How to win customer love with GIFs
The sun is shining brightly. The birds are chirping a cheerful tune. A hot cup of coffee awaits you by your bedside. What a lovely day!
Wait.
You are a support agent. This isn’t your morning. For you, every morning is the discovery of a conspiracy to test your patience and today is no exception.
Your fear that life wouldn’t turn out to be like literature is real.
Hundreds of support queries have made their way into your helpdesk. A bunch of them are screaming ‘Act now’ to your face.
Basic nightmare of support reps be like
Gah. So, predictably, day in and day out, you arm yourself with plain old weapons – a whole stack of templatized answers and industry-standard bulleted links to FAQs. And a battle of texts ensues (and it’s not as thrilling as it sounds)…
typitty-typitty-typitty-typitty…
The good thing about templates is they cut down a lot of time and the pain of re-typing support emails.
The not-so-interesting thing is there’s a chance you could bore your customers. No one wants to read an elaborate manual just to fix a light bulb.
And, you think you’ve made them happy with your answers? Problem not totally resolved.
Hop to the other end of customer support
Today, customers’ end-to-end journey fall somewhere between uninteresting and downright ugly, save the occasional good ones. The most overlooked aspect of customer service is making it a joy for both the parties.
People often become loyal to products and services for reasons beyond the primary features that all competitors offer.- Michelle Greenwald
You and I have enough unremarkable support stories to last a lifetime. So the next time a customer stops by your support portal with an innocent query, grow a funny bone and make him smile.
Here are 3 sure ways you can win customer love
without being cheesy*
Speak the language of the internet: GIFs
Who’s gif? Can I date her?
Ideally created to transfer images across slow modem connections, they’ve come a long way or at least, we’ve become more creative with them.
Tools required:
LiceCap, Recordit and a good sense of humour.
Or, GIF rigs like Mr. Gif, Giphy , PopKey can totally compensate for the lack of both.
Here’s what you can do:
Share product tutorials in a GIF-fy
Make your responses short by presenting your solutions as GIFs, like they’re texts from a friend. Don’t let it be like a barrage of words from your uncle who’s just gotten his hands on a smartphone for the first time. With GIFs, the content is easy to consume and convenient to follow.
All you need to do is attach them to your replies over email or chat. What’s more? They take a little less than a minute to create.
- Make an all-purpose GIF to quickly outline the key features of your product/service the way MailChimp has done. You can also spruce up your knowledge base with GIFs.
- Create direct answers to specific use cases and user requirements. Here’s a GIF explaining the share button feature added to our Android App to share tickets with teams.
Make Twitter interactions a notch cooler
When you come across a customer giving you a warm shout out on Twitter, reciprocate and make the interaction fun. Don’t go sounding like an automated response determined to bore the life out of your customers. With the recent addition of a GIF button to Twitter it’s all the more simpler to browse for the right ones and use them in adorable ways.
Add color to your emails/live chat
Whether you are answering customer queries or trying your best to placate an angry customer, GIFs can be a savior to ameliorate tricky support situations. But be careful not to overdo it, lest they take offence at your efforts.
Apart from stubborn email clients like Microsoft Outlook 2007-2013 and Windows Phone 7, GIFs work pretty well in emails. Here is a great guide to add animated GIFs in email.
When your customer is frustrated, try to be genuinely sorry…
Even if he decides to never darken your doorstep again…
But if he is absolutely in love with your product, you can be like…
And if the mistake is from his end and you fixed it…
At the end of the day, winning customer love is always the best feeling.
To summarise, if you have the GIFs to make your customer (and yourself) happy, do it. The world needs more of that.
Know of any GIFs that saved your bacon or tickled your customers pink? Feel free to add your favourites in the response section below. And if you loved what we wrote, spread some love 🙂
