Despite the various technological advances, one of the areas where a lot of businesses continue to fail is in customer support. This is because a vast majority of customers seeking support are those who have issues with the product. Add a layer of long waiting times, unhelpful staff and unresolved issues, the frustrations can easily add up.
A lot of these frustrations can easily be removed through investments in better technology. Consider this – 2016 is almost here. Yet, there are customer help-desks that still ask for your phone number and other details when you call them to request support for their product. Despite technology available to instantly identify a caller and retrieve their order history, a lot of businesses still use antiquated customer relationship management techniques.
This is a dangerous proposition in the age of social media considering a minor goof-up could easily blow up into a PR nightmare. What are some areas businesses must invest on in order to make helpdesk more effective? Here are some pointers
Sophisticated CRM : This is one of the must-haves in modern times, especially for businesses that handle thousands of orders a month. While customer relationship management tools are predominantly used to handle leads and manage sales cycles more efficiently, they also help support executives gain a holistic view of a customer right from their profile details to their order history and past technical support issues. This enables the staff to avoid asking the same questions to the customer thereby removing those layers adding to frustration. Modern cloud based CRM tools from companies like NetSuite are available as monthly subscriptions unlike traditional tools that required heavy capital expenditure.
Social Media Support : A large chunk of unhappy customers take their grievances online through platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Although most businesses today do have a social media presence, support requested through these services are often routed through conventional support desks. This creates an avoidable barrier and in effect makes the customer virtually run from pillar to post to get their issues resolved. Modern helpdesk tools provide multi-channel support that includes integrations with platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This not only ensures all questions routed over social media are addressed in a timely manner, but also provides an opportunity for business to track and monitor their social media reputation should something go wrong.
Automate Support Requests : For a customer needing help on extremely critical requests, every additional minute taken by the help-desk to turn around with resolution adds to their frustration, not to mention potential financial loss. Various studies point to a future where human support agents may be replaced by AI bots that would process support requests and automatically respond with resolution. We are already seeing innovation on that front with services like Inteliwise providing automated solutions and answers to customer requests through natural language processing. While this area is far from maturity, your business can take the lead in the industry to move towards such services that will help radically reduce turnaround times and therefore customer frustrations.
What are some ways your business has made helpdesk seamless and less frustrating for the customer? Share your stories in the comments.
