As the year comes to a close, the Pigeons took a moment and decided to enter 2022 all guns blazing! By now, it is pretty much obvious that our nest is full of surprises and our work is never done. With that in mind, we celebrate the end of a challenging year, welcoming the new one with open arms, and a brand new feature we have been working on for most of 2021. Brimming with excitement, we wish to proudly announce the release of our new product, specifically designed for retailers of all sizes, Samaritan, the ContactPigeon Omnichannel Chat.
What is ContactPigeon’s Omnichannel Chat Solution
After talking with hundreds of customers (and customers of our customers) we figured out what retailers could improve during the COVID-19 pandemic. The obsolete ways of providing customer service need to be disposed of and replaced. Customers have an abundance of choices on their phones and desktops so waiting on hold for a simple question such as “where is my order?” is out of the question.
An automated chat functionality solves all these troubles by creating a direct line of communication between you and your customers. ContactPigeon’s new product line is named “Samaritan” (after the Parable of the Good Samaritan) and is a customizable helpdesk solution for retailers, fully integrated within our omnichannel customer engagement platform. The first component and perhaps the most important is our Samaritan Chat.
It’s all about easiness, timeliness, and interactivity. The live chat is one of the most immediate ways to connect in real-time with your customers, solve their inquiries, and address their concerns. Our new feature gives your visitors the option to contact your customer service department effortlessly and effectively, with our built-in chatbot handling an important part of the workload. It’s the perfect mediator for a seamless customer experience, a smooth customer journey, and a complete omnichannel experience.
Offer truly omnichannel customer support to your customers
Statistics show that approximately 73% of consumers consider live chat as the best means of communication with a brand. Therefore, this feature is a must-have option for any business, as it nullifies the customer waiting time, either through email or by phone. As you know by now, at ContactPigeon we love providing the best methods for customer engagement! 🙂
The faster response time will make your business grow its conversion and retention rates since your customers won’t need to visit another brand for a similar service or product. Furthermore, the instant conversations between your team and your audience will also provide an additional fail-safe. Your business will be able to proactively alter the review of disgruntled customers before they share their negative feedback online.
Devoting time and attention to each customer individually is imperative, and the essence of ContactPigeon is embodied in meaningful, personalized interactions. Samaritan will offer your company a competitive edge, increase your resolution rates, and give your customers the targeted, preferential treatment they require. In addition, making customer inquiries part of the customer journey and using the data to enrich the customer profile, can lead to smarter automations and more valuable segments.
How can you benefit from Samaritan, the ContactPigeon Omnichannel Chat
We know that our customers expect the best from us, so we gifted our omnichannel chat with many interesting capabilities that will make your life easier. Just like all our functionalities, the chat is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the ContactPigeon platform.
- Firstly, it is a 100% GDPR compliant tool, as each agent can easily verify the customer’s identity either via email or via SMS before exchanging sensitive information. This groundbreaking addition is not included in similar chat applications, making ContactPigeon’s chat an ideal solution for supporting eCommerce customers.
- The application has both chatbot and live-chat properties and the consumer can get replies to frequently asked questions with ready-made, predetermined answers. This will improve the consumers’ experience as they will get instant responses even if the agents are not available at the time.
- Your assigned agents have the ability to answer immediately to their clients when a push notification alerts them of any incoming communication. But, fear not, because our chat has built-in options, such as business hours, that allow the bot to handle the initial conversation and the agent to follow up later.
- We believe that knowing your audience is the cornerstone of personalization. That’s why we have empowered the agents with a detailed customer profile embedded in the chat interface, for top-notch support. Specifically, the agents have instant access to every page visited, campaign received, message opened, item purchased, even abandoned cart products during the chat. This is what makes the interaction truly specialized, targeted, and personal.
- We would not be a top marketing automation solution if we did not use events, generated by the chat interactions for triggering automations or segmenting contacts. Trigger follow-up messages and personalize the experience of your e-shop visitors based on previous support interactions and increase the customer’s overall satisfaction.
Getting started with Samaritan
Like every feature inside our platform, using the live omnichannel chat functionality is a piece of cake. You can find the chat on the left-hand side of your familiar home page.
Messages Center
In this section, you can find all the support tickets, either ongoing or resolved. The conversations are divided into four major categories:
- “Unassigned” contains conversations that no agent has ownership of yet.
- “Open” includes conversations that are still in progress.
- “Mine” consists of the open conversations that are assigned to the logged-in user.
- “Closed” refers to chats that have been archived. Bonus feature: upon closing a chat, the visitor can rate the agent’s performance and of course, you can use the rating as part of automation flows.
Widget Settings
Everything you will ever need to make your chat run according to your preferences is in this section. You can modify every aspect of your chat to make it reflect your company’s branding and positioning.
Bot View
When the customers open the chat, they will meet Rosey, the lovely bot. Rosey will kick off the conversation with some basic, introductory questions and multiple choices based on the most common issues. Therefore, when the agents take over they will have a clear understanding of what the customer needs right from the start. This will increase the agents’ effectiveness because they will have all the necessary information from the beginning and will dive right in to save the day!
Tip: You can find 20+ chatbot uses cases for retailers in this article, to get inspired.
Transcript View
Moving on from the customers’ view, now you get to witness where the magic happens! Inside the platform, even before the agents take control, Samaritan works really hard to ensure maximum results. On the right-hand side, the omnichannel chat displays every piece of information that the customer support team will need to handle the potential issue. Once the operators click on the “Assign to me and join the chat” button, the actual real-time conversation begins.
Actual Chat View
Of course, we would save the best for last! As soon as the agent is added to the chat, they can start the actual conversation with the customer. We are pretty sure that the agents will be bombarded with questions, so we added a little trick to spice things up.
The agents will have the chance to choose their replies from a variety of pre-written, canned responses, or easily create new ones. This cool feature will not only allow your customer support agents to save valuable time and effort but also provide fast, correct answers to each consumer.
Samaritan has many aces up its sleeve, so for more details and a full feature walk-through, please contact your assigned Customer Success Consultant.
Wrapping up 2021 with a bang!
As a company, we aspire to always help our customers reach their full potential, achieve their goals and meet the expectations of a very demanding market. Our top priority has always been the success of our clients and we will continue to support them with the hottest marketing features and the latest best practices.
ContactPigeon is wrapping 2021 in a new, exciting way, foreboding a very innovative and creative 2022. We have many interesting plans for the new year so keep an eye for the new Samaritan additions and stay tuned for more!
