7 Tips To Increase Customer Support Satisfaction Yield

It’s good to have a customer support system in place; after all, customers are entitled to contact you about any issues they have with your products, services, or presence. Failure to respond to customer queries, complaints, or suggestions in a timely and complete manner can quickly destroy your reputation. Soon, you may find yourself without sufficient revenue to pay your bills. Once you establish that you don’t care about customers, it can take a very long time to rebuild trust with them as your business slowly slides toward bankruptcy.

Yet running an effective customer support team can feel like trying to please everyone at once or dealing with spurious, annoying complaints on the worst days. It’s never nice to hear that your business has made a mistake or to reiterate yourself with a message that you’ve given countless others. From a human standpoint, such situations lead to human burnout among your customer support staff, which can lead to poor performance that exacerbates the problem.

Moreover, your customers want instant solutions, your team needs proper resources, and somewhere in between, you’re trying to maintain quality while keeping costs reasonable. For this reason, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or that you’re like a hamster on a wheel.

But you can’t afford such feelings. After all, customer support is one of the richest areas for learning about how your target market sees your brand and where you’re making mistakes before you reach the point of reputational damage. In most markets, you’ll find that only a small fraction of the customers who are disappointed with your brand will actually complain. Thus, complaints are like icebergs, with much of the bulk hidden below the waterline. The key to customer service is to listen carefully, empathize with the customer, find a solution that makes them whole, and implement that solution wholly and quickly.

Deliver superior customer support

Let’s consider what that might look like below:

Respond quickly, even if you don’t have the answer

Nobody likes waiting in silence. A quick acceptance of your customer’s issue builds trust immediately and shows you care about them, even if you just send a brief message confirming you’ve received their request and give them a realistic timeframe for resolution.

Chatbots are great tools for responding quickly to queries or complaints when humans aren’t available. Humans call in sick, take a vacation, or may even quit unexpectedly, but chatbots never take a day off, so they’re always available. Of course, a chatbot is only as good as its programming, so train it well.

Build a knowledge base that actually helps

Should someone really have to contact you to get clarification on an issue? Especially with online pages and documents being so easy to create? If you create clear, searchable articles that address common problems in plain language, then you’re likely to answer or help with an issue before it even comes across your desk, so to speak. Updating this resource regularly based on new customer questions and feedback can help you stay up-to-date and appropriate for those changing needs.

Empower your support team to make decisions

Ultimately, support agents who need approval for every minor decision create bottlenecks and frustrated customers, and it also provides that “robotic response” syndrome that we’ve all had to deal with before. A company that actually gives its team clear guidelines and the authority to make judgment calls is one that can achieve a better completion rate with a higher “yield” of satisfaction, as it were.

They’re the people who know your customers more directly because they talk to them daily, so trust them to know when to bend the rules slightly to keep a customer happy and make it clear where they can’t. Of course, it’s also important to provide training to prevent that autonomy from “falling into customer demands simply because they know how to game the system.” That might decrease satisfaction, but it also means your well-meaning staff won’t be forced into making a poor decision or making an unwarranted apology.

Listen before solving

Sometimes, customers just need to vent before they’re ready for solutions. Yep, you’re not running a therapy service, but that doesn’t mean a complaint or grievance (provided it’s given respectfully and without abuse), is too much for you to handle.

It’s wise to train your team to identify emotional cues and acknowledge feelings before jumping into the fix, though again, don’t have them apologize for everything, especially in the cases of injuries where lawsuits could use this as material for their complaint. In those circumstances, train your staff to refer the call up a level. This approach might take an extra minute, but it prevents the back-and-forth that happens when you misunderstand the real issue or helps you work on it in your best interest while still providing the satisfaction you want to give.

Follow up after resolutions

Not many companies do this, but a quick check-in after solving a problem shows you care about the outcome, not just closing tickets. Of course, you can also have a survey feedback form in place to see whether your customer support agents are delivering or not. That’ll help you better see which staff members handle which support requests more easily, or you can reach out if a support request hasn’t been correctly processed.

This practice often catches continuing issues and turns frustrated customers into those who think your firm is at least doing something to resolve the issue. You’re never going to 100% please everyone at all times even with solid outreach, but this should up your rates of success a little.

Keep your promises

Not to sound like a blog post providing help with romantic troubles, but the truth is that the customer/business connection is a relationship, too. Part of the wish of hoping to deliver for customers indeed means support teams often feel pressured to promise quick solutions. It’s much better to be realistic about timelines and capabilities; if you say you’ll call back in an hour, do it – even if you’re just providing an update. Reliability builds more trust than speed, and so the counterpoint here is not to promise false guarantees either because they’ll just lead to disappointment if you can’t deliver. Try to avoid that outcome if you can.

Improve communication capabilities

Of course, one of the best routes to securing a satisfied customer support request is being able to contact you easily enough in the first place. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many businesses can falter here.

Having an online support portal people can log into their accounts with, a phone line even with virtual phone numbers, a live web chat when agents are available, or good old-fashioned emails that are directed internally or to your comms team can make a massive difference. Improving your communication capabilities will also ensure that you can appeal to all generations. Young people prefer shooting a message over social media, while older individuals tend to prefer calls. This way, you provide for both and alienate no one.

Conclusion

With this advice, we hope you can more easily improve your customer support satisfaction yield.

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