Improving customer support includes choosing the right ways to get help, using online resources for self-service, and ensuring customer satisfaction is always the top priority. These are the best practices to improve customer support online, whether you’re just starting with your support staff or looking for new ideas to keep your approach fresh. So, let’s take a look at how to do it.
Be Simple To Reach
It’s the most ominous feeling in the world to be looking for an online customer service team and being unable to find one. Making it as comfortable as possible for people to contact you is essential. It’s easy to see why you might want to hide your contact form or phone number on a page you must click through a few times to get to if you need help.
But, you might lose customers if you don’t answer all their questions. Add a link to “Contact Us” or “Support” to the top navigation bar of your website instead. Make sure that search engines index your contact page so a customer can find it even when they are not on your site. Taking off your “invisibility cloak” might make people talk more, but it’s the best thing you can do for your customers.
Give your Workers the Power
Your online customer service team comprises of the people in your company who know the most about your clients. They do much more than answer questions and ensure people get help. Don’t limit what your staff can do to improve customer service.
Even though you can set up systems to make sure no one changes things randomly, you should still encourage your customer service staff to think about how things could be better and then offer ways to improve them.
No matter how well you know the business strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs), it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to change your day-to-day job from the bottom up to make it more meaningful for your customers.
Context Is Important
We’ve all been repeatedly annoyed by being asked to say the same thing. It might seem like bad customer service when a customer tells your staff about a problem they’ve already looked up in a knowledge base or a search engine. If you’ve talked to your support staff more than once, having to repeat yourself in front of a real person could be very frustrating.
To avoid this awkward situation, give your customer-facing staff more information about what’s happening inside the company. Customers’ interactions with your marketing, customer success, and customer support teams can be tracked in a CRM by asking your salespeople to make notes about their conversations with customers.
Keep track of customer conversations in the Help Desk, and tell your support staff to look at these conversations before starting a new chat with a customer. Even though these extra steps may seem like a lot of work at first, they are important if you want your clients to feel like you care about them.
Know your Good Points and Bad Points
Do you know how long it takes for your clients to hear back from you for the first time? How long it usually takes to get a case solved? How often they have to call you to answer their questions before they are happy? When customers have to wait longer to hear back from you, they are more likely to look at the products and services of your competitors.
Everyone knows that you can only control what you can measure. You will likely find ways to improve if you closely monitor your key customer service performance indicators (KPIs). Ensure your help desk has full reporting capabilities to get the desired results.
Always Keep Learning
Because online customer service gives you more time to research than in-person or phone support, support staff shouldn’t rest on their laurels and only use documentation to help customers. Forward-thinking employees should know everything there is to know about how your product or service works, just like a power user would.
With a strong product foundation, you can better serve your customers and earn their trust by understanding their problems and concerns and being an advocate for them. They will also save time because they won’t have to ask their coworkers for help and will feel more responsible for the technical documentation they produce.
Conclusion
Customers want you to know what you’re talking about, but they also want you to be honest and open. Instead of hiding a problem, it’s better to admit you made a mistake and fix it immediately. If you take the time to get to know your customers, they are more likely to support what you are trying to do.
Using polite and friendly language is one of the best ways to find things you have in common with someone. The best practice to improve customer support and an effective online customer service strategy is listening to your customers, team members, and even ideas from other departments.
