When running a business, attracting customers is one thing; but retaining them is another thing. There are many things you can do to keep customers coming back, but none is as important as providing them with efficient customer support.
Simply put, customer support includes all services that businesses provide customers to help them solve their problems and get the most of products or services they’ve purchased or availed. Customer support also involves responding to customer questions, assisting them to onboard successfully, upgrading them to new products or services, and even troubleshooting issues they might encounter along the way.
With customer support playing an important role in retaining customers, how can businesses ensure that customers get the support they need round the clock? Below are five ways to improve customer support.
1. Create A Customer Knowledge Base
When customers encounter challenges, they want these resolved as quickly as possible. Before they reach out to the customer support team, most customers attempt to fix issues by themselves by searching high and low, mostly on the Internet.
To address this specific concern, you may create a customer knowledge base with articles that outline the solutions that our customers might need along the way. Make you articles SEO-friendly by using keywords and interlinking them with one another. This will ensure that the pieces of content you put out will rank highly on search engines, making it easy for your customers to find the help they need.
To ensure that your knowledge base content is relevant to customers, make use of the questions or issues that customers report to your customer service team by incorporating them into articles that provide step-by-step guidance on resolving those problems. Use visual content formats, like screenshots, videos, and images, and keep your knowledge base content updated at all times.
2. Train Your Customer Support Team
In any business, the customer support team plays a critical role in solving customer problems. Their work involves interacting with the customers via different communication channels. As customer-facing staff, they should have an in-depth understanding of your product or service offerings, as well as be able to exceed the expectations of customers and resolve conflicts. While hiring support staff who have the right personality is critical, it’s equally important to train them well to ensure that they’re well-equipped with the skills and information they need to help customers resolve their issues.
3. Make It Easy For Customers To Reach Your Support Team
In today's highly competitive business environment, customers have many options. That’s why to keep people coming back to your business, make it easy for them to reach your support team. One way of doing this is getting a toll free, 1-800 number that allows them to call your company's support team at no cost. If you haven't gotten one already, consider applying for one with a reputable service provider, such as Kall8.
In addition to calls, consider using multiple communication channels. The reality is that not all customers prefer to reach your support team via calls whenever they experience challenges. There are others who’d rather reach you through your website contact forms, social media, emails, and even live chats. To improve customer support, empower your support team with the tools and skills they need to provide quick responses to customers who reach out to your company through all these channels.
4. Use A Ticketing Software
An effective way to improve customer support is to get a ticketing software. With this kind of software, you'll be able to log customer issues as they’re reported and route them to relevant support staff for resolution. Issue ticketing software also makes it easy for support teams to follow-up on unresolved issues and even automate customer responses for issues that are reported via emails or live chats.
A ticketing software improves efficiency in resolving customer issues while relieving the support team of routine tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic customer support activities, such as supporting high-value clients.
5. Create An Online Community
While every company should have a customer service team, they can improve their support services by facilitating peer-to-peer support. Customers have a lot to learn from one another. You can leverage this ability by creating an online community that not only links customers, but also provides them with space to interact with one another. They can use this platform to share questions or issues they encounter with your offerings and get advice and tips on how to resolve those issues.
Final Thoughts
Whether your business sells products or offers services, providing support to your customers is inevitable and essential. With the business environment becoming more competitive and customer expectations of support services increasing significantly, providing customer support can take a toll on companies that rely wholly on support teams. The good things is that there are practical steps that you can take to enhance customer support. To start meeting the support needs your customers have, start implementing the five things discussed above.
