Last Updated on Mar 23, 2020 by James W
When you sell a product, your customers need to know that you offer a good support service to back it up. After all; the last thing they want to do is buy something and find that no-one can help them if their new purchase doesn’t work as intended!
The sad truth is many businesses don’t seem to offer a decent product support system to their customers. When that happens, word will spread, and consumers will buy elsewhere. That’s obviously bad news if you are the firm in question!
So, just how can you improve your product support? Here are a few expert tips that you should digest and put into practice:
Set up a decent call center
Most of the time, people will pick up the phone and call you if they can’t figure out something with your product. One of the frustrations that consumers often have is when they can’t get answers to their problems.
Some common complaints include complex menu systems and speaking to call center agents on the other side of the world. Therefore, it is crucial that your customers talk to people that will give them the support they need.
One of the ingredients in a thriving inbound call center is when folks get put through to call handlers in seconds. No-one wants to hang around on the phone for long, especially when they aren’t calling a toll-free number.
Another good call center tip is to use agents trained to deal with a variety of issues. People hate being passed around a company, and they abhor firms that don’t take ownership of an issue.
Build up a knowledge base
Let’s face it; not everyone will have the answers customers need straight away. There will be times where research is needed to qualify certain problems. Setting up a knowledge base makes it easy for support staff to search for answers to those and similar issues from the past.
In a nutshell, a knowledge base is just a database that allows you to do a full-text search. Some firms use bespoke solutions while others opt for off-the-shelf products like Zendesk.
To reduce support costs, many companies have opened up some of their knowledge base articles to the public. That means they can visit the retailer’s website and check out a list of FAQs or “frequently asked questions.???
Offer online chat facilities
In some instances, customers prefer to “chat??? with a support agent on the Web instead of sending an email or making a phone call. They do this because it’s convenient and helps them get the answers they need quicker.
If you’ve got a website, you should offer online support facilities to your customers. You can also speed up your replies by saving some common answers to scripts. The way that works is simple; you just select a “canned??? response and it sends it to your customer.
Not only does it improve your efficiency at dealing with support questions, it gives your customers the help they require.
