Customer support can be a challenge. Especially in the B2B (business-to-business) industry, the quick decisions your support team makes can have a profound impact on a customer relationship. Whether or not they make the right decision on the phone can be the difference between calming an upset customer or making the customer even more angry.
One method businesses are utilizing to improve the number of positive customer interactions that happen every day is to leverage customer-support systems. Here are five reasons why these systems are essential to great businesses and why they are now a core component of many support operations.
1) Customer-information storage
With so many information sources now capturing customer information, your team needs a system to store all this data. Jumping between several systems is time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, leverage a centralized customer-support system that houses all customer information and utilizes support integrations to share this data with other systems and the greater team.
2) Improved communication
If you aren’t working within a customer-support system, it can offer many ways to improve how you work together with colleagues. It’s time to retire swapping spreadsheets and email! Instead, a customer-support system provides sophisticated ticket-management features, including both public and private ticket actions. This capability lets you have internal conversations directly within a ticket without the customer’s ever seeing it.
3) Detailed customer insights
Another negative of the spreadsheets-and-email combination is that it doesn’t provide actionable data for your business. in contrast, a customer-support system is built to track inquiries at both the customer and contact level. This function enables powerful reporting capabilities so you can determine the happiness of your customers as well as how much effort your team puts into each customer relationship.
4) Additional communication channels
Email and phone support, should you offer both, is now considered to be a bare minimum for a functioning support team. Adding in live chat and self-service channels via your customer-support system will not only increase customer happiness (more ways to contact you) but also reduce ticket volume. Although some channels like self-service take time to create and set up, they enable you to provide a form of 24/7 support without breaking the bank.
5) Improved employee morale
The nature of support professionals is that they enjoy helping customers solve their problems. Providing a great resolution to a customer issue isn’t just a win for your business, it’s a win for them personally and for your support culture. Make these moments more frequent and reduce employee frustration by implementing a customer-service system. You’ll notice employees will be happier when they spend less time hunting for the right information and more time solving problems.
In short, customer-support systems are essential to great businesses because they completely change internal and external processes. Customers are happier because they have more ways to contact you and get better responses. Employees enjoy the systems because they make work easier and they can focus more on customer relationships. Simply put, these systems are the backbone of any great business!
This article was written by Matthew Brown from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.
