When it comes to customer support, people expect a quick response whether they try to contact a business via email or live chat. But each of these core customer support channels has its own potential perks and pitfalls; tailoring your approach to master the nuances of each is essential. Every channel is unique. While there are plenty of best practices that apply to any form of customer support, each channel offers unique ways for your team to deliver service that has an impact.
Here are some top tips for how to do customer support the right way across 2 of the most popular channels: email and live chat.
Email Support Tips
Email is a popular channel for customer support requests, but staying on top of the steady flood with enough momentum to keep customers happy can be a challenge. If your team is sending dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of customer support emails each day, here are some tips to get ahead of the curve.
1. Speed is critical
One notable disadvantage of email support, despite its popularity, is that customers can have a low tolerance for slow response time. It’s less instantaneous than phone or live chat, which can make customers grow impatient as they wait for a response. Always respond within 24 hours if possible, and within a few hours or less if your team can swing it. Worst case scenario? Get back to them by the next business day. Any later than that and you could risk bigger problems on the horizon.
2. Keep correspondence concise and conversational
Customers are busy and they want their problems solved quickly. Keep emails short, conversational, polite, and friendly. Avoid sending anything too long, and take care to keep instructions or solutions simple and easy to understand. At the same time, try to make short responses as thorough and effective as possible, and do the extra legwork if needed. The last thing your agents want to do is make more hoops for customers to jump through. Thank the customer for getting in touch, restate the problem so it’s clear, and then provide your solution.
3. Again: spelling and grammar
This is so important that it’s worth repeating: watch out for spelling and grammar. If your team’s emails go out the door looking unprofessional and unpolished, they could damage your brand’s reputation. Your agents may not be master wordsmiths by trade, but that’s no excuse to allow sloppy, unprofessional mistakes into correspondence with customers. Use a good spell-checker, then re-read messages a few times to ensure they’re in tip-top shape.
4. Keep subject lines short and informative
Don’t leave customers guessing what an email might be about. When responding, use a subject line that grabs their attention, but keep it focused and tightly written. Keep it short, too, with no more than 40 to 50 characters at a maximum.
5. Take responsibility and move on to solving problems quickly
To save time, energy, and hassle, don’t hesitate to take responsibility for any problems the customer might be experiencing. The less time that’s wasted going back and forth on who did what, when, where, or how, the sooner your team can get to the task of making things better. With email, it’s best to just accept responsibility and move right into offering a solution to the problem or ways you can make things right.
6. Sign off with the agent’s name and title
Again, customers interacting with your brand online will appreciate the human connection your agents can add to the mix. Everything they can do to let customers know that they’re just like them and want to help them out will boost success rates. Having agents sign emails personally, with their own name and title, will help customers put a human face to their experience.
7. Set realistic response-time expectations, then beat them
If customers are looking for answers in a hurry, be sure to give them a reasonable timeframe in which they can expect to get a resolution to their problem. Once that’s been established, work hard to fix the issue—then get them whatever they need in half the time promised. They’ll appreciate your team’s hustle.
Live Chat Support Tips
It might be less personal than direct phone contact, but live chat support can help close the deal and drive additional sales conversions by helping customers who are on the verge of purchasing your company’s goods or services but need a little extra information and assistance. Here are some tips to get the most out of live chat.
1. Be mindful of spelling and grammar
Poor grammar and spelling will not instil confidence in your company’s products, services, or ability to deliver a top-notch customer service experience. Live chat may be a lot like instant messaging, but agents should maintain professionalism throughout each exchange, and that includes being a stickler for stomping out typos and bad grammar before clicking the send button.
2. Put a human face on the chat experience
When reaching out to potential customers browsing your company’s site looking to connect with an agent, including a picture of the agent, their name, and a personalized message offering a greeting and asking if the customer would like assistance. This adds a pleasant and friendly human touch to the proceedings, setting customers at ease. They’re not chatting with a robot, so why not do everything possible to boost the signal for your agents’ digital person-to-person connection?
3. Brush up on sales training
Offering quick and helpful answers during live chat sessions can provide a boost to sales conversion on your company’s website, which is why it’s important for live chat agents to get the same level of product expertise and selling technique training as your sales team. If they’re on top of their sales game, they’ll be able to offer help, answer quick questions, and even direct customers to the services and products that will perfectly suit their needs.
4. Maximize the usefulness of transcripts
By keeping transcript logs of each live session, your agents can double on the value these helpful records provide your brand. On one hand, chat transcripts can offer valuable insights and solutions for solving common customer questions and problems. This advice can very easily be used to drive content for your brand’s self-service channel and internal brand analysis. Alternately, agents can offer a copy of the chat transcript to the customer for their own future reference. Either way, it’s a win-win.
5. Use chat macros to save time
Using pre-canned messages to the extreme can strip a lot of the personality out of the live chat experience. However, if your team words these prefab snippets of text in a creative way and then uses them sparingly, they can be a huge time saver. The trick with these messages is to load up the ones that are needed quickly, then adapt them slightly to suit the situation at hand. When personalized and given a conversational tone, they can be incredibly effective and much faster than typing everything by hand. This becomes extra valuable when juggling multiple live chats simultaneously.
6. Proactively target chat customers through real-time monitoring
Knowing the right moment to approach a site visitor with a friendly live chat assistance invitation is a far better strategy than pinging them automatically the moment they hit your help site. By adding real-time visitor monitoring to your company’s site or self-service portal, agents can keep an eye on the situation then reach out to connect with visitors who seem more likely to need assistance.
Source: Upwork
