How to Choose the Best Channels for Your Customer Support Strategy

With the advent of business ratings, online reviews, and social media, your company’s customer support efforts are now integral to your brand’s reputation and your customer experience online. It doesn’t matter how great your marketing efforts are if your support and expertise are lacking.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

Jeff Bezos

Are your customers and brand at loggerheads with each other all the time?

• Despite your company sinking its teeth into the Customer Service department.
• Despite satisfying and often exceeding your customer’s expectations. 
• Despite all those free (and extremely costly) giveaways and loyalty programs, you still have to pay for them occasionally. 

If the answer to all these is yes, you’ve got to get back to the drawing board and revisit your customer service strategy. To guide you, let’s understand the why before the how and look at what’s causing your customers to saunter to the dark side. Here are two plausible scenarios:

Scenario 1: You’re Doing Way Too Much

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, there is such a thing as doing too much regarding customer service. Always rooting for all things practical, we understand that it is impossible to offer support on every channel or be omnipresent. Falling short of human capital and excessive costs are often cited as the primary reasons. To that end, logic dictates that it is better if you choose the proper channels that make sense for your customers. 

So, if you need to, roll back on a channel that isn’t working for you, but most importantly, do it gracefully. The operative word is gracefully. Here’s a handy list of steps you can undertake to ensure that your customers don’t end up feeling angry and dissatisfied (due to the sudden and inevitable changes that will come their way):

1. Get into your customers’ mindsets to preempt the challenges/frustrations they may face. You can ease their pain and effectively address their concerns by embracing a more empathetic approach.
2. Implement the changes via stages instead of removing support tools all at once. One way of doing so is to offer alternate support options and highlight them on the platform before removing any customer support.
3. Once the channels have been closed, opt for more creative and personalized customer support options. Educational guides help customers understand all the options available to them.
4. Adopt a more direct and honest communication style when educating customers about the available support channels. For example, here’s what the brand Kinsta relays to their customers:

Support work often requires careful, focused thought and investigation. Keeping support solely online allows us to better help you troubleshoot your website in a speedy and more efficient manner, as our engineers are able to focus all of their energy on solving your support concerns with the fewest number of distractions and interruptions possible. This, in turn, means that your support requests are ultimately resolved faster.

Kinsta

Consider customer support as a journey and identify key touch points for informing customers about the changes in the support system. These include redirecting old landing pages to a community forum where customers can find new and inspiring material on the brand’s ongoing developments, support-related or otherwise.

Key Takeaway: The adage, more is better is not always preferable when using tools to offer a stellar customer service experience. Sometimes, fewer and more focused options do the job better and quicker. Also, it makes sense to guide your customers throughout the changes being made through clear and effective communication and providing alternate support options.

Scenario 2: You’re Not Focusing Enough on the BAD Customer Support Experiences.

Customers often love a company for its unique offerings, competitive pricing, ease of convenience, and quality products, among other things. Very rarely does a good customer experience come up on why they prefer brand A over brand B. 

However, interestingly, bad customer service is often one of the primary reasons customers stop engaging with a brand. Some examples that come to mind: 

• Those never-ending long queues on the phone from the customer service provider.
• That bag you just lost on the way to your honeymoon.
• That messy hotel room ended up costing a bomb on your credit card.

The list goes on. All these examples contribute to a terrible customer experience that needs immediate intervention.

A study conducted by the Customer Contact Council found two intriguing details that should form a part of every company’s customer strategy: It claims that:

Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.

Customer Contact Council

Your brand’s value-add should revolve around easing the customer’s concerns instead of offering fancy, relatively less useful features.

Adding to the first finding, it says:

Acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.

Customer Contact Council

Key Takeaway: Customers are willing to exact revenge on account of bad services rather than reward companies for better service. If your brand does not think on its feet and reduces the backlog of those ever-increasing customer complaints, it will fall down the rabbit hole and never be revived again.

Key Questions to Consider When Embracing a Customer-First Approach

When it comes to lending a helping hand and a sympathetic ear to your customers, some important questions need internalizing and probing:

A handy tip: When it comes to understanding your customer, take this as a thumb rule:
Listen to what your customers are telling you – but not too closely.

Confused? Let’s take an example. While customers may be asking for phone support, they want a fast response. To that end, it is highly recommended that your support team undergo training to help them promptly and preemptively address customers’ queries.

The Pros & Cons of Top Customer Support Tools: A Quick Guide

There’s no doubt that when it comes to customer services, different companies opt for different strategies – based on their needs, customer’s expectations, budgetary concerns, etc. Plus, with many options available today, it can get confusing and overwhelming. To make things easier for you, we’ve listed the top pros and cons for the four key customer support channels in action today, namely:

Phone Support:

Is It the Right Call for Offering an Illuminating Customer Experience?

Chat Support:

Can Being Chatty Do More Damage than Good?

Did You Know? Data by MarketingDive claims that people over 55 prefer telephone support over other platforms.

Email Support:

Mail is the New Medium of Communication – Or Is It?

Social Media Support:

Is Having an Online Social Presence a Boon or Bane?

Closing Thoughts

Telling reps to exceed customers’ expectations will likely result in confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways.

When choosing the right customer communication tools, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that brands can take. Organizations need to factor in multiple vital points such as available resources, budget, and time constraints, customer demands and user expectations, etc., to come up with a customer support strategy that delivers on all accounts:

• Providing a seamless, hassle-free, personalized, and positive customer experience for the user.
• Ensure that the strategies don’t cost the company – financially or otherwise.
• Offer meaningful value-added to all stakeholders—from the investors and customers to the company’s employees and the general community.

Armed with all this information, it’s time to walk the talk and deliver a fool-proof customer experience – one that entertains and educates the customers simultaneously. Are you in? We thought so.