8 Great Strategies to Build Your Business Customer Support Team

Intro

A satisfied customer is the fuel to the growth of any business. To ensure the brand's success and keep your customers happy, you need a great customer support team to effectively handle and solve customer challenges.

A great quality and professional support team will keep customers coming over for recurrent purchases and drive more revenue for the business. They understand and know how to relate to customer needs and effectively solve them.

This article shows how brands can build great customer support teams, build customer trust as they handle customer pains, and show them how to get value from the business.

1. Use channels customers mostly use.

Your customer preference channels of communication are different and your support team should have diverse channels to communicate with the target customers. These channels include

• Social media accounts
• Live chat. For example, our live chatbot on the website targets customers to get assistance from the support team to know more about the business.

Source: Ranktracker

• Forums
• Phone call
• Knowledge base
• Emails

Maximize the channels customers use to engage with your business. Measure the performance of the different channels and invest more in the ones with the highest tracking to deliver the best customer support services. Consider integrating advanced options like an AI receptionist. This feature provides 24/7 support by intelligently handling inquiries, speeding up responses, and personalizing each customer’s experience.

2. Use the right tools

Customer support should incorporate all the other departments in an organization. It is essential to have a tool that can integrate with all the other departments in the company.

Integrated communication channels help improve communication across the different teams and make informed decisions to solve customer needs with ease.

Ensure the tools have the right features and are cost-effective and the support team and other departments know how to use them with ease as they engage and handle customer needs.

With the right tools, you can automate repetitive tasks within the support team and make it easy to handle consumer demands.

For example, the right live chat software can help answer customer questions when they are on the website searching for more information and help regarding their pains. Using an efficient ticketing system improves the efficiency to improve the response time for customer needs.

3. Get feedback from customers

The feedback helps the support team improve their effectiveness in handling customer challenges. The team can also collect feedback among themselves and within the other departments in the company like sales and marketing to know more about consumer needs.

Get a customer representative to dig deeper into the customer experience and get first-hand experience and feedback. The representative gets deeper insights into the customer pains, the challenges they face solving their pains, and the chances to improve on the service delivery.

Working on deeper insights from the customer can foster a deeper relationship with the brand, build more trust and positive customer satisfaction, and retain customers for a long.

You can also use a proactive strategy and reach out to customers to get their feedback. With the feedback, you can tweak the strategy and communication patterns to customers and target prospects to deliver excellent customer service to the customers. Build that customer-centric culture with your support team to deliver the best support services to your customers.

With the customer feedback, you will know what works best for your support team and the kind of services and experience customers love about your brand so you can provide the best value to them in solving their challenges.

4. Hire a great team for customer support.

Ask these questions among others as you advertise and look for candidates to hire for your business customer support.

• How will you handle customer complaints?
• How fast will you respond to customer needs?
• How will they behave when handling customers? Their language, tone, etc
• What skills should your support team have?

Choose employees who have empathy and great communication skills among other skills to handle your customer needs. The answers the candidates give for the above hiring questions and others will help gauge their experience and expertise in customer support.

Ensure all the departments within the customer support team are well organized. Here is the customer support team structure for brands.

Source

You need to hire support staff who are passionate about your business products or services as they will have self-motivation to know better about the product and customers' needs regarding their pains.

5. Offer training to the customer support team

To deliver value to customers and serve them effectively, brands should train their support staff on the operation of the business and strengthen the team values through coaching and training.

The training and mentorship sessions should be comprehensive and cover all the areas of customer needs and concerns like the knowledge of the products or services, conflict resolutions, and the best effective communication strategies with the customers.

For example, our customer support team has extensive knowledge about the services below that we offer our customers.

Source: Ranktracker

The training empowers the customer support team to handle the challenges customers face. It also boosts their trust and diligence to perform their tasks effectively. The support team can make independent decisions to impact customer satisfaction.

With great training and advanced skills, the support team can handle customer inquiries and pains professionally, build trust with the brand, and drive more conversions. The team should have these great skills

• Communication
• Empathy
• Positive attitude
• Strong organization skills
• Listening skills
• Patience and friendliness
• Time management

In addition to the training, the team should have solid foundational knowledge of the business products and services to handle customer needs and show the value of their business to them.

6. Measure the right customer support metrics

Tracking the right metrics for your business sales and revenue growth is a great indicator of the health of your customer support. Research shows that unhappy customers leave a business and look for another. They also leave negative reviews that can damage the business image.

The metrics reveal more than just numbers from the customers. They show the behavioral patterns and feedback the customers have about what you offer. Some of these metrics to track include:

• Customer satisfaction score
• Net promoter score measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. Here is an example of it

Source: ProProfs

• First contact resolution
• Customer churn rate
• Customer effort score
• Customer health score

As you measure the metrics, contact regular performance evaluations from the data on the metrics you track and improve on the areas that will drive more satisfaction for the customer.

7. Set goals for your support team

To ensure effectiveness in the operation of the support team you need to set goals for the team. These goals can be to reduce customer response time, professionally handle customer challenges, and increase customer satisfaction rates.

You should know your customer expectations for your brand such as clear communication and have them as goals to maximize building trust with the customers and retain them for a long.

Be clear on what you want your support team to achieve for your business growth within the specific time gap. Set goals that align with the company vision and also which are customer-centric to ensure customer and business success at large.

You can also set reward programs for the customer support team who go an extra way to deliver excellent services to the customers and for the brand growth.

Encourage cooperation and teamwork within the support team for effective customer handling. Can use team board meetings, and brainstorming sessions about customer challenges and how to solve them.

Consider employee welfare as you set goals and don’t push them too hard as it can compromise their delivery of professional support to customers. Give reasonable workloads, and have flexible work schedules and support.

8. Use behavioral analytics to personalize customer support

With the help of analytics, you can know user behaviors as they interact and engage with your business. It is easy to predict customer behaviors and have a strategy to help them once they bring up issues that need to be solved.

With the help of behavioral analytics from your customers, your support team can be well equipped to handle and resolve customers' pains as they can predict them based on their behaviors as they engage and interact with the brand products or services or on the different communication channels.

When customers get personalized support for their challenges, they build more trust with the brand and make repeat purchases. You can also spy on your competitors and see how their customer support team from different channels handle their customers.

Conclusion

Having a support team that knows how to handle customer needs and provide solutions to their pains. A happy customer is a driving force for the growth of any business. Great customer support team builds the brand reputation improving the brand image to customers and prospects. Build more loyalty and trust with customers leading to repeat purchases and more sales and revenue.

Use these strategies to build a great customer support team that will drive more sales by providing professional assistance to customers and getting them to use the business services or products.

Ensure you keep updated on the latest trends in consumer needs and the market to provide the best customer support delivery.