Tag: supporting

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!

7 Steps to Drive Real Customer Support Improvement

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Many businesses have the same goals: to drive real trust and customer support improvement to their bottom line. However, restoring trust, as well as increasing the revenue stream, for some businesses seems impossible.

In such cases, customer service or customer support improvement can be the solution. Without customer service, consumers will search online, calling, emailing, (after all these tools are very expensive) or even post on social media. A simple Google search for customer service help or case studies can lead you to hundreds of examples for customer support improvement.

We have examined thousands of case studies and hundreds of case studies that both gave an overall assessment of customer service initiatives as well as how to verify and audit the actual data, as well as how to differentiate it. The key takeaways for managers are:

1. Customer service takes years to build trust with customers

A company provides outstanding service but two out of three customers never know about it. This may be the reason why only 37% of US businesses are serving their customers as they should. As you can imagine, this can have a very significant impact on your bottom line as 70% of customers form their opinions about you based on customer service.

In fact, 90% of consumers will simply stop buying from you if you don’t fix your service issues. The customer journey begins with a business statement describing what your organization does. This is vital because, in the post-internet age, your competitors have so much more control over customer perception and opinions.

2. It’s not a minor issue

Your customers need your help to validate their opinions because trust is a priceless asset. Without this, your real value proposition becomes blurred as to who are really accountable for your customers’ experience and therefore how much they’re going to take your word for it.

In the absence of security for your data, your competitors become better at collecting information than you. This gives them a competitive vantage over you and can present the most severe problem to the rest of the field as well.

3. Customer service dominates the top five business top trends for 2020

Over 80% of businesses which have successful customer service overall will increase their market share.

Today’s automation plays a major role in customer service and this makes up for most of the mistakes, as well as in the inability to build an excellent customer service culture or drive customer support improvement.

Despite it, there are certain lessons companies can take away by looking at both case studies and performance metrics in finance, healthcare, insurance, government, etc. They can easily check if their strategies are working out in practice and simply using additional variables like agents’ response time, how they’re training them, the amount of advertising dollars they’re spending on customer service (both online and offline) etc. can also provide valuable insights into the real performance of customer service.

4. Conduct an audit of the customer data

Let’s say you own a software company. Your next step is to visit the website of your top competitors and see what they can tell you about your customers. Additionally, using sites like G2.com that provide aggregated reviews from customers of rival products can show what customers are finding to be valuable and where there may be potential missteps. Using this data, you can get access to valuable customer data points of competitors that you may use to improve your customer support, positioning, and also for better understanding of market dynamics.

Furthermore, if you’re already a leer in customer service, we recommend making sure you make a point of having several performance audits and reviews along the way. Having multiple auditing sessions along the line might have a huge impact on your bottom line and this certainly helps you save yourself time, energy and money on the process.

5. Know how to answer every question

Back to customer support solutions, the most important aspect of a successful customer support improvement is being able to answer every question. In order to avoid questions, the rest of your communication should be about what you can do to fix it and how you’re going to do it.

In many cases, your customers prefer email and you try to answer some questions manually, like who can they call, how, what kind of questions or how they should respond to some specific questions.

By knowing and working through the questions and answers, you can then start compiling and building an internal knowledge base to help support your team. Furthermore, you can even use this to build a public facing self-service knowledge base that allows your customers to find the answers before contacting you, offloading common questions from your customer support team.

The key is to make sure that you also have a customer support solution such as Supportbench that will allow you to respond instantly and actually even facilitate some better answers.

6. Identify the key factors on customer satisfaction

The ability to enhance your customers’ health score is what’s defined as your company’s ability to live up to your customers’ expectation for what your company is best known to do. There are many different issues, like tracking your customers after getting an order, direct communication and change, resolving issues, or providing more coverage in the event of a claim. That’s why it’s important to look at a customer’s journey from the beginning and measure how you can help your customers. As part of doing so, it’s crucial to understand their pain points and understand what you can do to identify problems, tackle questions, and adjust your service.

Additionally, it is vital to view potential customer service challenges in perspective of your company and get your KPIs on a weekly basis. And before you can start looking at customer satisfaction, you have to see these issues as a business opportunity. So the first step of identifying problems is taking an eye-opening look at your customer satisfaction overall.

Business logic is at the root of every problem, and that’s how you first get to know your customers. It’s important to know what their feedback is and how you could be improving the way you engage with them. Without taking those first steps, you might fail to see the big picture and miss a great idea of how to take action.

Most industries today would be shocked by the fact that attention to customer retention is incredibly poor. According to the Customer Service World, more than 55% of Americans were unsatisfied with their customer experience in 2017.

And the fact that US customers use 27 customer service agencies because they aren’t getting the help they need has also skyrocketed. That’s why it’s vital to prioritize fixing those issues. What started as a mistake can really negatively impact the entire customer experience. It’s important to develop systems that match each and every employee’s needs so that you are doing everything possible to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers and drive customer support improvement

7. Get real on leading change

When it comes to effective customer service, leadership skills are a powerful part of it. Every time there is an issue with your business, it’s the responsibility of the business leadership to lead. You need to help shape the organization and help redefine the way customers interact with your company. Without change, you will continue to miss opportunities to build on your customer’s experience.

Customer satisfaction is the core of every relationship and for many consumers, that’s the number one touch point with your company. And in fact, even though those are two words that most companies don’t use in their daily messaging, people do use them.

Influencers are great to engage with your audience and you want to make sure they see value in your company. You must be there when customers want you to be there. And if you aren’t there, well that doesn’t translate to customer retention. It also means that you aren’t helping your customers get the service they need. They may be experiencing problems, but without knowing what you are doing, your next steps in communication may not lead anywhere good.

Once you know that 80% of all social media users dislike passive interaction and 85% of them are looking for engagement, you should be doing everything you can to satisfy that need. That is why being active with social media is crucial to customer satisfaction in 2020.

In some ways, a basic and simple guide to getting on social media that could improve your business. If you want to be there when people want you to be there, then you need to be there by listening to your customers and acting accordingly.

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 build a customer-service culture in your company

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Hiring a customer-service manager is the first step in bringing customer-service culture practices in your organization up to snuff.

But you don’t have to go through the trouble of hiring a consultant to make it happen; you can institute successful customer-service practices in your company by investing in everything from cultural training to customer service development. And to make sure you’re focused on developing the team, take the following steps to ensure you have a strong customer-service culture in your organization:

1. Work with an Experienced Customer-Service Trainer

Having an internal member of your team sit down and teach people at their pace is like watching paint dry: it takes time to get everyone on the same page. That’s why it makes sense to find a customer-service expert who can help companies across the country teach and train employees.

If your company doesn’t have one available, go to the experts at Glassdoor Workforce Solutions for the full list of best customer-service consultants for a customer-service culture.

2. Audit The Employees

If you want to build a winning customer-service culture in your company, you need to uncover where they’re finding themselves stumbling down the road and how can you help them realize success.

If you can’t find a way to upgrade their learning, look into how you can improve their job role or employee compensation package. This will give you a better idea of how to get them where they want to go.

If you have a company that’s growing and needs more new hires, find a way to attract and engage this new talent to your company. This can either mean investing more in their package or investing in training them on their chosen paths so that they can succeed.

3. Deliver on your Company Values

While it’s encouraging to see a company working on the right values, it’s even more important that a company follow through on them. This means having policies in place that ensure that the team understands and upholds the company’s values.

At the end of the day, your employees aren’t interested in joining your company just because you have policies that say so. They’re looking for a company that believes in them. For example, a company that won’t charge its employees fees for programs and training that would make the employee more productive and the company more money is more than likely going to keep them happy within your customer-service culture

4. Stay Alert And Proactive

Regardless of what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, if you’re not doing what you need to do, you can’t expect your team to fall in line. Instead, you’re going to need to be constantly active in your company.

For example, look into how you can train your employees and how your company can attract new talent to get better at what it does. Then, stay on top of it, stay aware, and always be proactive.

If you were able to outline all of the steps mentioned above in this guide, you’ll have a strong foundation in place to meet all of your company’s needs.

4. Delivering On Service To The Benefits Of A Great Brand

Your best customers are a reflection of the brand that you’re representing. If your organization isn’t known for communicating with its customers, and if you’re not known for its exceptional customer service, then your business will die. Because today, quality Customer Service is an expectation, not a nice to have.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to build a great brand. Namely, you can work on building a strong reputation of customer service.

If you’re already known for outstanding customer service, then this will make you a well-respected leader in your field. Then, with a solid reputation, you’ll be able to maintain it. Therefore, as they say, the more customers you have, the more profitable you’ll be.

But that’s not the only thing you can do to build a great brand. In fact, it’s more important than that. If you have a strong brand, you should be able to implement it in every aspect of your business.

5. Expand The Road Map For Your Brand

Another way that you can build a great brand is to look at where your brand is and where it could be going.

For example, a great brand is recognized, people will remember it, and what brand owners want their business to be known for is easily identifiable. However, if you haven’t been the best customer service leader in your organization, your competitors will be—and this will lead to lost business and losses of money.

Therefore, your best bet is to make all of your social media, press, and advertising platforms more visible to everyone. This will expose your brand to the widest audience possible, and when people know about your brand, they’ll be more likely to share it.

This will also allow you to create a strategy that will allow your brand to become a well-known brand: Maybe they’ll want to know the competition is coming after them. Or maybe they’ll notice that you’re a customer-centric brand instead of a brand that doesn’t care about their customers.

The goal of this exercise is to give you an overview of where your brand is, as well as where it could be going.

No matter how you look at it, people judge companies by how well they treat their customers. If you don’t make an effort to go out of your way to do that, then your business will fail. Everyone will not only know that you don’t care about your customers, but that you consider it beneath you to even exist there.

But it’s not always about treating your customers well. The other key to building a winning customer service culture is a culture of integrity. This kind of attitude will set your brand apart from the rest of the crowd.

But isn’t it also all about keeping the fans happy? Sure, but loyalty doesn’t just happen. You need to keep them happy so that they come back time and time again to do business with you. And this is where an active, competitive customer service culture comes in. If you don’t really care about people, then you’ll lose customers – and you’ll lose money.

If you’re serious about establishing a winning customer service culture, you need to make sure that every department is following that example.

Internal

Your HR department will build its employees’ skills and habits and train them on how to handle every issue. It’s up to you to make sure that your customer service is the one under your control, and if that’s not the case, then you need to reinforce it with the people you’re using it for.

Your employees are the future leaders of your company, and since customers will be under their influence, they should set up an environment that makes them feel valued and respected. Just being friendly to your customers will start to rub off on employees, and a good customer service culture will then draw them in further.

There’s one position within your company that should be given maximum priority. This is your customer service director. That’s the person responsible for ensuring that every customer is met with the most positive experience possible. They need to make sure that all the guys behind the scenes have the skills they need to carry out that job effectively. It may sound like an easy task to make sure your employees are well-trained in responding to every customer request, but it’s actually really hard.

Over all, it’s important to make sure that your employees are treated as equals, and that there’s a well-informed and supportive culture. As part of that, the culture of every team must play an important role. Everyone will be expected to come up with solutions, and in doing so, they need to train one another to do the same.

That kind of high-quality culture can attract customers and improve retention, all while ensuring that your employees feel like they’re their partner in success.

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-service culture? Contact us today!

How do we get more out of our customer support team?

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Because of the ease of reaching out through the internet and social media, there is continually an enormous number of customers looking for assistance from a great customer support team.

If you want effective customer support for your business it is helpful to have dedicated staff and officers who are always ready and willing to help. If you operate a manufacturing business, you may have someone on staff to help service suppliers, if your company is a consumer business like grocery and clothing stores, you need employees who can take care of questions from their customers.

Getting employees properly trained and equipped to assist their customers and how to use the right information to deliver the best answer to their questions is key to success. As the manager of a customer support company, you should also be knowledgeable about customer service matters and think of ways to strengthen your support team. Provide your employees with training and access to best practices that they can follow so they can develop positive traits of customer service that you want to instill in them.

Set Limits and Expectations

As with any aspect of business, it is important to create limitations and expectations for your customer support team. You need to give your staff some parameters in which they are to operate and you have to maintain clear lines of communication with your employees to ensure that the topics that you want discussed are handled properly.

Miscommunication is a major reason why a customer support team fails. Mistakes such as the failure to send an invoice or not following through on a refund, can cause you loss of revenue and unsatisfied customers.

Delegate tasks properly and let them know that you expect them to fulfill all the tasks that you or the team manager assigns to them. Keeping the team up to speed on their duties would help your company avoid mistakes caused by miscommunication.

Apologize and Move On

At one time or another, mistakes will happen but at the end of the day your customer support team will perform better if they feel supported.

Do not dwell on their mistakes and put them in a position where they are embarrassed or put on the spot for their error. Encourage them to acknowledge their error, apologize, and that should be the end of the conversation.

Equip them with proper training to avoid committing the same mistake. Supporting your customer service team’s growth will allow you gain their trust.

Train More Get More

It is good if your team feels comfortable enough to approach you and ask for help, however, you may not always have the time to answer their questions and give them support. As the customer service team that supposedly has the answers to customers’ concerns, shouldn’t they be more educated?

You might have to spend for training and education, but that would be a wise investment. A customer service team could not be unfamiliar with customer concern solutions. They need to be trustworthy and reliable and that would only happen if they are properly trained and armed with an updated knowledge base that would act as an encyclopedia of answers.

Equipped with all the necessary skills and information, your customer service team will help you retain your customers and keep them happy resulting in good feedback, referrals, and increased business.

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!

Mastering your customer’s journey

Posted on by rpsstudios

When you’re just getting started building a business, customer service is often the first and smallest thing you need to do. You need to understand how your customers receive their messages and what works best for your businesses and solutions. So, before diving headfirst into customer service, let’s take a moment to understand the different aspects of your customer’s journey, what you should be doing, and what not to do in this space.

What’s the secret to great customer service?

To build customer service into a strong foundation, you need to understand it in a certain way, and then act on the results of those insights. At Support Bench, we believe that great customer service means great customer insights.

While many CMOs may not know this, customer insight starts with a customer analytics study. That customer analytics study should offer valuable insights, including your most valuable customers. That said, very little of your customer’s data is out there.

Making sense of customer data

At a basic level, customer service insights are pretty easy. For example, if your company is looking to collect and analyze data from a single channel, a customer portal can play a role in getting you started. For small or relatively new businesses, listening to how customers interact with your product and services can provide valuable insight.

Another step is building good content around customers — whether it’s on their website, social media, email, or other channels. If you have a solid content strategy that focuses on what the different channels communicate, and the types of content that are most effective for them, it’s possible that you can access customer information to gain insights into your content’s impact.

Customers will tell you what they want

As part of your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, you want to provide everything your customers want: more information, more options, and more things to do. So, the biggest piece of the puzzle is determining what they need and providing it to them.

A great example of this is by analyzing the overall brand experience. When customers download your app or website, they usually want to know when it’s a good time to come back, what “power metrics” they should track, and how to access content that aligns with their needs.

The customer experience is a highly personal one — and you shouldn’t ignore that message. Don’t make your customer feel like they’re yelling at you, or like you’re directing them to bad information.

Choose the right channel

One of the best ways to create a perfect customer experience is to choose the correct channel. When you choose the right channel to serve customers, you create a very important understanding of who they are and what part of your customer’s journey your customers are. If they’re not in your database, you’re giving them a very incomplete picture of what type of customer they are. The right channel allows you to pinpoint how your customers are doing, and what, if anything, could help them do better.

The right channel is the one that help them do more. When your channel offers something that helps them do something, it’s likely that this will be among the things that lead to positive outcomes for them. For example, if you provide a tool that helps an employee better use their time, that should be something you implement in your channel. That means you make a strong connection with the information on your channel, based on what you’ve gathered.

Utilize the tools you already have

If your brand is not exactly known for customer service, even the most basic resource can be used to grow the number of your customers you get. This means you make an effort to understand your existing customer’s profile and create a relationship with them, or better yet, find out what helps them do better.

As part of your marketing automation (MaaS) platform, you can share analytics about all your customers on the platform. Make sure they’re aware of these, too. You can then learn more about them, and your customer’s journey and as a result, provide them with useful insights into what can improve their customer experience.

Don’t waste time on service matters

Conventional customer service will be extremely frustrating. When you need to do something, you’ll find your customer waiting for someone to help you, and they’ll either take a deep breath or will get very frustrated. At Support Bench, we’ve all experienced poor customer service experience in our own lifetimes. As the owner of a successful business, there’s something you should never do. It’s never simple to solve a customer’s problem. Good customer service doesn’t just happen automatically. It’s always worth the time.

Support Bench 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!