Customer Support Software Featured Articles

Many companies today face a quandary when it comes to customer support. They are expected to offer robust, multichannel customer support in order to please customers. At the same time, no one is offering them huge budget increases to hire more agents or teams. In essence, companies need to do more with less. They need to build in more efficiency into their processes, ask their workers for a bit more, ensure there’s no waste and spread their resources where they’re needed. They just need to make sure they’re not spread too thin.

One way of effectively making more with less is to transition more customers to self-service. The customer of today is generally happy to find his or her own answers, if the problem or question is not too complex, according to a recent blog post by TeamSupport CEO Robert C. Johnson. Many companies simply don’t give them the opportunity or the tools they require.  To do this, he writes, you’ll want to build up your knowledge base.

A self-help knowledge base, offered to customers at the right time and in an easy way to access, can reduce the amount of inquiries in your inbox, reduce the need for agents to answer the same questions over and over, and save customers time. In their minds, you’ll be branded a company whose self-service worked, and customers remember that.

Getting started, wrote Johnson, involves sitting down and thinking of your most important categories. You won’t be able to solve everyone’s problem with self-service, but you can automate the lion’s share of inquiries.

“Your first category should be FAQ or common problems. This will have an immediate impact on the amount of repeat inquiries,” he wrote.

The materials to produce might include articles, how-to videos or a “pathway” to the right solution using yes/no answers.  From here, companies can work on automating some processes for more complex queries that could be supported by more in-depth knowledge for intrepid customers who wish to find their own answers.

It’s critical to stress, however, that the material needs to be always fresh and updated. Nothing turns off a customer faster than finding outdated or obsolete information on a Web site. It’s a message that tells the customer, “We don’t care enough,” and that’s the opposite of the image you want to be projecting to customers. It’s also important to remember that it takes time, noted Johnson.

“Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day! If you continuously build, maintain, and update your knowledge base, your database will be a powerful tool and will begin to work for you,” he wrote.