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Businesses need to on their toes to understand evolving customer expectations. All customers expect an unbelievably good customer experience. Without a powerful customer-centric culture, where instant resolutions of issues are the norm, a business leaves itself vulnerable to the wrath of angry customers.
56% of people around the world have stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service experience. So, offering 24×7 customer support is a viable reason for businesses who focus on value in the digital age.
In many cases customers want businesses to address their queries right away.
Hence, companies need to make sure that the overall customer experience should be good otherwise; they will switch to other brands.
Knowing what is customer service and investing in 24×7 customer service can be beneficial for businesses in the long term.
What is 24×7 Customer Support?
24×7 customer support means when businesses are able to engage their customers whenever they need by deploying digital channels like live chat and chatbot. Delivering support to customers when they are in need of it is an absolute delight to customers. This is how clients react to customer support.
Customers generally do not like to wait, and they expect prompt responses. When there is a support team available 24×7, customers would get their issues resolved with proactive customer service assistance and clarity. Happy customers tend to remain loyal and would not want to switch brands when they are satisfied by the quality of support they get.
6 Proven Reasons Why Businesses Need to Offer 24×7 Customer Service
Depending on the nature of your business, it is possible that your customers simply can not afford to wait for their problems to be fixed. If you have a customer centric approach with a service team available at all hours of the day, you would be able to offer faster solutions.
Apart from your traditional email or phone support which are reactive communication channels, here is how you can deliver 24×7 support.
1. Customers demand real time support
What if when your customers are browsing your website and need assistance for making purchase decisions. This is the moment when they should be notified that you are available to deliver real time support.
As your website creates your brand’s image, the customer service in higher education industry or others, the aspect vouches for its credibility. Thus, it will significantly improve the buying experience and create long-lasting relationships.
Lack of proper service, on the other hand, might be discouraging for your clients – who might not close the deal and never return. When it comes to 24×7 customer support, you can use digital tools to enhance your customer service communication depending upon your business requirements.
Add live chat support
Live chat is the leading digital contact channel when compared with other channels such as email or social media. 46% of customers prefer to live chat to reach out to businesses.
Here is how live chat can deliver 24×7 support to your customers.
- Adding live chat helps agents to handle multiple conversations at the same time.
- Promptly address queries by using canned responses
- Provide effective response by routing chats to the right team
- Improves first response time and increase customer satisfaction rate
Automate your support with bots
Businesses that need to engage their customers round the clock are greatly relying on chatbots. $5 billion will be invested in chatbots by companies to provide their customers with better & faster service.
Slush, an entrepreneurial events organizer company deployed Jenny chatbot on their website and successfully handled 64% of all customer support requests for the Slush customer support team—a significant load.
Because of the 24×7 availability of the Jenny chatbot on their website and mobile app, people started 55% more conversations with Slush.
- By leveraging chatbots, you can engage your customers 24×7 with real-time answers when the support team is not available or busy.
- Bots can handle common queries at scale thus reducing the number of support tickets raised, which improves your team productivity.
2. Increased sales conversions with 24×7 call center
50% of consumers say that having a live person answer questions in the middle of a purchasing decision is one of the most important features a brand can offer.
Responding promptly is one of the key aspects of improving conversion rate by reducing the sales cycle. The faster you respond, the more repeat customers you will have and more sales you will generate.
Why does 24×7 customer support with live chat improve sales conversions?
Addressing sales queries reported by customers faster with an effective conversational customer engagement helps them in quick decision making. Thus, the availability factor acts as a catalyst in reducing the sales cycle and increasing conversions.
Using live chat helps to convert in a better way.
Best Practices
- Provide real time sales assistance – Add live chat to your website to deliver faster sales assistance by connecting to the sales representatives with intelligent routing.
- Deploy lead generation bots – You can leverage a sales bot to prequalify website visitors into quality leads and collect visitor information for future purposes.
- Reduce cart abandonment – By using well-customized messages, you can encourage website visitors to start a chat and reduce the cart abandonment rate significantly.
- Automate bookings & appointments – Use a chatbot to assist your customers through your booking process. It also improves team productivity related to manual follow-ups.
3. 24×7 support improves customer retention
59% of customers are more likely to buy when brands answer their queries in under a minute. It means long hold/wait time is what annoys every customer and impacts the decision to retain with the business or not.
Investing in offering 24×7 customer service is an excellent customer retention strategy and a great way to improve lifetime value. Customers become loyal towards your brand and retain for a long time period. Their lifetime value increases, which is an important metric that represents the total revenue you can expect from a single customer account.
Growing the value means that your customers are buying more frequently and/or spending more money on your business. A 5% increase in customer retention can produce 25% more profit.
If customers have a great experience with your support teams, they will be more frequently returning to your business. Also, they will tend to share their positive experience stories with others, which builds rapport with your customer base.
Best Practices
- Respond and resolve your customer queries instantly by implementing live chat as they demand immediate response when it comes to 24×7 customer care.
- You can deploy a customer service chatbot to engage your customers when your agents are not busy.
- An immediate response delivers an excellent customer experience that helps in more sales conversion and retains customers with your business.
4. Cultivate customer loyalty by offering 24×7 support
When a customer experiences consistent positive emotion with a brand, it results in a magical element known as loyalty. It could be 24×7 support, quality products, or any other aspect, the customer begins to associate the brand with high-value and chooses it over others.
It means when a customer is treated well and is showered with round the clock customer care, the individual chooses to remain loyal to that brand.
34% of consumers said that providing exceptional 24×7 customer service is the best way a company can build loyalty with them.
In order to deliver great customer support, you must give priority to the below areas.
- Build trust by being 24×7 available – Being unavailable leads customers to look for validation elsewhere. To build customer loyalty, ensure that your customer care agents are available 24×7 to provide a consistent service experience.
- Streamline your communication process – Communicating effectively and streamlining customer support processes increases loyalty. By using automation tools, you can effectively communicate with your clients.
- Solicit customer feedback to show how much you value them – Ask customers for feedback at every touchpoint to understand their needs. View customer complaints as an opportunity for growth, so respond quickly to the feedback. It shows that you care and build loyal relationships with your business.
- Keep a “customer” mindset – Forging good relationships with buyers, providing them 24×7 customer service, and looking for opportunities to offer or provide additional value are all effective tactics for keeping them as engaged long-term clients instead of transaction-focused customers.
5. Focus on delivering a better customer experience
The focal point of every business should be delivering a great customer experience. Availability of customer support 24×7 and instant resolution are the key elements of good customer service that directly impacts the satisfaction level of your clients.
When customers reach out to you with issues, the priority should be to identify the nature of the issue and use the right tools/process to provide an effective solution. The issues reported can be generic as well as technical, which requires visual understanding.
By using a co-browsing solution, agents can collaborate with customers in real time by guiding them through the complex process by controlling their screens. With a video contact center solution, you can diagnose the root cause of the issues and deliver personalized solutions by reducing the number of touchpoints.
Using the advanced tools to address customer queries in real time not just showcases your customer care standards but also delivers an excellent experience.
What’s next?
- When customers get effective solutions in the first contact with such responsive service, they are satisfied with the overall brand.
- Using advanced customer engagement tools showcases your support standards and how much you take your clients seriously.
- Happy customers share their success stories with positive word of mouth across friends and social media.
- The satisfied customers are likely to stick to your brand for a long time which increases their lifetime value.
6. 24×7 customer support demonstrates high responsiveness
Time is the main essence of offering great support. Expected response times are shrinking by the day. Customers and even potential customers expect real time answers.
Ensuring 24×7 customer support availability indicates to your customers that you are in the “NOW” business and hyper receptive to their needs. Happy customers can help you build credibility and bring in more business. 77% of customers are likely to recommend a company to a friend if they have a positive experience.
When you deliver 24×7 customer support –
- It shows how much you value your commitment to your customers.
- You depict that you understand your customer’s expectations and align the services as per their needs.
- It also showcases that your support team is aware of the importance of follow-up in customer service and is dedicated to providing consistent 24×7 customer support.
Consider the scenario where your company does not have the bandwidth to promptly handle customer requests. And are you in a position to lose 30% to 60% of your recurring business? Because such scenarios would only drive clients away to other businesses that invest time and effort in delivering 24×7 customer support.
Note: By auditing your customer service on a regular basis, you can learn what are the things most sought after by the customers. Staying beforehand ready to meet customer needs increases satisfaction and delivers a great experience.
24×7 Customer Support is the Need of the Hour
Though providing 24×7 customer support may sound a lot of work or expensive, however, it is a long term play and you are investing in building customer relationships. If done rightly, it will not only provide timely customer support but also increase customer retention, and gives your brand a competitive advantage that a few brands can match.
By being available 24×7 for your customers, you will gain a reputation for being professional, reliable, and caring about your customers. A positive reputation of your company will do wonders for the growth of your business, increasing your customer base and improved sales will roll in. Providing the 24/7 customer care number provides your customers a convenient way to reach out to you.
