We live in the era of conversational CRM, where the “help center” remains an essential element of the customer experience journey. The growing need for human interaction has led to increased demands for both in-house support agents and outsourced support teams, where the quality of query handling significantly impacts customer retention and recurring sales.
So what was about the Zendesk Relate conference that took place on May 11th? Briefly, it opened with the statement that we are all part of the post-covid (vaccinal) economy, and we live in the era of e-commerce and online communications — and this “new normal” will not go away. The world irrevocably changed and will never go back.
This phenomenon is called the “plateau effect”, which informs us that new customer habits are here to stay. So, if yesterday chatbots blew up the Customer Experience community, today it's just one of the many “fragrant” channels in the exotic bouquet of digital communications.
But conversational CRM does not just mean bots or automated messaging, it also includes chatting with real humans — the agents. So the opportunity to redirect customers to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp is both crucial and tricky at the same time. On the one hand, it helps customers stay with the current and most popular chat platform — messenger, but on the other, it incites growth and diversification within staffing echelons.
Thankfully, there are solutions for the cost increase, and Matthias Goehler, Zendesk EMEA Chief Technology Officer, talks about them in his interview with diginomica:
“There are so many simple requests that you could actually help yourself. So things like self-service are very important. Having proper FAQs. Having a proper customer portal community type of thing where you can hopefully find a lot of stuff. A good answer bot is important.”
To summarize, if the conversational CRM era is here to stay, it means that automated help centers will be required as never before. But the question is — can they be as responsive as the equivalent real agent chatting with you?
The answer is yes, BUT (and it’s an important but) — the help center page should be tailor-made to suit your customers’ needs. Of course, the basics like ready-made themes is already a great step to minimize the pressure on your support team. But if you want to sound “friendlier” in your help center, spend more time pairing responses that reflect your brand values both in timbre and tone.
Consider the following example from our portfolio:
Source: https://help.hibob.com/hc/en-us
Following the Zendesk Relate conference, we gained valuable insight regarding the “renewed focus on meaningful employee experiences”, as proven by our portfolio case study of the internal help center for Zendesk’s go-to-market team, which we recently wrote about.
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