Having a support team communicates a level of commitment to your clients. When they know that a team is constantly devoted to covering all the moving parts of a sale, it reassures them that they can rely on you to solve the problems that could arise. But they are not the only ones who benefit from the help of the support department: the sales team also rely on the expertise of their colleagues.
How can you create a top customer support team?
The answer is actually simpler than you can think: combine a knowledge sharing platform and self service tools. This is an excellent way to scale your customer service efficiently, as members of the support team gain access to faster problem solving and live answers to their questions.
Using a Q&A software for knowledge sharing may take some initial investment, but in the long run, it’s definitely worth it, since it saves your team a lot of time, according to Help Scout.
The principles of ‘whole company support’
Despite being a fairly new concept, a lot of successful companies are involving all the members of their team in customer service. Having an entire company working – even for an hour per week – for the support department turned out to be a wise decision.
Customer.io or Groove are just a few of the names that started scaling their support efforts lately. Buffer also shares a similar mindset, with a 5% support rule in action, meaning that every team member in the company takes a few hours one day per month, in order to handle support emails or engage with social media followers.
Why does your support team need support?
A survey conducted by Forester revealed that 41% of those who end up asking customer support a question expect a reply within six hours. However, just 36% of businesses that took part in the survey actually manage to respond within that time frame.
Simply put, it’s a verified fact that nobody can have all the answers related to a domain. In most cases, support agents encounter various issues that can leave them stumped at one point or another. In such situations, they need to consult other team members for help.
On the other side, having a comprehensive knowledge base within the company automatically eliminates the need for agents to struggle with finding answers to issues that may have been previously addressed. Instead, everything they need to do is simply search using the Q&A software and find an answer quickly.
A united group, with access to a lot of resources, promotes the kind of collaboration a team needs to efficiently address more tickets. Once an individual effort, answering customers’ problems now becomes a team effort, allowing support representatives to make use of their colleagues’ experience and knowledge.
Finally, after there are no more collaboration barriers, everything your support team needs is to be encouraged to work together. And guess what? Your internal knowledge sharing platform also helps you keep an eye on the agents, and recognize those who help each other and find the most creative solutions to help customers.
Coleman Parks published a survey in which 91% of consumers answered that they would prefer using a single, online knowledge base, if it’s available and adjusted to their needs.
What are the secondary benefits of having the entire company help the support team?
Besides the actual benefits, presented above, there are also a few additional advantages of using knowledge sharing. Let’s call them secondary benefits, since they somehow have something to do with the entire work environment.
Using an internal Q&A platform builds empathy externally and internally, and helps build a better onboarding process, so the customer support team won’t have to repeat specific conversations. Bug reports are easier to spot and resolve, not to mention that the product itself and product team will both get better and better, thanks to their work done alongside the customer support team.
Not to mention that internal tools will also get more attention, which is a plus for any company. Finally, customers will surely notice faster response and delivery times, and appreciate it. And you never know who shares some appreciation on social media.
We’ve talked about other perks, such as making the organization’s best problem-solving experiences reusable, enabling better and faster decision making, stimulating innovation and growth, improving delivery to customers, and reducing the loss of know-how, in a previous article about the benefits of knowledge sharing.
Conclusion
Helping your customer support team with a Q&A knowledge sharing software is a good idea. Not supporting them can lead to an increased number of tickets, increased response times, decreased customer satisfaction and, possibly having your support agents burn out.
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