Originally Published on 28/06/21
Building a loyal client base and encouraging customer referrals depends on you delivering the best possible customer experience (CX).
Good CX is part of what really separates a good broker from a great broker. Clients expect a friction-free and tailored experience from all the businesses they interact with, and your brokerage is no exception.
While there are many fantastic tools available to overhaul your CX and keep you competitive, they can often come with a hefty price tag. Thankfully, there are also great options for those who wish to keep their budgets lean.
While the free options often come with limitations, such as a maximum number of users or campaign sends, depending on the scale of your operation they can provide you with everything you need.
Read more: The Brokers’ Guide to Customer Experience
Chatbots are a tool for guiding your audience through queries and towards buying decisions without the need for the time of a dedicated individual. They vary in complexity, and the more advanced examples function as fully fledged digital assistants, with the ability to personalise their conversation options as they interact with users. They can be extremely useful for automating sales processes.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel allows you to build a chatbot within Facebook Messenger, for up to 50 users, for free.
MobileMonkey
With MobileMonkey you can build free chatbots across a number of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook Messenger and SMS.
Botsify
Botsify is a fully managed chatbot platform, with a 14 day free trial so you can determine whether its features are worth your investment.
Without accurate monitoring and analysis of your customers’ current experience, it can be difficult to know what’s working well and where improvements need to be made. Regardless of the level of customer activity that you need to monitor, there is a tool out there fit for your business.
Freshdesk
Offering a completely free package including email and social ticketing, self-service and reporting, Freshdesk can help you track and deliver customer service. It also has further uses for paid customers, including API integration and dynamic ticket forms.
HotJar
One of the leading data analysis tools, HotJar is available with a free plan. It allows you to understand how your customers use your website with heatmaps, session recordings and surveys.
Smartlook
Built to help you analyse user behaviour and understand their decisions at all levels, Smartlook works for websites and mobile apps.
Find out more: Podcast #68 - Tech for Brokers (Part One)
Find out more: Podcast #73 - Tech for Brokers (Part Two)
Improving customer experience often means saving time, resources and effort wherever possible, and with digital documentation tools you can do just that. Avoiding the need for endless printing and paper usage, making signing and contract processes digital while maintaining security is extremely beneficial.
Docusign
Docusign provides a suite of applications and integrations that streamline and digitise agreement processes.
Hellosign
A subsidiary of Dropbox, Hellosign boasts an intuitive and functional user interface for handling eSignatures.
PandaDoc
Offering a free trial, PandaDoc provides some premium features such as automated workflows and document analytics within its basic package.
Read more: Boosting Customer Retention with CRM
Understanding the needs of your customers will allow you to work with the tools you already have at your disposal to build solutions that can help them. For example, if you know that your client base is reluctant to adapt to digital communication, then you could choose to focus on overcoming this challenge first. A chatbot may not be of much use to you if your clients don’t want to visit your website in the first place.
The solutions will vary depending on the nature of your clients’ needs, but in this example, producing a digital onboarding guide to ease any anxieties your customer base may have, could in turn allow you to improve their customer experience far beyond that touchpoint.
Read more: The Importance of Customer Onboarding
Traditional customer experience techniques continue to be important, but investing time in automation and digital tools can lighten the load and lead to better results. Keep your clients’ needs front of mind, and you’ll find that customer experience tools can help you solve challenges more efficiently.
Read more: The Complete Tech Checklist for Brokers
Read more: Key Tech to Support the Sales Process
Read more: How brokers can engage with clients and create opportunities