'Net Features : customer support

Sell More & Reduce Stress with Offerchat Saved Responses

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:42:00 GMT

Providing customer service in a digital world presents a whole host of challenges.

While it's useful to know as much as you can about typical live chat users (see infographic below), it remains essential to have the best tools at your digital disposal.

While many enterprises are turning to automated help desk solutions (check out Website Magazine's 2013 Help Desk Comparison Chart) to lessen some of the burden for these important personnel, more can be done.

Live chat solution provider Offerchat for example has released a new feature that gives customer service agents an option to convert a response to a saved response. As you might imagine, that reduces repetitive replies and could ultimately reduce the stresss that comes with delivering quality high-quality customer support and improve the handling of pre-sales inquiries.

Below you will find an infographic from Offerchat about the demographics and behavior of typical live chat users.

More Live Chat Related Articles from Website Magazine:

- Top 15 Apps E-Commerce Merchants Can't Do Without
- 5 'Net Tactics to Master Live Chat
- 2013 Help Desk Comparison Chart

Freshdesk Gamifies the Help Desk

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:15:00 GMT

Gamification is certainly the trend-du-jour but with all its promise, it’s still hard for many Web workers to imagine just how it can be best utilized.

Cloud-based customer support solution Freshdesk just rolled out a new gamified version of its platform dubbed Freshdesk Arcade. The aim? Turning the often tedious role of customer support into a “collaborative game for every help desk agent.”

Support personnel are awarded “fresh points” for achievements including fast ticket resolution, helping resolve issues in the first call, and of course high customer satisfaction ratings. They can also lose points when negative reviews are received or when a customer or service-level agreement is violated.

And what’s a gamified website or Web service without keeping score? As these support personnel “level up” they improve their position (and earn achievements and “trophies” including Sharpshooter, Speed Racer and Customer Wow Champ) on the internal leaderboard – a perfect virtual measuring stick for those most competitive on your staff.

“At Freshdesk, we obsessively focus on agent productivity, giving every support agent more ways to win the love of customers,” says Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk CEO. “With Freshdesk Arcade, we are ultimately giving companies on Freshdesk the ability to turn customer support into a fun game for everyone—the business, agents and the end customers.”

Desk.com Introduces Multilingual Support Features

Michael Garrity — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Customer support software company Desk.com (part of the Salesforce family) just announced a major addition to its service offering. Starting June 6, it will offer its customers Multilingual Customer Support.

The new feature will allow teams to communicate with and provide support to customers using their preferred languages, ultimately growing a company’s global presence by improving their operations in areas outside of their home locations. Desk.com will support 39 different languages and regional dialects, including but not limited to French, German and Chinese.

Multilingual Customer Support is built for companies of all shapes and sizes, and it takes special measures to make sure that the process is as simple as possible for all of its customers. For instance, all incoming cases will be automatically routed to agents fluent in the user’s language. Various filters and rules will detect and establish language preferences based on case or customer attributes, and this preferred language will be the default for said customer when it comes to all future emails, phone and chat cases, tweets and Facebook posts.

The service will also publish a Desk.com customer’s internal knowledge base and customer-facing help center in multiple languages, so that agents always have the best answers available in all appropriate languages. This allows users to choose their preferred language from the help center.

It also comes with some built-in Translation Management features that help users efficiently maintain and coordinate additional content in multiple languages. So, when customers update content, Desk.com will automatically mark the accompanying content in other languages with an icon, letting them know where changes are required. All translations will be put in one location so that they can be easily edited in a side-by-side manner, and original articles will appear on the same page as the translation.

Personalized Customer Support on Facebook Through IVAs

Linc Wonham — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

As customer support becomes an increasing priority for online businesses in the age of social media, at least one company is pushing the bounds of virtual reality.

VirtuOz, a provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online marketing, sales and support, has announced the launch of VirtuOz IVAs for Facebook. Web companies can use VirtuOz intelligent virtual agents to provide 24/7 support and service over any channel such as mobile devices, websites or social networking sites.

The IVA for Facebook is designed to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, existing self-service and human-assisted channels such as contact centers and live chat.

One travel website, Voyages-sncf.com, which deployed an IVA on Facebook to increase customer satisfaction and boost favorable wall posts, leapfrogged its competition to achieve 100-percent customer resolution. VirtuOz provided the site with a virtual agent that not only directly answered customers' questions but also channeled issues back to live agents when necessary.

With recent reports suggesting that less than 5 percent of questions asked on companies' Facebook pages are answered, this can be a significant tool for Web businesses.

“Originally considered marketing’s domain, social media is becoming an important customer engagement channel across all functions including sales and support,” says Pam Kostka, chief marketing officer of VirtuOz. “Listening and monitoring social networks is no longer sufficient.”

“Deploying an IVA on a corporate Facebook page helps companies move beyond passive social service to active social service. Through the IVA for Facebook, companies can quickly respond in a personalized way to customer requests, comments or inquiries and provide service through one of the world’s most popular points of entry to the Web for 800 million-plus active users.”

VirtuOz intelligent virtual agents for Facebook are available now and are deployed as a tab within a company’s Facebook page.

Multimedia Customer Support from VeriShow

Linc Wonham — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Live support and real-time collaboration are two of the hottest topics in Web business right now, and there’s an impressive new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that delivers those tools and more to its growing base of users.

VeriShow enables online retailers and other Web-based companies to give customers multimedia support that can improve sales and build trust among website visitors. The company’s apps-based approach is designed to help business owners increase sales by offering their customers a new level of online assistance.

Internet retailers can engage with customers and prospects in real time on a platform that uses a host of collaborative apps. A new integration with live chat provider LivePerson enables an ordinary live chat session to be complemented by VeriShow’s fully synchronized multimedia customer support such as document sharing, image and video viewing, order form completion and more.

“Internet retailers and their customers expect top-notch live help and real-time online sales and support,” says Yuval H. Moed, co-founder and CEO of HBR Labs, VeriShow's parent company. “We’ve already seen tremendous interest in the joint VeriShow solution built on the LivePerson platform, and we look forward to meeting and exceeding that need among e-commerce customers.”

VeriShow offers a 30-day free trial period on all premium accounts, which include three levels of service ranging from $49 per month to $399 per month. The free solution provides basic Web meeting and live support for a limit of 30 minutes per session.

In Focus: FeedbackJar, Crowdsourced Support Community

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Reviews are an important component for all businesses on the Web.

While Yelp has the local business review niche all but wrapped up, there are other companies out there that are innovating in the space and aiming to make a significant impact. One of those providers is FeedbackJar, a site which provides a way for customers to communicate with each other and with local merchants. More than a review site alone, Feedback Jar is a "crowdsource customer support community."

The service differs from Yelp in that customers can help answer questions, share ideas, and resolve problems with products and services they use in their community. FeedbackJar encourages merchants to join the conversation with their customers. Businesses can create and claim a profile (and manage it), receive feedback on their business products or services and eliminate repetitive customer support tasks (as users can search popular topics). FeedbackJar is limited to 96 local areas, but covers all the major cities and even a few decent sized towns as well.