Customers expect more personalized care than ever before. This means that sales and customer service teams need to work together to create a seamless, unified customer experience. A unified experience not only creates a cohesive and positive suite of interactions for customers, but also provides the necessary tools for staff to craft efficient, anti-cumbersome workflows. In order to realize a fully unified customer experience, live chat for customer support or sales is mandatory.

If a customer speaks with your sales team, it is wholly likely that they expect the conversation history and information to be both remembered and readily available. Even if they’re now speaking to a customer support representative, they expect their historical interactions to be kept in account, rather than lost in a separate documentation system.

It makes sense that teams often turn inward for help, becoming more and more reliant on each other rather than on other teams in the customer satisfaction process. However, the best resources are likely actually on a team that is pre-sale or post-sale. Customer support teams have incredible insight to assist sales teams in their work and vice versa. Ultimately, your business benefits because clients will feel the seamlessness of their experience, and your teams will also be more satisfied since they won’t feel isolated and siloed off in their tasks.

Here are some great ways to align your customer support teams and sales teams.

Get Everyone Hooked on the Same Customer Journey Vision

Many of the most successful companies these days attribute their success to an overall vision – often a willingness to go the extra mile to make a customer happy, or a deliberate turn to enthusiasm in customer contacts. Regardless of what you choose for the hallmark of your buyer’s journey, pick something that can be consistently applied from marketing, through sales, and into the customer support teams.

With live chat for customer support or live chat for sales, your customers will notice that pleasant communication, outstanding knowledge, and your team’s willingness and ability to go the extra mile are consistently available to them, their opinion of your company can only grow. Company retreats can be great places to get everyone focused on the bigger vision and a great side effect is the opportunity for every team to learn more about what other teams do, and so grow appreciation for them.

Connect Teams Digitally For Easy Information Flow

Your company’s preferred CRM may be excellent, but if your company is using it in such a way that data isn’t flowing clearly from one team to the next, you are missing out on a great alignment opportunity. By combining all conversations, emails, and support requests into the same client data system that is shared with all necessary teams, you allow any representative to chat and speak knowledgeably about client history.

Even the most polite sales rep may frustrate a customer if they don’t have access to the information they need to continue solving a problem. Invest the time in getting sales to document the process of getting the customer in the first place, and in exchange, get customer support to document any issues or positive feedback they offer down the road.

Meet to Discuss High-Profile, High-Volume Clients

When your company relies on a few large clients as opposed to many smaller ones, it is worthwhile to get the stakeholders on the sales and customer support team together to run down the basics of what those clients have been up to. Both teams can provide clarity for each other about what the pain points, use cases, and long-term goals are for your high-value clients. When much of your business comes from just a few clients, it’s important for everyone to work together as a combined team to proactively solve any issues they run into, and provide a stellar experience.

Identify and Share Opportunities to Build Brand Loyalty

Sometimes, a support call will yield information that makes it clear that the client is interested in another one of your products. In other contexts, a sales representative might need to bring customer support into the conversation to solve a prior issue first and then land the next upgrade opportunity. Regardless, keeping that key information within a single team doesn’t benefit anyone. Building brand loyalty has to do with doing what other companies often cannot do, such as align their teams to offer exactly what the customer needs or wants in the moment. The best sales are the ones that help the client meet their specific needs fully and achieve their business goals, and opportunities to have those conversations often happen naturally when your clients are on the phone with customer service.

If you can upsell, cross-sell, or renew a client’s interest organically and get them to the right sales person to complete the process, they will feel cared for and you’ll be part of your company’s success. Facilitating these kinds of interactions also makes the members of individual teams feel supported and effective, which can go a long way to reducing employee turnover and increasing the longevity and experience of your employees.

Pass Along All Feedback For Iterative Improvement

Both live chat for customer support and sales operations maintain data and analytics about what is working (and not working) along the buyer’s journey. This data is often most relevant inside the team, but another team might actually have a better or more interesting insight if they can get their hands on those numbers. This isn’t about a blame game – getting the teams in a room together and discussing analytics should always be about ‘what can we try next?’‘ rather than ‘why didn’t we make that sale?”

Excellent customer care requires sharing the insights you glean from customers all the way up the channel. Otherwise, the resources and time it takes to gather that data is truly underutilized.

Aligning these teams is worth the time and attention to detail that such an effort requires. Word-of-mouth advertising has amazing ROI, and aligning your teams might be the start of an excellent conversation about your company’s ability to satisfy customer needs – no matter how many team(s) are involved.

Companies spend millions of dollars annually in attempts to remove internal silos and improve communication and collaboration. But these same companies also enable and fund separate and frequently unintegrated technology stacks creating those same operational silos – it’s counterintuitive. To stay competitive, it’s imperative that companies adapt to the necessity of unified live chat. 

At SnapEngage, we acutely understand that the future of B2B technology and operational efficiency is unified. We are seeing the first steps of this transition in conversational technology platforms, and particularly in live chat.  

We do not envision all-in-one tech behemoths at the core of the unifying transformation. There are certain unique needs and solutions that are core requirements to functional groups’ tech stacks. Sales needs a quality CRM, Marketing requires marketing automation, and Support needs a help desk. All of these are necessities to perform daily tasks and responsibilities that each functional group holds dear to the overall company mission.

Implementing a unified customer experience creates myriad opportunities and benefits, such as:

• 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report a causal increase in revenue
• 93% of customers are likely to become repeat customers at businesses that deliver exceptional customer journeys

Unified live chat removes silos, improves the customer experience

Oftentimes the lack of, and need for, unification coalesces in the same areas – brand identity, project management, business intelligence, and customer experience. The ongoing tech stack arms race is resulting in completely individualized and limited functional group tech stacks. This practice is particularly detrimental for customers, prospects, and businesses in general. 

Let’s take conversational technology and chat platforms as our main focus. Recent history demonstrates an unfortunate focus on a narrow, siloed view of chat platforms – essentially the opposite of a unified live chat approach. These tend to hone in on meeting an immediate need for one functional group, coupled with a general disregard for the tertiary effects that approach may have on overall customer experience and efficiency. 

Let’s dive into a common example – the daunting task of communicating with a cable or internet provider. We’ve all had this experience: you chat or call into your provider, they ask you for your account information, next your reason for contacting them, and then you are transferred to the appropriate team to handle your request. Only now, you are asked for that same account information and request once again. Potentially you will follow this same routine over and over until you give up, or until you stomach it long enough to finally reach the actual parties that can assist. 

What’s really going on in the aforementioned scenario is that you, the customer, are traversing a siloed experience  the opposite of a unified live chat experience. This is caused by a siloed back end, information is not being passed along in the systems and teams you are traveling between. Instead each team has a completely monolithic structure, hoarding information and likely running on separated systems. Entirely because of technical issues and siloed departments, you are having an all-too-common awful experience as a customer. 

Is this really the best experience available with all of these advanced technologies? Is it truly necessary being sent to entirely different departments, with different branding, and no trailing customer information? Shame on you, provider. 

Focus on the customer experience first

As customer experience entails an increasingly key decision for the fastest growing demographics in the world (and not only for retention and purchasing), companies are realizing it is more important than ever to support the customer, and create the most seamless experience possible for them. Through unified communication and branding, and by removing the technology silos and their down-stream effects, a barrier-free customer experience is entirely possible. 

In unified live chat, this translates to the ability for a customer or prospect to engage with a web property that has their needs and intents known – before any amount of information is shared. Then they are seamlessly routed to the right recipient from the company, the first time, to solve or address the needs at hand. This is all done behind the scenes, providing all visitors with the best possible customer experience, both fast and effective, that is available today. 

 Here’s what this model looks like from a technology perspective:

Visitor 1 – Support Use Case

• A Current Customer is logged into their account. They are chatting from a Google translated page in German. They’ve selected ‘help with payments’ from the chatbot menu they are presented with – in German.
• First Stop: In this scenario, the customer is brought directly to a chatbot or human agent who is knowledgeable in payments and can assist the customer with their need in German.
• Interaction Data: Because this need fell into the Support functional group, the chat transcript and accompanying activities or action items automatically flows to the help desk where it is stored for reporting and insights, in addition to any necessary actions needed (i.e. say there is a technical issue associated with this request).  
• Second Stop: Let’s then say while working on resolution for this customer, the German agent identifies an opportunity and desire for the customer to upgrade their plan type. This presents a great opportunity to transfer the visitor to a different team of German speaking sales agents who can now assist the client in gaining access to a new plan that will provide the customer with more value. The transfer is made and with very limited disruption to the visitor, because their login credentials and chat transcript follows them to the next agent, they are now continuing that same dialogue with a sales agent and will soon have the new plan activated and their payment issue resolved. 
• Interaction Data: Once the chat hits the sales agent and their associated CRM oriented tech stack, the new sales-oriented data is automatically pushed to the CRM for tracking and any associated action items.

Visitor 2 – Marketing/Sales Use Case

• A prospective customer is drawn to your website with interest around a webinar or piece of gated content. They are from Southeast Asia and have engaged your content before, displaying a relatively high level of intent.
• First Stop: Because this visitor has high-intent, as previously identified by your marketing automation system, instead of being served additional educational items they are directly routed to an sales development representative or automated scheduling system to further qualify the lead and begin the sales process
• Interaction Data: Once the chat hits the sales agent and their associated CRM oriented tech stack, the new sales-oriented data is automatically pushed to the CRM for tracking and any associated action items. The marketing automation data has already been captured for reporting and insights reasons.
• Second Stop: Let’s say that in this scenario, the visitor is actually already a customer who recently signed up for your service and while they came into the marketing/sales funnel as a potential prospect, they really just needed help with their configuration. This is where a transfer to the Support team comes in handy; no follow-ups, no switching systems and avoidance of the disjointed usage and branding experience that comes with that type of transition. The customer is now with your Support team getting the assistance they need and deserve. 
• Interaction Data: And now the chat transcripts and any associated follow up items are being pushed to your help desk for reporting insights and any necessary action items. 

These two examples represent only a couple of the many possible situations that occur daily within your currently siloed chat platform. The only way to truly address these scenarios requires an increased spend (i.e. duplicate licenses) to both functions’ desired chat platforms, or to implement a completely unified chat platform that meets the requirements for all departments, on top of the functional techstacks. 

Implement a strategy that creates a unified customer experience. Deconstruct the siloed journey so all customers experience a truly remarkable, refreshing journey from start to finish. It is irrefutable that the best point of integration is at the customer experience level. The difference with a unified chat platform is that the customer experience is at the center of focus. With a unified and delightful customer journey, the business as a whole flourishes. This is why the future of chat is unified.