7 Best Practices to Scale Your Customer Service
Customer support in the early days wasn’t something businesses really cared about. But today, customers are the king and good customer support has become completely inevitable and acts as one of the pillars of business growth.
If you’re reading
this blog, it is clear that you care about your customers and you are into
delivering great support by scaling your customer service. We totally
appreciate that because statistics show that 33% of Americans would consider switching to
another business even at a single instance of poor customer service. With so
much to lose, it’s only wise that you scale your customer service.
Today, we’ll be
looking at the top seven ways with which you can scale your customer service.
And by doing so, you’ll be able to improve the productivity of your customer
support team and thereby deliver great customer service and memorable customer
experiences (which can be good for your
reputation, sales numbers, customer base growth & more).
7 Ways
to Scale Your Customer Service
1.
Connect All Your Support Channels Into One Place
First things first.
In order to scale your customer service, you need to connect all your support
channels in one place first.
As a growing
business, it’s important for you to have a presence on multiple platforms -
social channels, email, Yelp, etc. What happens is, your customers will try to
reach out to you or raise queries over different channels.
As for your support
team, they will find it hard to keep track of requests or visit a platform
every now and then looking for queries. But when you integrate all your support
channels into place, the overall customer support process becomes a whole lot
easier. Your agents will not have to switch between tabs looking for customer
queries.
They’ll be able to
monitor and respond to all customer interactions from one place, i.e. one
inbox. You need to make use of an omnichannel customer service platform for this
to happen. With an omnichannel customer support platform in place, your support
agents can respond to customer queries across different platforms.
Your agents will not
miss customer queries no matter which channel it is from and they can also
provide quicker resolutions because of the “all
interactions in one inbox” approach. The omnichannel customer service
approach is being adopted by almost all businesses now and it’s high time you
switch to the same as well.
2. Use
Chatbot to Automate Most of the Support
Most of the time,
your support team gets the same, common support queries. And this takes a chunk
of time and effort from your support agents. They have to answer the same kind
of queries, again and again, taking a toll on their productivity.
What you can do here
is you can embrace automation - use chatbots to automate most of your support.
Chatbots are being increasingly used by businesses and statistics say that by
2022, 80% of businesses will have a chatbot in
place. Also, customers don’t mind using chatbots as long as they get
resolutions (a few of them actually love
interacting with chatbots).
Deploying a chatbot
can actually help you save agent time, cut down support costs and allow your
support agents to concentrate on more complex issues and deliver better
support.
SimplyBot
is an AI-powered chatbot (with built-in
NLP and ML technologies) that intelligently identifies your customer
queries and responds to them accordingly. Automate support and save agent time
on the go!
Here’s an article
that will help you understand more about chatbots,
👉
Conversational AI Chatbots - The What, Why and Everything Else
3. Make
Sure You Have a Shared Inbox Feature
Shared inbox? Is this
really necessary? If that’s what you’re thinking hold that thought! A shared
inbox feature can prove to be way more useful than you think!
At times, your
support agent might need help solving an issue. Or two agents might be dealing
with the same tickets. This is why a shared inbox is important. Your agent
collaborates with each other and provides great support to your customers -
helps scale your customer service standards.
It’s all about
providing your support agents with the right set of tools that can help make
the support process a delight.
4.
Empower Your Customer Support Team
This is one of the
most important things you should do in order to scale your customer service.
You need to empower your customer support team meaning, you should allow your
agents to do what’s best for the customer.
At times, your agents
might have to face unprecedented scenarios where they have to go beyond the
playbook to solve the issue. At those times, you agents should have the liberty
to a certain extent to decide and do what’s best for customers.
This can give your
agents a sense of confidence, responsibility, pride and push them to deliver
the best possible support which directly reflects on the satisfaction of your
customers.
5. Allow
Customers to Help Themselves
This is more of a
self-service approach where customers get to help themselves by finding what
they want. All you have to do is, make the job easier for them.
You can consider
deploying chatbots with FAQs and helpful articles. By implementing this
approach, you do not have to worry about the First Response Time because it’s
your customers taking care of what they need. And your support team on the
other hand can work on more complex issues.
Tata Play introduced
a WhatsApp chatbot as one of their customer support channels and the bot
resolves more than 5 million common customer queries every month. That’s how
powerful the self-serve approach with the right combination can be.
You can know more
about Tata Play and its WhatsApp integration with Simplify360 in this case
study,
👉 How
Tata Sky Decreased Their Cost Per Resolution Up to 40% With Simplify360!
6. Train
Your Customer Service Agents & Motivate Them
If you’re looking
forward to scaling your customer service, you should make sure your agents have
the necessary skills and knowledge to do so. Making sure your customers have
in-depth product and service knowledge is crucial to delivering great customer support.
Conduct quarterly
training sessions (just a vague timeline
- see what suits your business) and monitor your employee performance. See
how you can train your employees based on their performance. Collect employee
feedback and see what you can do to improve the customer service standards.
Also, make sure you
boost employee morale by offering incentives or any sort of motivation. This
helps boost the morale of your employees and directly influences their
productivity.
While hiring agents
for your support team, make sure to hire the right kind of people - the kind of
people who would like to make customers happy with appropriate solutions.
7. Make
Your Organization Customer-Centric
All the above ways
are great but as an organization, only when you put your customers above all,
you’ll be able to scale customer service. It is the customer-centric culture
that will differentiate you from the rest of your competitors.
And
customer-centricity should not just be you - it should start from the top chain
of the company and reflect to the bottom including every single customer
support agent.
When they naturally
understand that customers are king and they should be doing everything they can
in order to make them delighted, you don’t have to worry about scaling your
support - it’ll automatically happen.
But yes, the other
mentioned steps are equally important as this one. So, those are the seven ways
that will help you scale your customer service with ease.
The
Bottom Line
Today, great customer
service is important to grow your business and retain your customers.
Here’s a quick
summary of what we just saw above,
- Use an omnichannel customer service platform to
manage all your customer interactions from one place.
- Use chatbots to automate customer support and respond to trivial
support questions on autopilot.
- Use a customer support platform with a shared inbox feature to
help agents collaborate and work together.
- Allows support agents to make the best decisions for customers by
empowering them.
- Deploy FAQs and helpful articles and allow customers to self-serve
themselves.
- Turn your support agents into support champions by giving them the
necessary training, support and boosting their morale.
- Lean towards a customer-centric approach and induce the culture
within your organization.
The above-mentioned
points will definitely help you scale your customer service and reward with
happy customers - better customer retention rates, improved sales and better
business growth!
Now that you have
everything you need (including the tools),
start scaling your customer service!
To know more, visit: https://simplify360.com/ or call on +91 11410 91911 or +91 9667559647.
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