What does it mean to scale customer support?
To expand customer support operations, you have two options: hire more reps or extend the hours of operation. Here we will focus on the less expensive and simpler route, using automated customer service solutions powered by AI and machine learning across all your platforms. This process can save time and money while ensuring excellent customer service.
5 steps to scale customer support
1. Survey the scene
To automate your customer support, you need to take stock of what is and isn’t working. Do your knowledge base articles provide simple, easy-to-read instructions on what customers need to do? Or are they bloated with insider language you wouldn’t get if you aren’t in your organization? All communication with your customers must be customer-centric.
2. From customer support to customer success
According to The Atlantic’s Arthur C Brooks, contentment can be analyzed through two separate lenses: the elimination of pain and the acquisition of joy. Customer service falls into the bucket of pain reduction – not being able to sign into an account, failing to locate a specific product, or having unanswered questions.
Many organizations are shifting their focus to a customer success model, which doesn’t just alleviate the unpleasant features of product/service usage; it works towards facilitating an enjoyable and long-term experience that will lead customers to greater success. It is for this reason that more companies are making the switch from Customer Support Teams to Customer Success teams.
3. Get your team the right training
Providing good training for your customer support/success teams is difficult for the simplest products and services. Add any layer of complexity to it, and you set agents up for failure.
But how do you hire people to be problem solvers without memorizing every corner case? This is where automated customer service software kicks in. Instead of your team memorizing everything, they can utilize an AI-powered chatbot to help them help your customers quickly – so you can scale a team without needing a team of superheroes with an eidetic memory.
4. Measure Customer Satisfaction
Implementing customer satisfaction measurement systems will help you know what works and doesn’t. With the right customer feedback Surveys in place, your customer support agents are not fumbling in the dark to figure out what they need to do to improve.
These surveys should be automated using software. This will allow you to scale customer support without needing manual intervention and track key metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI).
5. Monitor The Results
Monitoring customer support means having the right dashboards in hand to know what people are asking, what tickets are getting created, which agents are responding quickly and what ticket average handle time looks like.
Quick wins for customer support use cases
Implement Automated Chatbots
A well-functioning automated chatbot can provide customers with answers to 90%+ of their questions. No more customer service agents answering the same questions over and over again. If you only do one thing with your customer support automation – get a bot to start triaging.
Pair NLP with a Great UX
Natural language processing (NLP) can be used to understand customer queries and provide accurate and timely responses. But what do you do if your customer doesn’t even know what question to ask? Two things to consider.
First – Pair your customer support bot with a menu that guides the customer into a limited set of options. For example, if you are an online retailer, some big use cases your customers have might be finding a product, checking the price, or reading reviews. If you are a credit union, some of the things your members might want to do on your site could be checking their balance, transferring money, or paying bills.
Second – Make sure that your customers see what is possible. As they type in their question, show them an autocomplete example of what other customers have asked. That way, they will know what the bot is likely to know.
Lean on Predictive Analytics
The best customer support is not just reacting to questions. It is being proactive and trying to predict what other questions you might have. This way, you can be prepared with answers.
Leverage automated ticketing
If your customer support bot can’t answer the question, then the automation platform should quickly and accurately route customer inquiries to the right customer service agent via Live Chat handoff or by creating a ticket in the automated ticketing system.
How can automation technology help businesses scale support?
While we could list a myriad of ways automation can help support teams’ scale, here are the highlights:
- Personalization – automation can provide a different experience for your freemium customers vs. enterprise customers
- Connection – automations can kick off workflows that get other teams involved
- Customer Experience – instead of looking up information in the CRM and comparing it back to the helpdesk, automation can give one unified view of the customer in one place.
Automation can help organizations save time and money by automating mundane tasks and freeing up resources for more important tasks – eliminating the “time famine” that Yale’s Dr. Laurie Santos talks about in her podcast The Happiness Lab.
How do you get a skeptical team to embrace this technology? Ask your support team if they would like to:
- Keep doing things the same manual way
- Keep spending manual time on mind-numbing tasks
- Do less problem-solving and more problem regurgitation
Almost every support team will say they don’t want to do that. Automation can help businesses save time and money while freeing up resources for better customer interactions.
Why you would use Capacity for scaling customer support
Capacity is a customer support automation platform that helps organizations answer questions, automate processes and build new solutions. As a platform, Capacity makes it easy to integrate bots, Live Chat, Guided Conversations, and Automations, so your support team is not spending time on repetitive tasks.
The first reason to use Capacity for scaling customer support is that our entire raison d’etre is to help your team do their best by automating your customer support. That’s why Capacity exists. Capacity provides a range of features that enable organizations to quickly and easily scale their customer support operations. We believe you shouldn’t have to turn to multiple vendors to get chatbots, workflows, automated ticket routing, automated ticket assignment and escalation. We think you should be able to scale your customer support operation without hiring additional staff or investing in additional infrastructure.
The second reason to use Capacity for scaling customer support is that we’ll provide you with a great ROI. We’ve seen clients like West Community Credit Union grow by 50%, reduce calls by 20% and increase satisfaction by 10 points.
The third reason to use Capacity for scaling customer support is that we make it easy. Believe it or not, making something easy takes a lot of work! While other platforms have pieces of what we do, we’re the first to put them together in an integrated package. Don’t take our word for it – give Capacity a quick spin and see how the world’s best companies are automating their support.
