The harsh reality for today’s business organizations is that it takes months to find a customer and just few seconds to lose one. In the age of instant gratification, nobody likes to wait and if you are a B2C brand, then this becomes an even bigger issue. Your customers want quick answers to the queries at their convenience. Period. Now it’s your job to ensure how to provide the best customer support to keep your customers loyal to your brand. You need to keep in mind that building a good customer experience doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by design. A right customer support system in place can be a game changer for you to outshine your competitors by offering seamless customer service.
Customer service is no longer limited to the walls of customer service department, as now customers are re-writing the rules of customer support. Brands must understand customer service is no longer just a department, it’s everyone’s job! Business organizations should bring together all the stakeholders together to put the right customer support system in place. Be it Information Technology, Operations, Customer Service, C-level executives or the front and back-end customer support teams, each and everyone should know their respective roles in the customer support process and should work in tandem to overcome customer support challenges and deliver best in class customer experience .
Customer Support System : Must Have Features
A right customer support system serves the business to achieve the shared goal of impeccable customer experience and prove customer support ROI to the management. Thus, to improve the customer support interactions, your customer support system must have these 10 features:
1. Omnichannel Communication Support
Customers can opt for any communication medium – phone, email, social media or online chat to seek support from your organization, a good customer support system is the one that supports omnichannel communication. It not only supports multiple communication channels but ensures synchronization among these channels to hold the context of customer interactions across channels for any particular interaction. This gives the customers convenience and ease of interaction with the brand.
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2. Unified Agent Desktop
Quick customer support is possible when your support agents are empowered with the right tools. With multiple channels and departments involved in a customer interaction, an agent needs to have a complete 360 degree view of the customer. Agents should have transparency and complete clarity about customer’s historical interaction and transactions with the organizations to offer better and personalized customer service. Unified agent interface gives access to all the related customer information in a single window.
3. Inbuilt Ticketing System
An ideal customer support system can be defined as a solution that offers a perfect blend of customer interactions management along with customer tickets management. This also helps to establish clear accountability between front-end and back-end systems. With omnichannel support, tickets can also be created via multiple interaction channels and presented in a single window to the customer support agents. This helps to resolve customer tickets faster and provide better assistance.
4. Live Chat Support
For customers, every single query is important and should be resolved at the earliest. Online chat option is one such interaction channel that ensures quick answers, and therefore is gaining a lot of attention. Customer support systems cannot fulfil its purpose if they do not provide a proactive chat support. Organizations can implement chat support for frequently asked questions to free-up their agents from basic queries and focus on much more complex issues.
5. Self-Service Portal
Customers prefer to be less dependent on companies for finding answers to the product or service related issues. Self-service customer portal option gives the control in the hands of customers and also reduces the burden of support agents by letting the customers find answers quickly from the available repository of FAQs. This feature is widely used by the customers as it offers maximum convenience and easy issue resolution.
6. Smart Ticket Prioritization
An intelligent customer support system is capable of identifying which tickets are to be resolved first to deliver effective customer service. You need to evaluate a customer support software on its ability to automatically prioritize tickets on the basis of various crucial factors like -time to SLA breach, count of pending messages, change in ticket status, or any other priority rule. Automated customer support system helps to streamline the process for addressing the customer issues in a pre-designed manner.
7. Customer Sentiment Analysis
Technology advancement is facilitating businesses to know their customers better than ever before. Smart customer support softwares are implementing the artificial technology to determine the sentiments of customers while they are interacting with the brands. One such example is using speech-to-text technology to identify words that allows the agent to understand a customer’s state. This helps to prioritize tickets for better customer experience.
8. Up-To-Date Knowledge Base
Customer support agents get queries about all the different types of product and service range an organization offers in the market. It would be overwhelming for an agent to know each every details of these offerings prior to attend customer queries. And here an updated knowledge base comes into the picture. A well thought out customer support system will always have a knowledge base option to serve as easy assistance to agents while resolving support tickets in real time. Intelligent search on this information helps Agent to find better results.
9. Internal Chat Option
Internal chat option is a must have feature for a customer support software to help agents communicate with other agents as well as allow supervisors to broadcast their message to workforce. This feature can result in quick ticket resolution by getting the assistance from subject matter expert within the team.
10. Robust Mobile App
Mobile usage is on the upside track and majority of customers are accessing your products and services via mobile. This implies that the customer queries coming in via mobile will go up as well. Therefore brands need to ensure that their website responsiveness to customer queries should be replicated over the mobile platform as well. A customer support software that is easily available via mobile app surely has an advantage over the competition.
A quick look at the above mentioned must have features of a customer support system will give you a fair idea of what to look for into customer support software while evaluating and choosing the one for your business. Also. do let us know in the comment section below about any other feature which is a must to deliver smooth customer service.