Is your customer support team juggling between delivering exceptional customer experience, keeping the team morale high, and balancing efficiency, all within a tight budget?
Then what’s missing in your customer support team is a customer support ops function. A customer support operations team can handle all the operational and strategic processes, allowing your customer support team to function smoothly and focus on core tasks, such as solving customer issues.
If you’re keen to know the importance of customer support operations, then this article is for you.
Putting a Focus on Customer Support
Research shows that if a customer receives excellent customer support, they’ll tell three or four people about their experience. However, if they receive poor customer support, they’ll tell ten to twelve other consumers.
Because online recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing and referrals are critical drivers of new business, all businesses must consistently deliver high customer support. To put more focus on customer support, you must:
- Understand your customers’ needs. The more you understand your customers, the more you’ll understand their expectations and needs. Hence, you must collect data to understand your customers better. Next, get your support team to help you collect valuable information from your customers. After that, determine how your products or services could better suit your customers’ needs and goals.
- Collect customer feedback. There are many ways to determine how customers feel about your brand, products, or services. First, identify the most viable and rewarding methods for your business. These may include:
- Giving customers the chance to provide online reviews and testimonials.
- Personally, ask your customers for feedback after they’ve used your products or services. For instance, by phone, in writing, or face-to-face.
- Provide a short and straightforward feedback survey or form with incentives to complete. The easier it is to complete the survey, the more response you’ll receive.
- Invite repeat customers to share their views about your company individually. Customers who are happy with what you’re offering will be eager to help you, especially if you’re looking to build on what they like and value.
- Meet and exceed your customers’ expectations to improve customer satisfaction. How often do customers receive more than what they expected? Surprising your customers this way by meeting their needs and goals can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. First, you must recognize customers’ special occasions and events or meaningful milestones of customer loyalty. Or you can extend a product or service they’ve purchased. This will boost your credibility and encourage new referrals to your brand.
Reasons Customer Support Ops Works?
Chad Horenfeldt notes, “Operations is… how you improve your customer obsessiveness. It’s how you improve your customer experience. It’s how you create customers for life.”
When most businesses are still small, customer support teams are self-sufficient. They help customers before, during, and after their sales transactions and guide them to use the product or service purchased if and when needed. Also, they manage their workflows and processes, documenting customer interactions, choosing tools, developing their processes and strategies, or implementing existing processes and systems.
However, in a growing business, for customer support agents to do their best work, they must focus solely on listening, understanding customer problems, and providing prompt and easy solutions. Customer support operations teams allow support agents and managers to focus only on customer support work. Also, they streamline customer support processes and workflows. On a business level, this reduces the call volume, improving the quality of customer support.
Advocate for the Customer Amid Other Business Ops
When resolving customer issues, customer support agents interact with different teams, including quality assurance ops, development team, and business development ops. Therefore, there must be set processes for information to flow correctly between various departments and operations teams.
For instance: if a client reports a bug in the software, your customer support team must communicate that to your development and testing teams. Good coordination and the right processes between teams are needed to respond quickly to the customer.
Neither your support team nor the development team has the time to define those processes. So, you need a team that isn’t buried into the daily operations to handle this matter. Your customer support operations team can also step in and find instances where process standardization is needed.
Put Effort into Building a Two-Way Trust with Your Customers
Customer support ops act as champions for your customer support team and advocates for your customers and company. And so they have a direct line to company executives and senior management. This two-way line of communication connects customers and frontline workers to senior management, building a two-way trust with your customers. Also, it allows the senior management to see and appreciate the importance of the customer support team’s work for the company and focus more on delivering better customer experiences, ultimately improving customer trust.
Measure and Achieve Goals
How much would you trust a self-managed customer support team, where every agent performs ad hoc communication with the customer, and customer support managers only come into the picture when something isn’t working? These quick fixes can cost your business customers.
The customer support ops team has the experience and expertise to build customer support tools and processes to measure and analyze important KPIs, customer support metrics and identify gaps to ensure your business achieves its customer support goals.
Hiring/Scaling Decisions for Customer Support
As your customer base and target audience grow, your customer support team scales, managing becomes hectic for your customer support manager with their daily responsibilities. The customer support ops can help you scale your customer support team, help you hire the right talents, and create a solid training program for new employees.
Rewarding and Recognizing Best-Performing Customer Support/Service Agents
Customer support/service teams often experience burnouts because they’re on their toes to help angry and frustrated customers. To improve their efficiency, you must constantly remind them about the business objectives, their importance in your company and reward them for their excellent work.
Customer support managers and teammates often point out an agent’s mistakes, but they rarely reward or recognize best-performing agents. The result is obvious; sad customer support agents equal unhappy customers.
Customer support ops teams can take initiatives to recognize and reward the best-performing customer support/service reps. From a simple appreciation of your customer support team’s communication channels to commissions and bonuses, a small gesture can improve employee morale and make them feel valued, ultimately enhancing their efficiency and improving customer experiences.
Bettering efficiency in customer service/support
The customer support ops team can identify automation opportunities, making your customer support processes more efficient. Balancing the customer support workforce with automation can also help managers understand hiring new talents.
Leverage Cloud App to Elevate Your Customer Support Approach
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a powerful customer support tool that offers the fastest way to capture and embed webcams, videos, GIFs, screencasts, and marked-up images through your company workflows, such as customer support, customer service, software development, and sales and marketing. It can help your customer support team avoid writing lengthy emails and get tasks completed 300% faster.
The app’s visual tools also increase efficiency by letting your customer support agents write less, talk less, and show more. For instance, Cloud Elements’s engineering team saves at least 50 minutes daily using Zight (formerly CloudApp). The team uses visual software to minimize the back-and-forth conversations with customers. Further, they use Zight (formerly CloudApp) to capture behaviors on their laptop and computer screens, allowing them to report bugs and troubleshoot issues promptly.