Listening to your customers can help your business grow. Let us tell you how.
What often comes to your mind when you think about customer support? If like most people you think that the inquiries that go to customer support are just people trying to reach out because they are having a problem with their products or services.
If people think this about customer support, it is bad news.
But since we have already mentioned above listening to customers can resolve your problems and improve the way you offer products or services.
On the basis of our experience, here are 8 ways to help your business grow through customer support inquiries. They act as a route for improvement rather than being a piece of bad news.
Product Improvement
When you go through your customer support questions and pick up the trend, you will notice the underlying problems with your process, product, or service. If the problems for which the customers are calling is a repeated one, it might be time to look into your product and check if it is facing a design issue or find a way to actively address the problem.
For example, a lot of companies get to know that their customers are not able to find the information that they are looking for on the business website. It may be possible that the information is available but the customers are unable to find it easily. To resolve this, you might want to undertake a design review so that the website UX team can address the problem. When you fix this issue, you can reduce the frustration of the customer and the volume of the customer support call.
If your customers are always asking you for copies of their invoices, you might want to put up a self-service option for the customers so that they can avail them on their own.
This information might also help you understand new sales opportunities like new features, potential upgrades or even consider launching a new product.
Resources For The Support Team
By tracking the reasons why customers tend to contact customer support helps you to determine certain topics that are occurring regularly. This allows you to provide your customer support team with education for helping them handle problems more effectively. This will help you improve the metrics of average resolution time that you spend on the problems and allow your team to handle more volume potentially.
Moreover, if you have the information on how many times your team had to write the same answer, you can create shortcuts. Having to type the same thing on a live chat or an email, repeatedly, takes time and so to deliver such answers creating a shortcut can save the time and effort of your team.
Prioritize and Escalate
Tracking the problems of customers can help you categorize the inquiries. When you reduce the time spent on common inquiries, it can help you resolve such issues quickly so that you can spend more time on the situations that are really difficult. When you identify such areas, you will be able to develop a priority system that is better and recognizes quickly when an issue needs attention on high priority or escalation to technical teams or product specialists.
Additionally, escalating and setting priorities can help your team handle problems efficiently when the tickets are routed to another team for handling.
Knowledge Base
People these days are more comfortable in solving their own problems. They search for information that can solve their problems online. Therefore, they might get frustrated if they don’t find it. You can develop a database by tracking your customer’s experience about the important touchpoints where your existing customers and prospects might be looking up for gathering solutions. This data can help you determine the missing information that can be used to build a knowledge base for your site and thus help your business grow.
Efficiency Of System
When you use an efficient customer tracking system you are able to make proper adjustments to the systems and processes. This will help your business grow since your support team’s frustration will be reduced and the resolution of issues will be more efficient.
Tracking By Channel And Issue
You should capture all the feedback from your customers from across the channels like website inquiries, social media, phone, emails, etc. By determining which inquiries arrive through which channel you can make decisions accordingly so as to the type of information you want to provide and where you want to do it.
Bridge The Gap Between Customers And Companies
Determining how and where the expectations of customers are compromised can be difficult if you aren’t tracking them and listening to them. There can be a disconnection between the service that you are delivering and the way they are perceiving it.
You need to track your customer’s reasons for reaching out to your support team and then create systems for improving your team’s efficiency. By doing this you can help your business grow since the customers will be happy about getting resolutions quickly.
Customer Interaction Information
Apart from tracking the issues of your customers, it is important that you ask for their feedback. You should survey if the people are happy with the resolution as well as with the overall process. This can allow encountering people whose problems have been resolved but they are still unhappy because it was difficult to resolve.
This is why companies conduct different type of surveys. The answers to these surveys can highlight the problem areas, system issues and the satisfaction level of the customer.
By tracking the customer support interactions and engagement can help your business grow using the surveys, data points, as well as for analytics that can reveal the places of improvement for your process, systems, and resources. When you improve the experience of your customer, it will drive you to achieve customer satisfaction and can be an important differentiation in today’s market.
