Some facts about remote employees

• According to Cisco, approximately 69% of the employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working remotely their work productivity improved.
• A report from ConnectSolutions concludes that remote workers can lead to higher efficiency.
• By the year 2023, experts predict one-half of the global adult workforce will be remote.

Remote team management can come with a few challenges, as well. Here are 11 best practices that explains to you how to manage remote teams effectively in your business.

1) Find the right workflow management system for your team

To maximize the team output you need to find out the right workflow management systems for your team. Choosing the best ways can help you have more productivity. Benefits of having the right workflow,

• You can easily avoid the trap of micromanagement.
• Allow your team to control the work on each level.
• The team can easily establish specific goals.

Bonus tip: Instead of focusing on how the work is being done, focus on the work itself and set clear objectives for every remote employee.

2) Create a workplace culture for your remote teams

While managing a remote team, it is important to have a clear vision of team culture. Culture is about human beings, and people want to feel part of something positive and bigger than themselves.

Remote team managers who are able to create this sense of culture will increase the quality, productivity, and commitment of their remote team members and their work. True workplace culture drives successful remote teams.

Bonus tip: Recognize their hard work and give them a reward for their efforts.

3) Try different communication medium

To manage your virtual teams you need to apply different communication methods. Here are some medium that works for communication purpose,

• Email
• Video Chat
• Phone
• Web Chat

Bonus tip: Make sure every remote team communication is delivered on the right platform.

4) Have a culture of accountability and trust

It is important to have a culture of accountability. In order to bring strong working relationships with your team members to create social bonding. Setting clear expectations for remote workers is also key.

Bonus tip:  Establish trust between your remote workers. It will improve the confidence level and trust.

5) Effective collaboration on documents

In remote team management, there are a number of documents shared by employees with each other. In this scenario, Google drive has made the life of virtual assistants easier than ever.

If you have a document that needs editing with the help of various people at a time, you can get it edited all at once when you share the document in Google Drive or Dropbox.

Bonus tip:  Use Google Drive for seamless work on files without having to download and re-upload them.

6) Allow a degree of flexible working hours

These days, working from home has been given to prioritizing in the life of people to get flexibility with their working hours. It is an important aspect to include flexibility in working hours to manage remote teams, one requires to get collaboration is not necessary.

Staying available through virtual tools can also help the team to stay connected and at the same time, they can chat and resolve any sort of upcoming issues.

 Bonus tip:  Make their working hour flexible so it will create an opportunity to create a structure of overbooking and micromanaging.

7) Track their performance

It is very important to implement a structure of tracking the performance of remote employees whether your team is virtual or not. Provide them flexibility but don’t completely leave them on their own. If they are getting paid based on working hours then track their attendance by using performance tracking and time tracking system.

Bonus tip: You can use SalesHandy tool to streamline your communication with your remote team members. It will create transparency in the work environment and you will know quickly whether a team member is productive or not.

8) Take regular feedback

Collecting regular feedback is one of the most important parts of remote management strategy. It allows you to encourage hard work, put transparency in your work and also create good opportunities to explore new ways to keep in touch with your remote team.

Bonus tip: Create 360-degree feedback so that remote employees can motivate him/herself for doing better.

9) Keep communication simple and natural

It is important to maintain communication through email service, product wiki, task board, and instant messaging apps. By using virtual assistance tools you can keep communication simple and natural. It is the best way to minimize setup overhead.

Bonus tip:  Use the right tool for your communication and create a simplified workflow.

10) Take out time for small conversation

To work in highly moderated management, remote employees need to get indulged in small conversations. If there is a deadline to maintain or have a quick meeting to attain, all things require small talk that can help in clearing the doubts and help in fast indulging for the execution of the tasks.

Bonus tip:  Small conversations with your team members demonstrate that you care and this will also make them like working for you more.

11) Get together face-to-face at least once a year

At least once in a year, you can bring all your teams together for a virtual conference. This type of gathering helps in increasing the possibilities of discussing business at a substantial stage.

With warm get-togethers and team-building activities directly impact productivity, team morale, and overall team performance. No matter whether your team is big or small, it is important to focus on team-building activities and create a sense of connectedness across the company.

Bonus tip: Small gatherings with your team members will give you an opportunity to have a big discussion about culture, vision, and team future.

12) Respect cultural differences

No matter whether we are managing small or big remote teams, managing cultural diversity in the team can be challenging sometimes. Dealing with cultural differences, and language barriers with remote team members are some of the issues that today’s managers and leaders face. So, it is important to successfully navigate cultural diversity in the workplace.

Bonus tip: Educate your team members about cultural ethics, language, and religious holidays. This will help to solve the problems and keep cultural misunderstanding at a minimum level.

Final thoughts

The explosion of technological advancements has redefined every aspect of our lives, especially the way we work. Having and managing remote employees is now a mundane aspect of today’s workplace. So, if you are a leader then you need to follow the above-mentioned best practices of managing remote teams to create a truly united team.

Almost 54% of all companies utilize third-party technical support teams to connect with customers. Because only selling the best product will not allow them to prevail in the industry in the long run. In order to gain new customers and retain loyal customers coming back, businesses have to follow concerted efforts to sustain it.

Report Linker reports says, the estimated market size for global outsourced customer experience in 2022 is at $90.87  billion, which is expected to rise to $173.68 billion by the end of 2029. Due to the highly competitive market, businesses face difficulties to maintain the quality of resources. The limitations for such businesses might be the time factor or enough support staff to offer service after the sale. 

Some companies choose to use offshore development centers, while there is a rising trend among businesses to participate in full-cycle processes. This include customer service outsourcing as an important part.

Customer service is incredibly important to today’s consumers, with as many as 70% of customers saying they would leave a company over poor customer service. If the customer service worsens, customers will ruin your brand image over social media and bad word of mouth.

What is customer service outsourcing?

In the 21st century, the mass of the exemplary crowd is moving at an agile velocity. The rise in demand and flexibility of the product is visible at the consensus rate. Nowadays the product life cycle doesn’t stop with the selling of the product to the customer, but it further moves to the desk for after-service facilities. 

The satisfaction of the customer lies at most importance for the vendor. In order to maintain the subtle reputation of the brand, arouses the call for extended effort in the form of better customer service.

To rescue the organization from anticipated business turmoil, the usual support lies at the end of the professional belonging to customer support services, expertise in the same. 

Factors to consider while outsourcing customer service

Most of the big and small companies resort to outsourcing their business functions. Either they choose to outsource most of their functions or just a handful of them so that they can focus on core aspects of the business. 

For either of the cases, there are certain key factors to be considered that will help them make informed decisions. 

Let’s dive into the factors to consider for making outsourcing decisions for your business.

#1. Plan budget according to your needs

Every single business seeks to garner cost efficiency, especially in outsourcing. You need to prepare the budget in advance before outsourcing any service and go through with deep analysis of all the pricing of different outsourcing companies.

You need to ensure that you are choosing the right customer service provider to streamline your overhead costs. There are many service providers that actually end up costing firms more money.

Tip: While selecting an outsourcing company for tech support, consider the track record, clientele, and reviews of their service.

#2. Ensure availability of right systems and tools

It is better to ask about the technologies and tools they are going to use for your project. Discuss with them and find out whether they are capable enough to handle your outsourcing needs. 

Many outsourcing organizations offer various solutions, but their under-trained customer service representatives will not offer you the benefits that you’re looking for. So, you need to look beyond those criteria.

Tips:

• Evaluate your providers with a verifiable track record of quality and performance. After all, customer retention and increased sales depend on good service.
• Make sure that they eliminate the need for additional resources such as executives, extra workspace.
• Check whether they have updated technology and skilled professionals or not.
• Check the report and detailed structured analysis of their previous claim work.

#3. Service level agreement in outsourcing contracts

SLA (Service level agreement) is a critical part of any outsourcing contract. A well-drafted SLA sets expectations for both parties because it provides proper guidance for measuring accurate performance to the set targets.

Few things to remember before moving forward,

• SLA needs to be specifying the consequences for failure to meet the expectation.
• It may also include a bonus term to be given to the service provider for exceeding the performance standard.
• It should be adaptable to the emergence of new technology and improvements.

#4. Brand reputation

When you want it to decide who your outsourcing partner would be, it is important to also understand their capabilities and their market reputation. You can go through the online client reviews that can give you an idea about their competencies.

A good outsourcing partner has credible customers, your industry or domain knowledge and also they have certifications or other industry specific recognition that can help you to evaluate how good they are

#5. Dealing with time zones

One of the key challenges faced by most of the companies is dealing with time zones. At times, your team might need some kind of clarification, important emails may return or work gets stuck until the requirements are well-clarified and understandable for everyone. With different time zones, it’s hard to communicate anytime you want.

Now, the question is how you can deal with working in different time zones?

It is also important to give the team a common working space to share, find, and collaborate on the information they need to get the work done.

• Use Slack, Skype or TeamViewer to keep communication open and transparent.

#6. Check legal compliance

Legal protections and laws greatly vary from country to country. To overcome, you have to learn and educate yourself on the enforcement of legal protections specific for your outsourcing initiative. Compliance with regulations about the preservation of client confidentiality and sensitive information is a crucial factor to consider.

What types of customer service you can outsource?

Whether it is customer service or technical support outsourcing, businesses may think of reducing the costs by alleviating the burden of repetitive and time-consuming tasks to third-party service providers. They want to keep their focus on the ultimate objective of bringing new prospects into the business. 

But the question is what services or business tasks should you outsource? Should you retain what is core and distribute the secondary?

Well, you can decide that based on your business requirements, however, the types of customer service that can be outsourced are as follows:

• Email support – Email services can be outsourced as maintaining continuous and unstinting communication with your customers is essential for the success of your customer relationship efforts.
• Live chat support – Online chat services can be outsourced for providing high-quality contact center and customer care support services in real time and assuring higher customer satisfaction levels.
• Phone support – The phone call support services can be outsourced for delivering better customer experience.

By outsourcing the above services, you can manage your resources efficiently. They can handle the tech support services that are more crucial.

Key skills to outsource your customer service

A well-structured action plan is essential prior to turning for customer service outsourcing. The strategy should focus on how effectively you can achieve your customer service goals. 

Consider the below criteria to outsource your support needs

• Language – Language is the key to effective communication. It is quite annoying for both the customer and the representative when language barriers hinder clear conversations. Prior to outsourcing your customer support tasks you need to evaluate and examine thoroughly the tone, clarity, and understanding of your business, the agents will communicate. You can have a test call to check the service quality.
• Reviews – You can check client reviews and testimonials to authenticate the outsourcing agencies. With reviews, you are able to gain more details into specific typical customer service experiences.
• Invest in systems or tools – When you outsource your business tasks, communication is a must between you and an outsourced support team.  For that, you should use tools like Slack or Skype.

Pros of customer service outsourcing

#1: Save money and resources

Many business owners probably don’t have the budget to hire and onboard extra customer service rep, because their employees need to focus on day-to-day operations. Outsourcing customer service is the ideal compromise because:

• You will get a skilled workforce at a lower cost.
• Easily control your IT cost because you will only pay for what you use when you need it.
• Save and focus on relevant human resources.
• It reduces upkeep maintenance costs.

You can save around a total of $3000 in initial setup and infrastructure costs that is close 25 years of Amazon prime subscription at current rates.

#2: Minimal supervision is required

When you hire a company for outsourcing customer service, you thought that they are going to take care of everything related to your product. If you are running a matured business, then you need to supervise them minimally and let them take it from there. 

With minimal supervision, you can focus on your core business goals. The professionals hired expertise in their domain rather than a freshly trained in-house team.

#3: Easily monitor performance

Customer service outsourcing companies have the right tools and resources to make sure the effectiveness and quality of the customer agent and its services. They have KPIs and analytics in place to measure employee performance and track activities, as well as it bolsters in managing the insight of data for propagating the full-proof business plan.

With existing processes ready to be integrated with your business operations, you don’t have to start from scratch. You are assured that your outsourced customer service team is well-trained, giving you peace of mind and allowing you to focus on core business activities.

#4: Deliver immediate customer service

Nowadays, every customer is looking for a fast and convenient support service to solve their issues. Handling customer service in the house with focus on, you might be unable to serve superior quality of customer support that you are looking for. And that can affect the overall customer service. 

In order to maintain the quality you have to outsource customer support to the best outsourcing companies.

• They help to improve the flexibility of your help desk service.
• Especially in outsourcing technical support, the third-party will take care of the cost and responsibility of installing, maintaining, and operating sophisticated telephony systems, data management teams, and other customer support software.
• The customer outsourcing company provides extensional support with ever-ready 24*7 customer support.

#5: Efficient customer service management 

Having a outsource partner have their own established system, tools, a process that you might not otherwise be able to invest in. The well established process helps in delivering faster and efficient support to your customers. The agencies that take up outsourcing work are well aware of how to scale their services for effective customer service management.

How support agency can manage customer service effectively?

• The have well equipped support systems – chat, phone, email.
• They have well defined systems to deliver services that meet SLAs and KPIs.
• Having resources and tools at place reduces the response time significantly.
• The outsourcing agencies offer extended after-hour and weekend support.

Cons of customer service outsourcing

#1: Language and cultural barriers

The organization takes lots of effort to get a potential customer base. And due to customer support, they don’t want to lose their customers. This fear holds an organization to outsource its customer support. 

To overcome these issues, try our bonus tips:

• Send clear and specific customer service needs that you’re looking for.
• Include deep specification about your requirements like the team or any member should have fluency in a certain language, or they should multi-lingual and has a neutral approach.

#2: Choosing the right company for outsourcing customer service will take time

No doubt that the decision of choosing a suitable outsourcing company is very difficult. In today’s fast-paced business world, outsourcing becomes the key driver for all start-ups to big organizations. 

To choose the right customer service outsourcing company you need to consider below-mentioned factors:

• Set your business goals.
• Check cultural compatibility.
• Inspect technology advancement level and infrastructure.
• Understand the terms for after-service customer support.

#3: Data security risk

The risk is the most significant driving factor behind what can and cannot be outsourced. According to the research nearly half, the respondents are doubtful of the security offered by the customer service outsourcing companies. About 30% feel security claims cannot be verified and approximate 20% feel no credibility.

Tip: Apply a data-centric approach for security purposes because it became difficult to control applications, devices or networks in a complex environment.

#4: Not having proper knowledge 

One big disadvantage of outsourcing is lack of knowledge. The customer support rep does not understand your product. It is very important to identify that your outsourcing partner has domain expertise and are often unfamiliar with company practices and values. 

Therefore, may not be dedicated to the company, devoted to the customer or provide a level of service that is in line with company standards and reflects the company culture.

Tips:

• Look for an outsourcing partner with domain expertise.
• The agents must be well trained about the product/services.

Final thoughts on how to outsource customer service

So, if you are planning to outsource your project, then it’s important to assess your short-term and long-term goals and create a framework from which to base daily operations to make sure that both parties have clear expectations from each other.

Through outsourcing, you can focus on providing better customer service and earn great advantage for your business, working in favor of both, the vendor and the customer.

Chat feedback can be helpful for your business in many ways like improving customer support, increasing conversion, and offering insight into research data that will be beneficial for your product and service.

What is pre and post-chat survey?

Post chat survey is a chat questionnaire that pops up once the chat is over. The customer will see a post-chat survey question often in the form of NPS (Net Promoter Score) to examine instantly whether the customer is satisfied with chat support or not.

A pre-chat survey enables the collection of visitor information prior to the chat session beginning and quickly routes the session to the agent most qualified to manage the chat.

Why live chat survey matters to your business?

• You can build more connections.
• Allow you to save more leads.
• Efficiently keeps more current customers if you take immediate action.
• Positive feedback helps you to move forward, while negative feedback helps to identify your service blind shot to improve your service.

Two types of customer chat feedback questionnaire

• Open-ended questions 

  Open-ended questions are based on the customer’s knowledge, feelings, and understanding. It commonly means that responses to this question are not limited to a set of options. With their response, you can collect information about the customer’s thought process. Example – Tell us about your experience with our company so far?

• Close-ended questions

  Close-ended questions are defined as question types that ask respondents to choose from a distinct set of pre-defined responses like “yes/no” or among a set of “multiple chat questionnaires. Below mentioned is an example,

Common mistakes we need to avoid in live chat survey

• Don’t ask many questions – Asking too many questions, make your website visitor to get annoyed, and they either leave without completing the whole survey process or start filling out your survey questions irresponsible way. 

• Asking relevant questions- Avoid asking unnecessary questions to your customers. Better to keep your chat questionnaire short because a short survey can boost your response rate. Asking questions that are not related to your product or service will create a bad impression.

Benefits of live chat survey

• Easily understand the customer perspective

  A good mixture of open-ended and close-ended questions can help you to decide what needs to be improved. The questions in a customer satisfaction survey should encompass every department of your organization that may have contributed to a client’s experience. While you want to get your customer’s opinions on your business, might be some questions that may not directly apply to the client; in these instances, it’s best to leave them out to avoid making your questionnaire too long or potentially confusing or frustrating your client.

• Get real–time feedback 

  Customer feedback can be collected around the clock and you can easily catch the negative and positive feedback about your product or services. Fetching real-time feedback from customers makes a powerful impact on customer experience. This data helps the organization to create a customer-friendly culture that makes each customer’s experience positive and productive. Correct data can help to make customers stick around for years to come.

• Automate your customer feedback 

  No need to put a dedicated agent to collect the feedback from customers. Customers can easily input their own data and automatically stored it. Data can be easily analyzed and streamlined whenever needed.

• Get real-time insight into customer journey 

  Throughout the customer journey process, it is important to understand the fact that who are your customers, what they were specifically looking for, what is the sensitivity level of their price point of view etc. Align your questions according to that and you will get complete customer insight.

How to convert customer data into actionable insights?

According to the report of Gartner “Every 10 customers who have a “high-effort” or difficult support experience, nine will become disloyal and eight will say something negative about your business”.

To help your support teams gauge their success, here are some most effortless ways to gather actionable feedback from your customers.

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) 

  CSAT is the key performance indicator and helps to measure customer satisfaction. The major goal of any CSAT score is to measure the customer satisfaction level with your service or product or interact with an agent.  You can determine the CSAT score by asking a multiple-chat questionnaire or by asking a simple question. Below mentioned is an example,

(Image source – Hubspot)

• NPS (Net Promoter Score)

  NPS tool is used for measuring not just customer experience, but also customer loyalty because it transcends single experiences. For example, you may ask a customer “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?” and give them the choice to select a score on a scale of 0-5 where 0 means “not at all likely” and 5 is “extremely likely”.You can use these insights to improve your net promoter score.

• CES (Customer Effort Score) 

  It directly measures the amount of effort it took for a visitor or customer to achieve his/her online goal. This is a metric that you will always want to monitor frequently for your business. In simple terms, if your customer effort level is high, this often results in lower customer loyalty. Better to reduce their effort time to win customers.

 Wrap Up

Overall, don’t discard or underestimate the information that customer comments provide you, and use it to grow your business. Just make sure you respect the customer’s time and don’t ask them to answer a ton of questions in one go. Ask only what’s really important to you, and use them to improve your service.

“Sustaining an audience is hard,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.”

Learning customer expectations and aligning them to an aspirational vision helps in delivering a high-value customer experience. It is important for the customer support team and the company should act consistently, in interacting with customers for the success of the business.

Live engagement with co-browsing is an emerging trend that businesses are implementing to enhance their customer service. It helps customer support reps to guide customers through complex situations in real time.

Co-browsing for customer engagement

By 2023, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. – Walker

Customer: I am having some problems filling up the enrollment form. I am completely stuck.

Agent: Don’t worry! You just have to click on the “co-browse” button on your screen and give me the code.

Customer: The code is XXXXX.

Agent: Ok, let me co-navigate along with you. We can both fill up the form together.

Customer: Great! And it’s done! “Thank you so much for your on-time assistance. It was really a great experience.

Agent: Super! Good day.

To deal with such conversations co-browsing serves as the best solution. It resolves the problem in the first contact enhancing the team performance.

Visually engaging the customers with the best co-browsing solution combining voice and video chat allows to fill up a form in minimum time and get things done and reach their immediate goal.

Importance of visual engagement tools

Aberdeen Group found out that businesses using visual engagement tools marked 83% in annual revenue and an array of positive growth.

Visual engagement tools are gaining momentum as businesses are responding to the changing trends and adapting to what actually customers want. Customers now prefer purchasing across various platforms, and having a way to engage consumers closely and effectively has driven businesses to prioritize visual engagement tools.

• Increases the website conversion rates through interactive conversation in real-time
• Raises customer service standards with quick and effective engagement
• Assists customers through the sales funnel and gives insights
• Provides immediate visual context for the issue to agents to resolve instantly
• Delivers quick and effective response and reduce resolution time

8 Ways co-browsing improves your customer engagement process

Co-browsing solution acts as a catalyst for making the interaction between the agents and customers quick and productive. It allows your agents to view customers’ web pages in the real-time scenario and can solve complex queries by personalized solutions to the customers improving the engagement process.

Let’s discuss key use cases of how co-browsing can boost client engagement strategy.

1. Convert your website visitors into leads

Co-browsing offers the best way to engage your website visitors and increase conversions. In fact, it can increase website conversions by 45% because all you’re really doing is offering instant customer service.

A great example can be when a visitor or customer is comparing websites quotes they look for taking expert advice and information at an advanced stage of their buying journey. Quotes that have been presented to the customer on the website are instantly accessible by the agent, who can advise and close accordingly.

When co-browsing solution combined with video chat it helps in engaging the customer interactively and quickly resolving the issue.  Effective guidance helps customers to make timely decisions and drive chances of sales conversion.

When you assist your customers in the exact time they need and engage them with personalized conversions builds trust and they choose to go the extra mile by being your brand advocates.

2. Deliver customer support remotely

Forrester report says, there are many companies in retail, financial services, healthcare among others have chosen video chat and co-browsing as a mode to connect with customers and provide interactive support to them in real time.

UK footwear retailer Schuh extended video chat by deploying it to mobile and maximizing the number of video agents by 20% in two years and now the video is its busiest customer service channel.

Co-browsing is a real-time collaboration platform that allows integration with a complete suite of tools that used to ensure a personalized service environment comprising of real-time sharing of information, live discussions, and effective conversations.

Benefits of remote support through co-browsing and video chat are:

• Personalized interactions – Co-browsing with video chat enables the agents to provide step-by-step assistance in resolving the customer query.
• Build customer trust – The secure and prompt service assistance of co-browsing solution boosts the confidence of customers and increase loyalty
• Sale conversions at minimum costs – With co-browsing, the agents learn and identify customer’s problems in the first contact. Thus, agents deliver effective resolutions in real time, which improves customer acquisitions and low-cost sales conversion.

3. Co-browsing software for interactive customer engagement

As co-browsing solution requires no downloads and installs it connects instantly with your customers to respond to their queries. You can deliver a good co-browsing experience to your customers by using live chat, screen sharing, and video chat.  

Using the scrolling, highlighting and drawing co-browsing tools on the customer screen to explain during the co-browse sessions engages your customers better. You can enhance the interaction by giving better product demos, educate new users and quickly answer them in real time.

4.  Reduce the number of touch points

With co-browsing, you can assure the resolution of the customer problem in the first go. No matter it is a technical issue, sales issue, form fill up or something else, co-browsing is the ultimate solution to deal with these issues and improve customer satisfaction.

It reduces the total of touchpoints for customer service. It delivers real time resolution to the customers in the first interaction itself and raises the chances of sales. It saves sales service costs by better providing better customer engagement.

5.  Increase your customer retention with co-browsing software

Customer retention is completely based on trust. And the trust is developed through a convenient and effective brand-customer exchange. Visual customer experience has the potential to build trust and a mutual connection between your brand and your consumer.

Most importantly, it settles down their fear. Customers will retain when they know what they are getting and know that they can trust it.

Co-browsing when combined with live chat and video chat helps to provide immediate resolutions that reduce the total response time and boosts customer engagement.

As per Customer Focus, 46% of customers leave a website if they can’t find what they are looking for. When the customers are satisfied with the service they retain your brand and bring in more customers.

6.  Deliver better ROI

The co-browsing software integrated into your e-commerce website allows your customer support team to see the customer’s browser and will help them in completing the purchase. It improves the engagement metrics by quick real time assistance.

When the queries are fixed instantly, customers get satisfied and are happy with your support services. An interactive customer engagement results in a higher conversion rate and thus delivers a better ROI.

7. Make your customer onboarding faster

Onboarding customers is a very important part of every business. If you appear complex to your customers while onboarding, possibly you might lose potential customers. It happens that superior products lose if the customer support team is not prompt enough.

By using co-browsing for the right onboarding, you can overcome the problem. The benefits of the co-browsing solution in the customer onboarding process are as follows:

• Guide your customers in taking product demos/actions
• Assist your customers to complete the setup process if they are unable to manage it.
• Save time by making conversations crisp and meaningful.

8.  Increase customer loyalty

To meet customer expectations is imperative to stay in the competition. You should put extra effort to take every opportunity to deliver the best services to your customers. Customers become loyal to brands when they are satisfied with your service and their issues get resolved the first time.

Businesses can meet their customer’s expectations and increase satisfaction by using over live engagement tools. These real time tools help to retain customers and gain new customers and improve business performance.

How co-browsing helps to build customer loyalty?

With the help of co-browsing, problem resolution is so fast, this boosts customer satisfaction. For example for a bank, you can use co-browsing to build loyalty in the following ways.

• Provide premium service with the help of co browsing
• Add co browsing and other live engagement tools on your bank kiosks
• Help your customers filling up banking for loan application with co browsing

9. Reduce cart abandonment

The role of a sales representative becomes important when a customer is facing a problem in completing the purchase. And this becomes even easier with co-browsing software integrated into your e-commerce website. Undoubtedly, this enhances your service and will improve the shopping experience of your customers.

There are many reasons why people might drop off their carts – one off which can be giving the credit card details because of the feeling of insecure issues. With the co-browsing solution, sales reps can assist the customers to fill out an order form assuring all the sensitive details to be hidden.

The cart abandonment rate can be considerably reduced by educating and suggesting the customers deeply about the products and walkthrough a seamless checkout process by guiding them throughout the buying journey.

8. Seamless customer experience

The latest WebRTC technology is highly flexible and fuss-free. It makes customer engagement effective by combining live chat and video chat while co-browsing.  It helps to deliver better customer experience without compromising on the user experience.

WebRTC based co-browsing requires no downloads or plug-ins. Just with a single click, your customers can share their browser. It works on all browsers allowing to connect with the agent with just one click.

Conclusion

In today’s scenario where customer engagement is given the topmost priority, co-browsing technology is a great way to help your customers and find a solution for them in a much faster way they want. Co-browsing software helps to gain more satisfied customers and accelerate business growth.

Inappropriate email etiquette can negatively impact perceptions of professionalism, on efficiency, and can increase a company’s risk of liability. If you follow professional email etiquette it helps to avoid miscommunication or even mistakes.  You don’t want your boss, co-workers, clients, or prospective employers judging you based on some avoidable mistakes, right? 

Let us discuss some important business email etiquette tips while using emails in the workplace.

1) Focus on subject line

Mostly the importance of the email subject line is underestimated. It serves as a ‘preview’ for your email. With subject lines recipient gets idea regarding the topic of your email. Subject lines should be short or concise to grab attention of reader. All caps, all small or even typos shows unprofessional impression and receiver may consider your email as ‘spam.’

2) Use a professional email address

For emails related to company using professional email address provided by employer is important. It represents you as a representative of your company. However this mail address should not be used for sending personal emails.

3) Email salutations

There are different salutations used in emails. Let’s see email etiquette examples

• For formal emails :

          Example: Dear Ms. Priya

• For any casual email:

          Example: Dear Priya

• If you know the recipient closely:

          Example: Hi Priya

4) Email sign-offs

Sign off is the last thing read by recipient, it has lasting impression on reader. For light hearted tone, warm sign offs are used. Below are commonly used sign-offs.

• Thanks
• Cheers
• Enjoy the weekend
• Looking forward to our next conversation
• Happy to hear your thoughts

5) Recipient names

Always check recipient name correctly. Do not shorten their names unless recipient has used short name in his signature. You can check his signature before sending email. 

6) Email tone

Email tone means expressing your attitude in mails. Your tone must be friendly, approachable and respectful. Do not write any portion in uppercase. It indicates that you are shouting on recipient and considered is as poor email etiquette. Always reread your emails before sending to recipient.

7) Fonts and formatting

Using multiple font sizes and colors looks messy and is bad business email etiquette. So, it is important to use professional font for every email. Otherwise it will not consider as professional email etiquette.

Professional Fonts used in emails are:

• Times New Roman
• Georgia
• Veranda
• Arial
• Book Antiqua
• Calibri

8) Hyperlinks

Sometimes you want to direct the reader to web pages. But pasting entire URL takes too much space and looks messy. Instead of this creating hyperlinks work.

9) Manage file attachments, compress them if required

Nobody likes larger attachments. The main reason behind this is larger attachments take large storage space. Before sending a large attachment, always ask for permission from the recipient. Otherwise you can also compress or “zip” your files before sending them to recipient.

10) Email signatures

An email signature gets routinely added to the end of a message. You can add your contact information in signature to allow receivers to know where to get in contact with you. Mailbutler lets you create professional email signatures that you can easily insert to emails. No HTML coding is required, and designs are always synced real time to your email client.

11) Email fields

To:  For adding the email address of recipient.

CC: For adding someone to see relevant information you have shared but he is not obligated to respond to it.

BCC: For adding some contacts to see the mail but recipients in To or CC fields will not be able to see contacts in BCC.

12) Reply vs. reply-all

Nothing is more embarrassing than “reply all” instead of “reply”. It means reply all option sends mass email all contacts in the mail whereas reply option is intended to send your reply to only one recipient. This mistake can occur if there are multiple recipients for that email.

It is better to double check before you send the reply or else you will be sorry. Email etiquette reply is very important in sending mails.

13) Email forwarding

When forwarding an email, always add your personal comment in it. Do not forward any mail without editing forwarding arrows, email addresses and comments from other forwarders.                       

14) Email response time   

It is not possible to respond to all mails immediately. Depending upon the nature and urgency of emails, time frame of 24-48 hours is accepted for responding to mails.

15) Email tracking

Sometimes you do not get instant reply from recipient. In this case, instead of asking “Did you see my email?” you can use certain tracking tools. Tools indicate you once the recipient opens an email.

16) Sending reminders to People

When writing reminder emails, always remember to write the content in brief. The approach should not be arrogant. Otherwise it is not considered as a proper email etiquette.

17) Avoid sending an email for discussions

Not all communication can occur via email. When discussing about confidential or important information making a phone call is important. It also avoids miscommunication.

18) Ensure your email wasn’t trashed

Sometimes you do not hear back from recipient. There are chances that receiver may be busy and do not respond to your mail. If you enquire whether they have received your message or not can make it worse. Remember, you need to be patient here. Wait for a week. If they don’t reply send them another mail. 

19) Double check that email address

Proper email etiquette calls for sending emails from your business email address rather than from a personal email address. When it comes to workplace matters, it is important for you to double check the recipient’s info before hitting the “send” button. If you make a habit of verifying the receiver’s info, you’ll avoid making mistakes.

20) Proofread

Always look over your e-mails for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Simple errors like these can cause your e-mail to look unprofessional and give the impression that you don’t care.

Key Takeaway

As you can see, there’s quite a bit to think about when it comes to business email etiquette at work. The importance of email etiquette lies in a fact that every email sent from your company has direct reflection on your business. Within few seconds recipient gets first impression of your company from your email. There are many benefits of using email etiquette. 

Mainly it avoids miscommunication and also helps in gaining business leads. This communication tool also gives an opportunity to build and cultivate long-term customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction. So, follow these email etiquette do’s and don’ts to make your emails professional and efficient.

Send better emails today!!!