Connection is an attempt to build a small, personal relationship with the customer over the span of one or more interactions. This is typically accomplished by mentioning personal details back to the customer, providing them suggestions or other extra information, matching their tone, or just generally showing your human side.

This confirms that you and the Business Partner genuinely do care about the customer and have their best interests at heart. According to the 2017 American Express Customer Service Barometer, 47% of customers value personalized service, and 45% stated that appreciation for them as a customer is important.

There are many reasons why connecting with the customer is important.

First off, in today's technologically advanced world, it's extremely easy to have a bot interpret customer's requests and send them a macro or canned answer. However, bots aren't great at being humans... they can't connect, provide empathy, or stray very far from how they were programmed. But, you can!
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That's one of the things that sets SimplrFlex apart from our competition. Instead of using a bot to send the customer an answer (which would be dry and provide no human/personal touch), we use a bot to send Experts the answer so that they can do the pieces where humans excel (connecting, empathy, etc.) If you're just sending the canned response, you're no better than a bot (and bots are much cheaper, easier to scale, and more accurate!) Make sure that you're showcasing the thing that makes you special so that we can continue to win the battle against bots!
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Remember that our Business Partners chose us because we aren't just bots. We can go above and beyond and provide fantastic personalized service. If the service we provide isn't better than a bot and costs more, the Business Partner is going to make the obvious choice of switching to a bot.
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Next, humans want to talk to humans. They want to feel valued and heard. If all they receive back is a response that is obviously canned and doesn't address everything they mentioned, they notice. It creates a frustrating customer experience and could cause the customer to choose another business for their needs in the future. By making sure you provide some connection, you affirm that you really read their message and do care... both as a person and as a business.
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Lastly, customers are much less likely to leave a negative review if they feel like they were provided personalized service... even if the answer they received wasn't correct or what they wanted to hear.

Connecting with the customer is actually very easy and only takes a few seconds per ticket.

For additional examples, make sure you've reviewed the Expert Success Guide. And, we have a Golden Ticket section in the Expert Community that provides some examples of tickets where Experts have gone above and beyond.

As you'll see in the examples below, it doesn't take much effort to go a really long way.