There is no such thing as a company with no customer support issues. Every system in dealing with the influx of customer complaints, questions and technical issues is ever going to be perfect and one hundred percent effective. In fact, all systems like this begin to slip and bloat and lose efficiency over enough time, resulting in some serious calibration being lost in the long term.
Customer support issues are a constant in the business world, and there is no magic wand that can be waved to fix it readily. However, in five basic steps, it is possible to tune up a customer support system so that it works as well as it possibly can. This is a good set of steps for building an initial customer support infrastructure, or for fine tuning existing ones that need the calibration and strap down.
Follow these, with modification to meet your own scenarios and policies, and you will go far.
First, look at your call center, if you have one. If you’ve got long hold times and poor first call resolution rates, then a few little tweaks need to be made. Phone trees need to be simplified, and agents need to be doubled. This will remove the bottleneck and the time navigating around before even being put on hold. This is endemic of call centers, and one of the reasons a lot of focus is drifting away from it in current times.
It may also be important to rethink the conversational skills of your department if communication is failing.
Next, consider the help desk. If the help desk is inefficient, then again, more agents may be necessary. This can be resolved by reaching out to freelance ticket takers who can answer customer support tickets as they come in, and have an always available, schedule free organic department for this.
Now we come to your online presence. If you still have customer support issues that the other things haven’t straightened out them your online presence needs to diversify, and you need to adopt new technologies and channels of interaction like social networks to alleviate bottlenecks and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Finally, implement self service where possible to empower the customer and alleviate demand placed upon your customer support staff. Self service is becoming the most preferred way to alleviate overload and efficiency loss in customer support, using powerful onboard software and AJAX interfaces to make it work.
Self service is probably the most important thing to take away from this list if you only remember one single solution suggested here.
When it comes to dealing with customer support issues, these are the five things I would recommend, in this order, to alleviate them as much as possible. Of course, if you research further, based on these concepts, you will find a multitude of additional techniques and suggestions which can also serve to alleviate these issues in higher detail and to a larger number.
It depends on your scenario and your customer service issues themselves on what changes you may need to make here or what additional measures may bring more to the table for solutions.
