As your business grows, so will your need for an efficient customer support system. Here are some standard procedures you should follow to provide your customers and staff with the best possible experience.
Get the Right Program
Every business needs to choose superior help desk software to succeed. Instead of your team spending time on clerical duties like entering support tickets, they will be able to focus on solving problems for your customers. Look for software that can instantly turn customer emails into tickets, send password reset links directly to users and allow customers to have a user account on a self-service portal.
Give Customers Several Contact Options
Each user will have a contact method that they are most inclined to use. There are four different contact avenues that all companies should offer. You should permit customers to send messages to your organization through its social media pages. Your website should have an email listed or a contact form for customers to complete. It should also include a link that connects them to a live chat with your team. Some customers will be frustrated if you do not have a customer service phone number listed on your website. One optional method is for customers to be able to open tickets in your system themselves.
Build Forums and FAQs
You will find that your team spends time answering some of the same questions over and over. You can create a searchable database of commonly asked questions on your website. A customer forum can cut down on your team’s workload as well. Your users can find solutions to problems from your employees as well as other customers on a forum. You will usually spend less time moderating a forum than having your staff answer every customer question.
Recruit and Maintain an Excellent Team
It is best to hire employees that have a solid background in customer support. You will spend more on salary for a veteran customer service representative, but you will save money on training. Typically, these employees will stay with your company for a longer period of time than entry-level staff.
Your software will usually allow you to see the average time it takes to resolve a ticket after it enters the system. If you see that this average time is much longer than you would like, or your employees report that they are overwhelmed, you should create more job openings in your department. Otherwise, the highly-skilled employees that you hired may burn out, leading to substandard customer experiences.
Some organizations do not concentrate enough of their attention on building and sustaining employee morale. Retain your employees by offering exceptional benefits and providing team building activities. Set aside time to solicit and discuss employee feedback.
Streamline Your Processes
You could have a system where each representative takes on whatever ticket is next in line. However, this would quickly become inefficient. Every member of your staff would need to have extensive knowledge of all of your products or services. Instead, you can divide your teams into dedicated groups, each centered on a particular area of your company. Your software should be able to categorize tickets and send them to the right group immediately.
This includes automatically connecting a customer who has previously contacted you to the same team member each time.
If you build the database of answers to frequently asked questions described above, you can use those answers to set up email templates. When a customer emails your team with one of these questions, your software should send out the corresponding email template right away. This will reduce the burden on your staff of having to answer these questions manually.
