Customer Service Priorities in Times of Crisis, Part II: Strategies for Growing Industries
In Part 1 of this blog post, we wrote about dealing with critical situations when the business climate is stagnating and sales are contracting. We offered customer support leaders steps they can take to prepare their teams to deliver in turbulent times and be able to build trust and customer loyalty. In Part 2, we’re going to talk about handling crises when a business is experiencing exponential growth.
When a business is exponentially growing, run damage control
Exponential growth that caught you by surprise may also mark the start of a crisis. When a business is experiencing sudden explosive growth, it’s again the customer support teams that take the initial hit being in the front line. Many would say, “that’s a better problem to have”, however, the fact that you have generated unexpected interest in your products and services does not yet mean that you have created loyal paying customers. An increase in the traffic and adoption of your product would invariably mean a surge in customer support tickets. More product bugs, glitches and inefficiencies will surface due to the rise in product use, which might just lead to lower customer satisfaction and product stickiness. The users of today are vocal, they’ll take it to social media. So can you prevent brand deterioration and customers fleeing to competitive products? Yes. While all the tips we shared in the first post are applicable here too, the focus will be different — customer support leads will be trying to minimize the damage and keep the status quo while the user base is rapidly growing.
Here are a few steps to take to handle the flood of new customers without straining your customer support team, damaging your brand reputation, and losing customers to the competition:
- Devise a clear and transparent communication strategy
Don’t let your support team start randomly responding to customer objections across multiple channels. It’s crucial to have a solid crisis communication plan in place that has secured leadership’s buy-in before agents start tweeting and blogging. Don’t take too much time to put together a plan, however — while time is ticking away, customers are left wondering what’s going on. Silence and denial are the worst possible reactions an organization can have.
Let’s take Zoom, for example: while the video conferencing company did not necessarily see it coming, their leadership was very quick to react. In an open letter to their users, CEO Eric S. Yuan acknowledged that they are experiencing issues and are currently unable to keep up with users’ demands. In his blog post, Eric outlined a clear action plan and a timeline for the next couple of months, and provided progress checks on the way. Did Zoom manage to fix everything overnight? Of course not! Did they succeed in gaining control over the situation? Yeah, it seems they did:
2. Reduce customer wait times and manage customer frustration
The first question customer support team leads have to answer is how to redistribute and control support volumes to flatten the average wait time curve.
Let’s face it. In times of crisis, it’s unlikely that you would manage to improve customer satisfaction. Even when your service is outstanding, customers are still distressed from the situation, and they might not be able to acknowledge and understand your efforts and best intentions at the moment.
Even keeping the same level of service from before the emergency might be a difficult task to accomplish.
Mend, one of the major telemedicine platforms on the market today, and a SessionStack customer for the last four years, experienced exponential growth of their user base right from the start of the Covid-19 crisis:
“One thing we had to change during this pandemic was how to keep the quality of our customer service with an exponential increase of users. During the first few stages of this pandemic, our support team was hit with an extremely high volume of tickets, so we had to adjust how to respond to this volume while delivering quality support. We then used better methods of communication internally, changed our protocols, and instituted better metrics for resolution and response time.” — Gabriel Latorre, Head of Support, Mend.
For us, then, it wasn’t really one thing we had to change, but an entire shift within our support team.
Here are a few things you can do to readjust the standard service schedule to cope with the load:
- Assign customers to different priority tiers depending on the emergency of their requests
- Set up an emergency response team to assess the situation and adjust priorities daily
- Introduce flexible work hours so that agents can cover a wider range of time zones
- Last but not least, arm your customer service team with the necessary tools to increase agents’ productivity. Cobrowsing, screensharing and session replay solutions like SessionStack not only help agents understand the reason behind every customer request, but enable them to close the communication loop with engineers faster, reduce the number of replies per support request, and improve the overall ticket resolution rate.
3. Boost the production of self-learning tools, on-demand training, and knowledge base articles to improve self-service
Ensuring the availability of help resources that are easily accessible by users is an effective way to provide high-quality service to your customers. A key benefit of having a comprehensive knowledge base is its around-the-clock availability. Customers can access information and find an answer to their questions, any time. They don’t need to waste time calling or emailing support to solve a problem they could have solved with a couple of clicks.
What’s more, readily available help resources enable organizations to become proactive in customer support by anticipating and solving client problems before users have stumbled upon them.
Our friends at OfficeRnD shared their experience with easing the burden on customer support in the past few months:
“The COVID outbreak put us all in customer success positions, meaning striving to support our customers during hard times. Our agents have been proactively reaching out to customers to understand their operational status and we were encouraging the community managers to go digital to make the best out of our platform. A major focus of our effort was to improve the self-service of our product by enhancing our knowledge base portal — we added a ton of new articles, updated the existing ones, hosted lots of webinars. In collaboration with our marketing team, we managed to provide excellent and timely customer service to our client base.” — Vineeth Gireesan, Support Manager at OfficeRnD
4. Automation is a friend, not a foe
Ask yourself — what can we quickly automate to achieve some productivity gains? According to Intercom’s customer support COVID-19 report, support leaders are increasingly turning to automation options, alongside the creation of help resources. ¼ of the survey respondents confirmed that they are already using tools like chatbots to handle the increase in support requests. The support leaders of teams that are already invested in automation are 41% more likely to say they reach their goals despite the disruption.
Along with bots, savvy customer service leaders rely on other forms of automation like automatically sending service delivery reports, customer follow-ups, KB article updates, and more.
5. Join forces with the product team to shift roadmap priorities
Before the start of the crisis, your product team might have been focused on building features to catch up with the competition, or they have been strategizing for innovations that will set you apart from the rest of the players on the market. Whatever the case, it’s time to pause, take a look around, and rethink your product roadmap.
Customer demands should serve as the foundation for the short-to-mid-term direction of the team. Scaling your product (focus on product stability and guaranteed uptime) is about ensuring that it’s robust enough to survive. Carve out time to improve your infrastructure, and prioritize feature requests from customers that align with your overall strategy.
6. Introduce a bug bounty program to improve product quality
The unexpected growth of your user base can be quite concerning especially when your product has not reached that level of maturity, in which you would have dedicated a significant resource to quality assurance. There is no such thing as bug-free software, however, you should strive to minimize the volume and severity of the defects in your products. If your product team resources are strained, a bug bounty program can be a creative way to organize the community to help in the effort.
Finally, be sure to listen to your community of users to help tweak your approach on the go. Work to actively and quickly address specific issues and questions that have been raised and openly commit to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues in the long run.
Are you operating in a stagnating industry or one that’s experiencing exponential growth? What is the one thing that you had to change about the way you do customer service? Share your experience in the comments below. Thank you!
Sources:
https://customerthink.com/customer-retention-in-a-time-of-crisis-10-action-steps-for-saas-companies/
https://hbr.org/2020/04/supporting-customer-service-through-the-coronavirus-crisis
https://www.northridgegroup.com/blog/delivering-customer-experience-in-times-of-crisis/
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4217-customer-service-tips-during-crisis.html
https://customerthink.com/customer-retention-in-a-time-of-crisis-10-action-steps-for-saas-companies/
https://www.accenture.com/bg-en/about/company/coronavirus-responsive-customer-service
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/
https://www.intercom.com/blog/covid-19-customer-support-report/
https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-service-crisis-management/
