opening for business, the classic contact center can seem kind of old school. Nobody wants to phone a business anymore, right? Wrong. In fact, 66% of customers still typically resolve their issues with a company via telephone, according to our latest Customer Experience Trends Report. While many support issues can be resolved via messaging, email, or self-service, sometimes it’s just easier and more efficient to pick up the phone.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be a great resource for you and your team. If you take a deep look into your customer data, you can get better forecasting capabilities. In other words, you can more effectively serve your customers and understand your prospects. Yet this adage is only true if: Around 65 percent of CRM projects fail due to low user adoption. Why?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool for any sales team; it saves them time and provides invaluable data insights for nurturing prospects until they become customers. But, surprisingly, it’s more common for sales reps to use Excel and email to store and manage prospect data than it is to use a CRM system. And for the teams that do use a CRM, few take full advantage of the tool.

Here’s something support leaders in the trenches know all too well: customer interactions are on the rise, which goes hand-in-hand with consumers’ expectations that the service they’ll receive will be stellar. That’s challenging enough for any business, but for companies in growth mode, those trends can lead to serious strain on support operations.

Have you ever heard someone say the price of growth is change? An old boss of mine used to say this regularly, and there’s a lot of truth to it. As your organization grows, it’s guaranteed to cause a lot of change. One place where this growth-fueled change often manifests itself is in how you support your customers. The last thing you want is to see your customer count skyrocket while your customer experience and customer satisfaction suffer.

Want a great way to tank your customer satisfaction? Ignore your customer service team. Customer expectations have never been higher, and they want answers faster, on the channel of their choice. Your team is made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge and experience—someone who’s new could unknowingly say the wrong thing and end up making an irate customer even more upset.