What this post is about
- Helping more efficiently: Provide customer support in a variety of ways
- Optimize solutions to make all tools simple and easy for customers to access
- Use your customer support to create a memorable company and brand
- Build a positive image through Support staff who demonstrate true industry expertise
For a long time, external call centers, answers with generic text modules, or automatically generated emails defined the image of customer support. With a bit of luck, the fixed question-and-answer game leads to a solution, but it rarely creates a positive impression.
Digitalization is changing the rules of the game: Increasingly, customers want transparency, accessibility, reliability, and free access to assistance. With broad-based customer service and honest commitment, you can easily integrate these requirements into your daily business.
Educate your customers (before questions arise)
Diversity and multiplicity are not only important buzzwords in our society, but also characterize your flexible customer support. Offer your users the chance to ask questions in a variety of ways. The most common options are: social media, phone, messenger services, email, or chat. Keep track of these with an omnichannel management tool like Zammad and use it to manage your central help desk. However, these simple means of communication have a clear disadvantage: they are mostly used by customers who haven't tried to solve their problem on their own.
Enable customers to help themselves! Simply share your wisdom in advance and pass on your know-how in a knowledge base or a blog, for example. Regular contributions and well-maintained FAQ pages provide answers and increase the time spent on the website.
Clinging to your knowledge won't help anyone. Instead, you'll benefit much more from being transparent and explaining complex processes in advance. In addition, you relieve your employees, who will process fewer general requests and can focus more on specific topics.
Actively address problem solutions in customer support
Working together on solutions brings faster results! A guiding principle that describes future-oriented customer support very well and offers the opportunity to build another competitive advantage. It is time to kill the idea that support is the last chance! In the best case, your team and the customers form a community where people help each other and proactively provide answers. A coherent logic since, in the end, all parties involved want to achieve success.
Approach your customers: create surveys that tell you about needs or problems. Have them vote on which improvements should be prioritized. Acting at eye level means listening carefully and also, in some cases, saying "We don't know everything yet either - but we know who to ask. Namely our customers."
Tonality sets the course
As in other areas of daily life, tone sets the course of conversation. This includes avoiding hasty recriminations - both written and verbal - in the first place. Certainly, this cannot be avoided with upset customers, but it is up to the company itself to straighten its back and take a step back.
Listen to the concern and try to take the customer's point of view. Because if you view your support as an offer of help and not as a justification point, you will reach your goal via a less rocky road.
Live customer support instead of advertising with it
Nobody needs big service promises, because only very few companies also keep them. The question should always be: How would I myself like to be helped in comparable situations?.
Clearly, this involves personal contact, regular status updates, and short processing periods. For requests and issues that require more time than calculated, keep the strings in your hand. Don't wait for the customer to ask. It's always safer to handle mitigation yourself before things go bang out of control.
Summary
With an omnichannel management tool or helpdesk like Zammad, you can easily manage your customer communication channels. It helps you to track incoming requests and have previous correspondences available. Tickets are assigned to specific staff members who take charge of responding to them. Always maintain an open and transparent attitude - this generates trust and shows that you want to solve problems together with your customers. A knowledge base or a blog with helpful tips add sustainable value to the service character. Your long-term effect: when things go wrong, customers know where to find help besides the contact form.
You can also read about how other customers use Zammad to provide the best possible customer support in our insightful customer stories: