The importance of how customers see and experience the product or service is without a doubt getting more important each year. Even several years ago, Gartner predicted that 89% of companies were mostly competing on the basis of customer experience.
When thinking about the customer experience, there are two sides of the coin. The usability of the product or service is important, but so is the customer’s interaction with the company when they require support.
One of the most important things in customer support is the speed of response. Nobody wants to wait to get help, especially when they have issues or questions which prevent them doing what they need to do.
In another survey, 89% say a quick response to an initial inquiry is important when deciding which company to buy from.
Here are my top 5 tips to make sure that customers receive support faster:
1) Have a comprehensive, easy to use, clear and up-to-date Knowledge Base. Based on several surveys, customers want to use self-service tools when possible. This removes the need to wait on a support representative to reply or sometimes a daunting wait-time on the phone. Self-service also increases the speed of resolution as the help is not tied to the support opening hours but is available 24/7. Chatbot or on-screen guidance can also do the trick, depending on your product and the business you are in.
2) Collect needed information in the first contact. When a support representative receives the required information immediately in the first contact, they can jump in to troubleshooting right away. Collecting information can be done easily in the support portal, where the customer is guided to provide certain information by using mandatory fields. If the support channel is a phone, the representative should have a clear understanding of which questions to ask in order to proceed with the troubleshooting after the call is ended.
3) Have well-documented processes inside the support team. Because processes come and go and constantly change, they must be up-to-date. This saves support representatives from guess work; they know exactly what to do and how. As a bonus, this sets everyone up to perform tasks the correct (and the same) way, making sure that the customer’s experience is the same across different representatives. Also, this increases First Contact Resolution, as a customer was put through the right process immediately, and he does not need to contact support again.
4) Make sure that knowledge inside the team is actively shared and documented. Sharing is caring! If one of your representatives spent hours investigating an issue that can happen another time, why not to document it to save time in the future? The benefit of this is a no-brainer. It is important for a team to have the “preventative mindset”; think about what can be done to avoid the question landing on their table again.
5) Constantly monitor incoming requests and find a way to avoid them. The less questions are coming in, the more time the representatives have to concentrate on the tickets that are coming in. As an end result, this allows representatives to reply faster to the requests that can’t be avoided or solved with any self-service tools.
When checking the list above, it is easy to notice that the speed revolves around the data: documentation and reporting. Knowledge is power as Francis Bacon said.
How are you making sure that data is maintained in order to make support faster?