In our previous article on New Customer Intake on Your Website (Part 1) we looked at the benefits of providing multiple methods of customer contact, and the importance of following up on leads. Here we’ll continue covering a few more ways to increase customer intake, and a few methods for improving customer relations as well.
Managing Customer Relations Using a Chat Bot
One of the pitfalls of generating new customers is that not everyone contacting a business is actually a new customer. Some respondents will only need the answers to simple questions, or may be seeking information already available on your website. In these cases, it’s often time saving to get this information into the hands of clients as quickly as possible. An efficient way to approach this scenario is to utilize a chat bot, a program that can direct customer to the assistance they need.
Chat bots are essentially a set of questions that customers can respond to. Depending on what the client needs, they will either be given a quick answer from the chat bot, sent a link to relevant information, or provide their contact information and have a message forwarded to someone who can help. The more customized your chat bot is, the less time you will need to devote to handling incoming clients with questions that can be easily answered. This is beneficial in two ways: first, it saves your business time, and more importantly, it ensures that clients get answers in the fastest way possible.
Intelligent Forms
An alternate program to chat bots is intelligent forms. These are similar to a chat bot sending a custom form directly related to what the customer needs. An intelligent form lists one question at a time, and generate the next question based on the answer given. For instance, using a restaurant as example, if the first question asks a client to choose the category their question is under, and the customer chooses “Catering,” the next question would be a question related to that, such as what type of event, and so on. Like a chat bot, intelligent forms are meant to simply the customer intake process.
Delegating Follow Ups
Regardless of whether you use a chat bot, a contact form, or something else entirely for new customer intake, you can still utilize a lead generation or customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage them. Using a management software can speed up the follow up process for any customer queries that can’t be resolved using a chat bot or other similar program. One option is to delegate incoming customer queries to the appropriate departments by using a Google spreadsheet.
Master spreadsheets can be set up that automatically sync to a chat bot or other program so that all relevant information about the customer’s question or problem and their contact information is available to the employee who will be contacting them. Apple uses a similar program, using what they refer to as “actionables.” Using this type of formatted follow up process can help keep customers from slipping through the cracks during busy periods, and helps to keep track of who is responsible for answering certain queries.
For more information on increasing your new customer intake on your website, or to request a consultation, contact tekRESCUE, located in San Marcos, TX.
