A Customer Support Checklist for High-Growth Companies
If you’re reaching high growth levels, your business must be doing something right. You’re increasing profit, growing your customer base, and hiring new employees in a rush.
But if you don’t scale your customer service to support all of those new customers, your competitors could catch up to you.
If you want to make the success last and stay on the fast track to rapid growth, you’ll need to make sure that your support approach is innovative.
You have to cover all of your bases so that your customers don’t have a terrible support experience, which may cause them to leave.
This is especially important because poor customer service is costing businesses a total of over $75 billion a year1 – and that’s not a figure we can afford to ignore.
That’s why we’ve created this customer support checklist for high-growth companies.
1. Build a Knowledge Base
In the last few years, self-service usage has increased from 67% to 76%2. That’s probably why self-assemble furniture brand IKEA’s gross profits have increased so much in recent times.
People want to do things for themselves, and that includes finding their own answers to support questions.
The greatest customer service strategies solve customer problems before they even get a chance to contact your support team.
That’s why it’s crucial to create a reliable knowledge base on your website, with relevant FAQ’s like payment information and other information.
When your growing list of customers need help, all they will need to do is search for a keyword within your knowledge base, and pull up relevant and related articles.
You can also include tutorials that showcase how to use your products or services.
That way, customers won’t have to spend time contacting your team to figure out how to use what you’re selling.
Building a customized, searchable knowledge base is a breeze with Freshdesk. You should also ask all your customers for feedback about your company so you can come up with ideas for articles to populate your knowledge base.
2. Capture Feedback to Prevent Recurring Support Issues
Your brand is growing quickly. How can you be sure that you’re delivering top-notch service to every customer? By asking them what they think!
Capture feedback in real time with surveys, emails, and calls.
Use the information and customer options you gather to predict common problems, populate your knowledge base, and correct issues.
Aside from reaching out to customers, you should also use social listening tools to find ongoing conversations about your business online.
If you’re growing fast, there’s bound to be some buzz about you on social media. Hopefully, most of it is positive. But there could be a few negative posts as well.
Look for specific keywords, phrases, or comments, and watch for brand mentions. The only thing left to do from there is to join the conversation.
Respond to each post, whether positive or negative, to build better relationships with current and prospective customers.
Facebook is the most frequently used social platform, so that’s a good place to start. Then, turn your attention to other platforms like Twitter, Instagram and others.
Take care of negative mentions first before engaging with the positive ones.
If you respond within five minutes to one hour of receiving a complaint, you create a good impression with the customer. So much so that they may even be impressed enough to stay on, and pay more in the future.
Try out our social listening tool to monitor brand mentions, and respond to queries on the same social media site that the customer went to; all without exiting your helpdesk.
To relieve of the pressure your support team faces, streamline your workflows for a smoother experience.
3. Streamline Workflows
Ticket overload can be overwhelming – irrespective of the number of support agents you have. So many tickets, and so little time.
One of the quickest ways to streamline tickets is to create canned responses to help you resolve tickets quickly and consistently, with pre-formatted replies.
In Freshdesk, you can enter these pre-formatted canned responses by just clicking a button.
Agent collision detection, another Freshdesk feature, can help ensure that multiple agents aren’t wasting their time on the same ticket.
You should also link related tickets together so agents can track issues that fall under the same category, and deliver consistent responses to each ticket.
The main idea is to organize tickets, so the volume never gets out of hand.
You also need to offer live chat so all your customers can get instant assistance when they visit your site.
4. Offer Live Chat
Live chat is an absolute must, irrespective of the size of your customer base.
Trust us, customers love it. In fact, 79% of customers3 say that they prefer live chat because they can use it to get their questions answered immediately.
It allows for live agents to deal with more than one chat at a time, thereby eliminating the need to hire more agents.
That, in turn, means you will be able to save big bucks, while also decreasing the wait time between each ticket.
Since live chat provides real-time advice and answers about products or services, it can also increase your average order value.
In Freshdesk, live chats are assigned conversations that they can respond to with words, images, or emojis – all from their Freshdesk dashboard.
From this dashboard, they can view contextual information about each customer in live chat, including their website path, profile, and ticket information.
5. Create an Omnichannel Support Strategy
It’s important to be active on as many support channels as possible; especially if your customer base is rapidly growing.
But every customer is different. So it’s no surprise that different customers prefer different support channels.
Omnichannel support connects the gaps between these channels, so agents can see what’s going on from one central location.
All channels are connected, unlike regular multichannel support.
This makes the support experience seamless for your customers because agents will always be clued in about previous interactions that customers have had with the brand on other channels.
Omnichannel support has also been shown to reduce ticket resolution time by a whopping 50%.
This is because your agents aren’t forced to search for the pieces of each story and put them all together, before being able to actually help customers.
An omnichannel system merges each channel, so they can put their energy and time toward more pressing issues.
If you’re experiencing high-growth and you’re having issues managing your customer support efforts, it might be time to break up with your current help desk.
6. Switch to a Better, More Secure Helpdesk
Help desk support software doesn’t solve every customer service problem, but it does improve the customer experience through sophisticated technology.
A good help desk will also keep track of employee behavior and improve the overall effectiveness of your support operations.
The right help desk is packed with tools that will help your employees spend less time thinking about how to manage customer requests, and more time actually managing them.
Freshdesk guarantees absolute security, and comes with custom SSL certificates, IP and network restrictions, single sign-on (SSO) scripts, clickjacking prevention and more.
If your helpdesk can’t help you accomplish everything on this checklist, it’s time to rethink your relationship and find someone new.
With Freshdesk, you can complete everything on this list and more.
Conclusion
Reaching high-growth is cause for celebration. However, if you don’t scale your support approach to handle so many new customers, you could lose them.
Accomplishing the tasks on this checklist can help ensure that your customers will enjoy the high-quality service they deserve.
First off, you’ve got to build a holistic knowledge base where users can find answers to commonly asked questions on their own time.
Then, start to capture feedback to prevent any recurring support issues.
You can also use the information you uncover from completing customer feedback, to come up with more knowledge base articles.
Canned responses and linking related tickets together are just two examples of how to streamline agent workflows and optimize their time.
Customers prefer live chat because they love immediate answers. Offer live chat on your site so that agents can answer multiple queries at once.
Crease an omnichannel support strategy that merges every support channel together. That way, agents can see the full story with every question they recieve.
Finally, consider switching to a different, more secure helpdesk that better fits your growing needs.
If your helpdesk can’t help you check off every step on this list, it might be time to switch. Switch to Freshdesk to try out every feature on this list, and then some!
Source:
1 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2018/05/17/businesses-lose-75-billion-due-to-poor-customer-service/#4e168d7f16f9
2 – https://www.expertcallers.com/blog/self-service-customer-support-will-rise-popularity-2018/
3 – https://blog.upscope.io/why-use-live-chat-whats-the-truth-behind-the-statistics/