These days, customers are far more likely to contact a business online instead of going into a store or speaking to you over the phone. For starters, face-to-face contact requires you to be physically at a store, and live phone calls often require your customer to wait in a queue. In addition, providing this kind of support can be challenging because you need to hire staff that are skilled in communication and know a lot about your business.
Most large companies outsource their customer support to call centers. If you’ve ever had to phone a large company for help, then you’ll know just how difficult and frustrating it can be to resolve an issue through these call centers.
Thankfully, there are plenty of unique ways for you to provide an impeccable level of online support to your customers. By doing this, you can drastically improve the user experience of your website, build your brand up as one that cares about support, and also reduce the operating costs of your business. So in this post, we’ll be covering some of the ways that you can drastically improve the level of online support that you offer for your business.
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Build an online knowledge base
If you’ve realized that you get the same support calls and emails asking the same questions, it’s worth creating an online knowledge base that covers most of those repeated questions. This will help reduce the amount of time you spend providing live support, thus saving on operating costs and improving your service.
Setup online support chat features
Most businesses today have some kind of online chat room software that they use to communicate with customers. In most cases, it can be used to provide online support to fix issues or respond to concerns and questions. While larger companies still outsource their online chat support, it could be an effective way for your business to provide on-call support without needing to use a phone line.
Create comprehensive guides
If you’re offering a product or service that requires a bit of experience to use, then we highly suggest that you write comprehensive guides and post them on your website. You need to make these simple to follow and read, and you should also focus on creating different versions for desktop and mobile reading. This will make it far more accessible for all users.
Get on social media
Social media is incredibly important for businesses as an advertising and promotional tool. However, it can also be used as a way to offer support much like a live chat option. While it does require some management, you can open up your direct messages to people that are having issues with your services or products.
Make your support easy to find
Lastly, make sure that your support is easy to find. Whether it’s linking your social media accounts on your website or emailing your customers about your guides and knowledge base after they purchase a product, you need to remind your customers that those helpful resources actually exist.
Train Your Employees
Online support requires specialists who can listen to customer’s complaints and provide solutions in the most efficient way. However, most companies often face recruitment challenges when interviewing applicants that claim to have the best skills. In return, they end up wasting resources such as time and money. That is why many companies will outsource online specialists.
This comes at an additional fee, where your company can engage in a long term contract with a company to support online customer care. However, it can be a challenge when the specialists lack enough knowledge about your company. As a result, you can lose customers who did not receive any help after making a call. But don’t worry, there’s a solution to this.
The answer is to start internal training on existing employees. It is a great strategy to use as your long term employees have more knowledge about your company. They are familiar with the company’s history, goals, mission, culture, and more. They have insights into all projects that have worked and those that have failed. This way, they know what works best for the company and what doesn’t.
For instance, Westcombe group apartments provide the best online support. This is because their employees know the company inside out, and they have closed many deals before, so they are familiar with common customer issues and the best solutions.
