Importance of Micro-Interactions in Customer Service

Businesses need to focus on customer service as much as they focus on productivity. In the digital world, providing complete support for the customer becomes challenging. Micro-interactions help businesses to enhance their customer satisfaction and it reduces the workload of the customer service team. This article elaborates on what micro-interactions are, the role and key components of micro-interactions, and the best practices of micro-interactions.

What are Micro-Interactions?

Micro-interactions are small designs that guide customers to complete a single task on the digital platform. These micro-interactions are task-based interactions that provide feedback or instructions for a digital product. It may include small animations, instructions, or simple interactions that help the customers complete an installation or fill out the forms. A few examples are the sound of refresh, search bar suggestions, a progress bar, and a small animation to indicate a single task.

The Role of Micro-Interaction

Indicates System Status

Micro-interactions are mainly used to indicate the status of any task like uploading a file or loading a page. It shows the system status for user understanding. This provides information that helps the users to ensure their work is in progress. The email marketing tool shows the progress bar for attachments.

Encourage User Engagement

Micro-interactions are used to encourage user engagement. If the user likes a post, it will show a popup symbol of thumbs up or heart. This tells the user that their likes are counted. It shows appreciation for the user engagement in the digital platforms.

Provides Effortless Interaction

In the digital platform, users may need to overcome many difficulties in handling digital products. These micro-interactions help the customers by providing small instructions then and there like filling out forms sample text given in the text box, providing instructions for passwords, arrow marks indicating swipe left or right, and so on. These small instructions help the customers in completing their major tasks.

Guides to Reduce Errors

While providing inputs like entering passwords, date of birth, and feedback customers may commit errors. These errors can be reduced by providing micro-interaction. They guide us to enter the date of birth in the right format, and passwords, and if any mandatory fields are missed out, these micro-interactions will indicate those things to the customer and reduce the chances of errors occurring.

Enhance User Experience

By providing this small guidance, user experience may improve. This method reduces the workload for the customer service team by resolving the customer’s issues before they arise. This enhances customer satisfaction and the CRM team’s efficiency.

Key components of micro-interactions

There are four major key components of micro-interactions:

Trigger

Trigger is the starting point of the micro-interactions. It is of two types: user-initiated and system-initiated. User-initiated triggers will require a direct action like clicking a button, or inputs come through a voice-integrated system. Whereas a system-initiated trigger is something predetermined that when a message or email is received, then the notification will be shown to the user.

Rules

Rules outline the flow of the process initiated by the trigger. It refers to the actual actions that happen after the trigger.

Feedback

Feedback refers to the process of confirmation sent to the users by the system. It denotes the users that the action is notified. For example, when a person makes a call a vibration that comes after the call is attended to by the other person.

Loops

Loops refer to the duration of the micro-interactions that appear. A few micro-interactions will appear only for the first time the user logs in. Whereas a few interactions will be there for repeated processing. This duration indicates the loop of the micro-interactions.

Modes

Modes determine the alteration in the micro-interactions. For example, weather applications will change frequently based on the location and weather conditions.

Best Practices of Micro-Interactions

Understand Customer Requirements

There are a variety of micro-interactions like providing guidance, showing progress, providing confirmation, and so on. Understand the user requirements to provide the right micro-interactions.

Provide Instant Feedback

Micro-interactions should be designed so that they provide instant feedback. For example, in search engines, while customers type the content for searching, the micro-interactions will show instant suggestions that can be selected by the user. This type of micro-interaction will be more useful for the users.

Focus on Appearance

Focus more on appearance to be simple. Micro-interactions are designed to help the customers. So, its appearance should be designed as simply as possible.

Consistency is Important

Consistency is important throughout the process. Try to provide consistent guidance throughout the task completion even though there is repetition in the process.

Provide Live Interactions

Provide some live interactions like when a user touches the icon it may pop up and indicate something. This provides confidence for the user to continue with the process.

Conclusion

Micro-interactions are important to enhance the customer experience. Various automation tools like CRM tools, customer service tools, and email marketing tools provide this feature. For every business, micro-interactions help the customers to find guidance regarding their digital products. By utilizing this feature effectively, every business can enhance their customer satisfaction and achieve their goals effortlessly.

• Tags:
• CRM
• Customer Service