A Small Guide for Ticketing Software Users on How to Keep Customers Delighted

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For many B2B companies, success means growing their customer base and increasing their revenue. This makes the acquisition of new customers a strategic focus for them. To achieve this goal, they invest heavily on advertising, incentivizing new customers and participating in trade shows.

While getting new customers is important for a company, a biased focus on this aspect can cause the company to neglect existing customers that it previously worked hard to acquire. In the long run, this is expensive for the business. According to Invespcro, it costs a business five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Further, a company only has a 5-20 percent chance of selling to a new customer compared to a 60-70 percent chance of selling to an existing customer.

With these benefits accruing from existing customers, B2B customers should focus on delighting existing customers just as much as they focus on acquiring new ones. Delighting customers entails keeping them happy. I believe it is all about surprising them by surpassing their expectations and creating a favorable emotional reaction. One way B2B companies can achieve this is by using help desk ticketing software.

So how can B2B companies use ticketing software to keep their customers delighted? Here is a 5-point guide to enable you to do exactly that:

1. Automate tickets to fast-track issue resolution

When customers reach out to your support staff, they want their issues resolved immediately. Available data shows 53 percent of them consider quick resolution of their issues as very important. According to MetricNet, there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and the time it takes to resolve customer issues.
The mean time to solve (MTTR) is the average time that lapses from the time an issue is reported to the time it gets resolved.


Image Source: MetricNet

But often, B2B companies are not able to meet this need right away. A ticketing software enables companies to resolve customer issues fast by automating the ticket issuance process. Automation reduces the time support staff spend entering customer data and allows them to focus more on engaging the customer. Your customer representatives can use the settings in the software to prioritize the most pressing tickets.

For instance, support staff can make quick decisions to balance issues that come from bigger clients but require more time to resolve with simple issues from smaller customers that can be resolved quickly. Ticket prioritization also enables your team to consolidate similar issues and create standard templates for such issues.

2. Use personalization to delight your customers

Customers want brands to treat them with respect, and the one way B2B companies can do this is by personalizing their interactions with them. As any customer experience expert will tell you, a help desk ticketing software can easily enable companies to utilize customer data such as personal information, geographic location, previous tickets, and the products they’ve bought before to personalize their service to customers. By allowing support to access this information, they can build rapport with customers and make them feel respected and valued by the company.

As a B2B company, you may personalize customer service by ensuring that every time customers reach out to you, they get a customized response to their communication. A classic example of a company that does this Zappos. Check out this engaging email that a customer representative sent to a customer who reached out to its CEO below.


Image Source: Qualtrics

With 80 percent of customers wanting to pay extra dollars, personalizing customer service is one of the strategies that B2B companies can tap to deliver better customer experiences and delight customer service.

3. Streamline customer communication

Customers reach out to their preferred brands through different communication channels. With a help desk software, B2B companies can track every communication channel and make themselves available for the customer when the need arises. In order to choose the best help desk software, a B2B company should first be clear on the channels that its customers use to communicate.

Ideally, a good help desk ticketing software is the one that allows for the integration of multiple communication channels, including telephony, social listening, live chats, and email capabilities.

Such a system software makes it possible for support staff to:
streamline routing of support calls
get instant notification of social media messages
have real-time chat pop-ups, and
route and follow-up email requests

The goal here is to allow customers to comfortably reach out to support teams through communication channels of their choice. While streamlining its communication channels, a B2B company should ensure that its customers receive consistent messages from customer staff.

This is important because 71% of customers expect to receive a consistent experience irrespective of the communication channel they use. A fully integrated ticketing software enables B2B companies to reduce issue resolution time, which enhances customer experience and delights them more.

FedEX is a classic example of the many customer delight examples that provide consistent messages and streamline communication to customers. Committed to open communication, transparency and customer experience, this second most trusted B2B brand improved its customer communication by cutting down on the number of emails sent out to customers and creating a customer-centric newsletter system.


Image Source: Customer Gauge

4. Provide expert support each time a customer reaches out

Customers want to be served by people who are knowledgeable about their issues. For B2B companies that deal with many products or highly technical products or services, constituting support groups to specialize in providing support for specific products can go a long way in ensuring that customers get expert support every time they reach out.

The help desk group feature in ticketing software allows you to create expert groups for improved customer experience. Using system tags, you can create labels for expert groups and the products they handle in your help desk software. Since the software has information about the products customers own, issue tickets are routed to respective reps automatically.

Besides products, a B2B company can set up help desk groups using other attributes, including language spoken and geographic location. The most critical thing is to ensure that customer issues are routed to support staff that is best equipped to resolve them as fast as possible.

IBM is a great example of a B2B company that provides expert support to customers. The global tech giant assigns each customer to a group of specialists who then help with integrating IBM’s Cloud Storage into their processes. The company asks its customers to give feedback to enable it to improve its products.

Key Takeaway

Customer service is one of the most powerful tools that any B2B company has for improving customer experience. With the use of customer service tools such as ticketing software, you can empower your support team to delight your customers and keep them emotionally connected to your brand for a long time. Consider implementing the four strategies discussed in the guide above can and increase the revenue streams to your company from existing customers.

Jared Cornell
Jared is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs Help Desk. He enjoys writing about emerging customer support products, trends in the customer support industry, and the financial impacts of using such tools. You can connect and engage with Jared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

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