Top 10 Themes in B2B Customer Support
As we wrap up the first half of 2015 (can you believe it?) we thought it would be fun to review the top 10 themes in customer support over the past several months. In no particular order, here they are:
- Omnichannel Support: Offer your customers multiple options for customer service, and make it seamless. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to get the help they need.
- Self-Service: Helping customers to help themselves benefits both customers (quick answers when/where they want them) and companies (lower support cost and quicker resolution times).
- The Cloud (SaaS): Cloud-based support software offers many benefits, not the least of which are saving time and money, less hassle, and automatic updates.
- Collaboration: Get your support, development, sales, and other teams working together to solve issues faster. Make sure customers don't have to repeat themselves or get bounced around.
- Understand Your Customers: in B2B customer service you need to manage the entire relationship, instead of just focusing on individual tickets. Anyone, at any time, should be able to access a full customer history.
- Effective Hiring: Your customer support reps have the most important interactions with your customers, make sure you hire a team with the right skill set to keep them happy.
- Training: Many customer support errors are the result of poorly trained customer support staff. Proper training provides consistency, gets new reps customer-ready faster, and gives your support team the confidence they need to properly address customer concerns.
- Customer Satisfaction: Use agent ratings and customers surveys to make sure your customers are getting the support they deserve. Ask for feedback on agents, products, and the customer experience.
- Reporting & Metrics: Use reports to understand productivity and customer satisfaction metrics. Your customer support software should help you monitor agent productivity, resource allocation, and potential "at-risk" accounts.
- Integrations: Horizontal integration is the key - companies who provide the best customer experiences integrate the support function with the rest of the organization to eliminate data and knowledge silos and share knowledge across the entire organization.
For a more in-depth review of these and many other topics, visit our resources page:
