Customer support makes up just a portion of your overall customer service, but it plays a huge role in your business. Support includes every way that you and your team assists customers in choosing, using, troubleshooting, and maintaining the products and services you provide. When customers open a support ticket or call for assistance, they need help, and many times, they may be frustrated as well. How you and your team handle support directly impacts your business’s churn rate: stellar customer support increases customer retention exponentially, while lackluster efforts disintegrate your relationship with your customers.
Avoid automatic responses
You may find that most of your support requests fall into a few distinct categories, and all of those categories have pretty straightforward solutions. Therefore, it seems reasonable to develop boilerplate responses, minimizing work on your end and the amount of support staff you need.
Don’t do it.
While the answer may be the same, every single customer’s situation will be a bit different, and sometimes, that situation will be just different enough that they’ll immediately notice they aren’t getting a real response to their issue. According to a few studies, canned responses are one of the top reasons customers leave a company. Spend the extra time to address each customer personally, and you have a better chance of solving their issue and building trust.
Keep things light and casual
It doesn’t matter how technical the subject is, customers don’t want to feel like they’re being talked down to or that they’re dealing with a robot. A casual tone is not only what consumers overwhelmingly prefer, but it reminds the customer that they are dealing with a person just like them, potentially minimizing any outright anger or rudeness your support team needs to deal with.
Do as much of the work for the customer as possible
Do you want your customers to remain loyal to you even if they’re encountering a problem with your product or service? Then your support team needs to lessen the amount of effort a customer has to put in to solving their issue. For example, instead of:
- making a customer update their account preferences to eliminate a product issue, have your support team do it for them
- asking the customer to repeat details all over again to another, more experienced, support member, use customer relationship management software to instantly share details internally
- sending customers to your general FAQs page to find instructions for a fix, send them a link to the direct page they need or take the time to walk them through it personally, either via phone, chat, or a screen share
Don’t pass the buck, but be honest
Customers hate when a support representative says they’ll “transfer a request”: in their minds, that translates to “I’m going to have to repeat all of this all over again”. Your support team should have access to as much information as possible so they can handle tickets on their own; when they can’t, train them to handle as much of the issue as they can before turning to another member of the team. For anything they can’t handle, it pays to be honest. Instead of offering to transfer the ticket, be honest without giving up responsibility for the issue: i.e., “I don’t know how to solve this, but I will find out.”
As with every aspect of customer service, effective customer support demands that your team is well trained, understands your products and services, and is adept in clearly explaining solutions and calming frustrated customers. By keeping interactions personal, as casual as possible, and minimizing the customers’ workload, your relationship with your base will flourish.
