Getting through the volume of help requests that stream in over email, live chat and phone calls can be overwhelming for your business. As a company expands with increasing sales, the number of questions and issues that customers have only increases unless they’re managed carefully.
In this article, we cover ways to reduce the time it takes to handle requests by making some adjustments in the business processes.
Change the Type of Language Being Spoken
While it’s easy to get used to speaking the company’s lingo, the customers will find it difficult to understand. Being clear with communication by using terminology that the customer will readily comprehend is far better than blinding them with jargon which only serves to confuse them.
Avoid using technical words, shorthand or industry slang; also, skip the fact-stating tidbits which can come across as passive-aggressive too. Soften everything to keep it friendly and helpful. Doing this goes a long way to being clear the first time and not having to re-explain something because the customer got confused. This makes calls shorter.
Provide the Right Tools for the Job
Not all help desk software is all that helpful. It takes time for staff to get to grips with it, which is why on-the-job training is so important. When employees know how to get the best out of every feature, they can best use the tools not only to do their job, but to provide excellent customer service too.
Help desk software provided by a company like SysAid will be designed to help customer service and technical support teams provide an improved level of service by giving them the information they require. It also assists managers in getting an overview of what types of queries are coming in, how fast they’re being handled, and where workflow is getting bottlenecked.
Recruit the Best People
The best people might be ones who have already worked in customer services before, or they might be employees new to this type of work. There are advantages and disadvantages to both situations depending on your perspective.
Previous experience in customer services is usually a good thing in this fast-paced environment. Being able to quickly understand the issue from a wide range of customers and deal with it effectively is very important. However, someone who’s new to customer services might find that difficult to pick up. Nevertheless, sometimes getting rid of bad habits picked up from working for other companies can be troublesome.
Companies must be prepared for all scenarios to pull the right team together. Only that way can they tackle queries quickly, process them efficiently and manage the workflow effectively.
Assign Specialists
A specialist might be a team leader, or someone else who handles the unusual cases or those that will take extra time to resolve. In order to keep the customer service team moving and not getting backed up with waiting calls, the more complex or advanced queries should be referred to specialists.
By using a separate mini team in this manner, it avoids a bottleneck of calls waiting, or emails going unanswered, which is then difficult for the team to catch up on once they’ve fallen behind.
Lastly, it’s also useful to have a knowledge base that customers can refer to on the website. This reduces the number of needless calls where the answer is already provided.
