Business customer support is all about taking care of your customers. How you do that depends on your ability to adapt to new options.
Online business basics remain constant while many aspects (and tools) vary dramatically. Understanding how to correctly perform online customer support is critical to delivering a great client experience. Here are six online customer service tips.
1. Consider your customer’s support needs.
Online customer service requires understanding what your customers expect from your support team.
Say you want to find a firm to host your website. If your site is down, you may want to see if they offer live chat. You don’t want to be directed to a ticket system or a forum. However, fantastic companies like Loco2 have removed their phone number from their website while still providing exceptional customer care.
Go where your customers are. In other words, if they’re already on your site, make sure they can receive help right there. Use an embeddable support widget such as Beacon. Therefore, clients are able to get help without leaving your site.
It’s easier to succeed by focusing on customer service channels. In many cases, email help is still preferred. However, understanding your clients’ needs is paramount.
2. Great customer service requires that you get out of their way.
Self-service may be a huge help to your clients, not a problem.
WooCommerce has one of the better examples. Owners of websites, many of whom are newbies, use Woo’s WordPress themes. If you’ve ever run a website before, even on a simple platform like WordPress, there are a lot of inquiries and frustrations.
What should Woo’s support team do? However, they wouldn’t have time to make themes if they had to answer every client’s question. Woo relies on onsite content to answer frequent questions, including documentation, best practices, FAQs, and video tutorials.
3. But don’t stop at content documentation.
Many organizations profit from the idea of “content as customer service.”
Help Scout has taken this to heart. They’ve created free e-books, webinars, and white papers to help people excel in customer service. Therefore, instead of generating a new reply for each customer, they have a comprehensive suite of content items that help them out.
Providing tons of valuable information to new visitors and potential consumers starts the Know-Like-Trust chain. This helps in converting random visitors into loyal customers.
4. Value your client’s time.
Do you know how long it takes for a first response? Do you know how long does it take to resolve? How many times does a consumer have to contact your staff before getting satisfactory answers?
The more you keep clients waiting, the more time they have to look at your competitors’ products. In addition, unless you’re already keeping an eye on your customer service KPIs, there’s probably some room for improvement. Make sure your help desk has powerful reporting tools to assist you to achieve your goals. Therefore, accept that online service is not robotic.
A nice tone (or any specific tone, really) is harder to convey via writing. You don’t have other signifiers like voice pitch swings or friendly body language.
Online customer service requires virtual empathy. Mirroring a customer’s tone helps them know you’re on their side. Similarly, mirroring creates rapport and eases your customer. This lowers the amount of interpretation required to understand your message.
5. Great customer care means knowing your product.
Because online customer care allows for more research than in-person or phone support, it doesn’t imply support personnel should rest on their laurels and only use documentation to assist customers.
Furthermore, like any real-world power user, front-facing personnel should know how your product or service works. Having a good product foundation not only allows you to support more clients faster. In addition, it allows you to understand their experience.
Of course, you can’t know everything. Even seasoned support pros need to consult engineers and designers on some topics.
6. Let others on your team provide customer service.
The flexibility of performing most support online is valuable. In addition, empowering your entire team to interact with clients and answer their concerns is vital to outstanding customer support.
Have everyone do support to develop a customer-centric culture. No long-term company-specific abilities are harmed.
In addition, each employee learns how to properly communicate with consumers. With this collaborative approach to customer service, you empower your staff to make decisions. Allow your workers to offer customer support to them without unnecessary red tape.
Put systems in place, but put your personnel on your customers’ team. Nothing creates client loyalty like this setup.
