Customer support can make or break your company’s brand image. A customer’s encounter with your brand and the after-purchase customer support will go a long way in ensuring they return back to your business in the future.

Why customer support should be the key business strategy

Across the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. According to an Accenture report, 33% of customers who abandoned a business relationship last year did so because personalization was lacking. Enterprises across the globe have ascertained that they have started taking this a lot more seriously than they used to, because of the visible results. Kolsky has reported that 34% of companies are implementing “customer journey mapping” into their customer service. Brands are viewed more favorably by consumers if they proactively accept and take customer feedback. The business experiences further boost when they apply customer feedback and the results are discernible to the customers, making them feel valued. More than two-thirds of customers are also willing to share their personal information with companies but, in exchange for some perceived value. If companies do not value the importance of customer support and management, then 89% of the consumers have switched to doing business with another competitor citing poor customer experience.

How can you give your customer support the necessary boost?

Customer support was earlier seen as something that was tagged along with product support, but now customer support is a key performance indicator driving businesses. The objective of a robust customer support framework is to ensure your customers feel heard, feel valued, and respected and will go a long way in building a reputation for your brand. Not that effective customer support management does not come without investments, but an investment done today will ensure you reap benefits for a long time to come. 

But the application of the customer support management framework should not be haphazard. There should be a method in establishing its application and by a method, we mean an automated workflow and use of technology tools that will aid and assist in setting a regular process that happens sans any delays or roadblocks. Let us understand this further:

Listing out customer issues and handling based on priority

When you had just started, every customer problem was of top priority. You took every customer query in a chronological manner and tried to solve everything based on when it has been registered. But as your business grows, and your product and service offerings widen, this strategy will not work because if you pick chronologically, some important queries and issues might have to take a back seat before it is picked to be resolved. Hence at this juncture, prioritizing your queries will help you understand which queries should be resolved first in the order of their importance. Complex problems require more time and easier ones do not need much time.

Let your customers support themselves

Every organization should ensure that they provide self-support material to customers. For those consumers who are encountering simpler problems, having self-study materials to support themselves. User guides, FAQs, blogs, and articles can go a long way in providing the necessary support to clients. It will eliminate the need to register any complaint if it can get resolved by the customer himself. This will remove cluttering of any such queries which are redundant and will allow the customer support team to focus on high-priority issues, saving their time and energy.

Source: Quandora

Technology-backed customer support

To make your customer support management a successful reality it is important to invest in customer support software which will enable omnichannel customer communication, automated case management as well as a working space to ensure the work happens the way it should. 

By providing omnichannel customer support, your workforce is ready to deliver customer service across all communication channels which include, chats both mobile and video, email, phones, social media, discussion forums, and much more. Despite making strategies related to clear information across all communication channels, sound case management will help automate the entire customer issue resolution lifecycle. Right from the problem generation stage to assignment, escalation, reassignment, and closure, automation will help to ensure there are no delays in the process. At every stage of the problem, customers will be notified and kept in the loop so that it does not appear that their problems are not being attended to. 

Having a centralized working space for your customer support team will help ensure a methodical approach to problem-solving. A space to work, a system with all crucial customer data with past interactions will provide the necessary reference to the support team to make your customer support proactive in handling their queries and give them a finer base to interact on.

Keep track of the progress

Meeting client expectations is the most favorable position one wants to reach but always being able to do that is not a pragmatic thought process. But a well-designed customer strategy backed by robust software designed by a custom software development will help you to understand how successful your strategies are. Our technology tracking tools will help you keep track of the progress of all the customer queries which are on their way to getting resolved. Such tools will also record the performance of the customer support agents in handling queries.

How customer service technology will change the face of customer service?

Now that we have established the right way and tips to manage customer support management let us understand how different customer service technologies will revolutionize the way you handle customer queries.

Video communication will increase

Eye contact is a powerful way of expressing confidence in your offering. Customers will increasingly look at real-time voice conversation and consultation as a generation ahead in terms of technology usage. Having a video conferencing tool that will facilitate eye contact, real-time exchange of information will improve relationships. Hence video conferencing or hearing a customer query through a video is a viable business improvement tool for vendors. It is time to start using video voicemails now and scheduled meetings with customers should involve face-to-face meetings whenever possible. 

Demand for Omni Channel experience will surge

Your brick and mortar stores are not the only places where your customers will interact. Customers can engage with your company on a variety of digital mediums like social media, eCommerce, 3’rd party review websites, etc. The increased levels of accessibility will drive the need for omnichannel experiences. For instance, rather than allowing your customers to navigate away from your social media page, your service team can respond to them wherever they are engaging. Here, if the problem can’t be solved, the agents can transfer the case to another medium when the customer can find better support. This reduces the friction in-service experience 

Demand for AI-enable chatbots will increase

Chatbots and AI will be a game-changer for customer support with reps spending 905 o their time on repeating the answers to the same questions and helping customers with the same issues over and over again.

What about those questions that require judgment?

Machines can learn, train, and teach too. In the future customer service  agents will have to deal with only highly-prioritized and edge cases where bots can’t answer with the help of a knowledge base or a past history of customer questions. Once you render a support content public in the knowledge base, a bot can learn and deliver that information again and again when customers ask for it. In the grand scheme of things, when AI and Bots become a mainstream part of every customer-facing team, leaders then will be able to route customer support reps into the customer success organization because there will be less need for the repetitive answering of questions and a greater need for helping customers grow and derive value from the products and services they have already purchased. 

Chapter247 makes it easy!

With more than 7 years in application support, trust us to offer multi-tiered IT support for your applications and software products with little involvement from your side. If you need support in establishing an effective structure for your customer support then you are at the right place. Consult our team now!