Building an effective customer support team is of paramount importance for all businesses. Quality customer service is central to creating a positive customer experience (CX), more so when CX is all set to surpass other factors such as product and price as the best way to make your brand stand out.
Even with the best-designed product or service, customers will face some issues. But if your customer support team delivers a positive experience to these customers, they will go on to spend more money and become more loyal to the brand than other customers.
Good experience while dealing with your brand is worth paying 25% more money to 86% of consumers. It’s also vital to customer retention and loyalty. Loyal customers who return again and again are worth exponentially more to your business than new customers.
The opposite of this will also have a powerful impact on our business. 82% of Americans have ended their relationship with a business due to poor customer experience and 39% will continue to avoid them for at least two years afterward.
How can you deliver a positive experience to your customers who need help?
By building a productive and unified customer service team!
To respond dynamically as a team, they need the right tools. Here are the 5 tools your customer service team needs to get the job done right and maximize productivity.
1) Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)
A CRM is a system to manage interactions with customers. It lets the entire team access the same customer information so everyone is on the same page. You could keep a digital address book or a simple spreadsheet to keep the information, however, that’s all it would do. If you get a good CRM, on the other hand, you can do so much more. Depending on the exact CRM you get, you can do incredible things like:
- Send marketing emails
- Know when they’re opened
- Respond to questions, comments, and feedback
- Track the effectiveness of marketing emails
- Create & track tasks
- Create and edit email templates for efficiency & consistency
- Schedule meetings
- Create landing pages
- Manage ads
- Interact with customers using live chat or chatbot features
- Make and track calls
- See each customer’s history with your business
- And much more
The price will depend on the CRM that you decide is best for your business, however, options range from completely free to a flat rate per month, per person, per contact, and per storage limit.
2) Ticket Management System
From the outside, customer support seems easy. It isn’t until your customer service team is up and running that you realize it isn’t. Do any of these issues sound familiar?
- Multiple representatives respond to one complaint
- Agents don’t know enough about the customer to make them feel like you care
- Multiple support tickets for common questions
- Customers feel like they’re starting over each time they make contact
- Agents spend too much time on manual organization
A ticket management system can help improve time management, streamline the support process, and organize customer information in one place so you can be more effective. It will allow you to:
- Rank tickets by priority
- Assign them to specific agents
- Automate organization & notifications
- See customer info & history at-a-glance
- Pick up where you left off with every customer
- Personalize their experience
- Create a searchable FAQ
- And more
Some CRMs have one built in to make the process even easier.
3) Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
Whether your customer service team handles dozens of calls each day or thousands, it’s important that the calls get to the right customer service agent as quickly as possible. An ACD will allow you to route each call to an available agent but that’s not all you can do. It also:
- Works seamlessly with your CRM to show customer info
- Provides multiple queues
- Allows you to track activity
- Includes voicemail
- Recognizes VIP customers for fast response
- And more
Just program it with the instructions you want it to follow and watch it work.
4) Self-Help Software
Most people don’t want to talk to your customer service reps. Not because they aren’t great at their jobs, but because having to call, go through prompts, wait on hold, explain their issue, and get it resolved, is a tedious process. If the issue is complex and technical, something they really can’t do themselves, then they’ll call your customer service team and be grateful for the help. If it’s something simple that they could do if they just knew how, they’d much prefer self-service. It cuts down on time, empowers the customer, leaving your agents free to deal with the customers who actually need them.
5) Task Automation Tools
A large portion of an agent’s time is spent collecting and logging data, organizing information, and finding the right data. Automation can help free up all this time so that your agents can spend it helping customers. Tools to automate the information gathered and recorded at the beginning and end of each call can save a lot of time. This will increase efficiency and allow agents to direct their attention to the tasks that need them the most.
Bottom Line
The right tools can handle a whole host of tasks that take the busy work away from your agents, so they’re free to do what matters most, help customers. As you may have noticed, many of the tools listed above have overlapping or complementary features. They work together to help you make the most of them. There are even some CRMs that can do it all and more. Figure out which tools you need and once you have a list, see if you can find one tool that integrates them all and leverages automation and data to make your team’s job as easy as possible and give constant trackable metrics to show you how your team is doing and where you need to improve. Let the technology do the busy work and streamline the process to help your team maximize efficiency.
Work with GlowTouch
Need More Help? At GlowTouch we provide outsourcing solutions for contact centers and technology by using our specialized knowledge in omnichannel customer and technical support to problem solve, deliver an exceptional customer experience, and prioritize upselling. To learn exactly how we can help you, contact Vikki Karrer at 502-947-3005 or email us at info@glowtouch.com.
