Businesses experience many changes as they grow up. Ergo, customer service is susceptible to these changes. That’s why it’s so important that businesses actually communicate with their customers. Businesses must adapt their customer support role to keep up with the growth.
Below are several tips for scaling your customer service to meet the needs of your expanding business.
Strengthen your Customer Service Team
Gaining and retaining customers are key priorities for all businesses. With this in mind, every business strives to provide prolific customer support at all times. This is only possible through a talented customer service team.
They the face of your business. Your customer’s experience is defined solely by the skill and quality of the support they receive. As your business grows and matures, you’ll need more support from your service and marketing teams.
For this reason, you need to constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to improve your customer service team. Otherwise, your customer relationships will stagnate.
Here are a few tips for strengthening your customer service team:
• Align your customer service team’s operations with the business’ organizational goals to extend a multifaceted and stable customer experience.
• Ensure everyone on the customer service team has a comprehensive understanding of the business’ product/service. Assist them by being prepared to answer customer questions, as needed.
• Conduct a specialized training program that educates the customer service team on the best practices to follow during customer interactions (i.e. face-to-face, e-mail, live chat, etc.).
• Analyze the scenarios the customer service team is likely to encounter. If needed, compile a list of customer service scenarios and incorporate them into the training program.
• Be prepared to address an increased number of customers, as the business grows up. Consider recruiting more qualified candidates if your customer service team is relatively small.
Email Validation for Heightened Customer Service
The advent of email has been a windfall for businesses. Email helps businesses communicate with their customers in a more personalized manner. At the same time, it’s used by customers to reach out to businesses to assist with solving their queries.
It’s become an indispensable tool for the customer support team, but overwhelming for them to comprehend and act on the significant number of emails they receive. As the business grows, the quantity of emails received daily will skyrocket. Therefore, interpreting the mounting volume of emails becomes impracticable quite quickly.
The solution? Deploy a competent email validator to comprehend, segregate, and prioritize the email without a significant amount of labor.
How can an email validator save your customer service?
Per a recent conversation with a friend at ZeroBounce, “A customer could have triggered too many questions in an email, but they are all probably dealing with the same issue. An adept email validator is capable of filtering through the email, based on the nature of the queries and their complexities. They can then be forwarded to the appropriate team for immediate resolution”.
An email validator can assist with operational data, such as frequently-emailed issues; a frequently-querying customer base; etc. For these reasons, making small adjustments to your current processes help make it easier for relevant customers to overcome these frequent issues.
Organize Various Departments to Make Data Easily-Retrievable
When business is stagnant, managing a variety of operational tasks isn’t a big deal. It isn’t the same; however, should the business thrive. Operations can become chaotic as employees are prone to increase their responsibilities.
As a result, staffing quite often transitions to variegated tasks, which leads to vastly-cluttered customer support processes. This issue can be overcome by departmentalizing the business.
Segregating operations into different departments based on their nature, streamlines processes, cuts down on possible confusion and duplication of efforts. For clear customer support endeavors:
Establish an informed culture – Ensure an extensive cohesiveness exists across the verticals. The scope and culpability of each department should be meticulously evaluated and conveyed to every employee.
Attune all teams to support customer service – Customer support team agents can deliver enhanced customer service when all other teams support them. All teams should be trained to have a clear understanding of how they’re responsible for assisting customer service.
Make data relevantly accessible – Customer support executives will need to pull a significant quantity of data to render relevant information to the customers. Be sure that the data processed by other departments is systematically available for them.
Build a Knowledge Base and Utilize It
As the business grows, you’re likely to confront an increased number of customer queries. Mind that your support agents aren’t the only ones needing to gear up for the heightened influx. All verticals and business owners should meet the requirements.
Build a knowledge base
Ponder the various techniques to handle the increased number of customer queries. Analyze the avenues for systemizing the processes, which will reduce the time and effort put into it. By this way, you can strategically handle the intensified customer support.
Document business process
New or unusual issues can intimidate the customer support team, leading them to nonadherence of processes and protocols. To avoid this, develop and issue a written statement that delivers a deep knowledge of how your business’ product/service works; goals you’re orienting to, and the promises made.
Provide self-service options
A growing team must avoid addressing rudimentary issues in order to deliver qualitative support for complex issues. An FAQ area narrows down customer queries. Remaining queries can be analyzed and deduced. Craft an all-inclusive FAQ page based on self-service options and provide relevant solutions. Then, customers can immediately approach you with their specific issues, immediately.
Consider Automating Repetitive Tasks
Regardless of industry, customer service involves repeatedly addressing the same queries. As the customer base increases, the iterative requests become wearisome. It’s also unlikely that you’ll have more unusual and complex queries to address.
Avoid putting more effort into these repetitive requests, like requesting the name and other details; areas of the issue; query responses, etc. At the same time, you can’t deny these matters.
As an alternative, automate tasks with effective helpdesk software. To choose the appropriate solution, consider:
• The functions it will perform.
• Strategy for avoiding team struggle.
• What features will satisfy the customer?
Sketch out answers to all questions. The understanding will help you identify suitable software to handle and manage reiterative requests. Additionally, if the software identifies frequently-reported issues; it can be improvised to better answer those issues.
It’s important for businesses to grows. At the same time, it’s important to ensure that customer support processes are made available to support the growth. Implement the methods listed above to scale your customer service during times of growth.
