If you are looking at succeeding in today’s business environment, you got to accept that there are lots of new choices for the customers. So you essentially need to compete with numerous competitors as well as ensure that your product is better than most in your fields. Same goes for your support services. I personally know friends who willing pay a higher subscription cost purely because they are assured of a high quality customer support. A CRM solution ensures that you have a record of all your customers and speedily attend to most of their concerns faster and in appropriate manner. A helpdesk solution combined with CRM solutions essentially the key towards success.
As I see it, a customer having a problem is both an opportunity as well as risk. Opportunity, as in if served quickly and in appropriate manner can lead to referrals and great word of mouth branding. Risk is of course that of attrition and bad publicity. This article puts you in the customer’s seat and enumerates the ways you organization can serve customers better.
Top ways to ensure a rocking customer support
The points mentioned below are my own learning from projects as well as real life examples. I don’t claim that these are easy and can be done overnight. What I can vouch for is that if done correctly, they can surely impact your customer satisfaction levels, referrals levels and growth rate in a positive manner.
1. Multi-channel support mechanism
After all, it must be easy for the customers to be able to reach the support desk. You must think about the possible channels how the customers would want to reach you. The usual channels website and call center number are more of a hygiene factor. How about a SMS or missed call. Do you have a mobile app? Would you want your customers to be able to register a complaint using it?
2. Helpdesk Automation
More the number of channels of capturing the support requests / complaints, the better it is from the customer’s perspective. However, what you do next is the key. Having tickets routed to the appropriate team so that they can run with the ticket. But what you can also do is to enable them to solve problem faster by asking a few details from the customer
- Emotion – Some times its important to understand how customer is feeling so that you can actually calm down the agitated the customer by prioritizing their tickets
- Category – You may have the support desk divided into multiple teams. It must be wise to ask what kind of ticket it is. Automated routing saves tremendous time and eliminates unnecessary routings.
- Screenshot – A picture can speak a thousand words. Having a provision to attach a screenshot or a file helps in understanding the problem and solving it much faster.
- Customer background – Of course, you can’t ask this from the customer; however your support desk must have access to the customer record so that for example they can see if the problem has occurred before or let’s say the subscription level of the customer.
3. Knowledge Base
Having a knowledge base vastly reduces the ticket creation and serves as a repository of artifacts which the customers can refer to themselves before raising the issue. This self help feature can be classified with appropriate keywords so that searching them becomes easy.
What’s next
If you are looking at implementing a world class customer support, you must charter the following course of things. Steps are sequential, thus for meaningful result / you must not skip any of these even if it takes time
- Having the IT infrastructure
The software part consists of having a CRM solution which could be integrated with possible channels. Most of them have the possibility to export / import customer data. Having this ready means you can now capture support requests in a single system and track all aspects in a single platform.
- Team organizing and Automation Rules
Organizing team into groups is a productivity measure you must stress upon. You can have one person into multiple groups; however, this step makes the ownership for every ticket lie with the respective team.
- Monitoring the SLAs
Having service level agreements ensures that you support desk is agile and able to resolve issues within targeted timelines. You may also want to enforce the team to respond to customer issues and acknowledge that they are working on the request.
What can we do for you?
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