Long gone are the days when brands could simply rest on their laurels, blast out marketing messages, and wait for the customer orders to come pouring in. That’s just not how business works anymore, nor should it.
For any business to succeed in the modern economy, you have to recognize and embrace the incredible power of two-way customer communication. Just as much as you want to tell potential customers about your products and services, you should be just as eager to hear what they have to ask and say too.
If a potential customer can’t quickly and easily find the answer to their question, they’re apt to look elsewhere. Conversely, by capturing that initial interest and nurturing honest and open communication with site answers, you could be winning over a new customer by building the foundation for a long-term relationship. As you know, repeat customers are the best customers, and that sort of positive relationship is often founded on great customer service.
But, as a business, how do you ensure that your customers are being heard in a timely and effective manner? How can you deliver top-notch site answers in a seamless and responsive way? Here are three solutions to consider.
#1. Wix Answers
You might already be familiar with Wix and its powerful website builder solution. The company found that it needed an appropriately robust yet accessible site answers solution, and that’s how its subsidiary offering, Wix Answers, was born. Wix Answers is open to mass markets, including at the enterprise level where scale is critically important, making it an ideal solution for enterprise and SME businesses that need a robust, all-in-one customer service solution.
On its surface, Wix Answers appears to be a help desk solution. And indeed, it has a great ticketing and support system so that customers can conveniently ask for the help they need, and customer support staff can respond to these queries in a timely and efficient manner. But, Wix Answers goes well beyond that.
At its core, the basic components include a ticketing system, a call center, and a knowledge base. What’s remarkably useful here is that all three components are intelligently integrated with one another. Many businesses waste tons of time learning and configuring 3rd party plug-ins that integrate into their help desk platform, in order to create a perfectly customized solution that fits their needs. Since many help desk solutions on the market are siloed, in a sense that they offer various components that need assembling, Wix Answers comes off as extremely handy for businesses that want to focus on the customer, instead of the customer support platform.
Wix Answers offers advanced SEO capabilities so that you can create some extremely effective SEO-oriented knowledge-base pages. By targeting specific keywords, the knowledge-base web pages can not only reduce the number of support tickets but can actually attract new leads who search for specific questions on Google.
Furthermore, even if a customer cannot find the answer on an existing knowledge-base page, a support chat widget can appear to initiate a conversation. When the customer types in a question, a ticket automatically opens on the agent’s dashboard (that is if there’s no existing ticket for the customer in question). Following the chat, if the support agent wishes to talk over the phone, the call can be initiated from within the ticket and recorded for later review. Support agents can add new entries to the knowledge base and make feature requests to the development team according to the conversation with the customer, all from the same interface.
This all works as part of Wix Answers’ One Tab ticketing system. Traditionally, customer support staff would need to navigate through multiple tabs as part of the support process. They might need one to see past tickets, another to ask for help from other staff, another to look for relevant articles, another to connect to the call center, and so on. With Wix Answers, all these touch points are integrated and easily accessible from just one ticketing tab. This decluttering makes it far easier for support agents to offer the best site answers possible.
The knowledge base, ticketing system, and call center all work together seamlessly. Bundles including all three products start from $30/month.
#2. Ultimate FAQ
Do you already use WordPress to power your website? The content management system is incredibly popular among all sorts of site owners, from bloggers to eCommerce professionals. While you could create a basic page inside WordPress to list the most frequently asked questions from your customers, the Ultimate FAQ plugin by Etoile Web Design is a purpose-built solution that delivers more.
Whether or not you’re on board with the Gutenberg block interface and design, it’s good to know that this WordPress plugin has been created to support that style of design for displaying site answers. You can choose from several different layouts, including a default layout with expandable text and a colored blocks layout for greater contrast, among others. You also have the option to display all site answers, instead of having them as expandable text blocks. In addition, there is a built-in search function so users can search for their question rather than sifting through a potentially very long list of questions, even if you organize them into categories.
If you’re using WooCommerce to power your eCommerce store, another feature that you’ll really enjoy in Ultimate FAQ is the ability to add a FAQ page to each and every product page. This can be very useful when you have more than a few products, but not all questions are relevant to all products. All you have to do is create a FAQ category with the same name as the product where you’d like the FAQ to appear.
The basic plugin for WordPress is free. The premium license for additional features starts from $34.47 for a single site, including six months of free support. Support is $15 per six-month period after that.
#3. Hootsuite Insights
With a help desk, the customer is actively seeking assistance on a matter. With site answers, the customer is already on your website and looking for answers. But, what’s important to note is that not all customer feedback is going to reach you or your employees directly. Customer service, in this way, can benefit greatly from a more proactive approach rather than relying simply on a reactive approach.
Social media has played very heavily into this, as users may be talking about a company or a brand, but they may not tag that brand directly or they may not seek out assistance directly. That’s where a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite Insights can come into play. They call it “richer social listening” to empower “smarter business decisions” by helping you “understand the conversations happening around your brand with… real-time social analytics.”
This starts with simply monitoring for brand mentions, but it also looks beyond your own social channels to find relevant conversations where opportunities may await, identify emerging trends and unusual spikes in volume, and gauge the overall sentiment surrounding your brand so you can better serve customers. You can then take in that feedback and act on it, focusing on the specific segments that matter the most to your business.
Hootsuite Insights subscriptions are based on a custom pricing model.
Use site answers to increase user engagement on your site
With billions of active websites and blogs on the internet today, the concept of getting traffic to your site is no big deal. However, what is important is what that traffic does when they are on your site.
With user engagement in mind, the most important area for you to focus your efforts on is with the value proposition and experience each user has on your site. If they find it of value, they are more likely to stick around and will also trust more in your brand.
To increase ROI, user engagement, and repeat traffic, be sure to start implementing these top solutions and methods to site answers today.
