Saving money and increasing sustainability is the utmost important aspect of any business. The ability to save money allows the company to scale and grow by investing the money back into the business. This is how companies grow into Walmarts and other similar big money machines. Amazon is a perfect example of how to be extremely successful and dominate.
Amazon reinvests its earnings back into the business in order to think long term to increase market share and dominance. While Amazon’s immediate profits seem to be decreasing, its sales are exploding. This business model is how empires take hold to kill off competitors.
What then are some of the best ways to save money with customers to reinvest into your business for increased earnings and sustainability?
Robots and Messaging
Chatbots are the new drug in customer service and AI is getting extremely efficient at answering the problems at hand. Chatbots are getting more intelligent by the day and are being used across many platforms like Facebook and popular messengers such as WeChat. They are used for such things as making appointments, booking flights and hotels, and any type of simple interaction. While having the ability to do simple tasks, this allows a fast and simple solution 24 hrs a day.
Bots are also responsible for other tasks like collecting personal information to add to the database while escalating more serious tasks to a real human when needed. All this time saved, allows manual labor to be used where needed while also providing fast solutions to customers to increase the satisfaction of the user experience.
Automating Ticketing Systems
Having the ability to manage the issues in an efficient manner can save a ton of money while increasing the efficiency for the customers and employees within a company. Some companies will let you use a free ticketing system, which allows for a chance to see how the user experience can be impacted while also reducing labor to increase the bottom line.
Another aspect of the ticketing system is the ability to efficiently manage escalating problems in the appropriate fashion to route the issue to the correct employee with the relevant knowledge. What is highly misunderstood and underrated is how happy customers result in happy employees which has a direct impact on employee retention and morale in the workplace.
Documenting and Answering the Right Questions
The FAQ of a site is an area to address common concerns and is highly undervalued. People really want to solve problems on their own and honestly hate to spend the time talking to people. The time it takes to explain a problem can be daunting and then will they have the answer? The sad answer to this question is most of the time they will not have the answer. All of this time is lost and money is directly compared to time.
Having the questions answered from previous customer experiences documented online can save a ton of time and money because the customer is doing the work himself. When you put the customer to work he gets immediate satisfaction which saved him time and also the company. It’s very important to have a good user experience on the site and have the FAQ made available with of course the appropriate questions and answers.
Data, Automation, and Profits
Discussing how chatbots, ticketing systems, and registration systems is easy to interpret on how they affect customers. However, these automated systems are just beginning to represent how important data is to ROI. While saving time and money when helping customers dealing directly with user experience, automation also has the ability to collect vast amounts of data which can be used to understand customers better in many facets and monitor strategies and results.
Share Your Thoughts
Are you using any of the technology or techniques listed above? Leave a comment.