Best practices in Customer support

Welcome to Freshchat Customer Support learning centre. In this course you will learn about the various best practices that need to be used by customer support representatives!

Customer support is the new marketing. And your customer support representatives are the face of your organization. The experience of your customer with your product or organization is directly dependent on the kind of service they receive from your customer support representatives.

Therefore when you hire someone for customer service, you need to look for attitude, technical skills (wherever applicable) and soft skills. We have laid down some factors that can help you in understanding what makes a candidate a potential customer service representative for your organization, how to identify, and hire them.

Personalization refers to tailoring your service or product according to your customer’s need, and making customer interactions relevant. There are two key parts to being able to offer personalization - knowledge about the customer, customer context.

It has a lot of value in customer support. So how can you personalise support queries

The primary aspect of customer support is to be available where the customer is. The customer doesn’t want to cross several hurdles to just start a conversation with your support team. From that perspective, would a customer want to fill up a form on your customer support page and wait without a proper ETA? Absolutely not. They would rather want to instantly start a conversation with your support team and focus on getting a resolution.

So should you include forms in your customer support pages?

Regardless of how much your customers love your organization and products, there will always be a set of customers who are unhappy with you. Though they might be small in number, they are an important component of your customer community. So, your customer service team needs to deal with difficult customers as part of their job.

One of the basic factors to remember is that you might or might not be able to resolve the issue for your customer, but do not dodge them. Your customer service representatives need to read the situations, and manage difficult customers effectively to prevent your customers from churning.

Service interruptions, product issues, and outages are inevitable situations that every customer support agent faces. While such times are considered to be tough times, they are great opportunities for support agents to make a positive impact on the customer.

Customers are stressed because they didn’t see an outage coming, and they do not know what to do. This is exactly when support agents can up their game by helping the customers with the right information at the right time. More importantly, be accessible across communication channels as much possible. The last thing a customer wants is to reach out to the support team during an outage and not get a response.

Customer support plays a key role in SaaS businesses as it has impacts the customer lifetime value. And for SaaS companies, higher the lifetime value of the customer, higher the revenue would be. What this means is - if you need to increase the customer lifetime value, you need to invest in customer support to reduce the churn.

Let us have a look at some of the best practices for customer support in SaaS.

Customers tend to have multiple touch points with an organization before deciding to purchase or even after a purchase. And each touchpoint is an opportunity for the organization to help the customer in their pursuit, be it support, sales or marketing.
Having a live chat messenger on your website makes it easier for the customer to start a conversation with your team than having to search for a contact email or phone number.

Understand the best practices while using a chat tool for customer support

Every organization needs to measure the effectiveness of their customer support. Without measuring it, it is impossible to ensure progress.You need to have clear metrics to measure the level of customer service your team is providing.
Let us discuss a set of metrics that you need to be measusing to ensure the success of your customer support team.

Imagine we are towards the end of November - Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just over. While your team did all the hard work to manage the increase in customer interaction volume, they are now faced with the sustained flow of support requests in December.
It is a time when several members of your support might choose to go on a vacation. So, you need a scalable way of managing support requests during the holiday season.

You need to plan your holiday season and yet allow some flexibility to ensure both your team and customers have a seamless experience.

The way customers interact with companies have changed big time. Today, there are several touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand before making a buying decision. A customer can choose any channel to initiate a conversation with your organization. And, remember, they also expects the same level of customer service across these channels, as much in your primary channel.

Therefore, it is important for your organization and your support team to be available on every channel where your customer is and increase your opportunities to converse with them.