Customers are the backbone of your business, so any negative reviews can spell doom for your brand. However, providing high-quality support can increase customer retention and loyalty. By answering questions and solving issues in an efficient manner, you can create a reputation that people trust.
In this post, we’ll discuss why customer support is important to your brand. Then, we’ll show you three ways to improve your support services. Let’s get started!
The Importance of Customer Support
When trying to grow your business, it’s important to keep your customers in mind. One of the most effective ways to prioritize their needs is by offering support services.
During transactions, customers might face problems such as insufficient product details or malfunctioning coupon codes. When issues arise, you’ll need to be there to answer their questions and resolve their complaints.
If your business excels in customer support, you can have an advantage over your competitors. In fact, studies show that 68% of customers won’t make a repeat purchase if they’ve had a negative experience with a particular brand. By providing an efficient service, you can encourage them to come back and keep them away from the competition.
Here are some additional benefits of offering excellent customer support:
- Save costs by retaining customers
- Improve your brand image
- Increase customer referrals
- Encourage loyalty
At the end of the day, your customers should be your first priority. Without the proper support, questions can go unanswered, potentially leaving buyers dissatisfied. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you have the right support systems in place.
How to Improve Your Customer Support (3 Ways)
Since customer support can significantly impact your success, it’s important to know how to improve it. Let’s look at three efficient strategies for your business.
1. Offer Multi-Channel Availability
Your clients will have unique needs, so it’s often best to provide multi-channel support. This gives different shoppers multiple ways to contact a customer service representative.
Phone calls and emails are two common methods of customer support. However, you could also consider adding a knowledge base or live chat feature to your website. Additionally, you could monitor and respond to queries submitted through social media.
When you offer multi-channel support, you give customers the chance to choose the most convenient way of contacting your business. Plus, different support channels can be beneficial for particular purposes. If customers need to discuss a sensitive issue, they may feel more comfortable doing this over email rather than a phone call.
You could also engage with your clients in real time, using a tool such as LiveChat:
With LiveChat, you can create a messaging channel that is unique from your other support systems. This option gives users immediate answers, so they won’t have to wait for replies via email. By adding this feature, you can address your customers’ questions and problems in a more efficient manner.
2. Be Proactive
Often, businesses react to problems after they happen. However, you can improve your customer support by being proactive.
For instance, instead of having customers come to you with certain issues, you can be the one to initiate contact. This will show them that you’re going above and beyond to ensure that they’re satisfied with your services.
Relying on reactive customer support can be detrimental to your success. When people have to reach out to you with a problem, they can leave the experience feeling dissatisfied. This might prompt them to post negative reviews:
One way to be proactive is by creating customer surveys. This can help you evaluate your shoppers’ needs and identify areas for improvement.
You can use a survey platform like SurveyMonkey to collect feedback. This tools offers over 150 templates to help you design your first professional survey:
You can then use the results to improve your current support strategy, and attempt to resolve recurring issues. This way, you can help ensure that future customers won’t run into similar problems.
3. Include a Self-Service Option
Lastly, you might want to add a way for customers to find answers to their own questions. You can offer self-service support by adding a knowledge base, discussion forums, or an FAQ section on your website:
About 86% of customers expect to find a self-service option on business websites. This feature helps them avoid long wait times, and enables them to resolve issues at their own convenience.
Additionally, a self-service option can decrease the amount of time your employees spend managing phone calls and emails. Rather than dealing with recurring or trivial issues, you can dedicate more time to other areas of your business.
One of the easiest ways to offer self-service is by creating an FAQ page on your website. When you answer frequently asked questions, you can establish a robust resource for future customers.
You can use a plugin such as Ultimate FAQ to easily build an FAQ page. This tool enables you to list an unlimited number of questions and group them based on similarity:
Lastly, you’ll want to make sure that your FAQ section is easy to find and accessible. For instance, you could place it in your main navigation menu, where it’s instantly viewable.
Conclusion
Providing excellent customer support should be a high priority. This can help you build a base of loyal clients and improve your brand image. You could consider providing immediate solutions with LiveChat, or building an FAQ page to enable users to resolve issues on their own.
Do you have any questions about improving customer support? Let us know in the comments section below!