Deliver a great customer support experience
How to improve customer support experience, reduce costs and increase revenue
Why we should even care about Customer Support Experience?
In today’s world every business no matter B2B or B2C, if want to stay alive and grow, they have to build a strong relationship with their customers. The quality of your relationship with your customers will define how successful your business can be.
The more deep and personalized this relationship becomes, the more loyalty you’ll see in your customers’ faces. That’s the key to success and the foundation of every business.
“ As a membership site, we’re always focused on reducing churn and increasing satisfaction. We know that collecting feedback from customers throughout the customer’s lifecycle has allowed us to achieve both.” James Bake
If your brand is just trying to sell to your customers, then you’d be easily compared and replaced with your competitors that offer more attractive options.
You may not be the only one who can deliver that specific service. Clients don’t come to you merely for your products/services. They’re looking for the value you can bring to them by solving their pain point or challenges.
Customers expect the right solution at the right time. And embracing this solution should be as easiest as possible.
They want to feel valuable and distinguished from cooperating with your brand. It’s not likely for them to be considered only as an opportunity for your organizations’ profit.
But these are merely the expectations your customers have. So what if you could deliver even more value than they’re expecting to them? Like making their concerns disappear, helping them make better and wiser decisions, or delivering a great customer support experience.
You’d be their hero.
Why Do Customers Need Support?
If you’re currently facing a lot of customers reaching out to your support team and asking for some help to achieve their goals in your product, it means the user experience of your product/website isn’t working as well as it should be. The customers can’t find the answers themselves they’re looking for, so they will try to contact your company and ask for help.
According to a diary study research from Nielsen Norman Group, which analyzed 45 unique customer journeys, they found out “64% of customers made at least one time contact with the organizations” and asked for support.
The most common reasons people contacted companies for support were:
- Missing or confusing information (38%): when some information that customers need to know before they move forward is missing or not clearly understood. For example, a user wants to try a service but he’s not sure if the company offers demo or trial usage, so he’d call the company to ask about it.
- Roadblocks (24%): when they find hurdles during completing a task or when they need something that the company doesn’t support. For example, a user faced an unexpected error while signing up or making a purchase.
- Service/Product Problems (24%): when they got an unexpected outcome from an interaction or facing a poor quality of service they paid for. For example, a user expected to receive a 20% discount coupon after making his first purchase (as the company promised) but he didn’t receive so he contacted the company’s support.
- Perception of complexity (14%): when a user finds a task too complex to complete and tries to contact a support representative so he/she can help him to do it.
Usual methods that customers use to contact support
How to deliver a great Customer Support Experience?
Seth Godin once said, “If a company puts customers on hold for a long time, it means they consider their customers as a cost, not an asset”.
The customers are the most valuable assets in your company. Without them, your business wouldn’t exist.
And that should be a belief inside of the heart of your company. So your customers can see and believe that you’re here to serve them.
It’s ok to be imperfect. Your customer can totally understand that. Even in big products, there are so many unexpected issues/problems.
But the thing that your customers can’t stand with is not being given a solution for that unexpected problem when they reach out to your support team.
When that happens, you let your customer have a bad experience with your brand. And it’s very likely for them to be churned.
Even if they are brand-loyal.
How to reduce the cost of Customer Support?
Before we ask this question, we should take a step back and look. Does Customer Support really look like a cost in the company that should be reduced?
Or, we can see it as an investment opportunity? With an excellent ROI.
The more you invest in your company’s Customer Support experience, the more satisfied and loyal customers you’re going to have. A lot of money is going to be saved to prevent churning. Yeah, your company invested a lot for each of those existing customers.
And besides, your company’s sales are going to be increased, and so the revenue.
But the good news is, you can reduce the cost of customer support by improving it. And you don’t need to sacrifice the quality of your Customer support experience merely to reduce the costs.
“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.” -Sally Gronow
Nobody enjoys waiting. So your customers. They don’t like to be on hold for a couple of minutes to reach out to a support representative. Or waiting for a couple of hours/day to get their ticket being responded to.
On the other hand, every request coming from a customer costs you. Some cheaper, some not. It depends on the complexity of the request and the channel they’re using to contact.
So, if you can satisfy customer’s needs in your website/product without their need for support, you can make both sides happy.
Your support team would receive fewer inquiries. A lot of money would be saved from the reduction of customer support costs. And also your customer satisfaction (CSAT) would be increased.
How to reduce customers' need for Support and deliver a better customer support experience?
It’s very bold to say that we can minimize the customer support needs to zero. There are so many customers with different needs, directions, personalities, and levels of knowledge. And more importantly, they’re changing constantly.
It’s not because that we can’t read the client’s minds and predict every situation. But even we can read their minds, we can’t design for every angle to meet every need. It’s not reasonable. Not affordable. And sometimes not feasible.
Besides, it’s ok to be imperfect. Your customer can totally understand that. Even in big products, there are so many unexpected issues/problems.
But the thing that your customers can’t stand is not being given a solution for that unexpected problem when they reach out to your support team.
When that happens, you let your customer have a bad experience with your brand. And it’s very likely for them to be churned.
Even if they are brand-loyal.
But here are some ways you can use to improve customer support experience and minimize the customer’s needs for support:
1. Customer Journey
“Until you understand your customers — deeply and genuinely — you cannot truly serve them.” Rasheed Ogunlaru
To provide a great customer support experience and minimize your customer’s need for support, it’s very crucial to know them better:
- Who are they?
- What challenges they’re having?
- What’s their expectation from an ideal solution?
- What kind of devices or channels do they use in multiple situations?
- etc…
With Customer Journey Mapping you’ll be able to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see from their perspective. Empathically understand their pain points and needs.
Customer journey mapping allows you to:
- Understand their various needs and desired outcome in multiple channels
- Clearly see how your customers interact with your product
- Getting a comprehensive perspective of the whole process in your product
- Figure out how to prioritize the importance of customer’s problem or future features
Once you learned more about them and analyzed every situation and ways that your customers might interact with your product to get what they need. You’re more likely to see the hidden opportunities for improving the User Experience in every journey.
Then you can come up with more optimized and personalized solutions for them to meet their desired needs from various angles. And the more you fulfill these gaps in your customers’ needs, the fewer inquiries your support team would receive from them.
2. Effective Customer Education and Onboarding
What if your SaaS (Software As A Service) product is too complex, but in its own simplest form? Probably you have many limitations to make your product easier to use. Even though that your target audience may be tech-people or tech-savvy, but there will be so many questions that your support team needs to answer.
By trying to teach your customers effectively, you can prevent so many contact inquiries to happen.
- Try to understand which type of context (blog posts, videos, tutorials, etc…) is more engaging for your customers and create instructive content based on your audiences’ taste.
- Spend time to find out which flow/section of your product is more challenging to most of your users. and try to simplify and optimize that process so they can achieve their goals easier.
- Put your efforts and design a very effective user onboarding experience — This is a very influential way that your new customers can quickly learn about the value of your product and how to use it. If the onboarding process works successfully on your users it will reduce support inquiries, increase purchase rate after the free trial and bring more satisfaction to your users.
3. Listen Carefully to Your Customers
When you’re asking yourself “How to improve your SaaS service or customer experience?” you can have the best answers. From those who are using it. Your customers. They are the biggest fountain of information that you need. And the highway that connects you with them, is your Customer Support team.
The Customer Support team already knows a lot about your customers. They’ve listened to a lot of their complaints, problems, questions, or even suggestions. Thus, through your customer support team, you’ll get access to a lot of valuable information.
That’s why you should keep your Design and Customer Support teams close together.
- Sort out their most commonly asked questions or complaints
- Investigate to find out the root of each of those problems/confusions
- Brainstorm with the team to come up with the best possible solution for those — so you can make sure those problems won’t happen again
By solving the most common problems you’ll let your customers know that they’ve been heard and valued. Besides, you’re going to reduce some of your future customer support inquiries. And your support team would face lower frustrations.
4. Customer Self Service Support
What if you could create a system inside of your product that helps your customers find the answers on their own? With no interaction with your support team. At least the problems can be solved without any support.
Customer Self-Service Support will give your product the power to make it happen.
By enabling Self Service Support your customers can satisfy their needs whenever it arises. Their problems could be solved so fast. It means in addition to saving your customers time and prevent the feeling of frustration, this system also can prevent contact inquiries to your organization.
Types of customer self-service support:
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Knowledge base
- Chatbots
- Interactive voice response (IVR)
But be careful, it’s not as simple as that. Study shows that 55% of customers have difficult times using web self-service system to find their answers.
The Bottom line
A great user experience is silent. If your users are not reaching out to you and asking for some help, it means your product’s user experience is working well. Please don’t remove the “Contact” page from your website to make that happen :D
In conclusion, to deliver a great customer support experience and reduce support inquiries, you must first deeply understand your user’s pain points and goals. Invest to improve your product user experience, listen to the users, and use self-service tools to answer their potential questions.
References
Thank you for taking the time for reading this article. Please let me know your thoughts in the comment. Hope you enjoyed it!
