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,

 

  1. Use an omnichannel customer service platform to manage all your customer interactions from one place.
  2. Use chatbots to automate customer support and respond to trivial support questions on autopilot.
  3. Use a customer support platform with a shared inbox feature to help agents collaborate and work together.
  4. Allows support agents to make the best decisions for customers by empowering them.
  5. Deploy FAQs and helpful articles and allow customers to self-serve themselves.
  6. Turn your support agents into support champions by giving them the necessary training, support and boosting their morale.
  7. 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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