Category: Blog

In the B2B space, customer retention is very important. However, many companies don’t focus on building a customer retention strategy and in most cases, the customer success team doesn’t get rewarded in the same way a salesperson would get compensated for closing a new customer. Customer retention doesn’t have the same broad appeal as other closed deals. Somehow, it doesn’t make sense. And on the other side, it’s important for the growth of any business as the cost of accumulating a new user is much greater than maintaining and growing an existing account. It has been seen that growing companies prioritize customer success more than stagnating ones and that retention increases by 5% giving the profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.

What is customer retention management?

Customer retention management refers to the steps that are taken to discover and record them well on how a business is retaining the customers and their revenue. The process is done by looking at key customer retention metrics like churn rate and customer lifetime value. 

The companies track their success in this area to see how well they are fulfilling their customer needs and if they are continuing to earn their business over time. 

Some of the customer retention metrics are:

• Customer Churn
• Revenue Churn
• Existing Customer Growth Rate
• Repeat Purchase Ratio
• Product Return Rate
• Days Sales Outstanding
• Net Promoter Score
• Time Between Purchases
• Loyal Customer Rate
• Customer Lifetime Value

What is customer churn?

Customer churn is one of the most straightforward customer retention metrics. The customer churn rate refers to the rate at which the customers stop doing business with you. The customer churn can be because your customer has ended the subscription or opted out of renewing a subscription. 

A churned customer is a customer that your company unsuccessfully retained. The churn rate at a certain level is natural in your customer base. The reason could be anything when they no longer need your service like they are acquired or go out of business, they have hired an internal resource, or no longer needs your product/service, etc., 

In case, your churn rate is more than 5-7%, then you should evaluate your customer retention strategy and find out why there may be a problem. The high churn rate shows that your service or product is failing to satisfy your client’s needs or wants.

Sometimes, churn rate is referred to as retention rate but both are entirely different metrics.  

How to calculate customer churn?

The volume of business your company conducts tells how often you should calculate and examine your company’s churn rate. Like, if you have hundreds or thousands of customers, it may be safe for your sales, marketing, or customer success team to track churn daily. If you have a small user base or customer signed onto longer contracts, a semi-annual or annual checking will work well. You should keep in mind that new customers you boarded in whatever period should not be factored into the churn rate. 

Annual Churn Rate = (Number of Customers at Start of Year – Number of Customers at End of Year) / Number of Customers at Start of Year

Example of Customer Churn

We can use the following example metrics to calculate the churn rate.

Churn Rate

Let’s say our company started December with 10K customers. At the end of the month, we found that 500 left our business. This would mean our churn rate is five percent ((10,000 customers – 9,500 customers ) / 10,000 customers = 5%). 

Now, let’s say we gained 275 customers during August and lost 500 more during March. Our churn rate for March would then be 5.11% ((9,775 customers – 9,225 customers) / 9,755 customers = 5.11%).

What is the revenue churn rate?

The revenue churn rate is the percentage of revenue you’ve lost from existing customers in a given period. The revenue churn can result from an order cancellation, a plan downgrade, or an end to a business relationship. Particularly for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, the revenue churn rate indicates the customer’s health and satisfaction. The broad revenue churn rate provides an overall view of customer’s health, it must be tracked on an individual basis. The main objective of your customer’s support team is to proactively ensure customers aren’t having any problems while using your product or service, before even approaching the point where they downgrade their subscription. 

Whenever revenue churn happens, it simply means that your customer is on the verge of leaving, and at that time your management team should quickly take action to prevent this from happening.

How to calculate revenue churn?

The revenue churn rate should be calculated every month. To calculate the revenue churn rate start with subtracting the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the end of the month from the MRR you had at the beginning of the month. 

Subtract any revenue you accrued from up-selling or cross-selling to existing customers. Lastly, divide the number by the MRR you had at the beginning of the month. The answer you will get will be a negative percentage, which will mean your revenue gains from existing customer gains surpassed any losses. You should keep in mind that revenue from new customers should not be included in this calculation. 

Monthly Revenue Churn Rate = [(MRR at Start of Month – MRR at End of Month) – MRR in Upgrades during Month] / MRR at Start of Month

Example of Revenue Churn Rate

Let’s use a related example to the one we used above to calculate the revenue churn rate

Let’s assume that our company began in October with an MRR of $50K. In that month, we lost $5K to churn and gained $2.5K from upgrades. For this month, our revenue churn rate would be five percent. ([($50,000 – $45,000) – $2,500] / $50,000 = 5%).

For November, since we’ve gained $2.5K in upgrades as well as $10K in new MRR our starting MRR is going to be $57,500. If we lose $7K to churn and gain $3K to upgrades, our churn rate would be 6.95% ([($57,500 – $50,500) – $3,000] / $57,500 = 6.95%).

Churn rate vs retention rate

Retention rate is the ratio of customers that return to do business at your company. The retention rate is different from the churn rate as the churn rate implies the number of customers you have lost over some time. A company with a high churn rate will have a lower retention rate. 

Retention rate is the number of customers you’ve retained over a specific period. User churn rate is also referred to as Attrition Rate and is defined as the percentage of customers who have canceled or unsubscribed from your service during a specific period. 

And if your retention rate for a certain period is 90%, your churn rate for that same period is 10%.

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that automates selected tasks by conversing with a user through a conversational interface. 

The highly advanced chatbots are powered by AI, and they are constantly learning from user requests and are improving their knowledge base with each conversation. 

Today, most of the chatbots in use follow a simple phone like simulation: A+B = C, based on if/then logic, or by offering choices through which users can make a choice. 

7 chatbot conversation examples for business

1) Emirates Vacations

Photo from: LifeData.AI

Emirates Vacations created their conversation chat or within their display rates. They deployed the chatbot in 2018, and they target different bot sequences and visuals depending upon the page that is getting browsed. Since the deployment, the engagement rates rose to 87%. The average CTR rates remain at an all-time low of 0.35% for display rates. 

What can we learn from Emirates Display Ad chatbot:

a) Be relevant to the user journey

Instead of using the same message throughout the customer journey, use a different message for your website, product pages, and Facebook business page. 

b) Keep users goal in mind

The Emirates Vacations Chatbot is designed to achieve a particular goal, it’s more than just an ad. Whenever your users browse your website or Facebook page they have a task in mind that they’re looking to do, that’s the time where your chatbot should come in action mode and help them complete their task as quickly as they can. 

c) Flatter users with frictionless experiences

Provide your users with a mind-blowing user experience. Like, helping them sign up or book a particular product in the ad itself, without leaving the ad or page. It’s the most convenient way for the users to choose your product again and again.

2) Hipmunk

Photo credit: Hackernoon.com

Hipmunk was able to make a special place of their own in the travel niche. They used a location-based approach to book a flight, hotel, cars, and more straight from their website. They used a conversational and engaging way to book travel. Consider that an average person visits over 38 sites before booking

Few niches are more competitive and saturated than travel, but Hipmunk was able to cut through the noise with their location-based approach to booking flights, hotels, cars, and more. Considering the average person visits over 38 sites before booking, Hipmunk is an engaging and convenient way to book travel, Hipmunk is achieving new records in the field.

Here’s what we can learn from Hipmunk Chatbot:

Hipmunk has crafted its sequence by the intricacies of how their users search. 

a) Send deals or promotions based on user preferences

Sending details or promotions based on user preference is a simple, elegant, and powerful feature that helps the users extract information from multiple websites all in one place which is the messenger. It’s a relief for those who use the “million tab search method” during their exploration.

b) Use conversational language to personalize experiences

The interaction between a chatbot and the users builds trust between them. As each conversation happens and feels like a human agent is talking with them, making it easy for users to connect and understand them. Making them feel like they are talking to their friend for an acquaintance.

c) Create content that is rich and useful

Due to Hipmunk’s two significant features, proactive outreach and simplifying an exhaustive process for users, one can easily get there if they want to go without going through a million deals or sites. Usually, with ‘HipTips’ apps the user’s wait time turns into exploring new deals. 

3) Kia

Photo credit: Chatbotguide.org

KIA is a car maker industry that uses a chat or that turns messenger into a viable platform for interaction.  The chatbot is known as “Kian” which has generated 3x more interactions than the corporate sites and talks to 115,000 users per week. It has an average of 21% conversion rate. 

What we can learn from the KIA chatbot:

Kia chatbot provide amazing metrics based on the expecting user objective this helps Kia to personalize services at different levels.

a) Collect user data to improve retargeting

Collecting customer’s details and other needs should be captured by the Chabot instead of letting them disappear. This should be one job of a chatbot which they shouldn’t miss. The collected leads can help to power your future sales and re-marketing efforts. 

b) Offer different services in one place

Along with capturing lead information, the chatbot should also provide other assistance like providing bill payment options or connecting with a live agent. 

c) Replicate human interactions to connect

The chatbot should be capable of answering any questions related to your products and services. Like solving queries about payments, services, return policy, etc., 

4) Madison Reed

Photo credit: madisonreed.com

Madison Reed’s chatbot is called Meet Madi. It’s a hair color bot that is obsessed with finding its customers’ most flattering shade. The most awesome feature of Meet Madi is the selfie submission. Users can submit a selfie-and Madi will point them towards the best color product recommendations.  

What can we learn from Meet Madi:

Madison Reed’s Chatbot teaches us a few valuable things on how one can build the best chatbot conversations.

a) Speak your audience’s natural language

Madi uses “x’s and o’s” as well as flattering comments to build a connection with their audience. Just speaking the style of your audience can do wonders, try it yourself and see the numbers soaring high. 

b) Solve an actual problem

Similar to other lead generation tactics, your chatbot should help solve a real problem for your customers. Like, how Madi acts as a personal colorist for their users and is available 24×7, this way people don’t have to wait to take a colorist appointment which can take months.

c) Ask relevant questions

Meet Madi asks relevant questions from their customers. The bot asks questions such as “Is your hair chemically treated?” or “What color is your hair (not including gray)?” Madi has a unique personality, she makes their customers feel like they are talking to a friend, she’s funny and witty. Just because of this personality of hers, Madi was able to boost engagement by 400% with a 21% click-through rate to the company’s website. 

5) Civilized Caveman

Photo credit: manychats.com

Civilized Caveman was one of the first companies to use a Facebook Messenger bot quiz. Any users who took their 1-minute “sugar quiz” were given a 7-day detox as a result. After that, Civilized Caveman was able to build a relationship with its now subscribers through offerings and content. 

What Civilized Caveman teaches us: 

a) Along with a conversational tone, the Civilized Caveman quiz provokes an emotion

The sugar quiz by Civilized Caveman prompted different types of people to become subscribers whether they are curious or are struggling with sugar addiction. 

b) Use a quiz to start your chatbot funnel

Through quizzes, users can automatically become a subscriber as soon as they Get Started. It’s the best way to engage your target audience.

c) Take advantage of images to boost engagement

Images and GIFs are a great way to boost engagement. They immediately catch the user’s attention and prompt them to take the required action. 

6) Amtrak

Check out this youtube video From Amtrak

Chatbots are known for their speed and convenience. Due to this reason, the travel industry quickly adopted chatbots for business purposes. Amtrak is one of those companies that use a chatbot to help their visitors plan a vacation, book reservations, navigate their site– Amtrak.com, get route information, and much more. Amtrak’s chatbot is a company’s powerhouse that generates 30% more revenue per booking, 8X ROI, and answers over 5 million questions a year. 

What can we learn from Amtrak Chatbot:

Amtrak is one of the best customer service chatbots in the industry. Here are few things that you can learn from Amtrak.

a) Leverage post-sales support as a revenue channel

It has been seen that the users who are satisfied with your service, ten to return and spend 67% more on average. In any industry, quick and convenient customer support leads to more profit and happier customers. 

b) Have Live Chat ready for back-up: 

It’s not possible that a chatbot can answer any questions. To solve this problem, you should design your chatbot in such a way that your bot can get connected with live support for queries that need human help. 

c) Create a chatbot around customer problems:

Amtrak makes it easy for their customers by booking tickets straight from the chatbot without leaving the page. Because of Julie’s chatbot, about 375,000 daily visitors easily booked their tickets or completed other tasks without any problems.

7) Ovarian Cancer Canada

Photo credit: manychat.com

Ovarian Cancer Canada partnered up with UK-based social listening company Maybe* to create the first non-profit chatbot. The chatbot helped to overcome the outdated part of charity fundraising– which usually involves a bulky email list, face-to-face sign-up, non-credible data. The non-profit chatbot successfully secured a $10 million grant for research, boosted donation rates by 250â„… , and created a repeatable and cost-effective donation channel for the organization’s future. 

What can we learn from Ovarian Cancer Canada:

a) Learn more about users in your bot with a quiz

Ovarian Cancer Canada and Maybe* created a quiz to learn more about their subscriber’s emotional state, ovarian cancer awareness level, and craft messaging accordingly to boost conversion rates. 

b) Use dynamic content to build closer ties with your audience:

Ovarian Cancer Canada distributed the woman’s story of surviving cancer through GIFs, videos, and images to improve engagement in the bot. 

c) Accept payments inside your chatbot:

The chatbot allowed people to sign petitions and make donations through the Facebook Messenger Window that helped to increase the engagement rate.

Reducing customer churn always leads to:

• Increase in revenue
• High referrals
• Increase in upsell revenue
• More customer acquisition channels because of high LTV

It’s not easy to reduce customer churn. The big part of customer churn always involves innovating and improving your product/service. This is similar to the rising tides approach where the companies should slowly but continuously reduce churn over time. 

Some of these churns can be controlled while some of the problems are out of the scope. 

7 reasons for customer churn which can be solved by taking some necessary steps. 

1) Bad customer service

“Bad Customer Service” is one of the biggest reasons where customers leave a service or cancel their subscription. According to research from the U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 68% of customers leave a company because of the treatment that they receive from the business. Most of these customers don’t leave quietly, the unhappy customers often tell between 9-15 people about their experience. This means that bad customer service actively hurts your company. 

Prompt handling of complaints and polite, friendly communication are the signs of good customer service. Connecting with your customers at the emotional level and making every customer feel like they are important is what good customer service is. Users just don’t want to buy the products and leave, they also want to feel engaged and appreciated. 

How can you reduce this customer churn? The answer is personalization. Customized messages and content make customers feel like that you are paying attention to them, want to know more, and are genuinely interested in them. This always works and gets customers to engage with your brand in return. 

2) Not enough value

The value should not be considered equal to the price. It contains much more than that. Value in general describes the entire customer experience. To get a better customer experience, 55% of the customers are willing to pay extra instead of choosing a cheap brand. 

You can provide value to your customers by personalizing incentives, as one thing which is important to one customer is not necessary will be important for another one. It all comes to understanding the likes and dislikes of each customer. Giving customized service to each customer is considered a good value. 

3) Poor quality communications

Not engaging with your customers and giving them vague replies can also be a cause of customer churn. Over 35% of customers unsubscribe from emails because they are sent too often. Distributing the emails that are not relevant to the customers annoys them and puts you in the position where your company looks clueless and doesn’t know the things they are doing.

To avoid this issue, it’s best not to spam your customers. Make sure that each message you send is clear and serves a purpose. These purposes can be a welcome message to create brand awareness or sharing an article with them that provides value. 

4) No brand loyalty

Customers leave a company, not because of the product but because there’s no commitment with the company. It mostly happens to the service-related complaints. The reason is there is no brand loyalty to differentiate between your competitors– why you are better than your competitors. When this happens, then price becomes the deciding factor whether to use your service or not. 

To prevent this kind of customer churn, you will have to build a brand loyal customer base. Brand loyal customers see more commitment towards your brand. Customers became loyal to your brand based on their understanding of your company rather than prices or promotions. These kinds of customers stay with your brand even if the prices go up and also encourage their friends and family to use your products.

5) Lack of (or Zero) Engagement

Metasaas is a company that identifies unused, underused, or abandoned SAAS licenses. The company found out that about 31% of SAAS licenses go unused. 

It’s always a hefty task to manage all of your software licenses. It’s possible that some of the recurring revenue you’re earning is coming because someone forgot to cancel it. Or your product is not being used frequently, it can also be the case where your customers aren’t using the full feature set. 

All these things are the cause of low engagement which always indicated a strong leading indicator of churn. To identify this problem, first, you need to find out the track engagement. For most products, this would mean, in-app analytics, while other more ”˜behind the scenes’ products might require conducting customer surveys. If you like, you can start from Net Promoter Score®. 

And if you have the sample size and analytics resources, you may be able to correlate engagement numbers with the churn. You may be able to come up with a ”˜borderline’ where engagement is there but goes beyond a certain point.  

Intercom folks see the ”˜borderline’ as: “Once you come across with your ”˜borderline’ metric, you should set up monitoring so that your customer success team is quickly notified when a customer approaches that line. One of the customer success team members should proactively reach out and try to understand why the customer is not engaged and what can be done to fix the problem.”

6) Poor Product-Market Fit

Attracting the users that are not a right fit for your product or who don’t require your product can lead to zero engagement with a high churn rate. It’s essential to attract only those users or customers who can benefit from your product. Otherwise, it will hurt your company’s reputation, and a lot of money and time is wasted where it can be utilized on educating a client that can use your product. 

To reduce this customer churn, you and your team should constantly remain in touch with your users along with your customer success, sales, and marketing teams. When it’s found that the products are being sold to the wrong customers, the leaders of each team should diagnose the issue and work on mending the problem. This can lead to adjusting the company’s standards for qualifying a lead, and ensuring that the lead has the needs that you can solve. Sometimes, just doing slight tweaking in the onboarding process or product can make this segment of customers successful. 

7) Difficult User Experience

It’s great that your product has the core functionality and provides a positive ROI, but is your product easy to use? 

Some enterprise software platforms might be able to get away with bad user experience design. Still, usability and easy to use products only win customer’s hearts. When software becoming more user-centric, and users have high expectations from the company, providing a good customer experience is more necessary. Top companies like Microsoft scrambling to make their messaging platform as great as Slack. 

A poor user experience grates on end-users over time. These end-users complain to there, who complain to their bosses until the matter goes on to higher-ups who eventually get sick of it and switch over to a new platform. 

To fix poor user experience, the customer success and product teams must be in sync. Regular meetings like monthly or quarterly between leaders and contributors from both teams should meet and review the details related to usability. 

The customer success team should come prepared with real-life examples of how this impacts customers, and how often tickets see created as a result of the issue. This way, the customer success team can show the effect of usability issues that affects the overall experience. 

Canned responses are pre-made desk messages that your customer support team can use in different situations. The templates allow your support team to respond quickly and efficiently to different customer issues. This can save time, and increase your team efficiency.  

Below are some of the canned response templates that you can use for different purposes.

7 Best customer services response examples

1) We’re still working on your case.

Sometimes it takes longer than expected to solve any issue. When the time-lapse increases, your customers’ patience also decreases and they might start wondering if their issue will ever get resolved or not. At that time, your customer support team should make sure that they should proactively follow-up with your customers and tell them you’re still working hard on their issue and will let them know about any updates. This shows that you care about them. 

Response Template

Update on your issue

Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],

I wanted to update you before the weekend about the status of your issue.

We are still working on Your [ISSUE], it is still in progress and is being worked on by our product team. We’re prioritizing your request, and I will make sure this issue is resolved over the weekend. Thank you for your patience!

Take care, [YOUR NAME]

2) Were you happy with the resolution?

Oftentimes many issues take time to resolve. Like, your customer may have trouble using a feature of your product. You should follow up with them a week later to make sure they were able to use that feature. It should be you who should positively reach out to your customers, check-in with them to make sure they are satisfied with your services. 

Response Template

How’s it going?

Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],

A few weeks ago, you mentioned that you’d like to try out our new service. Our records show that you just had your new feature. How did it go?

Just wanted to make sure that you don’t have any issues with our service 🙂

Thank you, [YOUR NAME]

3) We need more information to complete your order.

In some cases, a customer places an order online, and automatically, your sales process might kick the order to the customer service team to confirm or update the order before processing it. When you reach out and need the customer to take an extra step, double-check that your email is clear, to the point, and easy to understand. 

Response Template

Confirming your order

Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],

Thank you for placing your order with us on [DATE]. We need to confirm your payment method for the order, as the card you had on file was declined.

You can give me a call at [XXX-XXX-XXXX] to update this information, or you can change your preferences in your account profile now. Then, we’ll be able to process and ship your order.

If you have any further questions or concerns, let us know! Thanks for your order from [COMPANY]

Take care, [YOUR NAME]

4) We acknowledge this mistake. 

Sometimes, mistakes happen no matter how good your customer service is. It happens to every company. Making mistakes is not a huge thing but not acknowledging them and rectifying them becomes a big thing. 

If the problem is small, then you should rectify the problem before reaching out to your customer. You should still let the customer know about the error and tell them the steps with your user base. As long as the problem is solved, your customers will appreciate your honesty and commitment. 

If the problem is a big one, you should reach out to your customers immediately. Apologize for any inconvenience that you have caused them and let them know that you are working on strengthening out the things and everything will be back to normal asap. 

Response Template

Update on your case

Hello [CUSTOMER NAME],

I wanted to reach out with an update on your issue regarding [ISSUE TOPIC]. We regretfully admit that there has been an oversight made on your case. During our troubleshooting, we [EXPLANATION].

We acknowledge and apologize for how our mistake has created an inconvenience for you. We know that your goal is to [CUSTOMER’S GOAL] and we want to assure you that we are doing everything within our power to resolve this situation. Here are the steps we are taking right now:

[TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS]

Again, we are incredibly sorry for the inconvenience this has caused and will update you as soon as we have a resolution. Please feel welcome to reach out to us with any questions you may have on this information as we would be more than happy to help.

Talk to you soon,

[YOUR NAME]

5) We can’t do that, but here’s another option.

Often, customers make requests that your team can’t do. People have specific needs and wants and it’s not possible to fulfill every one of them. When you’re unable to meet their demand you should have a backup resource where you can direct your customers. 

Here, comes the use of a community forum or knowledge base. You can direct your customers to these self-service resources where they can collaborate with other customers. This provides an alternative solution but also encourages customers to communicate with one and another. This increases customer loyalty and stimulates customer advocacy. 

Response Template

Product Request

Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],

Thank you for reaching out about [CUSTOMER’S REQUEST]. At this time, we don’t have the bandwidth to complete your request, but I wanted to reach out with some alternative resources to direct you to. I apologize that we can’t provide a direct solution, however, these options may be able to supply the solution you are looking for. 

To start, I would recommend taking a look at our community forum: [LINK TO FORUM]. There, you can find other users who may be experiencing a similar roadblock. 

If that resource doesn’t work, take a look at our knowledge base: [LINK TO KNOWLEDGE BASE]. We have some FAQ pages that may link to the answer you’re looking for.

Finally, if both those options fail, you can post your request on our ideas forum: [LINK TO FORUM]. This forum lets you pitch a product or service idea to our team. If our developers like it, they may consider it as a future product or feature. 

Please feel welcome to reach out to me with any questions you may have on these resources. I would be more than happy to help! 

Thank you,

[YOUR NAME]

6) I need access to this account!

The customers want access to their account but for some reason they are unable to pass the security measures. While writing your response be sure to state clearly what is required from the customers to give access. Try to position your team as a protector and back up your claims from published policies. 

Response Template

Regarding your access request

Hello [CUSTOMER NAME],

I understand you just want to get into your account and back to work, and I am here to help you. However, as I’m sure you can understand, we have to be careful to protect the details that you and all of our customers trust us to store. You can read up on our security policy and practices here: [URL]

Here’s what you can do to regain access to your account:

[REITERATE YOUR STEPS IN A BULLETED LIST]

If any of those steps are unclear, let me know, and I’m happy to explain further. I know it’s stressful, but for the protection of all of our customers (and to comply with information security laws), I’m unable to give you access otherwise.

Thank you for your understanding.

[YOUR NAME]

7) I need a discount!

This is the situation when a customer doesn’t want to pay the discounted price and wants some kind of discount to sign up for your services. In this case, you can showcase your value that your services offer that will help your customers get more for their money. Your answer should showcase the value of your product, and offer helpful options. 

Response Template

Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],

I hope you are having a good day! 

We appreciate your business with us! While we don’t offer discounts, I do want to make sure you’re getting the most you can for your money. You mentioned that XYZ product is cheaper, but there are a couple of key differences you might not know about.

[EXPLORE KEY POINTS] 

I’ve just had a look at your account, and one thing I noticed is that you’re not using [FEATURE] right now. A lot of our customers find that is a really useful tool for them to achieve [A COMMON GOAL].  That makes our product cost-effective for them. Check out this case study [URL AND COMPANY NAME]

Of course, I can understand that you may have an immediate need to reduce your ongoing costs. If that’s the case then I have a couple of options for you:

If you move to an annual plan, you’ll save 20% instantly, which works out to [$X] in your case. You can do that here: [URL]

You could move down to our basic plan, and save $Y, though you would lose access to [FEATURES] that I can see you’re frequently using.

If we can help you understand these options better, or if you’d like help getting more out of your account, hit reply and let us know! We’re here to help whenever you need it.

Thank you.

[YOUR NAME]

Tips to write canned customer service response.

There are three things that you should consider while writing canned responses for different situations:

1) Avoid bland jargon

The formal language which has no emotions doesn’t get taken up very well by the customers. You should write responses as you’re speaking with your acquaintance. 

2) Set expectations

Set the expectations before your customers. If there are any next steps, let them know before them. 

3) Don’t use a canned response when a personal response is needed

Periodically, there are times when canned responses don’t work. There are times when personalized responses are required rather than canned responses– especially when your product falls short.

What Is Insurance Lead Generation?

Insurance lead generation is defined as an act that insurance experts implement by the means of various strategies that are meant to generate leads and attract more potential clients. Lead generation is one of the most important aspects in every industry, including the insurance sector. As lead generation is the key to have a full fledging insurance business. To attract more qualified leads towards you, you have to create every step of the buyer journey very strategically, while keeping your customers in mind. You have to plan the steps in such a way that every phase has a streamlined pipeline that provides information to the customers when they need it. 

Sales pipelines go hand in hand with the conversion funnel. The bottom part contains very potential leads that can likely turn into customers, while the top part contains the buyers who are ready to buy from you at any time. To generate leads, you have to fill the Sales pipeline as much as you can. This will result in consistently developing new leads that will stay with you for long. 

How To Get Insurance Leads?  

Start a Blog 

Blogging regularly is the simplest and easiest way to generate leads and publish content. Your target audience will likely find you more through your blogs if you provide the information and answers to their questions. It’s also a way to show off your expertise to your customers.

Establish Lead Generation Goals 

If you want to generate more leads, you will have to set target specific goals that generate leads. Make sure that your goals are attainable and specific according to your business requirements. Like, I want to generate 4 leads at the end of the month or I will cold call to 10 possible prospects. 

Ask For Referrals

Word of mouth and testimonials go a long way when it comes to generating leads from them. People believe in testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals more than any other method. Sometimes, it’s tough to get referrals when you’re new and your client list is small. You can try to get an introduction from potential clients for example from your colleagues, family, or friends. Try to build an exit survey when clients leave to look for areas of improvement.

Be Active In Your Community

Being active in your local community helps you to build a reputation as a friendly and kind member of your community. You can be active in your community by doing things like:

• Advising local charities on their insurance purchases.
• Hosting insurance seminars for small business owners.
• Taking part in area meetups or online forums.
• Offering to be a guest speaker for business groups.
• Assisting clients’ friends or relatives when appropriate.

The above-mentioned things will help you to build a reputation and your prospects will keep you in mind when they will need your service. 

Try Traditional Techniques 

Some old school tricks still work, such as:

• Advertisements
• Collaborating with your local restaurants and offer their gift certificates to weekly winners
• Do advertising in industry trade magazines

Incorporate New Techniques 

Having your website that showcases your business helps you to generate leads. You can include the latest features in your website, like:

• Adding a “Get a Quote” button or newsletter signup
• Put a contact form on every page of your website
• Include testimonials to strengthen your credibility
• Compare business insurance quotes for insurance professionals

These things will help you to capture more leads and eventually will grow your client lists. 

Start a Referral Program

Reminding your clients to refer you now and then is also a great way to generate leads. To strengthen, you can launch referral programs. And, giving them encouragement in the form of gift cards, referral fees, or movie tickets. 

Network Relentlessly 

Networking is not a tough task and if done properly it can yield great results in no time. You can start doing networking by:

• Joining your chamber of commerce.
• Attending meetup groups and networking events.
• Getting active on social media.
• Connecting with your alumni association.

How Does ChatGen Help You To Generate Insurance Leads — Our Unique Way Of Approaching The Issue?

Chat On The Website:

If for some ways you are unable to chat with your target audience then there are high chances that you are losing leads. It can be also tough to sit all day and track the possible leads. Our ChatGen Chatbot collects all the customer details that visit your website and you can use the data to provide quiet or talk to them. ChatGen Chatbot can be integrated with Facebook Messenger. The prospect can directly have a chat with the Chatbot and seek answers to the questions related to the offer. 

Facebook Ads :

ChatGen Chatbots can help you to drive leads from Facebook ads straight to your messenger chat. There you can interact with them to educate them and close the leads. We help you to reduce cost per lead, and you don’t have to rely on forms that many people don’t fill. Users are directly taken to messenger for your business page when they click the call to action button. Running Facebook ads through chatbots is a great way to reduce the dropdown rate and it’s also more likely that all the leads will be converted into users. 

Reply To Comments via ChatGen Chatbot:

ChatGen Chatbots helps you to reply to all the comments that are made on your Facebook page via messenger. It can be used to send them personalized comments, thank them for commenting and you can also ask them if they need any help. 

 

With artificial intelligence evolving steadily, the applications implementing AI are finding their use better and on a broader basis. A chatbot is one of the gems created using AI. While many businesses are moving towards chatbots,  57 percent of them have already agreed that conversational bots can deliver a large return on investment for minimal effort.

According to Juniper’s Research, chatbot conversations hold the potential to deliver $8 billion in cost savings by 2022. 

Before we dive into the use cases of chatbots, let us have a quick glance over the wide range of industries that are already using chatbots or have the potential to adopt one in the future:

1. E-commerce
2. Banking
3. Human Resources (HR)
4. Sales and Marketing
5. Government
6. HealthCare
7. Insurance
8. Real Estate

Chatbots are already causing disruptions in many sectors, and the aforementioned are just the beginning. 

Chatbots in E-commerce:

On E-Commerce websites, the entire customer journey, right from navigating the entire website to buying the product, happens online. Be it sales, customer support, or customer engagement, chatbot alone can handle everything simultaneously with a no-brainer. A chatbot in time saves nine, and we couldn’t stress more. Many huge brands like Sephora, Nykaa, Vi, IRCTC have introduced their own chatbots in-app and across Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik Messengers. Here are a few tasks a chatbot can take care of:

• Product Recommendations and Order tracking:
  

  A user might find it difficult sometimes to find his/her desired product. In such cases, based on the user input, a chatbot can come up with accurate recommendations. For example, a chatbot can suggest a perfect dress based on user input specifications. Customer care calls are off the plate now. You can track your order within minutes in just a few clicks.

• A complete 24×7 support:
  

  Imagine a customer trying to buy a product at 2 am but could not due to some issues. Chatbots can work tirelessly 24×7 while their human agents are off the desk during the night.

• Cart Recovery:
  

  Abandoned carts seen wisely can be a great source of revenue. A chatbot can remind a consumer about the abandoned carts and redirect them to buying at least some of the products, if not all of them.

• Gather Customer Feedback:
  

  Customer feedback enables all businesses to leverage the customer experience on their website. One of the examples is Beauty Assistant Chatbot on one of the well-known beauty brand Nykaa’s website! These bots help you in choosing the perfect beauty products based on your inputs.

Chatbots in Banking:

The banking sector has witnessed a huge digital transformation in recent years. From net banking to transferring money online, everyone can carry their bank accounts in their cellphones, quite literally. The AI-powered chatbots make online banking handier in the following ways:  

• Answering basic queries:
  

  A chatbot can solve simple queries like ‘Where is the nearest ATM? How to install an XYZ banking app on mobile? What are the different types of loans?’ within minutes.

• Lead Generation:
  

  A chatbot can engage with any visitor to the website turning them into leads.

• Perform easy tasks:
  

  A chatbot can perform simple tasks like money transfer and online transactions.

• Assist in capturing frauds:
  

  On the bright side, online banking has its cons too. In cases like losing an ATM card or your PIN being misused, chatbots can quickly help you to block your card, account, etc., without any hassle.

• Personalized banking services:
  

  Personalization is an attraction. According to Accenture, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience. From managing bank accounts, payments, canceling requests to checking balance, a chatbot can do it all. Recently, Kotak Mahindra came up with its AI-powered virtual assistant named KEYA. It is capable enough to answer various queries related to home loans, credit card/debit card, digital banking, and more to name!

By 2022, banks could automate up to 90% of their interactions with chatbots. (Foye, 2017)

Chatbots in HR :

Human Resources is one of the tedious tasks due to the amount of data that needs to be handled regularly. Whether it is an onboarding process or solving an employee query, these human-like chatbots can expedite the toughest tasks. HR Department deals with huge data, paperwork, and maintaining records of day-to-day tasks. The adoption of AI across various industries and professions is efficiently reducing human efforts with each passing day. 

Here is a list of ways a chatbot has been assisting people working in the HR Department:

• Pre-Onboarding:
  

  A recruitment process can extend till days and sometimes weeks. It is tough handling a huge number of applications that flow in for a particular job position. The primitive phase of selecting a candidate, shortlisting CVs, handling queries can be managed by a chatbot.

• Paperwork Completion:
  

  Often, a new hire may get confused while signing the contracts or attaching any scanned document. A chatbot can guide him/her throughout the entire process in a step-by-step manner.

• Maintain privacy:
  

  Privacy is the biggest concern in the digital world. Through chatbots, one can understand why his/her confidential data is required. Olivia is one of the virtual AI assistants that automates the process of recruitment. It handles screening, having a Q & A with candidates, and scheduling meets. This is not only a time-saver but the best alternative when there are 100s of applications for a position.

Chatbots in Sales and Marketing:

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. Many companies invest hugely in sales and marketing campaigns. Their main aim is to reach out to their cold prospects and turn them into loyal customers. In the bygone days, people followed old school traditional methods. However, with the help of evolving technology, this process has become fun and easy. The end goal remains the same, that is, the promotion of products or services. 

Since chatbots are equipped with machine learning, they can converse with users in a human manner. 

• Generate leads in a fun way:
  

  A chatbot can easily attract leads in lesser time by conversing with a user in an engaging and catchy format.

• Differentiate between warm and cold leads:
  

  Warm leads are the ones who have already engaged with your website and are more likely to make a purchase. Segregating the warm leads cannot be done by the sales team, and this is where chatbots come into the picture.

• Build your email list effectively:
  

  With chatbots, prompting a user to fill his email id in the chat helps you build your email list with the least effort.

• Lead Nurturing:
  

  A lead nurtured is a sale converted. To maintain a healthy relationship with the existing consumer, lead generation is an essential step. Chatbots have the capability to store and memorize visitor information. This key feature can be implemented in lead nurturing.

Domino’s AnyWare technology is a pizza order processing interface introduced by Dominos, an international restaurant chain. It provisions placing orders using their menu and carrying out the delivery. The users can access this chatbot via voice, Amazon Echo, Google Home, text messaging, Twitter, and even smartwatches and television. 

Chatbots in Government: 

Government-run websites usually face a lot of traffic since people trust and rely on them. As an authentic source of information, every visitor’s doubt must be cleared. Sometimes, the website is bombarded with too much information leading to confusion and misguiding the visitor. 

Here’s how chatbots are performing in the government sector:

• Access to public data:

  Chatbots can be used to access public data like news, citizen rights, new laws, and much more. 

• Helping with government processes:

  The chatbots can help in filling official documents or can guide you in completing procedures on the website. 

IRCTC’s chatbot ‘Disha’ is one such example. The chatbot focuses on providing constant support to all the visitors online. From answering queries to checking the status of the train, cancellation policies, and booking tickets, it can assist you in every step.

Chatbots in Healthcare:

The Healthcare sector has been witnessing the magic of artificial intelligence in recent days. The Healthcare sector has been developing so much that we even have bots to accompany people experiencing mental sickness. 

There are countless cases wherein a chatbot could help doctors, physicians, nurses, patients, or their families. 

Some of the tasks a chatbot can perform are:

• Better organization of patient pathways
• Medication Management
• Early-stage diagnosis
• Booking appointments with the doctor
• First Aid
• Offering solutions for simpler medical problems

Apart from this, health chatbots are also addressing issues in healthcare. 

One of the examples is Babylon Health, an online medical consultation, and health service that was found in 2013. The company implements Artificial Intelligence based on individual medical history and general medical knowledge. In the first case, a user reports the symptoms of his/her illness to the app, which checks them against a database of diseases using speech recognition, and then offers an appropriate prescription. 

Chatbots in Insurance:

The insurance industry has begun to reap the benefits of the chatbot industry. As of today, the insurance industry faces a myriad of challenges not often seen in other sectors. With digitization coming into the bigger picture, the consumer and the business owner both have started seeing a shift in their expectations. The consumer now shops everything online right from insurance policies, comparing quotes, and even self-service policies. The ease of quick access to the information is one key role the provider has to keep up with. 

Imagine if a consumer has to stand in line for hours only to get one of his queries solved, how frustrated it would become! This is where automated insurance agents a.k.a chatbots come into the picture. A website or a landing page with proper details and up-to-date information can help the customer get acquainted with things in a more effective manner. 

Here’s how chatbots are performing in the insurance sector:

• Customer Awareness:
  

  A chatbot can help teach consumers various policies, claims, and self-service policies. These chatbots engage with the visitors and based on the user input, the chatbot suggests the policy plans accordingly.

• Claim processing & Payment Assistance:
  

  The chatbots can help customers with the updates of their current policies, or help them with concerns related to the existing ones.

What is lead generation website

A lead generation website is fairly different from the once that is purely designed to provide information to the users. The purpose of lead generation websites is to take the prospects one step further into the sales funnel. Lead generation sites encourage users to make online enquiries, sign up for newsletters simply make a purchase from your brand. 

How to create a lead generation website

Before creating a lead generation website the first thing you have to do is to define your target audience. You should have an understanding of who you’re selling, the pain points of your customer, what will encourage them to use your product. 

After completing the first step, you have to set up the infrastructure and the navigation of your website that would be liked more by your customers. Try to speak directly to your buyers, talk about their pain points, tell them how you will solve their problems.

The third step is to work on the conversion points. You have to create at least one conversion point for every funnel stage. One conversion point for the top of the funnel: that’ll convert them from visitors into leads, one for the middle of the funnel that’ll indicate whether they are qualified leads and one for the bottom of the funnel that indicates whether they are ready to enter into the sales funnel.  These conversion points help to make sure that once you start identifying the specific pages of your website you can leverage the conversion points according to the requirement. CTA’s along with forms should be placed sideways on the website. 

12 Best Practices To Build a Lead Generation Website in 2021

1) CTA strategy and organization

If you have a small site, you can use the CTA in multiple places in different ways. However, if you have a large site, you can create a single CTA and place it in multiple locations leveraging Google Tag Manager to track the individual button clicks on pages. In addition to minimizing the number of CTAs, you can use a clear and consistent naming convention that will make it easier to manage the CTAs. Using this way, you will be able to locate a particular CTA easily. 

2) Strategic conversion points

The number of forms for your users to convert on is not important as much as how you’re routing your site visitors is important. 

When you are placing the CTA’s on your page, think about where your visitors are in their discovery process. Ask them to take one step at a time, multiple steps can make them feel pressured and they will drop out from the process. Guiding them and educating them about your product is also a relevant next step.

3) Clear labels

The button text in your website should match exactly to the page the button takes users to. Describing what the button does in a simple way increases the conversion rate.

4) Visitor-centric navigation

In your top navigation bar you should always have a BOFU based CTA which should be placed in the top right corner of your navbar. Using a fixed navigation bar always reduces friction  more so that the CTA remains accessible to the visitors even when they are scrolling through your site page. And in addition, your navigation bar should go well with the pages they lead to. If for some reason a page linked in the navigation bar is not what it seems to do then it will drive the traffic away.

5) Measure the performance of each lead generator.

Using tools like website grader you should test your every lead generator that contributed in building up your business. By measuring the performance you get to know how each page is doing and get feedback on what you should do to improve your content. You can also compare the not-so-well landing pages with the working well landing pages. Lastly, you can also try to run internal reports like evaluating landing page visits, CTA clicks, and thank you page shares to find out which offers are doing well and which are not.

6) Optimize each step of the lead generation process.

You should keep one mind in mind before creating your offer and linking it in your CTA to only add the links/blog posts or resources that are related to the offer’s subject. You can start learning about your customer’s conversion path as soon as they land on your website. The path starts from visiting your website and ends up in signing up for the offer. 

Sometimes the visitor’s path doesn’t end up with the desired outcome. At that time, you have to optimize your conversion path. One way to optimize your conversion path is to do A/B testing and work based on the desired results. 

7) The CTAs

To set apart CTA’s from others use contrasting colors on your site. Keep the CTA short and simple. 

8) The Thank-You Pages

It has been seen that the landing page gets all the love in the lead generation process. But you shouldn’t forget the thank you page as they also play an important role in the buyer journey. The visitors are led towards thank you forms once they submit a form on the landing page. Apart from saying thank you, make sure to include a link for your new lead to download the offer on your thank you page. Additionally, you can also include your brand’s social media’s button, or a link to another offer.

9) The Kickback Email

When the user enters the required information to get access to the content then you have a chance to send them a kickback ”˜Thank you’ email. The kickback emails tend to double the engagement rates of standard marketing emails. You can use kickback emails to include super specific CTA and encourage sharing them on email and social media. 

10) Start with a basic CTA on your homepage.

CTA in your homepage is one of the most important parts that grabs the users attention. While short and simple CTA’s help them with what to do next, on the other hand long and complex CTA’s turn them away. Your website homepage comes under the top of the marketing funnel and that’s why you should offer a free trial, or ask them to subscribe for your newsletter.

11) Subscribe to Updates

Sometimes the users are not ready to buy your product when they first visit your website. Hence, to solve their doubts and hesitations you should ask them to subscribe to your newsletters that notifies them of industry trends and product updates. Follow up with your user personally and slowly turn them into marketing qualified leads.

12) Try Us for Free

Well, who doesn’t love free products!? If the freebie is somehow related to promoting to your brand, it attracts lots of qualified leads. Free products help to generate demands and help you in creating a contact list of future buyers. You should use the ”˜Try us for free’ CTA button on your homepage, at the end of each product demo.

What is Lead Generation Strategy?

A lead generation strategy is a combination of tactics that attracts a MOFU audience and takes them a step ahead in the funnel or converts them into leads. The aim is to inspire them to take the required action that has been decided by the brand. The required action can be entering the contact details, signing up for a newsletter or following them on social media. The lead generation strategy consists of four components:

• Lead Capture
  It is a way to collect information from a lead. The information includes name, contact information and qualifying details like, business website, number of position, state, country, job title.
• Lead Magnets
  It’s the second step that steers the chances to become a lead.
• Lead Qualification
  It is the process that analyzes the leads’ info and determines whether they are a good fit or not.
• Lead Segmentation
  The last step is to sort out leads based on the provided details: job title, lead magnet attracted them, pages they visited on your website.

Let’s check out the top lead generation strategies and examples that will help you to capture leads quickly!

Top 5 Lead Generation Strategies and Examples for 2021

1. Create Gated Content
2. Create a Value-packed Newsletter
3. Host an Event
4. Provide a Freemium Product or Free Trial
5. Target Top-of-funnel Keywords

Create Gated Content

Gated content is an online stuff that is only available to users who fill out required information in exchange for the resource. The Gated content is kinda locked and is not available unlike any other blog posts or landing pages. To obtain the content, the user has to complete a short form. Gated content is a powerful lead generation strategy as it attracts high quality leads that are interested in topics that are related to your brand in exchange for free information. 

The examples of gated content are: 

• White papers
• E-books
• Guides
• Reports
• Courses
• Worksheets
• Online tools

Example: Hubspot is a perfect example in using Gated content as a lead generation strategy. They have a special resource section on their website which is full of gated content. The users can use the resources after they fill out the lead gen form.

Create a Value-packed Newsletter

A value packed newsletter that is distributed weekly or monthly can be a great way to send out information to your targeted prospects. It encourages users to stay in touch with your brand and get updated with latest news and features. The newsletters can also be used to drive buyers further down the funnel. You can include information in the newsletters like,

• New blog posts
• Updates about your products or services
• Special offers
• Upcoming events
• Recommended reading from other thought leaders

Make sure to add CTA at the end of the newsletter to encourage buyers to take the required action. 

Example: The famous business coach, Marie Forleo, uses her “MF Insider” newsletter to provide value and drive prospects. The newsletter is full of knowledge and provides lots of value. 

Host an Event

Hosting an event online or offline is also a great example of lead generation strategies. The webinars and events attract and encourage your target audiences to give the asked info via event registration. The live events are a great opportunity to connect with your users in real time and solve their queries, learn more about them and guide prospects through the sales funnel.

• Webinar
• Workshop
• Seminar
• Meetup
• Conference

These are some of the examples of live events. 

Example: One of the perfect examples of using events and webinars as a lead generation strategy is Content Marketing Institute. CMI regularly hosts live and pre-recorded webinars to capture and generate leads. 

Provide a Freemium Product or Free Trial

Providing a free trial is one of the most popular ways of lead generating strategies. The freemium products and free trials attract qualified leads who are still thinking about buying the product. Free products also allow you to convert the users and move them through the sales funnel. Further, you can offer them tempting offers, paid features and delivering drip email campaigns that promote the features of paid products. 

Example: Trello, project management software, offers a free version of their tool (with stripped-down features) to generate leads and drive free users toward paid plans.

Target Top-of-Funnel Keywords

Targeting keywords that your target audience frequently use at the top of the sales funnel, and using those keywords in different ways is also a way to capture leads. The TOFU keywords can be used to drive the potential users towards leads magnets and encourages them to provide the asked information. 

The TOFU keywords can be targeted in various ways: 

• Create evergreen content that is optimized for the target terms.
• Develop an on-site blog strategy around the target keywords.
• Target the terms in pay-per-click marketing.
• Guest blog on sites that have a high share of voice for the target terms.

And make a note of following the SEO rules to boost your chances of showing on top of the google page. This will help you to show your brand to a large number of potential buyers.

Example: SmartAsset, a personal finance tech company, targeted a top-of-funnel term they knew their target audience was searching for. They created useful, valuable content around the topic, which helped them rank for the term.

Let’s say you’ve ordered three cartons of toilet paper from Amazon. The cost: $88.77. Then you’re charged $7,455 for the delivery. Yikes! You’d think that’s not possible, but that’s exactly what happened to Barbara Carroll from Georgia, USA, as reported by USAtoday. 

It took more than two months, but Barbara finally got her amount refunded after a battle that stretched her patience thin. 

Everyone might not agree with this oft-quoted phrase, “The customer is always right!” but in this case, the customer was beyond right; she was wronged!

It is always easier to break a relationship than build it; hence why customer service is a cornerstone of every successful business.

And this is also why you should define customer service KPIs and encourage your employees to stick to them. Customer satisfaction KPIs and metrics also tell a lot about a business; they tell us how an organization conducts business with its customers.

This brings us to our topic for the day: What are customer service KPIs and how do we measure them? Let’s get into it without much further ado.

What are customer service KPIs? 

Customer service KPIs are performance indicators used by customer support or customer service teams to track, monitor, and enhance customer relations by closely monitoring every interaction point with customers to improve customer experience. 

Customer support is a discipline that thrives on human interactions. It’s necessary to have KPIs and metrics to measure how well your team performs. Elevating customer support to exceptional support is possible only when you have the numbers, and in this article, we are going to break down what you need to track to stay on top. 

Here’s a list of top 10 customer service KPIs that every business needs to know and monitor closely.

• First Response Time (FRT)
• First Call Resolution rate (FCR)
• Average Handle Time (AHT)
• Average resolution Time (ART)
• Ticket volumes 
• Customer churn rate
• Customer retention rate
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer service

First Response Time (FRT) 

First Response Time (FRT) is an indicator that shows how long your agents take to make the first response to your customers.

FRT is a critical metric to track because it is a way of acknowledging the customer. The longer the FRT, the higher the chance of customers switching channels or altogether to a different business. It also helps you see if you have enough agents to deal with the volume. 

FRTs are different for each channel. For example, a phone channel may have an FRT in seconds, while a text-based communication channel like email may have a higher FRT. Your goal is to keep your FRT as short as possible because this assures the customers that someone can look into their requirements.

Best practices: 

The industry standard for the FRT for each channel is:

Channel	Good	Better	Best
Phone	3 minutes or less	1 minute or less	20 seconds or less
Email	12 hours or less	4 hours or less	1 hour or less
Social media	2 hours or lee	1 hour or less	15 minutes or less
Live chat	1 hour or less	5 minutes or less	1 minute or less

Source: Zendesk, Customer experience trends report, 2020

First Contact Resolution (FCR)

First Contact Resolution is defined as your agents’ ability to resolve your customers’ query in the first interaction itself. It measures the efficiency of your team to resolve an issue in the first call. 

It is one of the most important customer service performance metrics to track. It indicates how well your agents understand your customers’ problems and resolve them in one go without needing to transfer or return the call. The higher your FCR, the happier and more satisfied your customers will be.

While FRT indicates speed, FCR indicates resourcefulness and higher satisfaction. Both are essential for providing a happy customer experience. Hence, FRT+FCR, FTW (For the Win 😉 )

Best Practices:

• Train your agents to handle the most common scenarios, and enable them to use their skills and instincts to handle the ones that they haven’t come across
• Provide live call scripts to handle known issues

Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average Handle Time is the total time taken for the interaction, starting from the wait time, hold time, and interaction time (or the time taken from the opening of a support email to when the agent clicks send).

Average Handle Time = (Wait time + Hold time + Interaction time) / Total number of calls/emails

Providing unbeatable customer service lies in the little details. Shaving a few seconds off the total handle time adds up to substantial time savings. The goal is to reduce the AHT over time, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of quality. As a manager, you should look for methods to optimize and streamline the existing process to reduce the overall wait time and hold time to bring down the AHT. 

Best practices:

• Optimize routing methods to reduce the overall wait time
• Provide training on standard hardware and software issues to enable your agents to handle them effectively
• Build a comprehensive self-help portal to enable customers to solve their issues, like a robust KB.

Average Resolution Time (ART)

Average Resolution Time is the average time taken by agents to resolve a customer issue completely. 

Average Resolution Time (ART) = Sum of time taken to resolve each issue / total number of issues resolved

A short resolution time indicates effective support, which in turn contributes to better customer satisfaction. Every customer expects a quick and consistent support experience, and providing that in the shortest time possible will lead to higher CSAT.

Best practices:

• Link to knowledge base articles within replies to help customers resolve their issues on their own
• Foresee what other underlying issues may confuse your customers and provide materials to resolve the same

Ticket Volume

Ticket volume is the total number of support-related conversations in an agent’s inbox.

Tracking this metric will give you an overall idea of how many customers reach out to you on a day-to-day basis and what kind of issues they’re looking to solve. You can track this over time to check for trends and see how the product or support changes affect this number. Ideally, this number should be as low as possible; no tickets to solve indicate that your customers are not facing any issues and are happy with how the product works.

Best Practices:

• Have a well-built KB to manage the ticket volume. 
• Enable customers to solve little issues on their own with self-help articles

Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate is the percentage that indicates how many customers have stopped using your product/services.

Customer churn rate gives you the percentage of lost customers within a defined period. Following the churn rate is critical because, in general, it is much less expensive to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

Best practices:

For a SaaS company that targets the SMB segment, 3-5% monthly is an acceptable churn rate. Track churn trends to see what makes customers drop off and improve your product/service based on their inputs.

Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers who have continuously used your product/service over a defined period.

Customer retention rate = ((CE – CN) / CS) x 100, where CE = no. of customers at the end of a particular period CN = no. of new customers acquired during that period CS = no. of customers at the beginning of that period

Customer loyalty plays a fundamental role in any business’s success as it contributes directly to your CSAT and NPS scores. Businesses should focus more on customer retention rather than acquisition. 

Churn rate and retention rates are interconnected: The higher the retention, the lower the churn rate. For example, if your churn rate is 15% over a year, that means that 85% of customers stayed with your company. Thus the retention rate is 85%. 

Best practices:

A growing retention rate is what every business should aim for. Keeping that in mind, here’s what you can do:

• Collect feedback and fix problems
• Acquire customers that match your product size
• Increase product adoption through onboarding

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score is the number that says whether a customer experience was good or bad.

% of satisfied customers = (No. of customers who responded positively / Total no. of customers surveyed) x 100

You can gather this number by presenting a CSAT survey at the end of every resolution to gather customer sentiment. 

Angry customers are more vocal in general, which may tend to skew your CSAT score. Encourage your happy customers to complete the happiness survey to get an accurate measure of your CSAT score. 

Best practices:

An 80% CSAT score is considered excellent in the customer service domain. You can ask CSAT questions like:

• How satisfied were you with our product/service? (Answers can be a slider bar on a scale of 5)
• Were you satisfied with our product/service? (Yes/No)

Your CSAT scale can include numbers, smiley faces, colour variations like red/green to indicate sentiment, etc. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is the percentage of customers indicating their willingness to recommend a product/service they’ve just tried to a friend or colleague. 

This score is widely regarded as a tool to measure loyalty to a product/service/brand. The NPS helps you gauge how likely your customers are to refer you to their friends and relatives. NPS scores are calculated from questions that are targeted more towards intention rather than emotion. While CSAT focuses on customer emotion/sentiment, NPS is targeted more towards a customer’s willingness to remain loyal to your business/brand. 

Customer responses are usually categorized into:

Promoters (9-10) – They’ll continue buying from you and refer you to their contacts

Passives (7-8) – They’re satisfied customers but may not actively promote your business

Detractors (0-6) – Unsatisfied customers who negatively impact your brand through reviews/word of mouth

Best practices:

You can find out your NPS score with this key question, where users can slide their responses on a scale of 1-10: “How likely are you to recommend this product/service to a friend?”

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score is a customer experience metric that measures how easy it is for a customer to do business with you. This can be determined through a CES survey, just like it is done for CSAT and NPS scores. 

It helps you understand whether your product/service is easy to use. A high CES score will have your customers complaining about how bulky your product/service is, and they may even end up churning. The CES is directly linked to customer satisfaction, and hence it is necessary to keep this metric as low as possible. 

Calculating the CES usually involves sending out a survey question just like CSAT and NPS, and customers will rate you on a scale of 1-5. 

Best practices:

Ask questions like, “How much do you agree with the following?”

• The company’s service made it easy for me to make a purchase
• The company’s website made shopping easy for me
• The company’s product helped me resolve my issue easily

So why is it important to measure KPIs?

Measuring customer satisfaction metrics provide a more in-depth insight into how happy customers are when dealing with your business. Support leads can have a set of KPIs and measure them to help your team adhere to the performance standards and provide a happy customer experience.

But, tracking metrics alone won’t be of much help. It’s essential to track these metrics and derive actionable items from them to build a customer service experience that works. It is necessary to set KPIs based on every customer touchpoint to track and improve service across all these touchpoints.

The success of any business is governed by its underlying principles. However remarkable the product/service you offer may be, what matters is how you make your customers feel.

For example, consider that you want to learn Japanese. You could start by downloading an app that teaches you the Japanese letters and keep at it daily until you get better. Well, that’s what I did. Did that help me? Sure. But how could I have done it better?

Let’s say you enroll yourself in a professional Japanese language course where a mentor/tutor guides you by teaching you the core principles of learning a language. Before starting with the alphabet, you’d need to know the types of scripts, how many letters of the alphabet are there, and where you should start learning.

Understanding where to start is essential to achieve continuous improvement, and having in place a set of principles will help you achieve that. When it comes to customer service, this is no different. You could start with the definition of customer service and interact with customers based on that, or you could build principles and abide by them to provide your customers with that ‘wow’ moment.

Here is a set of 8 principles of customer service for your business to abide by:

1. Be accessible
2. Be prompt
3. Be clear
4. Be transparent
5. Prioritize quality over quantity
6. Provide the human touch
7. Learn the ins and outs of your product/service
8. Be ready to go the extra mile
9. Why do you need customer service principles and practices?

Be accessible

How easy is it for your customers to reach you? 

This is the first question your customer service team should ask themselves. If your customer wants to reach you, can they do it through a channel of their choice?

Some of your customers might prefer to call you, while others may choose live chat, and a third group may prefer to email you. This does not mean that you must go out of your way to have a presence across all channels. 

CEB Global showed that customers value fast resolution over their choice of a communication channel. 

The best way to be accessible is to survey your customers and find out which is their preferred way of contacting you. This is where omnichannel support could come in handy; invest in a solution that will help you provide your customers with a holistic experience.

Be prompt

Respond to a customer, even if you can’t provide a solution immediately. It helps a customer feel valued and provides acknowledgment that someone is available to look into their problem. Promptness of response has the highest impact on both customer satisfaction and frustration. 

Can you ever think of a situation where you’ve switched from one telecom service provider to another due to a lack of acknowledgment? If yes, then you have your answer there.

The average American spends 13 hours per year and 43 days per lifetime on hold for customer service resolutions.

Customers hate to wait, and they hate it even more when you put them on hold. So if you want to improve your customer service, providing a prompt response is the right place to start. 

Response times are usually measured using metrics like:

• First response time
• Average response time
• First contact resolution rate

Be clear

While response speed is important, you also need to be clear in what you communicate. Clarity is about how processable your communication is. 

When sending out a first response email, you have to ensure that your sentences are not wordy. Be as crisp as possible, and you can explain the issue at a later stage when you resolve it. Here are a few tips to keep in mind to communicate clearly:

Conciseness

Talking or typing in a concise manner isn’t easy. The less mental effort it takes to process a sentence, the better the customers’ understanding will be. The problem with detailed responses is that people tend to tune out after a specific limit, and you may have to repeat yourself to make it understandable. This ultimately leads to wasted time and effort.

Structure

If you’re sending out a response email, structure it in a way so that it’s easy to process. Address the what, the why, and the how-to. This makes it more consumable.

Analogy

When it comes to new concepts, nothing works better than an analogy. When you explain any complex or new use cases, structure it so that even a layperson can understand. While this may increase the length, it will help you ensure that customers get what you’re trying to convey.

Be transparent

You’ve ordered your food, and you’re waiting for it to arrive. The seconds are ticking by, and there’s no sign of food coming your way. 

“What the hell is taking so long?” is the worst feeling ever, especially when it comes to customer service. 

Keep your customers in the know; transparency in customer service is as important as speed. No one likes to wait, and being transparent may help you take some of that bitterness off the waiting period. 

Tell your customers what is taking so long, why it’s taking so long, and how much longer it will take for them to get a resolution. For example, when you receive a ticket, instead of just sending out an acknowledgment mail, keep sending periodic messages to indicate what you’re working on, how long you’ve been on it, and what you’re doing to get it resolved. This will reassure customers that you’re on their issue and help take the bitterness and frustration out of that waiting period.

Prioritize quality over quantity

Speed and accuracy don’t go well together most of the time. 

While speed is important to acknowledge your customers, accuracy is what will determine the quality of service. Your focus should be on how well you could resolve your customers’ issues, rather than on how many customer issues you were able to resolve. 

While quantity is important for efficiency, it should not come at the cost of quality. 

Your reps should not hurry customers off the call so that they can resolve more issues. No one likes to be dismissed, and the quality of service matters when it comes to overall customer satisfaction. Train your agents to serve your customers better even when there are multiple other issues to resolve and focus on quality rather than quantity.

Provide the human touch

No one likes to keep pressing one button after another for eternity. Keep your IVR simple so that customers can talk to an agent if they need to. While enabling your customers to serve themselves is crucial, it should not come at the cost of human interaction.

75% of customers feel it takes too long to reach a live agent – Harris Interactive

Encourage agents to show their personality in the emails they send and fill up any quiet time with small talk to help customers feel that they are getting a personalized experience. Add elements that bring a friendly face to your support teams; after all, however intelligent AI becomes, customers always prefer a human touch. 

Learn the ins and outs of your product/service

If your reps have enough knowledge about your product’s working, then there won’t be many issues that they can’t deal with. The more your agents know about your product/service, the better they’ll be at providing service for it. It is crucial that customer service reps learn and understand every nook and corner of your product so that they’re equipped enough to address customer issues. 

This will help increase speed, and your reps can answer questions with accuracy, providing an overall excellent customer experience.

Make training a key part of your customer support operations. Enable them to try out each feature, enable any integrations/add-ons so that they can address any query that comes their way. 

Customers love people that know what they’re talking about, and providing product training is one great way to help your reps build their confidence.

Be ready to go the extra mile

Always try to go above and beyond; don’t just stop with providing a solution, but go one step ahead and offer them something that would turn a support ticket into a support experience.

A small gesture that shows that you care for the customers’ needs helps cement your brand image in your customers’ minds. Seeing and serving beyond what is just needed helps elevate customer experience to a whole new level.

Learn to give customer experiences rather than solutions. Offer them something that goes beyond the expected – something that gives them the ‘wow’ factor. Personalization is one way you could achieve this; it lifts customer support into the more holistic customer experience space.

Why do you need customer service principles and practices?

Customer service is always about the customer, and it’s never about your company. The core principle that you need to stress is to be customer-centric. Principles help give a name and structure to the service you provide, and sticking to them will help you elevate customer experiences to a whole new level.