Approaching customer support

You need to ask yourself a very fundamental question - what is the kind of support you want to provide as an organization?. For instance, are you going to take the “long answer approach” while responding to your customer? Long answer approach refers to answering the customers with detailed explanations and scenarios. It usually includes a few paragraphs, links to documentation, self-service videos, and more.

 

Or is it the conversational support approach? This kind of approach refers to keeping customer support conversational - via chat, email, social media. This approach usually doesn’t have a fixed response but is contextual and depends on the follow up questions and interactions with the customer.  However, the approach you take largely depends on the quality of support you want to offer. And the quality of support is not just about solving the customer’s problem but also about how easy it is for the customer to reach you.

forms for customer support

Customer support forms - to gate or not to gate?

The primary aspect of customer support is to be available where the customer is. The customer doesn’t want to cross several hurdles to just start a conversation with your support team. From that perspective, would a customer want to fill up a form on your customer support page and wait without a proper ETA? Absolutely not. They would rather want to instantly start a conversation with your support team and focus on getting a resolution. We’ re in the era of modern messaging and instant gratification - so forms are a definite “no” in customer support.

Customer support is all about experience

Customer support teams can improve the overall experience of the customer if they have enough context about the customer. Knowing the customer context refers to knowing a set of factors that will enable you to understand their situation, interest, choice, and more. That information in turn will help you customize your conversations with them in a meaningful way.

For example, imagine if your support agent knew that a customer visited your support portal and spent time on a page that talks about your product plans. With that context your support could start the conversation in much more meaningful way by asking “Can I help you with some information on how you can go about upgrading your current plan?”

Another approach is to automatically trigger conversations based on a customer’s actions. Live chat tools like Freshchat allow you to set up unique triggered messages based on the customer’s actions. For instance, you could trigger a message asking them if they’d like to get a free demo, based on the context that they spent quite some time on the feature page of your product.

 

Scaling customer support with bots

It is not feasible for support agents to be online 24/7. But that doesn’t mean that customers cannot get support during offline business hours. More and more businesses are adding chatbots to their support arsenal. And, there are several reasons to that. With the help of bots, you can respond to customer queries on scale, quickly and in real time. In fact, chatbots are part of most modern day live chat tools. These bots handle first level customer conversations and even suggest appropriate FAQs. Further, they can also specify a clear ETA by which the customer can expect a support agent to get back to them.

 

Next topic - Handling difficult conversations

What next?

Building your multichannel customer support

There are several touchpoints through which a customer interacts with your brand before making a buying decision. Be available on every channel where your customer is and increase your opportunities to converse with them.

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multichannel customer support