From the initial buying interactions to after-sales, the customer service process is getting increasingly complicated. Rather than attracting customers to their business, entrepreneurs are pushing them away with overwhelming engagement and outdated service policies.
Are you trying too hard to please your customers?
The truth is that when you make your customer service process too complex, you forget to focus on the obvious- to help your customers now than later.
It can be daunting for most businesses to delight customers after the sale has happened and offer them an exceptional service experience consistently. You need to simplify your customer support processes and in this blog, we discuss how. Stay tuned!
What is Customer Service & Why You Must Simplify It?
Customer service is common. Great customer service is hard to find.
At some point or the other, we all have approached a business to seek necessary information, share our issues, or simply register a complaint. Remember the time you bought a new TV and soon contacted the customer support team to guide you through the installation process?
However, the sad part is that customer service experiences are not as smooth as most customers would expect them to be.
Even in the year 2020, customers still shy away from the idea of reaching out to a business for support. According to a study by Harris Interactive, 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent.
Coming back to the main question- why you must simplify your customer service?
The answer is simple- if customers still have to struggle to find the right solutions at the right time, it is going to hamper their overall experience with your brand.
Believe it or not but, poor customer service experiences can make you lose your customers and eventually your business. Here are some statistics that will help you see the bigger picture.
Therefore, a simplified yet proactive customer service process is perhaps the best way to delight your customers and make them purchase from you again and again.
Simplify Your Customer Service Experience in 5 Easy Steps
1. Adopt an Omnichannel Approach
Gone are the days when you could entertain your customers enough through phone and email as traditional platforms. Today, you need to interact with them where you can find them easily and that can be several places online. Each customer prefers a different way of communicating with your brand.
Companies, thus, incorporate text messages, video chat, and chatbots as their customer service platforms. Communicating with your customers using different channels is the key here. You can also use some latest customer service email templates for quick responses.
US businesses lose up to $62 billion USD due to poor customer experience.
As a brand, you should not overlook the social communities on your company’s website, since they act like an open forum where your target audience can share their feedback. You can lend a personalized approach to customer care, only when you have access to a complete customer profile.
Recommended Read: What Is An Omnichannel Customer Experience
2. Map Out the Customer Journey
Ensure your help desk customers relish a great service experience by directing that experience on your own. Map out your customer’s journey for different kinds of support processes. You need to assure that every touchpoint meets the highest standard of customer service, right from ticket creation until its resolution.
Identify how to delight your customers along their journey with your brand even after they have purchased from you. You may work on reducing the first response time and respond to customers in a timely manner.
Sending canned responses to customers to acknowledge their problems and also helps to make the overall service experience better. Work on your customer feedback by training operators and overcoming the support challenges, which is the most crucial part of customer journey mapping.
3. Implement a Knowledge Base
It is critical for your brand to have a robust knowledge base in place, as customers prefer self-help more than reaching out to your customer support department. Only then can you minimize the number of your support tickets and eventually, the support costs.
Organize your knowledge base internally by employing a knowledge management software such as ProProfs Knowledge Base. Ensure all your FAQs and how-to guides that resolve the commonly occurring problems are well-organized and readily available to both your operators and customers. Besides, inspire teams within your organization to continually update and make the knowledge base better.
4. Keep KPIs Customer-Focussed
Are you looking at a huge list of reports to supervise the performance of your operators? Well, it is not relevant for improving your customer support processes. Focus more on results rather than reports. You can look at a few crucial help desk metrics, those that are results-based or may even be project-based. This way you can focus more on creating a gratifying customer experience.
If you are looking at resolving tickets faster, for instance, your go-to reports need to be simple and worth of achieving this objective. You can look at the figures that relate to how many tickets are we replying to? Are we getting busier with more tickets? New tickets, total open tickets, average rating, and rated tickets.
5. Deploy a Help Desk Software
It is not a one man’s show when it comes to offering solutions and delighting customers with timely responses. You need to set up a help desk software to make the job of your operators easy and fulfill the instant solution needs of your customers.
When teams work collaboratively, only then can customer problems be addressed and ultimately solved. Ticket prioritization and assignment come in handy with ProProfs help desk software.
Your system administrator can sort, prioritize, mark, and assign tickets. Parent tickets can be split into child tickets, and this enables them to track internal subtasks, reviewing progress on issues anytime, anywhere.
This customer support software helps you to guarantee that nothing is forgotten. You can check who is working on what and never lose track of tickets.
The best part about a help desk software is that it comes integrated with an in-built survey software. After you have offered a solution to your customers, gather their feedback through surveys. They can rate their service experience to help you improve on your support. Train operators who have not been performing well and work towards closing tickets faster.
If you are able to cut down on your SLA time, it may do wonders for your business. Customers appreciate fast responses and when they get them, they endorse your brand free-of-cost; leading to an increased stream of revenue and higher profits.
For Delightful Customers, Keep it Simple!
Customers today look forward to doing business with a brand that offers a smooth customer service experience. Irrespective of the support channel a customer opts to reach out to your business, they want faster resolutions and shorter conversations.
Q1. What is the difference between customer experience and customer delight?
Customer experience refers to the overall experience a customer has with a brand. This experience can be negative, positive, or simply neutral. However, customer delight happens when you surprise your customers by exceeding their expectations.
Q2. How to choose the best help desk software
You need to check your business requirements, as well as budget before committing to help desk software. If you want an easy-to-use and feature-rich help desk that comes at an affordable price, then you must check out these best help desk software.
Watch: How to Set up Your Help Desk in Under 5 Minutes
Q3. How to Improve Customer Support With Powerful Reporting & Tracking
Insightful reports can help you track the performance of your agents as well as teams. When you measure the right metrics such as average ticket resolution time, you eventually work towards improving the customer support experience. Watch this short video to learn more.
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