Nearly 95% of consumers cite customer service as important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand. A lack of good customer support can cause you to lose out on users, impacting your revenue. In fact, businesses can grow their revenue by as much as 8% above their competition when they improve the customer service experience.
Source: Bain & Company
Just setting up customer support isn’t enough. You also need a customer support team that is responsive and is proactively helping your users to use your product or services.
We’ve listed ten ways you can improve your customer support and make it more responsive.
To start with, you need to make sure that your users can access your team to ask questions, get help, and raise issues. Provide live chat on your product or within your website so that users can connect with your customer support at any time.
When setting up a live chat, you can customise the chat widget to reflect your brand colour and even add a friendly message within the widget to provide a positive experience for your users.
Source: RingCentral
Unlike phone support, where your customer may have to verbally describe the issue they are facing on your website, you can integrate your live chat with co-browsing that lets your agent see what the customer sees; and fix these issues immediately.
Depending on what you sell, the size of your business, and the geographies you cater to, you may need to have agents supporting customers round the clock.
Having the right number of agents on call can be critical. Too few and you may end up with frustrated and angry customers. Too many, and you have a bloated workforce that eats into your margins.
There are a number of ways to optimise your agent strength while ensuring high responsiveness.
Source: RingCentral
Now that you have set up live chat and assigned agents to handle the traffic, the next priority is ensuring that your customer support responds to customer queries instantly. Your users are not interested in waiting for your team to get back to them, and would even leave your brand for a competitor in such cases.
One study found that 66% of US online adults believe that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with a good online customer experience.
Ensure that your response time is less than 30 seconds to deliver quality service and keep your customers happy.
One way to ensure timely response is by tracking response time as one of the performance metrics for your support agents. Holding them accountable for their response time will make your support team more likely to keep their turnaround time shorter and they would even pay attention if they are a few seconds late.
As your business grows, a lot of inefficiencies creep into the system. It’s important to keep your processes lean and efficient. Muda is a Japanese philosophy that believes in identifying and eliminating such wasteful activities, tasks, and actions from your processes.
One way to follow this philosophy is by setting up automated workflows and responses. So, if a user asks a common question, you can set up templated responses that your customer support tool will send them automatically. This way, your team won’t have to pitch in and instead, can focus on higher priority issues and questions.
Source: GrooveHQ
Setting up automated workflows is easy with the right tool. This would allow your customers to ask questions and be automatically directed to the right knowledge base article that can help them fix their issue.
You need to make it easier for your support agents to find the right answers without having to do their own research or check with other team members.
A wiki is a database of information that allows your team to document and reference knowledge and best practices about the work they do. So, your customer support wiki would consist of information about questions that users ask, common issues that are still being worked on, and even access to tools that support agents would need while working.
Here’s how you can create a support wiki:
Your customer support receives a lot of messages every day. They have the added pressure of having to respond to users with the right response within minutes of their message. You can simplify this process by setting up canned responses and message templates.
These responses can be copied by your support agents and used with some modification. Since users tend to ask a lot of common questions, the canned responses will make your agents more efficient.
Your support team can search your directory of responses and pick the right one instead of having to research and write out the entire response. It saves time and assures a better experience for your users.
There are two ways to save responses for a quick turnaround:
1. Add canned responses to your support wiki so that support agents can reference them and copy the response as needed. You can set these responses up when creating your wiki. You may also deploy AI in customer support to find the right canned response to deliver to your customer’s query.
How AI chatbots are used. Source: Statista
2. Save responses within your live chat software. Use tools that allow your support team to save responses and quickly pull them up while chatting with a user. With responses stored within your live chat tool, there’s less tab switching.
Not all problems require a chat with your support staff. You can make it easier for your users to find solutions to their own problems by building a knowledge base with a collection of articles they can search through. Users can then get the help they need through this help desk, whether it’s understanding how to use your product or learning why they are facing a common issue.
There are plenty of online helpdesk tools that come equipped with the ability to launch a knowledge base. When creating your knowledge base, here are a few best practices to adhere to.
Just helping users while they are on your platform isn’t enough. Be more proactive in helping them by sending weekly or fortnightly emails, keeping them in the loop about new updates to your product, scheduled downtimes, and best practices for using a specific feature.
However, too much of anything is never good. Also, depending on what you sell, your messages may not be top priority for customers. So, make sure that you set the right frequency for your email communications.
Although Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing tool out there, do check out the several alternatives on offer and pick one that fits your business requirements the best.
When crafting emails to your users, here are some best practices to make them worth a read and increase clicks back to your product:
There are always new issues and bugs to expect in any product. But how you tackle them and communicate this to your users can help you win their trust and build your credibility.
When such issues crop up, inform your users instantly and let them know that your team is on it. Set expectations for what problems they can expect, and give them an estimated timeline for when they can expect a resolution.
Here are a few ways to give users timely status updates about issues that haven’t been fixed yet:
Create internal processes that can expedite support response and resolution times. Here’s an example of a well-defined internal process that your support team can follow:
Giving an expected resolution date and time, and constantly updating the user makes it easier for them to rely on the business and trust your team to follow through.
Your customer support is a vital part of growing your business and by prioritising it, you can improve your responsiveness, boost customer loyalty, and increase revenue. We hope this guide helps you set up responsive customer support for your business.
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