Customers are the backbone of any business, and good and effective customer service is integral to growth. Bad experiences can lead to poor reviews, impacting sales and profit.
No matter what stage your business is in, you need dedicated professionals who can perform day-to-day tasks like attending to customer calls, answering queries, noting feedback, and resolving any issues a customer may face.
You can hire a customer service virtual assistant (VA) to help with these tasks.
VAs do the routine tasks that would otherwise eat into your workday. They are trained professionals with experience in customer relations — they can maintain a calm demeanor with upset customers, are available 24/7, are skilled communicators who can preempt the answers clients seek, solve queries quickly, obtain customer feedback, and perform many more tasks.
VAs work remotely and on a contract basis, saving time and money that would be spent on hiring a full-time employee.
Here are 15 tasks that a customer service virtual assistant can do for you:
- Answer queries: Prospective or current customers can ask questions through email, website chat boxes, or social media. These channels can be a lot to track — a dedicated VA can respond to inquiries and answer questions with relevant information. Queries they can answer include information on product descriptions, shipping times, shipment tracking, resolving complaints, informing about special offers, escalating inquiries to relevant departments, and much more.
- Provide technical support: An experienced VA can help customers navigate any bugs they may face on the business website (unable to add an item to their cart), diagnose software or hardware problems (computer running slowly due to newly installed updates, keyboard keys malfunctioning, etc), direct them to technical support documents (FAQs, support manuals), access customers’ devices remotely and troubleshoot the problem, and preemptively alert customers if they need to update their software, operating system, etc. to ensure hassle-free working.
- Manage shopping carts: An assistant can implement several strategies to increase sales. These include suggesting products based on browsing history, sending reminders when products are left in a cart, and notifying customers when favorited items are back in stock. Additionally, VAs can assist the check-out process by providing exclusive discount codes, sending updates on delivery times, and processing returns and exchanges. All these tasks make the shopping experience easier and more personalized, increasing customer loyalty and recommendations.
- Maintain customer relationship management (CRM) systems: CRM systems help improve customer interactions and manage data. VAs can keep databases up-to-date by entering new customer information and updating existing ones. These databases can be used for several activities including categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning leads to sales representatives, grouping customers into different segments to send them personalized communication, sending follow-up messages like thank-you emails after a purchase, and tracking metrics such as customer satisfaction scores and resolution time.
- Set up chatbots and automate customer services: An assistant can automate operations by setting up chatbots that can understand natural-language queries and resolve customer queries. Popular chatbot platforms include Dialogflow, IBM Watson Assistant, and Microsoft Bot Framework. NLTK and spaCy help chatbots interpret human language, and platforms like Zapier integrate chatbots with other systems. Skilled VAs can write chatbot scripts based on historical customer interactions, integrate chatbots with backend systems, train chatbots for when to flag for human intervention, and perform other tasks that automate customer service and improve efficiency and effectiveness.
- Maintain customer records: VAs ensure customer information is up-to-date by performing many small tasks that otherwise take up significant time. These tasks serve many functions and include updating contact information whenever customers change their address, email, telephone number, etc., recording interactions with customers and taking note of information like purchases, inquiries, and product preferences, recording customer feedback which can be used to improve customer satisfaction, and integrating all this information with CRM platforms, ensuring that all departments in a company can access the information they need.
- Handle complaints: Handling complaints and maintaining customer satisfaction is important to ensure customer loyalty and give your business a good rating, which is important to gain new customers. VAs with the correct set of communication skills will be able to pacify an upset customer, gather relevant information, offer solutions (product return, exchanges, etc), escalate the issue to the concerned department head if they are unable to resolve it, and also follow-up with the customer at a later date to ensure their problem has been resolved.
- Process orders: Customer service VAs can guide customers through order processing to enable a seamless experience. VAs can help customers select a product, provide information on pricing, discounts, shipping information, etc., send real-time shipping updates, and set up automated notifications. They can also help customers with alternative payment options if a card is denied, assist with any order modifications, and facilitate easy returns and exchanges by coordinating pick-ups and refunds. All these tasks reduce order completion time, increasing sales and ensuring customer satisfaction.
- Up-sell and cross-sell products: VAs can employ numerous strategies to increase sales. These include recommending complementary or upgraded services to customers (for example, a VA can suggest a customer purchase a cost-saving annual wifi plan with unlimited data instead of a monthly option), offering bundled products at a discount, providing information on the benefits of upgrading a subscription or buying a newer model of a product, promoting limited-time offers through email campaigns (for example, promotional discount codes that expire in 24 hours), and much more. These actions not only help increase revenue but also have the added benefit of familiarizing customers with a company’s different offerings.
- Offer self-service options: VAs can set up processes that allow customers to troubleshoot and find answers to queries without contacting sales representatives. VAs can redirect customers with issues to an FAQ page with answers to commonly asked questions, to a blog page with knowledge-base articles that explain how to go about procedures in a step-by-step manner (for example, resetting a router, installing new software, etc), set up interactive chatbots that can diagnose customers’ self-service needs, and link to a YouTube page that has demo videos, among other resources.
- Provide real-time language translation: Multilingual VAs can help clients from different geographies who use your company’s product/service be understood through clear communication, ensuring customer satisfaction. VAs can provide real-time chat translation, correspond via email in different languages, implement digital tools like Google Translate, Dialog, and Microsoft Translator to detect and translate speech, and translate web pages like FAQ sections and blog posts into various languages to help customers.
- Draft and present reports: VAs can analyze data and present reports to provide insight into customer service performance, visualizing how well the company interacts with its clients. VAs collect data that includes support tickets, customer inquiries, chatbot interactions, and social media messages. They can also track important performance metrics like response time, customer wait time, resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, and more. This data is then analyzed and the VA identifies areas where the company can improve. VAs can also benchmark this data against other competitors if needed.
- After-hours support: Outside normal operating hours, a VA can ensure customers’ problems are acknowledged and resolved. VAs can automate query responses that redirect customers to FAQ pages and knowledge-base sources, help customers schedule appointments with concerned representatives during regular working hours, flag written inquiries that come in at odd hours and make sure that live agents attend to them, and give customers the option of entering their contact details and requesting a call-back during business hours. Offering such services ensures customers’ problems are resolved quickly and maintains customer satisfaction.
- Conduct market research: Data analysis and customer behavior insights can help a company better understand its target audience, competitor businesses, and the industry. VAs can collect customer feedback by designing surveys that provide insights into customers’ experiences and satisfaction. If needed, they can even schedule and conduct interviews with customers to dive deeper into their needs and pain points. An experienced VA will also collate similar information on competitors to understand their customers’ pain points and try to convert them. VAs can also track keywords, hashtags, and other messaging on social media to know what people think about a product, and use this information to identify prevailing customer sentiment.
- Onboard and training: An assistant can ensure a new customer has a seamless experience with the company, ensuring satisfaction. A VA can guide new customers through setting up an account using videos and tutorials (for example, guided tours of a website), send periodic onboarding emails with tips, best practices, and other information, and provide easy access to troubleshooting resources (FAQs, articles, videos, etc.). VAs will also collect feedback at the end of the onboarding process to understand the customer’s experience. This information can be used to make the next customer’s onboarding experience even smoother!
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Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a Harvard College graduate. He founded Lumiere as a Ph.D. student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1-1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.
