How to Deliver Market-Leading Customer Support: 3 Effective Strategies

Poor customer support causes 58% of customers to end their relationship with a company. And that’s a trend that will only get bigger as more customers get accustomed to relevant, fast, and convenient customer support from leading online sellers.

For smaller and medium brands, it means that they must either embrace customer support as the focal point of their efforts or risk losing even the most loyal customers to the competition.

But how can you ensure that your customer service quality is on par with the best practices in your market? And how can you match your audience’s expectations in terms of the type of support they receive?

To help answer these questions, let’s go through three key strategies for developing market-leading customer support your customers appreciate.

Create a Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is basically a library of information about your brand, products, services, and practices. It’s the ultimate resource for both customers and employees to find answers to the most common questions, learn how to resolve various issues, and learn to make the most of the products that you offer.

But besides being a helpful resource, it’s also an integral part of any successful customer support system today. But how exactly can a knowledge base help improve your customer service?

Since it’s a comprehensive resource, it can reduce the number of inquiries your support team has to work with. If you have a knowledge base that makes it easy to resolve problems independently, many customers will use it instead of contacting support, which can free up a lot of time for your support reps to focus on more unusual or complicated issues.

And even when people do reach out, having a knowledge base means that your support reps can either look up the solutions to the issue themselves or direct customers to relevant articles or resources. They can then learn the steps they need to take without the support rep needing to be actively involved.

But for any of that to happen, you need to develop a knowledge base that is:

well-structured;
informative;
comprehensive;
continually updated to remain relevant.

Your customers must also be aware that a knowledge base exists and know how to use it. So, make sure that the relevant articles are easy to find by implementing a logical and intuitive structure and search system.

Implement Omnichannel Support

If you want to provide excellent customer support experiences, you must ensure that your customers actually reach out to your support in the first place. And that means that you must make it easy for your customers to reach you through a channel they find the most convenient.

Long gone are the days when you could get by with a contact form and a phone number; if customers have to wait for days for you to reply, the majority will move on before you have a chance to address the issue.

Because of that, one of the most crucial aspects of market-leading customer support is providing omnichannel support across multiple channels.

For instance, as prospective customers scroll through your site on their smartphones, they may want to reach out to get a quick answer. Providing a Whatsapp chat on website allows them to use an external app they love using to quickly communicate with your support reps, minimizing the number of steps they have to take to receive an answer.

You should also have a support presence on social media because many customers will choose to reach out through Facebook, Instagram, or other platforms where you have a presence. Providing quick and relevant answers can make a huge difference and turn someone who’s just inquiring into an eager buyer.

Deliver Quick Solutions

One of the critical aspects of succeeding with customer service is being able to deliver fast support solutions. And for that to happen, you must implement specific steps to ensure your support team can deal with any issues quickly.

We’ve already covered how a knowledge base can be immensely helpful in providing answers faster and also helping your support team use a consistent and proven process for finding solutions. We also talked about how having multi-channel support will ensure that customers have an easy time reaching out, which will reduce the time from when they first encounter the problem to when they have a solution.

However, there are other things that you can do as well.

For instance, you should continuously monitor whether the current number of support people is enough to handle the customer load. As your company gets bigger, the support demands will increase as well, and you’ll need a process for expanding your team.

Finally, if you want to avoid blindspots in your support system, you should ask the people you want to satisfy – your customers – for feedback. They can point out some of the frustrating parts of trying to get help and allow you to continually improve based on the feedback you receive.

Bottom Line

Customer support is an integral part of running a successful business. In fact, sometimes, even companies with an inferior product or higher prices can edge ahead of the competition simply because they excel at providing outstanding customer support.

By implementing the steps listed above, you will be well on your way to making consistent improvements in how well your customer support functions.