Answering service
If your company offers phone support and you are outside of your traditional hours, it is frustrating for a customer to hear the phone endlessly ring and then go to a voicemail. By providing an answering service, you give them the ability to talk to a human who can at least point them in the right direction, rather than forcing them to wait to see if anyone even listens to the voice mailbox, let alone calls them back.
You can also implement a full-service answering service or call-center that handles all of your incoming phone volume. Call-centers handle all training and quality control for the calls they manage, so while it might seem counterintuitive to let something so important out of the hands of your support team, it’s an excellent way to scale.
Helpdesk
When customer support teams first start out, they often use a shared inbox on a service like Gmail in order to keep costs down. But adding a helpdesk to the tools that your team uses is a huge up-level for the customer support that you are able to provide. Helpdesks offer features such as:
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automation for workflows and ticket assigning
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tagging for better data about what kinds of tickets are coming through
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escalation processes to assign tickets to appropriate team members
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coworking features that let customer support agents know when someone else is working on their ticket.
If your team does not already have a helpdesk, finding one that addresses the needs you have for your team will be a big step forward for your customer support team.
Knowledge base and chatbots
These tools help support teams provide more self-service options. If your customer support team does not have a knowledge base already, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to deflect some of your tickets from your inbox, lower your volume, and provide your customers with a better support experience.
Utilizing chatbots or AI does the same: a chatbot is able to direct your customer to where they need to go—which may or may not involve interaction with your customer support team. If it resolves the customer’s issues quickly and without fault, it saves both your customers and your team members a little bit of time that they could spend working on more meaningful and impactful tasks.