Optimize > Customer Support
Why
A satisfied customer is one who will continue to buy from you, seldom shop around, refer other customers and in general be a superstar advocate for your business. - Gregory Ciotti
This strategic activity is to organize customer support activities and get correct tools in place to ensure a fast response to customer requests. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.
How
- Define what it means by ‘great customer service’ and align with your brand values. Set the standards such as:
- Response time
- Proactive engagement (e.g. through error detection and fix)
- Conversational personality
- How the disagreements/complaints are handled
- Legal requirements of your agreements and the industry
- • Determine the channels through which you support the customers. This could vary with the licensing agreement with the customer:
- Inbound channels (calls, chats, email, SM, Forums, etc)
- Channels for investigations (Remote desktop, Onsite visits, Event logs, etc.)
- Setup automated help assistants and knowledge bases to reduce your operational costs and provide efficient responses by handling regular queries automatically. This includes an automated self-support process, freeing users from self-help diagnostics, and troubleshooting from online knowledge bases.
- Hire and train your customer support staff who has a customer-centric-mindset. Establish standard response procedures to have consistency across all staff. Train and set KPIs based on customer satisfaction and feedback.
- Setup the right tools and integration in between. The tools can be:
- Call center software
- CRM
- Help Desk ticketing system
- Social media monitoring
- Remote assistance tools
- Event log monitoring
- Most of the traditional tools can be expensive, consider setting up a lean infrastructure as appropriate.
- Establish on-site support procedures if necessary.