This post has been extracted by Charing Kam from our e-Book, “How To Keep Your Customers Coming Back”.
It’s easy to talk about customer service as if the only time customers interact with your brand is through face-to-face contact, but the reality is that customer service is so much more than that now. Customer service has expanded to phone services, e-mail exchanges, live-chats, and social media interactions. Even your website is considered part of your customer service.
How do you make sure you’re providing an effortless experience for your customer across all of these different channels? You innovate to reduce the effort it takes for your customers to go through each customer service channel to find what they’re looking for.
So what kinds of channels should you offer?
1) Social media
To effectively manage your social media channels and meet your customers’ expectations, you should have someone on staff dedicated to monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts for customer feedback!
At the same time, don’t forget about lesser known social media. While more and more users are taking to Twitter to voice direct complaints to customers, you can’t neglect sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages and industry-specific review sites when monitoring your customer complaints.
2) Email
Some users will want to email your company directly to voice a complaint. It’s important to have a generic company email alias setup that allows your customers to uncategorically contact your company. Make sure you have someone monitoring this alias so they can direct various emails to the right people and get your customers’ questions answered.
You’ll also want an email alias setup to manage your support tickets coming in. Internally, put a process in place for how to manage these web tickets. If possible, hire a full time staff member to manage your response process and make sure your tickets are getting solved.
3) Phone
Phone support is still the #1 channel preference for every generation except millennials. So what are some best practices for creating an effortless phone support channel for your customers?
Don’t hire-out your phone support team. Your call support lines should be fielded in-house by empowered employees who have the autonomy to respond effectively to customers.
Minimize the amount of time customers are on-hold. Make sure you hire enough support staff so that your customers aren’t waiting more than 2 minutes. You should also give your employees enough agency to answer questions without them having to put your customers on hold to ask their manager a question.
Also,use a phone system designed for the effortless experience! When customers call after hours, your phone system should immediately cut to voicemail. It should also have automatic call routing so that your incoming calls are always routing to the representatives who are free to prevent hold time.
4) Self-Service Channels
Make sure to have a well-developed FAQ section on your website that not only provides helpful content you think your customers might need but is also tailored to your customers’ needs over time. Keep track of what words your users are searching for on your website and tailor your FAQ section accordingly.
Don’t forget to add suggested pages at the end of each FAQ to keep your customers from having to dig too hard on your website.
If you want to make your FAQ pages really effortless, try installing a live chat feature so that your customers can ask your support team questions via instant message instead of having to switch channels and make a direct call.
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