Customer support forms: how to structure your customer support service
The efficiency and reliability of customer service can make or break your business.
At the end of the day, the most valuable type of customers are those who come back. The best way to ensure your customers come back is to make them happy.
This is where customer support comes in.
We’ll look at three customer support models:
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Call centers or 1 on 1 support
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Self-service (FAQ and knowledge base)
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Digital solutions (live chat and email support)
Why good customer service matters
Although customer support and customer service – these are different concepts, they are very related.
In fact, good customer service skills are a must for any customer service representative.
And, as we found out earlier, good customer service can be a revenue driver for your business… Good customer service can help you add value to your product, retain customers, increase recurring income, and more.
As a result, you structure your customer support in a way that improves the customer experience.
Customer support models
Now let’s take a look at the different ways in which you can simulate a customer support service. We’ll also take a look at which strategies are best for different types of companies.
Call centers or 1 on 1 support
When you think about giving customer support, your first thought might be call centers.
After all, call centers allow direct interaction with customers. Especially for large companies and enterprises.
With direct 1-to-1 interaction, the customer not only receives more personalized assistance, but also makes it easier for the customer service representative to increase sales.
However, this customer support model is costly. You will have to pay full salary for each client you want to serve at the same time.
Thus, if you want to be able to support 50 customers at any given time, then your customer support costs will increase accordingly.
On the other hand, if you fail to scale the call center accordingly, it can lead to long waiting times and lower customer satisfaction.
Self-service (FAQ and knowledgebase)
On the other hand, we have customer self-service models. They rely on platforms that host the information a customer needs to solve most of the common problems they may face.
Most often, these platforms can be presented in the form of short FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) pages or more detailed knowledge bases or support documents.
While these solutions are really low cost, they also lead to low customer engagement rates. As a result, many customers may leave without solving their problems or getting a 1-on-1 interaction with your company.
Thus, you are missing out on the chance to delight your customers with high quality customer support. Plus, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to identify customer needs that can lead to increased product sales.
Digital solutions (live chat and email support)
Digital solutions are perhaps the best way to find a reasonable balance between the two models we just looked at.
On the one hand, they allow you to interact with customers one-on-one via chat or (even better), via live chat… Thus, personalized support and sales opportunities are still possible.
On the other hand, these solutions enable you to multitask and increase productivity. For example, a single support representative can provide support to multiple users at the same time using email and chat capabilities.
As a result, digital solutions provide many of the benefits of the call center model while reducing costs. In addition, scaling a digital customer support solution also means lower costs.
Live Chat Support Platforms Not Only Improve Customer Service Experience, They Can Become Powerful lead generation channel for your business…
Providing customer support via live chat
So where do you start when it comes to implementing a customer support solution using live chat on your site?
Fortunately, adding chat to your site is incredibly easy. And depending on the product you choose as a platform, you can take advantage of additional features such as browser entry.
We recommend MomentIt has a chat, browser recording and CRM platform that you can use to grow your business. The best part is that registration is free, no payment methods required.
Find out more by reading our guide on how quickly and for free add a chat to your website…
After you have installed the customer support chat on your site, you will need to deploy and implement a new customer support model.
It may sound daunting, but luckily, we detail the process in our guide on how to use chat for customer support…
Translation prepared as part of the course “Head of User Support in IT”.
We invite everyone to an open lesson “Digitizing Support”… In this lesson we will talk about metrics that will help us understand how well we are doing. Or not. And let’s also think about why sometimes metrics tell us that everything is fine, when in fact it is not.
