Your company’s reputation depends on excellent customer support. Even if you utilize tools like self-help, community forums, or automation, some customer issues still require a human touch. Although hiring staff can be costly, companies can’t afford to skip it if they are concerned about customer satisfaction.
Case management continues to play a critical role in preserving customer relationships while also feeding the product development process. Developing a well-defined customer support plan that encompasses several channels to meet customers where they are is essential to any business.
Related: The B2B Customer-Centricity Crash Course
Top Four Digital Channels, Ranked by Popularity
In today’s digital world, businesses need to make it easy for customers to access support through multiple channels. These can include ticketing, live chat, social media, email, and other means. It’s also imperative that companies know which support channels work best for their business model and are most useful to their unique customer base.
Current trends in customer support show that 79% of customer case submission is happening via digital channels. While digital channels are effective at capturing customer information, a company must be diligent in creating a process where the channel is capturing the customer information needed to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently.
1. Email
Behind traditional telephone support, the second most common form of case submission for companies that thrive on customer support is email. Email has proven to be effective for easy interaction between the customer and the support agent during an open case. However there are still some challenges with opening a new case as well as creating the proper structure needed to capture essential customer information at the point of initial interaction.
2. Web Form
A web form is preferred by many companies because it offers the customer the opportunity to utilize a structured process for entering all essential case information at the initial point of case creation. There are also some automated options available in a web form including the use of suggested answers to the most common questions. This can save time by deflecting the case before it is submitted and routed to a customer support agent. A well designed web case form can be a boon to any company’s customer support plan.
3. Live Chat
Chat has seen growing popularity among modern customer support services. In fact, 79% of businesses claim that offering live chat features has had a positive impact on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
Similar to the personalized touch of phone conversations, chat offers one-to-one conversations between the customer and the support agent to ensure that issues are resolved quickly. The benefit of implementing chat tools is the use of chatbots at the beginning of support conversations as a way to triage high-level support questions from the more common questions that have easy answers.
4. Social and Community
Community conversations have been used by marketing and/or product development teams as a way to monitor how customers are using the product. They are a great way to inform a company about the effectiveness of their product and services. Issues that cannot be addressed by the community can be sent to a customer support agent for quicker resolution.
Ready to Increase your CSAT?
TeamSupport is eager to work with companies that value customer support and how it affects their bottom line. We understand that resources are tight, but you can’t afford to miss out on one of the determining factors of business success.
Interested in learning more? Download our ebook, “Back to the Basics of Customer Support: Making a Plan to Maximize Support Efficiency” to learn more about upgrading your customer support software today.
Or better yet, schedule some time to talk to us today.
