- December 21, 2021
- by Last expert
- Blogs, Customer support
- 0 Comments
Running a customer service department might be more difficult than you think; keeping customers pleased isn’t always straightforward, and maintaining employee morale can be difficult as well. There will always be clients that are dissatisfied. The key is to keep them as happy as possible so that they will return.
With advice, tips, and tactics, as well as a systematic strategy. Then we’ll show you how to do it in the simplest method possible.
Here are some of the most important aspects of your assistance that you may design and should address as soon as feasible.
Style
One of the most important questions you must ask yourself is what kind of help you will supply. One possibility is to take the “one big answer” method. This entails attempting to respond to each customer contact with a comprehensive response that addresses every possible scenario; for example, your response could be five or six paragraphs long, include links to your documentation, and even include an embedded video explaining how to use the feature in question. Although it is thorough, there is no reason to engage in back-and-forth dialogue with the customer. A dialogue with your consumer is an alternative, whether it’s via email, in-app communications, or over the phone. You strive to get to the bottom of the problem, and if necessary, you ask further questions or offer recommendations.
Voice and tone
The way you intend to communicate with clients is closely tied to the type of help you intend to provide. Consider your company voice (for example, formal and restrained or easygoing and chatty?) as well as the tone for different scenarios (for example, reacting to a customer who has been overcharged versus interacting with a customer on Twitter). You might wish to ask yourself the following questions:
What level of formality do you desire in your customer communications?
Will you use a conversational tone in your writing?
Should you use emojis and animated gifs in your communication?
While it’s critical to have certain principles in place, it’s also crucial not to be overly restrictive. The last thing you want is to build a team of robotic customer service employees who follow a script of prepared messages, never assisting or sympathising with customers, only systematically following orders.
Quality
You can choose the quality of your help, which may appear to be rather subjective. Some organisations rely more on customer satisfaction or quick responses than others, but who you recruit has a big impact on the level of support you can provide.
Even if it’s simple, well-structured and resourced user onboarding can help teach your support personnel to respond to your customers’ demands quickly and effectively. However, training someone to be resilient, compassionate, capable of efficiently managing situations, and to thrive under duress for long periods of time while being upbeat and hopeful is difficult, if not impossible.
For a long time to come, the quality of your support experience will be influenced by your early recruits and their influence on the support team’s value system and workflows. Make good decisions and make certain they have the procedures, plans, and leadership in place to succeed.
Speed
In an ideal world, every time a customer had an issue, they would be able to speak with a polite and educated support representative in real time (often with live chat support). But reality sets in, and we all know that’s not going to happen. So, consider how critical speed of reaction is to you. And how may you use expectation-setting and/or automated techniques to provide your clients with some alternatives while they wait for your staff to arrive?
“Speed, like coverage and language support, is mostly a financial issue.”
Consider it from your consumers’ perspective: how important is speed of first response against time to truly resolve the issue? You should also think about what competitors or challengers in your industry are offering.
Speed, like coverage and language support, is mostly a financial issue. You’ll be able to answer your clients’ questions faster, in more languages, and at all hours of the day and night if you hire more people. Whatever you choose, keep track of your average response times and time to first response to evaluate if you’re on schedule to meet your objectives.
Coverage
Will you be available for assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Or do you believe 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday will suffice? Keep in mind that even the most business-oriented enterprise software packages are used outside of working hours. What are your plans for the holidays? Will you give skeletal coverage or none at all over the holidays?
Language
What languages to support and when to start supporting them can be a tricky decision.
Whatever your feelings about it, the truth is that English is the global software industry’s lingua franca. If you’re in the B2B area, you can probably get by with only serving customers in English; Intercom, for example, has over 25,000 paying customers in over 90 countries and only supports them in English.
If your customers are international, you’ll need to start thinking about serving them in their native language far sooner. Another thing to think about is your worldwide marketing strategy. You can utilise a variety of services to translate your website into multiple languages, but you should consider the ramifications for support if you do so.
Process
Things will break as you scale if you don’t have solid processes in place, and your customer service will suffer as a result.
You must ensure that team members feel empowered to make the necessary decisions. At the very least, you should ensure that you have procedures in place for:
Emergencies:What constitutes an emergency, and who should be notified? When and how will they be informed?
Escalation:Not only for emergencies, such as product issues, but also when do you need to call in a product engineer?
Communication: how do members of the team find out about stuff?
Refunds: under what circumstances will you issue them and who processes them?
Security: e.g. if someone asks to reset their password how do you verify their identity?
While your procedures will need to alter and evolve as your company grows, it’s far easier to put them in place now than it is to try to graft them onto work practises that have grown organically and are deeply embedded in your support team’s culture. As the team grows, the method makes it easier for everyone to perform well. No one is left in the dark about what they need to do; in a variety of situations, it’s obvious what they need to accomplish. You may also benefit by learning customer level in customer support.
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