Tag: custom

5 Steps to Improve Customer Support

Posted on by Supportbench

Every business seeks to improve customer support for customers who are the best and most valuable to the brand.

And every business has a second set of customers who are the best and most loyal to the brand but who might also be a bit less valuable.

Your best way to capture and retain both sets of customers is to invest and improve customer support.

Customer support works for both types of customers, but there’s one thing that separates them: A great customer service culture. And it can go a long way toward improving your bottom line.

You can have a killer customer support culture in your company without getting fancy. If you look at your customer support data from the analytics side of things, you’ll see there are a lot of actionable skills and behaviors that your team has that could be scaled up.

But we often hear business owners say, “I can’t afford to train my customer support team” – which is often the underlying belief of most small business owners.

The cost to improve customer support and training a remote team is often very low, but having a basic training program built into the organization from the beginning is the only true path to customer support success.

When new customers come through the door, it can take an extra minute for a support representative to kind of nurture them into a loyalty brand advocate. So, you don’t want to set up a support team that is ignorant of products and services and can’t then reinforce a user-friendly brand experience.

Instead, look at the bulk of your inbound communication as a customer onboarding process. You’re going to want to prepare and train your people to come to your consumers as experts in your brand and in your products and services – but a great customer service culture starts well before those people become members of your team.

Every support representative brings some kind of unique attributes that make them uniquely suited to help your customers. And with real customer experience leadership the organization can scale insights up into employee behaviors, communication, knowledge management and improve customer support.

A unified customer support framework can dramatically increase both customer success and revenue growth. You don’t have to hire people at every individual level for the support organization to be successful.

Luckily for you, there are platforms like Supportbench to help you grow your brand and scale your team in a way that gets results. Even “shy” teams can be refactored to deliver a better experience – and then scale up as needed. Now is the perfect time to get training right.

A lot of high-growth companies are growing their customer support teams, but they’re also ramping up their engagement platforms to support a growing customer experience.

Your business can succeed while never losing its long-term focus on customer satisfaction and value to your customers.

The road to a customer-centric company begins by better understanding the interests and values of your customers and making every interaction with them feel more relevant. Following an agile, iterative approach to customer support can help you change how and where you support your customers to support that effort.

Here are five tips to foster a winning customer service culture:

1. Listen to your customers

Listen for and actively invite feedback from your customers to understand what’s important to them and uncover opportunities to improve how you provide service. Have your customer success team play active listening to customers as you work with them to understand the performance of your products and services, identify and solve recurring challenges that may be preventing customers from reaching their goals, and better predict the next level of conversations and service visits.

2. Understand the business and your internal infrastructure

Employees, product, and business teams all have different operating requirements and goals. People are passionate about their products and services; sales teams are very motivated to increase bookings.

Sellers are incentivized to make a sale and keep their commission as an indication of product success. There are many factors that come into play that affect your service team’s success that vary from the needs of your product management team to employees’ affinity for technology and customer success resources.

Before you can help your customers, you need to first build up your customer support team to adapt to the needs of your organizations.

3. Don’t be too rigid

There are many good reasons you want to offer the highest level of customer support you can, but you need to implement a plan that works in all departments. Start by hiring for who you want to be.

When you have your ideal customer, go for it!

But not all companies want to attract customers that way. Help as many as you can, but remember that your customer success team isn’t set up for fixing problems.

Be flexible and have a plan that uses a consultative, “we’ll explain your problem to you” approach instead of a one-way mode where they’re filling in every single need the customer has with solutions.

4. Use metrics to guide your conversations

You’ll quickly discover that there are many metrics to keep in mind when working with your customer support team. Talk to your customer success team about what metrics matter most for them so they can improve customer support.

Develop a communication plan to identify bottlenecks that could limit speed of resolution. Build those metrics into your employee performance and evaluation plans to improve customer support.

5. Focus on quality

The easiest way to take a task off your plate is to eliminate it completely. If there’s something that you’re spending your time on that isn’t worth it or could be done quicker, start by reducing the frequency of that conversation. Make a plan to track all feedback and help sell solutions instead of solve every customer ’s issue.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How to take care of your customer from start to finish

Posted on by rpsstudios

Find out more about how you can take care of your customers and become a top industry player by presenting your innovation in a compelling way.

We’ve compiled tips on how to plan the best customer experiences for your organization. There are a lot of different ways to create excellent customer experiences.

But here’s what we’ve found is the best method:

Incorporate ‘conversation-centric’ thinking into your product design

Know the questions that your customer will be asking and answer them. Understand the customer’s needs by focusing on those core needs before thinking about any elements of the experience.

Conduct digital surveys

One of our customers used Amazon Kiva robots to collect customer preferences. Our customers’ service, which develops video conferencing systems, utilized Kiva’s speech recognition technology to create computer-generated responses. These responses were then used to build customized consumer surveys.

Use data analysis and intelligence

Data-driven behavior change should start with intuitive, sustainable features. Support teams evaluate which features are attracting and retaining customers in real time and create customized product features based on customer reactions and take care of your customer.

Cast your net wide

Create lists of target audiences and use the insights to create rich and engaging content. Don’t just focus on your own market — think about other customers, market segments and existing media use.

Use content that encourages conversation

Intentional content facilitates the ‘ask-ask-ask’ exchange. Start early with survey questions. Your team need to understand the intent of the user and continually test interactive content to make it more effective.

Keep it simple

Make it quick and simple for customers to take advantage of your service or product. Be sure that the interaction is straightforward and use easy-to-understand customer journeys to guide you through your customer journey mapping process and take care of your customer.

Set clear objectives

Define clear customer outcomes and measure results. Focus on the needs of the customer and draw from this information.

Make it happen

Promote your service and product and actively encourage the customer’s participation. Set a frequency of contact to enable your team to get to know the customer more and make them feel valued and valued for their ongoing engagement.

Make it that way

Don’t anticipate customer objections. Don’t try to be perfect all the time — learn from your experiences and make adjustments as you go. Also, be mindful of attrition rates — don’t get pushed to focus on this too much.

Invest in ideas

If you use a client facing technology, consider your team’s ideas. Creative projects are a great way to change your attitude to ideas — and maybe add to them.

Build a sustained value proposition

When delivering results you need to persuade your customers why you are worth the price. With the internet, everyone can shout over your deliverables. Spend time to get to know your customers, listen to their needs, and use this to your advantage. Set a service expectation to properly take care of your customer.

Provide a service expectation based on your customer’s relationship with the company — how do you measure this? How do you make sure that you are delivering this consistent experience day in day out?

Look at complex issues

Find out what ‘the way things were’ looks like, especially in complicated scenarios such as demographic data, market segmentation, geography and technology trends. What are the various ways to deliver better business outcomes if you can bring complexity to the table? Then set steps that build the structures for this.

Be innovative

Look to the latest technologies to create better customer experiences.  Undoubtedly, you’ve learned something during your eight years building your platform. So you know the tricks for delighting your customers.

But what about the dirty work? When you talk to your customers about how they think your service should work for them, how do you know which stories and techniques really matter? When you catch customers doing great things, you know that there’s still plenty you can do to empower them to care for your users.

Take a step back and answer these five questions to understand what’s working for your customers:

1. How can my customers use my service to help them achieve their goals?

What are your customers’ top priorities? Know which features they’re using to achieve their goals. Try out Supportbench’s platform to find out which features are particularly useful to your customers. Think about the features you could add.

2. What differentiates my customer from the competition?

We have our customer personas in place, but you still need to examine how your customers behave. Study successful companies and think of the customer as a whole – which features fit most naturally to the culture of your company?

3. What is success like for my customer ?

This is probably the most important question.

Take a step back and think about what success looks like for each member of your company – it might be a goal or objective, or simply making someone’s lives easier on a day to day basis.

4. What is success for me?

Remember to build this question into your plans – make sure you can measure your own success, otherwise you may feel like you aren’t making progress towards your goal.

5. How do I have the power to influence my customers?

This question is about empowering yourself and seeing who you can influence. Think about how can you bring additional value or delight to your customers experience.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and take care of your customer? Contact us today!

The Importance of Customer Feedback

Posted on by Supportbench

Try to nail your first one as you get started, then expand your customer experience across the rest of your customer base. Whether it’s using technology to enhance your customer experience or a discussion starter campaign, there is a whole slew of customer feedback to make sure your website is leading the way.

Here are six things you need to keep in mind when creating a delightful customer experience:

1. Customer service should extend beyond the website

The website should be a great starting point for creating a customer experience, but it shouldn’t be the end of it. You should always try to touch customers’ lives beyond the website. Take feedback online, offer multiple choice options in surveys or use a chatbot to speak with customers in more convenient ways.

Additionally, do keep in mind the customer’s journey from customer decision-making through customer service.

Want a better understanding of what people are thinking about your brand? Delve into customer feedback data and try to identify the phrases, feelings, impressions, and conversations your customers have with each other while they’re experiencing your brand.

2. Navigate the Customer Lifecycle Strategically

To create a memorable customer experience and ensure ongoing engagement, think through the customer lifecycle with a long-term view. Understand what your customer wants in the first moment and what they want in the future before you start your conversation.

Then serve them in a way that gives them the best chance to purchase or become a happy customer. Look at past success stories from your customers, determine which issues are most relevant to your business model, and design your customer journey to align with their feedback. For example, for a lending software business, if you wanted to acquire new customers, you would conduct in-depth interviews with potential borrowers, ask them about their financial goals, and measure their financial performance over time.

3. Create a repeatable sequence that sells

While there’s nothing wrong with giving people product ideas on a whim, offer a consistent and clear selling sequence that mimics this essential marketing principle. Not only is this incredibly valuable to your customers, but it also allows your content to generate unique user value, automatically aligning your content with what people find meaningful.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and identify your unique selling point.

4. Market your content when your customers are talking

Everyone loves content, so all you have to do is offer up unique content to people who are thinking about it. The magic is creating relevant content for people at different stages of their customer journey by examining conversations that your brand is already having on social media.

You could compile a wealth of knowledge that you can spin into engaging content for your prospects, and use a simple algorithm to promote it to people waiting for more information.

5. Create a Conversation by Starting Conversations

Be proactive in your customer experience by creating a conversational tone so that you can both get more interaction with your customers and maintain control over your brand’s reputation. If your customers notice that you’re being proactive, they may start using their questions to convey their own thoughts or turn them into delightful content. Mention key topics of interest during a conversation with your customers, encourage questions, and respect their privacy by not sharing any confidential details.

6. Cultivate a customer community

Community members can boost a client’s visibility on social media, create anticipation around events, and even promote your brand to highly influential individuals. Those customer s can also participate in live Q&A sessions, recommend your products and services, and become advocates for your brand.

Over the past year, we’ve worked with our customers to create a number of experiences that are amazing, and that ultimately lead to happy customers. The following are our Customer Success success tips and insights from observing these experiences. Approach the customer in the most impactful way possible

The best customer experiences live up to the name, and then some. They’re emotional. They tackle problems in some creative and innovative ways. Whether it’s a simple thank you or going above and beyond to delight a customer, crafting messages that force a customer to open their eyes and give a soulful response, can lead to something extraordinary. We urge our customers to take this tip to heart, and to approach every customer the same.

When creating customer experiences that deeply delight customers, make them feel they have truly been listened to, and that you’ve understood their needs. Let your problems speak for themselves

The great thing about creating better customer experiences is that customers are happy to share them with others. When creating customer experiences that are easily resonant with customers, they are more likely to share these with their peers – customers beyond your customer base. This means a better customer experience can eventually lead to greater success. Our customers make excellent use of these experiences to increase their growth, including the post-incident customer experience; ensuring that customers are brought back to their desired action following a product transition; and helping to increase repeat customers. Deliver complex, repeatable customer experiences

Customer success managers often struggle to stay on top of their customer’s needs, because they need to try so many new things to drive the greatest impact. This is a natural part of starting a new company – and the importance of having that variety of customer experiences – but, it can still mean that your efforts can fall short.

A good customer success manager will be able to automate a customer’s interactions with your product by implementing and testing many different customer experiences. They should also be able to provide hundreds of new versions of the same customer experience that they’ve tested. For instance, you could use your customer’s complaint feed to provide a whole new, specific customer experience – without any of the work of attempting to generate new problems. Provide support for a longer period

Once customers are happy with your product, it’s important that they stay committed to your product. We must advocate for product adoption from the customer in the form of frequent self-support and training, and they are much more likely to stick with your product as long as you make every effort to help them along the way. It is also important that customers are able to seamlessly transition their support needs between solutions – particularly post-incident support. They should see no need to jump between products or training channels in order to obtain support, and even in the event that they need more support, we aim to educate them using Customer Success to ensure they are able to find the right person for the right support.

Continue to review, and reflect on these customer experiences as they happen

Most of the customer experiences you create with customers will never be perfect. We encourage our customers to take the time to constantly review, and evaluate their customer experiences. Regularly capture and document customer feedback, which should focus on both the process and the outcome. You should always encourage direct conversation with customers, so your Customer Success team can work through their conversations and provide any insights that may add to the customer experience. Once you have the feedback, use it to inform next steps – but make sure to focus on gathering and recognizing the insights that tell you what is working well for your customers, and what isn’t.

Our Customer Success team is designed to play this role, which is an important one.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and get reliable customer feedback? Contact us today!

Customer Feedback is Critical to Customer Success

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Does the word “customer success” even make you cringe? If you say it a lot, you know that even though it feels nice to praise your customers, the “thank you” can feel empty. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that what mattered the most to a customer is providing something of utmost value. In customer experience management, feedback matters.

We conducted research with the relevant sources, such as customers, analysts, and researchers; and designed a dozen customer surveys, with content that combined detailed questions, applications of observable behaviors, and social media in order to improve customer success.

These surveys, along with every piece of content created for customer communication, were then developed to reflect the following customer-centric metrics and insights:

Retention: Is the experience your customers have with your organization consistent with their feelings of a strong relationship?

Customer Satisfaction: How will your organization’s actions enhance your customer’s lifetime value, and will it be worth it for a business with only 100 customers to pay for the lifetime value of one customer?

Sales Opportunities: Do customers leave your business in large numbers because they encounter their best opportunities elsewhere?

Vision: Does your organization have enough leadership clarity, resources, and vision?

Innovation: Are your customers adopting new systems and processes when they realize you don’t offer this feature?

Data-Driven Approach: Is your organization committed to providing the best outcomes for customers with the right data, facts, analysis, and outcomes?

Connections: Do your organization’s customers feel heard, understood, and believed in?

Visionary Leaders: Are your organization’s leaders courageous enough to trust the customer and to think long-term about the future of your brand?

Providers: Do customers perceive your business’s providers as allies or competitors? If you’re new to the concept of customer experience management, or if you’re new to online customer engagement, we have some suggested ways to get started.

We also give you a glimpse of what we’re doing to help other businesses succeed, alongside our customer success centric approach for every page of a blog post.

What if you could create exceptional customer experiences with less effort?

Not possible? Better use existing customer data to offer customer actions that seem more convincing and have better chances of customer satisfaction.

We’ve all had those customer experiences – that annoying, ill-informed person who just won’t make a change despite the experience being horrendous. Or let’s say there are many issues and the issue with each person is different, so to say that there isn’t one right solution is to do a disservice to the customer and it’s customer success metric.

It’s a problem that all businesses face when trying to think of valuable customer insights that can enable better business decisions. Reality check

Research analyst IDC stated that the potential value of a customer experience is $117 for each dollar spent, and a new report by Forrester found that companies with an exceptional customer experience win 73% of their customers back, while losing only 8% of their customers.

They found that in order to create better customer experiences, businesses need to have customer data available to them from the very beginning. More than three quarters of companies surveyed said they had some kind of customer intelligence product and software to collect and analyze customer data and improve customer success.

Different businesses need different solutions in place to drive better customer experiences. Plus, they are not simple to implement and could be expensive, which most businesses simply do not have time for.

Fortunately, there is technology out there to help business understand their customers better.

Supportbench has a growing ecosystem of solutions that businesses can use to enhance their customer experiences, taking customer feedback even further. Supportbench works by building and connecting experiences with businesses across multiple channels and to various companies in real-time.

We are confident that if you are currently using a customer intelligence solution, you are missing out on the benefits of this technology in order to drive better customer experiences. Make the most of customer intelligence

The answer to creating exceptional customer experiences is giving customer insights a chance to shine. Whether that means identifying marketing shortcomings or finding more relevant ways to connect a customer with the right employee when a customer has specific issues.

We work with the top brands in the world to create great customer experiences, from 3M to Budget and these companies are setting great business goals by creating insights that can help them do just that.

Here are some of the top ways in which companies are using customer intelligence software:

When it comes to implementing new features, Supportbench creates customer success solutions that embrace the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things to understand how people are actually using the app. By helping a team understand what a new feature needs to do to ensure success, businesses are able to take steps to protect their customers and drive improved functionality. Intercom users are able to put customer insights into action through real-time action actions. Identifying and improving applications with customer insights can help increase work efficiency and reduce time spent on manual tasks. Transform a customer experience by continually learning from user feedback.

As a result, you can solve multiple critical business problems, making it possible to turn failures into successes and failures into discoveries.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and build customer success? Contact us today!

How to Boost Your Customer Support Team Performance

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Your company’s customers should benefit from a culture that expects them to succeed in their efforts to purchase from your customer support team.

A winning customer service culture implies that people that work for your company have a highly flexible and approachable attitude towards providing service to customers. In turn, this will not only cause your business to grow, but it’ll also result in your customer base becoming more satisfied with you and your customer support team in a unique way

Knowing how to build a winning customer service culture in your company will be essential if you’re looking to attract and retain clients. However, there are plenty of things that you can do to ensure that your company’s customer service culture is seamless.

It starts with building employee engagement

Employee engagement is extremely important in the workplace. As the saying goes, people buy from the people, not the company. Therefore, if you can deliver a high-value customer experience to your employees, then it will lead to other benefits that you can’t anticipate.

This includes lower turnover rates, higher productivity, and improved customer retention. It can also mean making more informed decisions within your customer support team, further increasing the effectiveness of your marketing and sales teams, and even reducing technical challenges you could face while trying to sell something.

Therefore, it’s important to build employee engagement into your overall strategy for creating a winning customer service culture. This will help you to expand your business through existing and potential clients. When you can keep your current employees more engaged, you can be sure that they’ll share your vision of your company and work toward improving their business processes.

It’s also vital to have some sort of employee training program in place if you want to build a winning customer service culture.

Train your employees on processes they’ll find easier to use as well as on the available tools they’ll need for their work. For instance, you should have an in-house training program for employees in customer service and sales so that they can provide you with a consistent quality service.

For example, the team at Windmill Foundry, a solar integrator, claims that their customer retention rate has increased by nine percent thanks to their customer training program.

It also pays to run some internal surveys to gauge what the key issues of the organization can be improved upon. Ask staff about their level of satisfaction with company policies and procedures, which can be found on the company website.

Ask employees what their customers want to see more of and it can show you what your company’s goals for building a winning customer service culture really are.

A great way to streamline processes and make your customer service department more effective is to find a customer service platform like Supportbench, that can help you automate and streamline certain tasks. A customer service platform can be set up to handle particular tasks, such as responding to inquiries or writing orders, and when used correctly, it can boost your productivity as well as cut down on other employees’ work time.

This could be valuable if you’re looking to automate tasks that are unrelated to core business tasks such as responding to customer queries. We see our customers use the Supportbench platform to help streamline a number of different tasks:

Chat – This conversational tool facilitates online communication with your customer support team using text or email, and you can set it up to handle the majority of your customer service inquiries as soon as they appear in your inbox.

Schedule appointments – By messaging a user’s mobile number, it can let you schedule appointment reminders via email.

Require users to pass out documents – It’s just one of the many ways you can use this system to automate everyday tasks.

Contact the customer – It’s smart to ask customers when they’re free for a meeting or should they give you a phone call.

Visualize and plan – Gather the feedback from employees, customers, and other stakeholders to build a future plan for how you’ll improve customer service. This will then allow you to identify the areas that need improvement and will help to improve the customer experience.

It’s important that you’re continuously reviewing these processes, processes, and standards to improve customer service. This is especially important if you’re running a call center. In fact, if you regularly make changes to your processes, then it’ll be much easier for your customers to tell whether they’re getting a quick, successful response from your customer support team.

In summary, a winning customer service culture involves a lot of communication between your employees and customers. Alongside improving processes and systems, the use of customer training, employee feedback, feedback from consumers, and automated systems are all key factors in developing a thriving company culture.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and build a customer support team? Contact us today!

The Benefits of Community Conversations

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Community conversations in Customer Support is crucial in everything we do, whether it’s social media, marketing, PR, or making something happen for your business. With that in mind, it’s very important that your customer support team is effective and consistently produces quality responses to your clients’ complaints and issues.

Keeping your support staff as efficient as possible, and increasing their productivity can be incredibly difficult for a small business, especially since they work without a lot of time to spare. Not only does this often mean that you’ll have to manage around a certain amount of time on each support task, but also spending a lot of it on an average can lead to a pretty significant time crunch in the future. Therefore, finding the right ways to stay vigilant on the job, and ensure your customers receive the swift and efficient customer service they deserve requires a little extra thought on your part.

7 Ways to Boost Your Customer Support Team’s Productivity

Working with a client to provide support can be extremely fulfilling at times. Perhaps your client has had a problem for months, and you take on the responsibility of resolving it. Perhaps you only have limited time to handle the problem however, and if you want your client to feel comfortable with you, you have to commit a lot of your time to addressing the issue. Regardless of what kind of situation you’re in, there are a few ways that you can ensure that your team is as productive as possible, and ensure that you’re giving your customers the best possible service out there.

1. Hold Community Town Halls and Work Party Sessions

Always improving the quality of your customer support can be hard work when you’re dealing with people with so many different jobs on their team. In some cases, if you think your team is actually doing an outstanding job on a particular project, it’s time to bring them together to have a community conversations event. You can choose from a few different options when it comes to bringing your team together for this, and the reason for doing this is really quite simple:

Since your team members don’t always always have time to sit down and talk about how their customers are feeling, it’s a good idea to use a town hall meeting. Bring people together on the project itself, like emails or social media, but make sure you prepare a lot of ground. Allow people to share how they’re feeling, or how they feel about the process or project you’re working on. To make the most of these kinds of community sessions, make sure that you invest in a set of tasks. Having a set of points that everyone is striving to achieve creates engagement and can lead to increased productivity for your team and your clients.

2. Share Performance Reports

Once you gather all of the information that your team has produced during these community symposiums and work parties, it’s time to share their performance with the rest of the team. These reports are essentially individual, but people’s feedback can really help improve the team’s overall productivity.

For example, a survey can be a great way of gathering information about the feedback of a particular product or service. You’re able to collect all the feedback your team members have been able to gather over time, and if any of the members of your team deserve credit, it’s all the better. But it doesn’t end there. You’re also able to organize those reports into one place, making it easier for everyone to access. You can start by putting your report in the middle of your weekly meeting, or create a new report specifically for those people who may not be able to attend the larger meetings. Of course, in the future, you can take your review as far as you want. Take full advantage of the fact that it’s always easier to look back at past numbers when it’s easier to see them.

Give your team access to performance reports in a way that they can identify and fine-tune specific improvements they’d like to see, as well as motivating them to strive to become even better at their job. To generate these reports, look up stats for the following categories:

3. Offer Flexible Working Hours

Flexible working hours play a crucial role in ensuring that your team is as efficient as possible. The most important part of this is providing flexibility in your employees’ start times, so that they can start their day earlier. This is more of a challenge to community conversations because it’s difficult to determine the exact start time for any given employee. Fortunately, you can work around this by having an open office policy, which means your team can set their own hours while still being “available” to be accessible to you.

But there are some things you can do to help your team get the best out of their early risers. While it’s not always possible for your team to work longer hours, these office policies can help. Offer your team attractive rewards, encouraging them to work harder, and ensure they have ample break time.

4. Make Sure Your Employees Feel Quickly Involved in the Meeting

Once your team begins talking with each other, it can be important to make sure that each other is involved in the meeting. While it’s certainly up to the individual team members to decide whether or not to participate in the meeting, including a clear agenda allows your team to participate more effectively. If you do take a more structured meeting, make sure there are clear direction points on how the meeting will move forward. Additionally, be prepared for your team to start talking early in the meeting, since it’s generally ideal to start with some small group activities, like a game or group meditation for community conversations.

5. Offer Real-Time Feedback on Individual Employees

One of the best ways to get feedback from your employees is by allowing them to get feedback on a real-time basis. Whether you use a Google hangout, Skype, or regular emails, your employees will have the opportunity to have a more direct and immediate dialog with the company, as well as have the knowledge that their actions can have an impact on the overall company results. Supportbench allows you to have a clear overview of how your Support Team is performing to help with this.

Another great benefit of real-time feedback is that it goes one step further, offering valuable information that should go a long way towards fostering great relationships between employees and the company. At the end of the day, to keep your employees happy and motivated, it’s important to honor those employee feedback surveys.

6. Verbalizing the Value of Great Customer Service Strategies

Another important aspect of becoming a great customer service organization is communicating the value of great customer service. Your staff will want to communicate this value to their customers in a manner that motivates them, but doing so can be challenging if you don’t have a system in place.

After all, just because your customers are happy, that doesn’t mean that your employees are either, so investing time in a great and efficient process will ensure that they are happy as well. Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s possible for all departments to take the step to build a great experience for customers that cannot be subpar, and not only will it be a great outcome, but it’ll also attract more qualified candidates to the company.

7. Schedule Regular Workplace Events

There are some workplace activities that your team can start at the start of every workday, or even put in place at the end of the day. For example, have lunch with your team, or hold a casual impromptu social gathering. It’s important to balance your team’s social life with your everyday business tasks, so keep these activities enjoyable.

Regardless of what activities you incorporate, it’s important to set aside time for your employees, so that they can be free to spend time with each other. There’s no need to overwork your team members, but it does pay to give them an opportunity to connect with each other.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and drive community conversations? Contact us today!

Operating Real-Time Customer Service

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Saving money and time, giving the customer the best possible experience, and building loyalty with Real-Time Customer Service. These are just a few of the important reasons why providing real-time customer support is so critical for successful businesses.

Establish a Clear Understanding of Your Customers

Customer care is a diverse and ever-changing industry. The good news is that the easier it is to communicate with your customers, the more likely they are to open the door for your next sale. Good customer support means knowing your customers in the first place and what they need from you. This will help you provide a personalized experience with remarkable results. According to Matt Price, CEO of Optimizely, “Real-time support is a key contributor to creating sustained results, in the form of better sales, better conversion, and increased market share. ”

The First-Mover Advantage

A key first step in providing real-time customer support is being first to respond to customer concerns. Customers expect to receive a response within 24 hours. Properly prepared business processes are vital to realizing this level of responsiveness.

By anticipating their needs, you allow yourself time to whip a system up. The urgent nature of live chat is prompting an increasing number of ecommerce companies to partner with companies that monitor customer interaction and respond in real time. Because responses that take days are extremely frustrating for customers and the business, it makes sense to connect with a company that knows how to respond in this type of situation. This gives your customers more time to process their issues while allowing your business time to complete the support process.

Making Better Use of Support Centralization

Many ecommerce businesses are now connecting to cloud-based platforms like Supportbench to centralize their ecommerce support processes and provide better service to their customers, and help their service agents be more efficient. In the past, a live customer care rep might respond to a customer who has just bought a product through an online store. This customer interaction would take place, likely taking hours or even days.

By implementing a few core real-time support processes, an ecommerce company can quickly get back to actual customers while gaining the costs and time savings associated with a server automation solution. In fact, job site CareerBuilder conducted a study that revealed companies employing a live customer care person are able to handle real-time inquiries within 24 hours. Furthermore, employers have more than double the return engagement rates as those that do not.

Chatbots and Facebook Messenger are the Best Options for Omni Channel Support

Across all industries, more and more companies are looking for automation solutions to simplify their customer experience. Helpdesk automation is the next step on the journey to improving customer experience and making your business more efficient and efficient.

If you’re a business needing to offer a specific support service, using a Facebook Messenger-ready chatbot to listen and respond to customer messages can be a cost-effective and effective way to ensure a response to customer questions, concerns, or requests. It takes less than a minute to type out a question.Once the correct information is populated, the response can be initiated and documented. This type of service helps speed up response times and adds more important data to your CRM system. Chatbots can help you become more efficient with customer service and create a better experience with your customer and the customer experience can ultimately be improved as a result.

Make Customer Self-Service a Requirement

If you’re one of the many businesses offering web and mobile self-service capabilities, a customer service and support system that supports this demand will come in extremely handy. In addition to making customer self-service possible, maintaining this infrastructure and system is much more efficient and less expensive than a full-time support employee. But not everybody wants to make the effort to setup and maintain their own service system. In fact, supporting remote helpdesk chatbots, or bots that help manage and monitor social media channels, is becoming increasingly popular.

As more businesses integrate self-service capabilities with customer support, this type of customer support offers a more personalized and engaging experience that customers want to give their attention to. It also saves business time and money, which is always important, and increases your effectiveness.

It’s not enough to offer online self-service. Customers will expect your customer support systems to support customers 24/7, which means businesses must have the resources and help desks that support customer support chatbots to fulfill this demand. Additionally, it’s vital to offer the highest quality customer support you can. No matter what you choose to do with support, there are three key trends in support services:

  • A focus on customer care
  • Refining the support experience
  • Guided self-service

Making customer care a priority not only helps business owners save time and money, but also makes a meaningful impact on their customers’ experiences. A focus on customer care always creates a better customer experience for customers, resulting in them leaving a more positive and satisfied impression of your business.

Refining the customer support experience comes naturally, since it is integral to having the right tools in place. Whether your business is focused on advertising, financial services, retail, outsourcing, manufacturing, food services, hospitality, real estate, retail, or other types of industries, these businesses are using real-time customer service to drive customer value. For example, as part of a customer service and support initiative with a finance company that offers real-time customer support, staff members are on the phone for two hours a day, every day. The staff listens to the customer’s needs and suggestions, then connects them to someone knowledgeable who can assist them in solving their problem quickly and easily. This process creates measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty that results in an immediate return on investment.

Guided self-service is the hottest trend in customer support solutions. If used correctly, guided self-service empowers your employees to answer customer questions and concerns, while providing the proper level of expertise. This can be done by using a smart chatbot or other self-service system, also known as automated chat for customers. Using guided self-service that’s easy for customers to navigate will also create a more personalized experience and better overall business results. A customer service and support team can help organizations connect with customers with real-time, conversational skills via on-the-go automated self-service solutions.

Great customer service is still a must-have, and automated self-service is the best way to give customers the best experience possible. We’re seeing more automated chatbots deployed today, and organizations of all sizes and industries are turning to this technology to manage and grow their support operations faster and better. The evolution of the marketing and customer experience is driving a trend that benefits not only our customers, but our business as well.

Supportbench makes automated self-service an integral part of its platform for marketers, editors, developers, developers, project managers, and attorneys. Consumers are realizing that they are ready to ask questions or start a project on a mobile device and businesses are taking notice. Chatbots help customers shop for products more efficiently and confirm when a purchase is a good fit and what kind of product best fits their style, needs, and budget. In addition, self-service solutions are often more customer-friendly and easier for businesses to manage than full-time support staff. By automating customer service, you can minimize the impact on your staff and reduce costs.

Customers want a positive experience. A cloud-based customer experience platform enables business owners to be more agile by leveraging data to understand and quickly move data. Whether you’re a solution provider, sales rep, call center, social media manager, or customer service rep, join the customer service revolution by getting the right tools.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How to improve Service Recovery

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

As service professionals, we should be proactive and proactive in helping customers. Realistically, we can’t change everything that went wrong. But we can ensure that our tools and techniques are up to date. With a little planning and training, we can better satisfy the needs of our customers with an improvement in customer service recovery.

Here’s the ultimate guide to service recovery for customer service. From a company perspective, when a service is wrong, it undermines the quality of our work. Customers don’t like to deal with a company that can’t solve a problem fast. With that in mind, we wanted to provide some basic pointers about how to assess your service and help resolve a problem quickly.

How it works

Once you find that a problem exists, start by researching the details. Once you’ve got everything that you need, go to the problem on your computer or mobile device and explore the problem process.

Review the documentation on how to deal with an issue, such as the process of connecting a phone, changing an account, or a download for an app or service. In the section below, you’ll discover some tips on how to find some of the crucial information.

Time constraints

Service recovery is not impossible, and it can be achieved using a very simple method. Contact the (contact any) customer service, or find a solution, with a note attached.

Describe the problem to the representative, with what information you have at hand, and how long it will take to solve the problem. Before they act, ask the representative your exact timeframe, to see if they can solve the problem immediately. If the company doesn’t make an effort to listen to your situation, you might want to contact the customer service department of the business and ask them for a solution. If you are patient and you remember your notes, you might even get a referral point in the future.

Training

If you are going to train yourself and your team, understand that the real task of improving your service is a continual work. You don’t need to create your own training system from scratch, but you will need to ensure you do not meet the same challenges every single time.

Before the training, create a checklist.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

  • How much time do I need to complete the training?
  • How much time will this take?
  • What is the purpose of the training?
  • Does my work environment make it difficult for me to receive training?

If your answers to these questions are still blank, you might want to find a way to incorporate it into your daily work. For example, make a tool to help with training, or create a spreadsheet for all the posts that need to be completed in order to get started.

Use your knowledge to serve

While you’re on the phone, consult the documentation on how to approach a customer service desk to see if you can find an issue related to your own work. When you get to your job, understand your process.

If you have worked in this industry before, but only ever through outsourcing, you will appreciate the benefits of working from home. By discussing customer service issues with your HR department, you can also gain valuable time by solving the problem.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Customer Service Automation: Why Is It the Future

Posted on by Supportbench

Customer service automation to keep delivering continuous quality customer service is always an ambitious task, but if up to the challenge, you can thrive, with some automation. Our team of professionals at Supportbench, experienced in helping organizations and teams deliver high quality customer support through the Supportbench platform, can help you with your journey ahead.

From defining service terms to dealing with the sales process, even just up front, big changes happen as soon as a service agent is onboarded and starts working. Data management, document sharing, processing transaction information, and coding processes come into focus, contributing to an enhanced level of performance and efficiency. These changes often help simplify the customer experience and drive increased sales of your products and services.

To assist you as you turn customer experience into profit, we’ve put together a list of benefits and features that help your customer service operations go from bad to best. Check it out below.

One of Supportbench’s core market benefits is the power of unification. Using our extensive experience, our dedicated service team designs and builds customer service applications to suit our clients’ unique needs. These solutions can and often do take a few months to complete, but you’ll be able to turn on the tools to perform routine tasks and scale up your expertise as needed.

Attention to Content Retention

The value of the ability to gather your customers’ content right away during an interaction creates a tremendous leverage point with a potential new client. They’ll start a project with minimal knowledge about your offering, but it will develop over time, eventually leading to a long-term relationship where they understand how your business operates and how to use it in order to meet their needs with customer service automation.

Simplified Workflows & Processes

Being a team of realists, we’re tempted to think that customers aren’t going to grasp how tedious and time-consuming it is to do customer service. By implementing workflows and strategically thinking through the onboarding process, you can help drive adoption, retention, as well as the added bonus of decreased influx of new customer inquiries on how to use specific features.

Timeline Automation

Timeline automation makes operations easier at all times. It saves time and helps with analytics, both in terms of identifying risks and gaining insights as you head into a new conversation. One key grievance that customers will often express when dealing with customer service is how they feel like they’re being tossed around and dealing with so many different people or repeating the same information over and over.

By taking advantage of Supportbench’s synchronized and unified Customer Support platform, any agent who is working with a new customer inquiry, or even an existing one, can easily get insights immediately into the case history and how to pick things up where they were left off.

However, it’s important to note that the process of training customer support agents to be diligent about reviewing previous information prior to engagement is up to the policies and guidelines set by your company. Make sure that your agents take advantage of the tools available to them.

An automation-driven customer experience increases productivity and consistency, which brings increased likelihood of winning new customers. This is true regardless of whether your solution is fully automated or you use onboarding activation.

Whether you’re providing an on-premise software like DocuSign or providing a hosted solution like Sendler, you can improve the customer experience by strategically building out processes that are supported by automation.

This allows you to bypass expensive personnel by using proactive tools to help the agents get into the mindset of their customers. It’s also scalable, helping you with low or remote locations while not compromising the quality of the experience.

DocuSign Case Study: Optimized Onboarding

When we launched a product, we wanted it to be incredibly easy to use, and to be easy to use. Once we were able to achieve this through automation, we saw a real lift in customer satisfaction. “We used DocuSign to sign our SaaS, and it was so much easier than other ways. We’re now going to use the system more,” shared Georgia, an early adopter.

What’s more, DocuSign has solid compliance policies in place that clients are able to implement to complement them. There are simple things that we like to d on for GDPR compliance, such as credit reporting and certifications. While some of this can be done manually, there’s value in automation so you can carry out these tasks entirely online or even at an offline location, like a service center.

Notifications and tracking

Checking the status of your new customer is critical to the customer service process, but it’s also a challenge, since it can vary greatly across a variety of companies. In addition to hardware, everything from good and bad CRM integration to documentation must be considered. Our consulting team performs custom deep dives to see how well a firm’s platform-based offering compares with other providers, but we also run a competitive analysis and download data from multiple vendors and proprietary tools, such as Hubspot, to help with training and scheduling and the ability to notifies your customers. We also work with companies on how they can manage the assets that customers have digitally and automate this process.

Right at the start of the journey we develop a comprehensive call center workflow plan, such as a Sales Stage Plan, an onboarding stage plan, a service recovery plan, and an activation stage plan, which lets us start configuring a strategy that enables our first responders to carry out the audit promptly.

Software-as-a-Service

The beauty of web-based CRM is that it’s easy to get the engine to run. In addition to the onboarding stage, we use the sales platform or platform to sign new customers. By doing so we can come up with a more personalized onboarding process, such as adding the customer’s relationship on their social channels, using their identity on the platform, and tracking their assets and contacts. It’s also a great way to introduce the customer to your tech stack and welcome them with a customer service automation.

Overnight response times and expertise

With DocuSign, we get to measure improvements very quickly in terms of the time between activation and the first calls to our site, including:

  • Time between the activation and the first call to the call center
  • Time to the first call to the first rep
  • Response time
  • Simplification

Service teams are busy and while there are sometimes difficulties, we see a clear lift in customer satisfaction when they’re able to serve our customers all night long with data, documents and signage—just in the time it would take them to craft it with pen and paper.

Industry best practices

A little-known fact is that DocuSign’s goal is to drive all of the various service worksite processes on line, while simultaneously making it easier to focus on re-training and repairs. New employees benefit, as well, as it helps them understand the what, why and how, for making any system-based services better. These systems include comprehensive onboarding, which is much easier to run than manual processes.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience

Ultimately, delivering an exemplary customer experience means providing exceptional service to your customers—as a human should. The customer service team is the emotional catalyst of an organization, but without what we call the “customer experience continuum,” it cannot deliver an exceptional service. Meaning, if the experience from the very beginning is a cultural and non-verbal power trip, then your great customer service team is likely falling short. If a customer service rep is universally ignored when they ask for a technician, then you’re serving your customer poorly and the relationship is likely to suffer. Doing a good job of training, mentoring and improving in numbers can certainly give your customer service team the ability to improve the customer experience, but doing it right requires the right tools, too.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and build great customer service automation? Contact us today!

How To Maintain a Healthy Customer Service Operation

Posted on by rpsstudios

Maintaining a Healthy Customer Service Operation Can Provide a Steady Stream of Revenue.

Customer service is a critical part of a business and many companies place it in the ranks alongside sales or other operations, but the size of a company’s call center has always been a determining factor for how customer support functions. A staff of about 20 people is great, and the number and size of your employee handling direct support can have a significant impact on the way you run the operation. That means that it’s vital to have employees and staff responsible for customer service at your help desk and ensure that every customer service operation is handled as well as possible.

Having a customer support team and a group of employees will allow for some much-needed unity and also give you quick access to the resources required to support customer demands. The benefits are many and customer service reps usually thrive when they build personal connections.

Due to improving marketing tactics, new businesses continue to increase customer acquisition but this is useless if new subscribers do not get the service they deserve from a company. Bigger calls mean more staff and that means more customer service hours per day.

You can increase the support of customer service reps with a strong call center that can assist customers with existing and new projects. Customer service reps are your future. When they are strong, you are more likely to get more support from them and should be able to give you loyal customers we get full service and support from the beginning of their service relationship with your company.

It can be challenging to set up a customer service team and decide how to structure the support team’s work schedule. Talk to the company manager and be sure that the key ratios are met and that the employee and customer service staff are working together to maximize the work hours for the team. Communication is key and your company manager must be fully aware of the needs of their staff.

When you are running long hours of help desk operation you should take care of your customer service reps and at the same time monitor that their time is spent interacting with the customer clients in person and that the customer service team is handling all of the customer’s needs.

How to Generate Revenue from Great Customer Service

In today’s competitive marketplace, many businesses are trying to generate revenue and are hungry for a customer service team that can assist in the revenue generation process. Rather than relying on external sources like advertising, businesses must place the same weight on retaining existing businesses as they do attract new businesses.

Different companies have different value propositions to engage in new business. Some businesses will engage in advertising and some will engage in sales strategy. Either way, it’s clear that many businesses spend a lot for new customer acquisition but don’t have the time and money needed to have a better service experience for their existing customers.

Finding customers to focus on is more important for businesses than other things because customer service is the foundation of a business and anything that can retain customers can be used to generate revenue.

You will notice that a lot of prospective customers are looking for something specific from their service team. A good customer service operation team should treat every customer with equal opportunity to use and enjoy their services. The customer support team should also make sure that customers have access to the best possible customer service experience for whatever activity or service that they want from your business.

Make sure that every employee uses each other’s behaviors to represent the best in themselves and the best in their department. When a service team wants to offer an answer, they always need to offer the best answer that the customer can get without compromising the professionalism of the whole team. The customer’s best interests as much as your bottom line should be the highest priority.

Customers who are happy share their experiences and could even vouch for your services. A great testimonial can work as well as any advertising that your marketing team can come up with.

How to Build Your Team

Not every person in your company should be labeled as a customer service rep. There should be specific people who reach out to customers and those who take action looking for solutions to their problems. But regardless if your teams work in different departments there should be great communication between all of them and the customer service team. Delivering customer satisfaction is a team approach and your results can drastically improve when there is harmony between all your departments.

Now, when you are choosing team members for your customer service department, you’ll want to make sure that these people should be able to follow the team script and should always keep in mind that they’re representative of everyone on the team. Define the roles of your company’s personnel because customers appreciate it when they can easily identify the people that are able to help them with their inquiries and problems.

When your business start scaling, stop thinking that your business is a one-man show. You can’t do everything. However, you can start building a team that can offer you support and face customer problems in a timely manner. You can build this kind of team slowly, beginning with one person if that’s all you can afford at first, then with the help of that person build a system that would make it easier for other customer service reps that will come to your aid later.

As someone who knows the ins and outs of your business, you should be able to figure out the best type of individuals to work with on your customer service team. Look for people with experience or those who are willing to be trained with the kind of customer service that you expect to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Using Data To Improve Your Customer Service

Posted on by rpsstudios

 

Every organization is collecting, processing, and archiving the massive amounts of data its users generate, so they can improve customer service more efficiently and consistently design services, products, and even rules that make possible a continuous customer experience. At the same time, however, many managers are already analyzing and taking actions that might benefit from the downloaded value data could provide to their businesses, without realizing it.

This tip sheet from Support Bench is an easy guide for learning to choose the right sources of data. What types of data would be helpful, how to interpret it and what to do with it? Based on Google, here are six methods to use, and some simple practices to get you started.

1. Data Created By A Consultant

The useful thing about data created by a consultant is its quick transfer from one source to another. While this applies to customers as well as to them: you don’t have to log into a spreadsheet to see what happened during a particular service or product upgrade.

You simply download the complete data without any modifications or themes. Then run the data through a website and a calendar. Research your number of requested upgrades, and refresh the calendar as and when you need new ones.

2. Data Created By Customer Engagement

Overcoming resistance to change, consumers can be very good at identifying which processes they like and dislike. A customer-engagement survey or survey answered anonymously will tell you about exactly what they don’t like. This is the information you can use as you work with new products and services on your payroll.

3. Data Created By Consumer Research

Google’s Webmaster Tools asks for feedback from users on new sites. User testing can help your website stay relevant and flexible, not only through new features but also through balancing existing options and the need to keep the site up to date.

4. Data Created By Master Or Assistant Data Collection And Analysis

Scalability of data collection and analysis should be easy, at least if you can squeeze it out of various sources of source, whether it’s big data sets or hard data sets. Try using raw statistics as well as predictive models. No matter the scale, the team at Google will work toward your goals and accept some red flags along the way.

5. Data Created By A Technical Dev team

An organization’s own technology department may create their own code when needed. But this data includes things that should benefit your business more generally, such as system configurations, hardware usage, custom patterns and so on.

The data should be easy to analyze and maintain. You should try to keep the audit software open to outside experts. Take time to start using this data for outside initiatives, too.

Information obtained in or through using data, even if your purchase of and use of it comes from a supplier, a vendor or a service provider, is information that could be very valuable to you. I recommend doing a batch of this to your complete list, starting with this to help you keep a low technical barrier to entry and even do analysis features.

6. Data Acquisitions And Contracts

Whether you acquire it or contract it, by tapping into analytics or Big Data, you will be able to know about what your users are doing, what their goals are and what might be different for them.

What are some simple tips to use data to improve your customer support? Please share your suggestions below!

Happy data gathering!

Support Bench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention and improve customer service.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!