How to Make Your Customer Support Software Work for You
The goal of your customer support software is to increase efficiency and free up time to work on bigger issues. One way to do this is to make your software work for you. In last week’s blog, we mentioned that customers generally like to answer questions or find information on their own. To do this, you’ll want to build up your knowledge base.
When customers can answer questions on their own it benefits your company in multiple ways:
- Reduces the amount of inquiries in your inbox
- Keeps phone calls for similar questions down
- Gives customers ownership and saves their time
In addition, when a customer has to do a bit of research, they are more likely to retain the information. This cuts down on repeat calls from the same customer, which makes everyone happy!
Now that you know the benefits of building up your knowledge base, we’re going to tell you where to start.
First, develop a plan and determine the most important categories. Your first category should be FAQ or common problems. This will have an immediate impact on the amount of repeat inquiries. You can do this by:
- Creating articles
- Producing how-to videos
- Building a solution path – this is a series of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions designed to bring the user to their solution. Sort of like a quiz.
Once the ‘common inquiries’ category is created, your support staff will have more time to work on the following tasks:
- Articles to let clients know about updates and new features
- Optimizing your search function
- Knowledge management
- Update information, remove obsolete articles and videos, and edit articles.
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.
photo credit: tec_estromberg via photopin cc
