Customer Support Software Featured Articles

Name a business today that is not moving faster than it was five years ago. Technology has improved our lives in many ways, but it hasn’t delivered on the promise of less work. If anything, we have more work today because our expectations have been raised.

Most businesses know this fact, but many are not putting it into practice when it comes to business-to-business customer support. If workers are overloaded with more work than ever, it follows that B2B customer support should be working hard to make touch points easier than ever and wait times reduced beyond what was acceptable in the past.

Part of the solution is training and supporting B2B customer support agents differently, and part is making sure that the technologies in place for customer interactions are well suited for today’s business climate.

Let’s start with agent adjustments.

If businesses are busier than ever, they need fast answers and deft agents who can handle their needs quickly and efficiently. From a training perspective, this means more empowered agents who do not have to move up the chain of command to handle common issues. It means ensuring that agents can both handle complaints as well as questions.

From a staffing perspective, it also means that businesses must take seriously the need for appropriate staffing. Web-based chat is a popular support mechanism, for instance, but its effectiveness is greatly reduced if each agent must support more than a handful of simultaneous chats at the same time. Chat agents need to be responsive and more than just deflectors away from telephone support.

On the technology side, supporting the harried business professional means making communications efficient.

The start is good self-service options, since Gartner (News - Alert) reports that up to 75 percent of all support interactions will be self-serve by 2017. This means a well-stocked knowledgebase, curated community forums and a good customer portal. A token knowledgebase wastes more time than it helps, and a community forum that isn’t curated or doesn’t have good answers is of little use to the busy business pro.

Taking advantage of advances in customer support technology also is important. TeamSupport, for instance, helps businesses improve their self-serve options by showing the effectiveness of knowledgebase articles when customers look for answers. If a business finds that its knowledgebase is not useful for B2B customers on a given question, it can quickly improve its answers to drive better effectiveness.

Or, for instance, TeamSupport’s phone-to-ticket functionality. Overloaded workers don’t want to call and have to wait on hold for an agent, and phone-to-ticket advances make it easier to lodge a question or request asynchronously and then have customer support call them back. With phone-to-ticket, a support ticket is created from a voicemail and the voicemail is attached. Support agents can then call up a customer’s record, figure out a solution, and call back the customer.

These are the sort of adjustments that businesses need to make when it comes to B2B customer support. The pressure to move faster is a reality, and businesses that serve other businesses must recognize this trend and adapt. Those that do make the adjustment will find better retention rates and ultimately happier business customers.