Customer support is an essential part of any company. It’s how you address your customers’ issues, assist them with your product, and make sure they’re happy with their purchase.
But beyond that, it can also help you reach your other core business goals.
With the right approach, customer support can play a significant role in your ability to build customer relationships and grow your business.
With a growth-focused mindset, your team can be an integral part of your strategy for reaching your company’s acquisition and revenue goals.
5 Customer Support Hacks to Help Grow Your Business
If you’re not yet taking a growth-focused approach, these 5 customer support hacks can help you make the most of your team’s efforts.
1. Help Your Customers Help Themselves
The first idea on this list doesn’t involve interacting directly with customers. Instead, it centers on building a helpful knowledge base.
And this approach is very much in line with what most audiences want.
In one survey, 91% of people said they would gladly use a self-service knowledge base if one were available to them.
And beyond that, 75% of respondents said they consider a self-service knowledge base a convenient way to resolve a support issue.
Today, this is standard practice for most major brands. For example, Amazon provides step-by-step tutorials for troubleshooting common issues.
The primary advantage here is to customers, as it will often help them find a resolution faster than if they’d had to wait for an available agent.
But it’s helpful to your company, too.
When users are able to solve specific issues themselves, your support team can focus on inquiries that aren’t already addressed on your site — many of which could be from prospective customers.
And speaking with interested potential customers is a much better (and more cost-effective) use of their time than addressing questions that could quickly be addressed in a simple FAQ.
2. Create (and Stick to) SLAs
Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, are policies that determine what an appropriate response time is for each inquiry, depending on its priority level.
Creating SLAs is a great way to set clear expectations for your support team and ensure that each request is handled within a reasonable amount of time.
It will also help your team more efficiently prioritize each ticket that enters your system.
Without a clear prioritization system, your team could easily get bogged down with minor issues that have no real impact on your business.
But when you have a system in place, you can be confident that they’re focusing on high-priority issues.
This way, a major bug that’s rendering your product unusable (and preventing sales) won’t go unnoticed.
3. Use Automation Where You Can
Another way to maximize your team’s efficiency is to use automation wherever you can.
If you work in the customer service field, you may be a little skeptical of this suggestion. And that makes sense.
After all, customer support is mostly about engaging with customers on a personal level and making them feel heard — which an automated response is highly unlikely to do.
But when used correctly, automation can enable your team to help your customers more efficiently.
For example, setting follow-up rules is a great way to make sure agents don’t forget to follow up with customers when necessary.
This rule can help your team as a whole make sure they aren’t overlooking any tickets.
And using automated messages to give customers an estimated wait time (if applicable) isn’t a bad idea, either.
If you can’t get to a user’s inquiry immediately, this is an easy way to reassure them that an agent will speak with them soon — so that they’ll stick around and get the level of customer support you aim to deliver.
4. Express Empathy
One of the best ways to step up your team’s customer support is to focus on empathy.
Unfortunately, this is something that’s severely lacking in customer service as a whole.
As Micah Bennett of Zapier explains, “I’m constantly blown away at how appreciative people are when they get human replies. Years of uncaring or even hostile support experiences have set the bar low for their expectations that they get excited by genuine answers.”
While this is a sad commentary on the state of customer service, it means that it’s not difficult to stand out if you’re willing to spend a few extra seconds making your customers feel heard.
It can be as simple as tailoring your responses to individual users, and expressing that you understand their concern or frustration.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Go the Extra Mile
When most customers reach out to a customer service team, their expectations are fairly low.
They simply want their problem resolved — and in most cases, they don’t expect the experience to be a particularly pleasant one.
As consumers, most of us have had the experience of being put on hold for extended periods of time or waiting an insane amount of time to speak with someone in the first place.
So if you’re able to resolve a customer’s issue quickly and efficiently, you’re already ahead of the game.
But that doesn’t mean you should aim solely for adequacy.
Of course, if your team is pressed for time, with hundreds of requests in the queue, it’s understandable to focus on efficiency.
Still, if there’s an opportunity to go the extra mile, it’s almost always a good idea to take it.
Essentially, you can attribute a large portion of their success to their willingness to go the extra mile for their customers.
And your company doesn’t necessarily need to be quite as over-the-top to replicate this success.
