We know that when it comes to your business, success comes down to how your customers view their experience with not only the product/service, but also with the customer support team. Because it's much easier to convert a current customer than someone unfamiliar with your brand, the goal of your business should be to ensure customers to come back monthly or yearly. Therefore, ensuring that churn is minimized is essential for business success.
In the past year, 49% of people have switched from a service provider or business because of poor customer support. Therefore, in order for your customers to remain satisfied and your business to be successful, exceptional customer support is key.
In marketing and business development, it’s always stated that you need to reach out to leads with the right content at the right time. This is the same when they have already agreed to be a subscribing customer! The best customer support comes down to being available to assist when your customer needs it, how they want to be in contact, and with the personalized help they need.
Because customer support and experience as a whole are extremely important if you want to continue growing, we’ve outlined ten customer support best practices that your business needs to know and implement.
1. Hire the Right People
Your customer support team is at the forefront of customer interactions. Whether you have an in-house customer support team or you work with an outsourced partner, you need to ensure they live up to the values you have set for the company as a whole.
You can’t stop there when it comes to customer support. If the organization as a whole doesn’t value customer experience and make training and continual improvement a priority, then that will ultimately trickle down to your agents.
Ensure that the people hired, at any organizational level, have a consistent belief and attitude around customer experience. This is essential because 73% of customers are likely to leave a brand if they feel the company doesn’t have consistent customer service and experience across departments.
2. Identify the right customer support skills and provide appropriate training
As experts in customer support and experience, we know that there are several key skills that every inbound agent must have. Then, there are some additional skills that elevate your customer experience even more.
For instance, empathy and timeliness are important when it comes to helping a customer because they want and agent to be able to put themselves in their shoes as well as fix their problems in a timely manner. These customer support skills along with nine others can be found in our customer support skills blog post!
3. Make sure your support link is easy to find
Do you enjoy spending excessive amounts of time trying to find a support link that actually takes you to the contact method you’d prefer?
No? Neither do your customers.
Improve your customer support and experience by ensuring that your support link is easy to find, ideally in multiple locations. Most common locations for support include the main menu, footer, or chat box in the bottom right of the screen.
4. Offer a variety of contact options for support for increased accessibility
Not only do you need to ensure support links are easy to find, you also need to link to methods of contact your customers actually want to use. These days it can be easy to say that the majority of your customer-base doesn’t like calling, but you can’t forget about the customers that still would rather have a conversation with another person!
Offering services such as chat, email, phone (voice and text), and in-app support can ensure that you’re meeting your customers where they want to connect.
Don’t know where to start in terms of what support to add first? Survey your customers! You’ll want to end up offering as wide of a variety of support as possible, but knowing what your customers want the most will help you decide where to start.
5. Create a FAQ and Self-Help Database
An inexpensive method of customer support is to add a FAQ page or portal onto your website. When 63% of millennials begin their customer service experiences online and 90% of people expect an online portal for customer support, this is likely their first place to seek assistance. You don’t need to include every potential question that could be asked about your company or product, but you should add the most frequently asked questions first.
A couple other benefits of a FAQ page include:
Decreasing agent support time spent on simple questions - If customers can solve an easy question just by performing a search on your website, your customer support agents are freed up to take on more complex and time-consuming problems.
Improves your SEO - With FAQ pages, the questions are oftentimes exactly what a customer is typing into search engines. Therefore, these highly-keyworded pages can improve your organic traffic and potentially bring in new clients!
6. Categorize customer support tickets
Organization improves efficiency, and efficiency allows your support team to help customers in a timely manner. Whether you have a drop-down menu for your customer to choose the category of their issue, or you automatically flag certain words, grouping inquiries will make it easier for support teams to find relevant, open questions and respond quickly.
7. Organize all customer complaints to one place
It’s never efficient for your customer support team to have to check one portal for email questions, another for chat, and another for phone. Ensuring that all customer support tickets can be found in one place not only helps your team easily navigate complaints, it also makes it easy to follow a contact trail for those customers who have multiple inquiries and spoke with different agents about the same issue.
Customers never want to repeat themselves over and over, so if your customer support agent can understand the problem prior to contacting, it’ll only make for a better customer experience.
8. Set your customer support standards appropriately and manage customer expectations
Exceeding customer expectations is always a good thing to strive for. However, in order to exceed expectations, you first need to set them. Figure out what is reasonable for your customers to expect from your support team, whether that be times and time zones available, when to expect a response, etc.
Once you set the standards for your customer support, you can then set out to exceed those expectations for your customers. Setting expectations isn't just to help you get systems in place to work to exceed them. This practice also helps your customers know when they can hope to hear back on their support ticket.
If a customer submits a ticket over the weekend and you make it known in the portal that your team only offers support Monday through Friday, the customer won't be upset that they didn't hear from your team until Monday. And if someone does reach out early on a Monday, this will only make the customer more excited due to the prompt response.
9. Ask customers to review customer support agents
Surveys and feedback are imperative for making improvements, which is why you can’t forget about CSAT surveys when it comes to your customers and their experience with your customer support team. Not only will the feedback help you improve support training to provide better customer experience, it’ll also show your customers that you actually value what they have to say and want to continuously improve. Asking for someone’s opinion and acting on it goes a long way in the customer’s eyes.
Next, share the reviews with your agents--both good and bad. Everyone likes to hear when they’ve done a good job, and that recognition is always appreciated. If the review is negative, always offer it up to you customer support agents with tips on how to improve, so they can take it as a learning experience to improve for next time.
10. Analyze data and determine action steps to take
Whether the data comes in the form of analyzing frequently asked questions or from a customer satisfaction survey, determining how to take action (even if the action is to not take any action) is the important next step.
Is this question frequent enough to add to the self-help database?
Do you need to provide additional training for your team?
Ensuring that collected data is used to improve customer experience will make for a better-performing support team, more satisfied (not to mention, repeat!) customers, and, ultimately, a growing company.
Incept is the Best Partner in Customer Experience
When it comes to customer experience, it's no surprise that companies that partner with Incept have satisfied customers. As we've discussed (and know all too well by now), a customer's experience with your company is a huge factor in whether or not they will stick around.
Incept brings true conversational marketing back to customer experience to improve the outcome of customer interactions, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth. Our conversational marketing solution means you don’t need to hire pricey consultants and wait for months to gain actionable insight into the customer experience.
We don’t settle for merely reaching your business goals. Our leadership, talent and culture are designed to deliver continuous improvement and business transformation. Our data and reports give you end-to-end visibility into the customer journey and enable us to design and deliver the optimal customer experience for your brand. We unify the customer experience by giving you the right innovation, deployed at the right time.
Want to take this information with you in a convenient pdf? Fill out the form below to get the guide!
Ready to improve your customer experience? Fill out the form below!
When more and more customers are willing to switch to a different brand due to poor customer experience, it's more important than ever to ensure high-quality support.
This guide not only goes over CX best practices but also gives you direction on how to implement them!