Mobile apps can be one of the best ways to reach customers and keep them. However, smaller companies often do not fully understand the value of an app as part of their overall customer service plan.
How can a good app boost your customer service and make you invaluable to your clients? Here are five ways:
1. It Is Always Open
Your business probably is not open 24 hours a day to serve customers whenever they have needs. But your app can always be open for business. An app provides an easy portal for customers to make late night or early morning orders, to manage payments on their own schedules, and to complete transactions when customers are on the run.
Today’s consumers expect to be able to conduct business on the road and on their terms, so they are more likely to open an app than to pick up the phone or drive by your location. Being there for people right at the tap of their finger builds customer loyalty, and in the modern, competitive era, you need loyalty more than ever.
2. It Frees Up Personnel
The more that customers can do themselves, the less they have to contact and tie up your employees, which enables you to provide quicker customer service. When customers can order directly through the app, they do not have to interact with sales personnel. But the app can still offer new products or suggest additional services just like an employee would do. If they have questions, employees can answer these through email, text, or phone calls at an appropriate time rather than always playing defense.
By installing simple transactions on the app, your service people will also be free to focus their efforts on high-maintenance customers, complex service issues, and customer base development.
3. It Provides an Outlet
Businesses increasingly have to deal with customers who take their complaints public. This can become a PR nightmare, and a bad review has effects well beyond that one transaction. If your customer cannot get an easy resolution to their disappointments, concerns, or complaints, they will likely turn to talking with other people or using social media to air grievances.
An easy-to-use return option in the mobile app as well as simple ways to initiate contact or get updates on complaint resolution will help prevent public shaming.
4. It Offers Easy Solutions
A well-equipped app should help customers handle minor issues, questions, and changes on their own. The less effort they have to put into finding solutions, the better they will think about your company and your customer service.
What types of problems should a mobile app easily solve? These could include things like changing billing information or shipping addresses, reporting and receiving updates about problems with goods, or initiating returns. Anything customers can fill in themselves should be on the app and not your own data entry employees. You save money and they save time.
5. It Directs Customers
The app is a great way to direct both new and existing customers to new products and services. Customers can go to pages where they can see new items or be offered reorders on goods they already buy. Or they can be directed less assertively by using suggestion on what to do next. Additionally, the app can deliver push notifications to drive sales or launch new products. Any way you do it, an app is a new way to grow customers.
Whatever improvement your customer service needs, an app can help by shifting the weight off personnel as well as giving customers an easier experience — both when problems exist and when they don’t. Start creating your custom business app today. Our app pros will help you make your life simpler and your customers happier.
Originally published by Jacobs Media
