Fast technical support is very important for customers, especially in critical situations. The user’s loyalty and the company’s reputation depend on the speed and quality of solving the problem.
Together with seasoned experts, we’ll tell you what steps you need to take to create a professional 24/7 customer support service.
Make sure you need it
If your company has the idea of organizing its own customer support department, then before moving on, ask yourself the question: “Is this really necessary?”. If you work with a small number of clients and it takes no more than 30% of the time of one employee to communicate with their representatives, then you do not need technical support in its classical sense: you’ll just waste your resources.
If you work with many clients, then it is definitely worth considering creating a help desk. Perhaps at first, you will hire only one person. They will devote all their time to helping users, and you will not have to distract other employees for these tasks.
It is important to catch the moment when the service really becomes necessary and not to delay its creation. Being late can lead to a decrease in loyalty, the loss of a customer base, and its transfer to competitors.
Make a plan of action
So you’ve decided you need a service. Now it’s important to come up with a plan. It is individual for each company, but some points will be common to all:
Choice of communication channels
This can be a phone, social media profiles, and a ticket system. One channel is enough to get started. The most affordable option is to help clients on social networks.
The team and its training
Decide which employees to hire and which not. Who will train them, and how?
Manpower is crucial here, especially if you want to humanize your customer support by not leveraging chatbots.
Scripts and guidelines
Find the most common questions and develop answer templates for them. Choose the style in which you build communication with clients – official business or conversational, warm, and friendly.
As a basis for compiling texts, you can use the guidelines on how to arrange business correspondence. They would teach you how to create strong text.
Such books contain a lot of tips and ready-made solutions that will help you create a working system for communication in a short time.
Work schedule and its formation
Do not immediately launch 24/7 support if less than 5% of customers contact you at night. It will be expensive and premature. Also, keep in mind that the more standard the work schedule, the fewer people are required in the department.
For example, if your technical support service works Mon – Fri from 9 am to 6 pm, then 1-2 people may be enough for you. But if night shifts are added to this schedule, 3-4 more employees will need to be employed.
Remember that support is run by ordinary people. You cannot put an employee on the night shift twice in a row. Or rather, it is possible, but it will not work for a long time. It sounds like a common truth, but some leaders forget about it. Consider the legal side of the issue: work at night, according to the law, is paid higher than daytime, which means additional costs.
Personnel scaling
The more people in the department, the more managers are required. When your service grows, you will need to hire a separate employee who will manage technical support: create and manage schedules and shifts. You may also need a person to train specialists and control the quality of their work.
Select channels to work
As we wrote above, there are several channels for working with clients. Among them:
Viber, Telegram, Instagram, etc.
Social networks are the cheapest and easiest method of communication. Remember yourself: when you have a problem with a product or service, in most cases, you first look for the official account of the company, write to it directly or tag it with a hashtag to express emotions and get the issue resolved.
When choosing a social network, you need to take into account the specifics of the business and the preferences of customers. For example, you know that your clients are active Telegram users. Therefore, it is logical to start with this social network/messenger. More sites can be added later.
Ticket system
It works like this: the client leaves a question on the site through a special support form. Such a system allows employees to quickly service a queue of applications, transfer them to colleagues and keep statistics.
In addition, it is also convenient for the user: they always know that their problem is being dealt with and can refer to the ticket number if necessary. The easiest way is to organize an application processing system based on existing solutions. For example, Zendesk or Jira.
Phone
We live in the era of instant messengers, but it is still more convenient for many to resolve all issues by phone. So this type of support is suitable for a large number of businesses. Just like in the case of the ticket system, it is not necessary to do everything from scratch – you can use ready-made solutions for IP telephony.
Final thoughts
In the modern world, it is important to provide your company’s customers with an effective support service.
A potential client or consumer of a product needs to be able to ask a question of interest to them and receive a prompt response:
- get qualified assistance or advice on the services of the company;
- leave feedback on a product, service, or company employee, perhaps leave a complaint about them or express gratitude;
- leave a proposal for cooperation with the company’s management without long delays.
To meet this customer expectation, companies use software tools – help desk class automation systems. So our final advice would be to at least consider implementing this solution into your business strategy.
