Chapter 3: Six signs you need to improve your customer service experience.
But being able to improve your customer service experience isn’t just about the experience between your agents and your customers; it’s also about how to improve customer service in the workplace — that is, your agents’ experience. In order to provide great customer service experiences, your service agents must also have the right tools to make the most of their time with your customers.
That’s why customer service solutions, like a help desk app, are so important and can transform the customer service experience. If you have the right help desk solution, you can know your customers better, offer the products and services they really want, and quickly respond whenever they need help. And you can solve employee issues and get them the solutions they need — fast. Think you might need a help desk solution for your business? Read on for six things to consider as you evaluate how to better your customer service experience:
1. You’re outgrowing your current ticket management system.
DITCH THE SPREADSHEETS
2. You have more than one person supporting customers.
When your business grows, you’ll need a team of people to help customers. The problem with email is that it’s designed to be used by one person. While it works well for one-to-one or one-to-many communications, a shared email account isn’t an efficient way for multiple people to communicate with customers.
When several people use the same email account, there’s no easy way to see who’s read a customer email, who’s looking for answers to an inquiry, or who (if anyone) has actually responded. It’s easy for emails to get lost and for customers to fall through the cracks. With email, there’s also no mechanism for routing specific cases to specific agents. This results in certain confusion, as well as something called agent collision, which is when multiple agents work the same cases.
3. You’re looking for ways to be more productive or make better decisions.
It’s vital to make sure your customers feel supported, of course, but a help desk solution provides other benefits as well. A help desk solution typically contains productivity tools to help you quickly route cases, find the right answers, and respond to customers and employees fast. And they usually have tools that let you automate simple requests so your agents can focus on the more complicated issues.
But beyond the customer-agent ramifications, the deeper business impacts are appealing. Most help desk solutions can give you reports on key support team and business metrics to help you make customer service improvements. You can track inquiries so you can spot issues early, or learn new features your customers want. If you get a help desk solution with integration capabilities, you can connect support to other business systems; this gives other departments a complete view of customer information, allowing teams to collaborate more efficiently to make every customer interaction a great one. And with the right help desk solution, you can easily add more agents as your business grows, so even during busy times, there’s no hiccup in the service you provide for your customers.
4. Your customers are reaching out to you on multiple channels.
5. You want to make it easy for customers to help themselves.
Self-service customer support is table stakes in today’s world, and it’s one place where email simply doesn’t deliver. Uber-connected customers like to find their own answers — on their own time frame — and most would rather use self-service than picking up the phone. And for small businesses, offering a self-service site is the most cost-effective way to offer 24/7 support and improves the overall customer service experience when they can get solutions on their own, fast.
With so many people using smartphones to manage their businesses and personal lives, it’s critical to offer a mobile service experience so your customers can also solve their problems on the go.
6. Your business is expanding.
TAKE IT ON THE ROAD
