4 ways to gather customer details on chat

How can you serve your customers effectively if you don’t really know them?

Nowadays, providing a great customer experience means having a rich bank of customer details — from account numbers to product preferences, behavioral data and purchase history. 

But how should you be using all of this data? And how can you collect it in a way that’s fast, easy, safe, and non-intrusive for your customers?

How can gathering customer details help your business?

Let’s start with the basics: why do you need customer details?

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that gathering customer data can create for customer service, sales and marketing teams:  

• Put your customer conversations into context – Each time you interact with a customer, you can use everything from their purchase history to the pages they’ve viewed on your website to tailor your conversations. This way, you can help guide customers through the customer journey, catch opportunities to cross- and up-sell, and anticipate their needs more effectively. 

• Serve customers faster – When your customer service team has basic info like the customer’s name, customer ID, address, product preferences and order history at their fingertips, queries can be solved much faster. You’ll skip the usual information-gathering stage and get straight to the matter at hand. 

• Understand them more deeply – When you know details like the time they spend on your website or the social media channels they follow, or the questions they ask your customer service team, you can create a richer picture of who your customers are and what they want from you. 

• Provide personalized service – From the basics (addressing them by name, speaking the right language) to more complex stuff (showing personalized offers, tailoring your communications channels), personalization feeds off customer data.

How can chat help collect customer details?

Both chatbots and live chat are powerful channels for collecting these kinds of useful customer data.

Why? Because chat is a low-effort form of communication; customers don’t have to pick up the phone, write a long email, or fill in a complicated survey to provide information. 

Customers are increasingly wary of providing their data without a good reason for doing so[1]. In a chat context, they receive a clear benefit for exchanging their data: better, more accurate customer service that solves their problem faster.

1. Use a chatbot to ask survey questions 

After a conversation between a customer and an agent ends, you can program a chatbot to automatically follow up with a quick survey. With just a few clicks, customers can then rate the quality of the service they received. 

Customer feedback is notoriously hard to gather, but this is a great way to increase the response rates for your surveys because: 

• The experience is fresh in their mind. Customers don’t have to cast their minds back days or weeks to remember what happened. 

• They don’t have to leave the app to answer – How many of us have clicked on a survey link with every intention of answering it, only to get distracted before we can click ‘submit’? With chat, the survey question can appear and be answered within the same window — much less space for distraction. 

2. Review chat transcripts to understand customer needs 

Don’t delete those chat transcripts: the customer information you can gather from them is like gold dust for customer service, marketing and sales teams. The beauty of live chat is that it gives customers and agents the best of both email and phone conversations. 

Phone calls allow agents to quickly ask follow-up questions and build trust with customers — but it’s much harder to extract either quantitative or qualitative data from them without taking hours to transcribe each individual call. 

It’s easier to mine emails for this kind of data, but you lose the conversational aspect of the customer relationship; there’s likely to be long pauses between each message, and there’s less of an opportunity to build a rapport. 

But conversational messaging — one-on-one chats between customers and agents via either a website widget or a messaging app like Whatsapp or iMessage — gives you the best of both worlds. With conversational AI your customer service team can even go one step further and get detailed information on your customers. This will help you engage with your customers in the most human way and also helps you keep a faithful record of every word that’s exchanged.

By periodically reviewing these chat transcripts with your team, you can: 

• Analyze how often customers are using certain words or phrases

• Report on broader trends of customer complaints or frequently asked questions

• Create case studies of interactions that went particularly well or badly and use them to inform customer service team training 

• Help marketing and sales teams understand the ‘voice of the customer’ in more detail, so they can build trust by matching the tone, word choice and phraseology of your target audience in future communications

3. Understand what customers are looking for with self-service FAQs and segmentation

Allowing customers to navigate to the information they’re looking for via your chat app really speeds up solving many queries. Customers can find the information they’re looking for by filling out custom fields or choosing from drop-down menus. 

That means customers don’t have to make a call or scroll through long FAQ pages, and your customer service team can spend their time solving more complex problems. 

Providing multilingual self-service options can also make information much more accessible for customers by helping them access the information they need in their preferred language. 

But there are huge data benefits to self-service, too. 

For one thing, you can develop a much richer understanding of how well your website is serving your customers. If lots of customers are asking the same questions about your products, for example, you might need to clarify your product descriptions to make things clearer. 

You can also use self-service to segment customers into different demographics like age and location, so you can understand how different types of customers interact with your brand. Are customers of a certain age in a certain location looking for more information on a certain topic? 

Maybe you want to target that demographic with an awareness campaign that helps them get a better understanding of who you are or what you do. 

4. Collect basic information quickly

With the right chatbot software, everything that’s sent over your chat app is automatically recorded and kept forever. No need for your customer service agents to spend long minutes typing in the customer ID number or asking them to spell their surname just one more time. 

This makes it an ideal channel for collecting basic information like the customer name, account number, contact information and the nature of the customer’s query. If you’re dealing with a new customer, this data can then be entered into the customer details page — either automatically via chatbot, or manually by a customer service agent. If it’s an existing customer, you can use the information to keep this customer profile up-to-date.

Now that you have this data, you can use it to solve the customer’s query. Or, if the query can’t be solved over chat, you can pass it on to your call center. This way, customers aren’t left repeating the same information over and over again, and their issues get resolved faster and with less frustration. 

How does Freshchat help customer service teams collect customer details?

Freshchat is built to make collecting customer details easy and safe for both you and your customers.

• It uses events to track user actions on your website and displays collected data to agents to personalize conversations with your customers. 

• Businesses can also use this event data to run behavior based campaigns

• It can help you initiate a proactive chatbot conversation based on user actions to nudge action, for instance – minimize cart abandonment, offer pricing plan information, etc. 

• Freshchat also supports custom integrations where businesses can fetch user data from their CRM or any third-party app.

We know that, nowadays, you need to be able to assure customers that their data is safe in your hands. That’s why we’ve completely reinforced Freshchat with advanced security measures, including: 

• Restricted login access, so you can choose when and where agents can log in to access data

• HIPAA compliant data storage for healthcare data

• GDPR-ready features that help you stay compliant when collecting, storing and accessing data 

• A raft of other security features, including click-jacking prevention, SHA 256 encoding, data encryption and more 

If you can make it easy and safe for customers to provide you with their details, you’ll overcome two of the major hurdles to customer data collection. And, once you have the data you need to understand your customers better, you’ll be poised to build deeper, richer, longer-lasting customer relationships. 

Source

1. https://hbr.org/2015/05/customer-data-designing-for-transparency-and-trust