Optimizing text-based support: Identify customer needs and expectations | #customersupport #supporticket

Providing a holistic, omnichannel experience has been a priority for many businesses, and for good reason. Customer expectations are on the rise across channels. In fact, two-thirds of customers expect support to be faster than it was five years ago and almost half of the millennials demand more options to contact companies.

Meeting those rising expectations is anything but easy. As teams scramble to rise to the challenge, there are several options ahead of them. One is building and deploying a text-based customer service funnel that provides human, self-serve, and proactive layers of support. The funnel allows customers to find answers to many of their questions independently and talk to agents when dealing with more complex problems.

Developing the self-serve and proactive layers of this funnel requires knowing your customers well. To that end, it’s vital that you identify common pain points and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and then provide answers. And in the next part, we’ll go over several tips on how to approach this challenge and what benefits to expect.

How to identify pain points?

As you go about helping customers, you may be wondering how to identify common inquiries and pain points. Depending on the CRM software you use, you can tag customer conversations and support tickets according to certain categories and discover common feature requests and complaints. You may find, for instance, that most problems stem from a dysfunctional payment system or that a set of recurring glitches and bugs in your product causes customers to churn.

You can also dig into your knowledge base, website, and Google Analytics data to learn what questions and queries customers are interested in. These sources can reveal articles you need to write or those that need to be rewritten to improve their usability and relevance. Exploring metrics such as time-on-page and bounce rate is also important as it shows what customers want to know about and whether your content provides the information they need.

Social media, messenger apps, and live chat are also great tools for understanding customer pain points. People like communicating through these channels. Use this habit to your advantage to not only provide exceptional support but also engage customers and learn more about their opinion of your product.

Your sales team is another important source of customer-related information. Sales reps and business development representatives (BDRs) are constantly dealing with prospects and are thus in an ideal position to collect valuable information on how others perceive your business offering. Sales reps should thus regularly take notes and pass observations to the support, marketing, and product teams. 

Delivering consistent messaging

Once you identify pain points and FAQs, write content that provides customers with the necessary information. But it’s also important to ensure that you maintain consistent messaging across different support channels.

Scripts that provide agents with ready-made responses and phrases to email, social media, and live chat inquiries should be dynamically updated to reflect the latest knowledge base articles. This will ensure that you provide the most effective responses to customers across different touchpoints. Also, you’ll get to communicate in a single voice and maintain a consistent brand presentation that can lead to a 23% revenue increase.

Self-service makes customers happier

And while companies might be happy to talk to customers, voice support is an expensive channel to maintain. Businesses spend over $1 trillion annually to handle 265 billion customer service calls, and self-service options can help deflect some of this call volume. Agents would have more time to deal with complicated tasks.

Keeping customers off the phone will also improve their loyalty and affinity to your company. No one is eager to get on the phone, and by the time they’re dialing you, they’re probably already frustrated. Enabling customers to solve their own problems or contact you using asynchronous digital channels gives them confidence in themselves and your product. And 65% of people feel good about the business they’re interacting with if they can solve problems independently.

Build stronger relationships with customers

Advanced software tools make it easier to learn about customer pain points. RingCentral’s solutions, for instance, enable agents to interact with customers across multiple touchpoints via voice, SMS, social, or email. And each of these interactions is another opportunity to collect valuable data. Real-time reports, in-depth customer surveys, and CRM software integrations are additional features that RingCentral provides to enable you to understand customers and build stronger relationships with them.

If you want to explore these technologies and learn how they can supercharge your customer service efforts, then click here to learn more about our offering and sign up for a free personal demo.