9 Proven Hacks to Reduce Customer Service Costs Quickly

Have you ever been to an orchestra concert? Even if you haven’t, allow us to paint a picture of what you’d see there.

A conductor stands on a raised podium and guides the orchestras or choir comprising of multitudes of instrumentalists, who in turn produce a brilliant symphony that’s mesmerising.

As a team leader or a businessman, imagine yourself as the conductor, orchestrating a symphony of customer interactions. Each note, each beat, each rhythm is a customer touchpoint that needs to be harmonised to create a melodious customer experience.

But what if you could do it more efficiently and cost-effectively? Here are nine hacks to help you do just that.

‍#1 The Power of Unified Communications

Unlike a decade ago, customers today have multiple options when it comes to choosing how they wish to interact with businesses, and it can get challenging to track all the interactions.  

Is it all too common for you to see your customer support agents juggling between emails, chats, and calls. To say the least, this affects their quality of service adversely. So, what’s the solution? Unified Communications.  

Staying true to the idea of bringing all necessary apps and tools within one ecosystem, CINNOX’s unified solution provides your teams with a single inbox for all types of engagement. Be it email, SMS, chats, calls, video calls, social media, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc – manage all these channels and more from a single inbox on CINNOX.  

This not only reduces the time spent switching between different platforms but also ensures a seamless customer experience. ‍

#2 Spin the Relationship Mapping Magic

The idea of Relationship Mapping was born with the intention to help businesses retain their existing customers and build a rewarding, long-term relationship with them.  

Let’s understand the importance of Relationship Mapping with the following example.  

If an old customer of your business is seeking help from customer support, but the support agent has no way of knowing if he or she has interacted with the customer on an earlier occasion, or to view interaction history with the customer, then it would unnecessarily increase the resolution time and end up unfavourably affecting the customer experience with your business.  

An agent should not struggle to remember customer preferences and past interactions. This lack of information can lead to a disjointed customer experience. This is where relationship mapping comes in.  

With CINNOX’s Relationship Mapping, the customers interacting with your business for the first time can be matched with the best suited experts, based on the nature of their enquiry. Also, any returning customers will be paired with the same agents they interacted with previously to offer consistent experience and build a long-lasting relationship. This also allows your agents to personalise interactions, leading to increased customer satisfaction and reduced service costs. ‍

#3 Don’t Shy Away from Collaborating with Internal Teams

A unified communication ecosystem is required not just for one-to-one engagement with customers but to also enable your growing organisation to work as one. Take any profitable business in your industry and notice one thing about them – they have cracked the code to make their teams work as a single unit. That cohesion is required to achieve success.  

Customer support teams have direct access to customers and the data on what’s troubling them, what they like, what they dislike, how they view your product, and what they think about a particular product or service etc. As you might be able to tell, this data can be very valuable to other teams within your business to shape their services. A marketing team could base the campaigns on insights derived from this data, the product team could implement customer suggestions into their updates or upgrades etc. This is only possible when the teams are working together and interacting on a shared platform, with 360-degree data visibility.

You can bring down your resolution time by getting other teams involved in the process of customer engagement. A marketing enquiry can directly be addressed by a marketing team member, instead of the customer support agent putting the customer on hold for few minutes or worst yet few days.  

With CINNOX, a platform to collaborate effectively is available by default. Your team members can even connect over audio and video conferences schedule a conference, automatically transcribe the audio recordings after calls, and more. This not only speeds up problem-solving but also promotes teamwork, leading to improved service quality.

‍#4 Embrace Modern Telephony

Curb upfront & operational costs from the get-go and build a global support centre within a few moments by leveraging borderless capabilities like the virtual PBX, International toll-free services, SIP trunking.

Virtual PBX eliminates the need for costly hardware and maintenance associated with traditional phone systems, offering a more cost-effective solution. Whereas International Toll-Free Services can allow your business to provide a free-to-call number for customers worldwide, enhancing customer service without incurring the high international call charges. SIP Trunking utilises the internet to connect your PBX system to the telephone network, bypassing traditional phone lines and their associated costs. This results in substantial savings, especially for businesses making a high volume of international calls.  

With CINNOX's telephony capabilities, you can scale your support operations globally, and manage all calls through a virtual PBX, provide international toll-free services to customers, and utilise SIP trunking for efficient call routing. This not only streamlines communication but also significantly reduces telephony costs.  ‍

#5 Shake Hands with AI Chatbot for Precision Support

Flooded with repetitive queries? This can lead to wasted time and resources. Why waste your team’s time and efforts on enquiries that are all too common. Instead, deploy a Chatbot to take care of the common enquiries.  

By leveraging CINNOX’s AI Chatbot, your business only needs to build one knowledge base which can be shared by all of the support channels, ensuring that customers receive the same answers and there’s consistency in tonality, voice, and style of engagement, with the same service standard, and data is collected and stored in one interface each and every time.

To top it up, if your customers need to get in touch with human agents for advanced support, the CINNOX’s AI Chatbot can seamlessly hand over the enquiry to a human agent while retaining complete context of interaction with the customer so that the agent is spared from asking repeated questions and can directly dive into addressing the customer’s enquiry.  

This not only frees up agent’s time to handle more complex issues but also reduces service costs. ‍

#6 1-to-1 to Enquiry Conferencing

Take a stock of how your current escalation system works. Does it result in delays in resolving customer enquiries? Most likely, yes.  

With CINNOX, you can turn a 1-to-1 call with customers into a conference by inviting your superiors or colleagues to join in to help you resolve the customer’s enquiries quickly and efficiently, without needing to hang up.  

This capability is not just limited to calls, but also chat enquiries. Your agents can easily invite team members to join an ongoing chat to help resolve a customer enquiry. This not only speeds up problem-solving but also ensures that the right people are involved in resolving issues. ‍

#7 Rising Beyond Security

Understanding visitors’ behaviour on your website can not only prove beneficial for your sales and marketing initiatives but also fuel your team’s customer engagement efforts to close a deal. Your team can easily detect faults by tracking a customer’s real-time IP address or identity and initiate relevant procedure to maintain fault-free transactions.  

CINNOX’s robust security and compliance to global standards ensures the security of customer data, and reduces the risk of costly data breaches. ‍

#8 Greet and Guide your Customers to Intended Destination

Now you must be wondering how can greeting a customer result in cost reduction cost savings. Let us show you how. When you spend thousands of dollars to advertise your products or services and get your customers to visit your website, you are losing out on a major opportunity to engage with them if you are leaving them to navigate on their own.  

It’s a new territory for them, a new site, a new experience. You are the master of this realm and know where every customer belongs or should be guided to. So, as soon as they land on your site, your web widget should be able to pop up a gentle greeting and invite them to navigate to the intended product page or get in touch with an expert to help personalise their journey. This way, you are ensuring you do not miss out another sale, while keeping the customer engaged throughout the purchase process.  

CINNOX’s comprehensive web widget is like an entire world within your website. This miniature widget holds multiple features and capabilities within it. You can configure it to greet your customers, collect pre-chat information, post-chat feedback, direct customers to the right destination with smart routing, and more. You can engage them via chat, turn the web chat into a voice or a video call, and further transform it into a conference by inviting your colleagues to assist the customer, without breaking the chain of communication. We can proudly say that none of the other tools or platforms can offer this capability. Try it yourself - you can start for free! ‍

#9 The Oracle of Data Analytics

When you view customer data in isolation, you won’t be able to see their journey in its entirety. This can lead to misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and a disjointed customer experience. By not having a comprehensive view of the customer journey, you may fail to recognise patterns, anticipate customer needs, or identify areas for improvement. This can result in lower customer satisfaction, reduced loyalty, and ultimately, increased service costs.  

With CINNOX, your teams can get data flowing through your tech stack by integrating it with CINNOX and viewing customer data in a holistic manner. This is crucial for providing a seamless, personalised customer experience and for optimising service efficiency.  

By integrating APIs from other tools used by your organisation, you are not just getting a wholesome visibility of the customer data, but also aiding your team with tracking and collection of Business Intelligence data, which can further be broken down into actionable tactics backed by informed decisions, for practical implementation and real-time operational automation throughout the end-to-end process.

‍

By implementing these strategic hacks, you can transform your contact centre into a hub of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Each hack, from unified communications to data analytics, is supported by the powerful features and capabilities of CINNOX. It's not just about cutting costs, but about enhancing the customer experience, improving agent productivity, and driving business growth.  

So, take the leap with CINNOX today and orchestrate a symphony of customer interactions that hits all the right notes.

‍