Improve Customer Support Productivity + Best Customer Support SaaS

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Reducing the wait time equals happy customers. But, when the customer support team is not productive enough, companies start facing challenges like increased operational costs and negative feedback. Today, for around 95% of customers, exceptional customer support leads to brand loyalty.

The efficiency of a customer support team heavily relies on productivity and the SaaS tools they use. Productivity is a multi-dimensional term. Many factors influence the productivity of a customer support team. If you are a business that is trying to get your team out of the ‘productivity issues’ whirlwind, then this article is for you.

We’ll also put you on some of the best customer support SaaS tools available. With these SaaS products, you can start improving productivity today.

Productivity Issues in Customer Support Teams

Customer support teams have a very ‘always on the go’ kind of job where they need to be available to address customer needs. Customer support teams have to deal with several non-ideal scenarios like angry customers, miscommunication, lack of trust and patience, keeping track of infinite requirements, and complex product demos. Plus, not having SaaS tools to support their work makes the monotony of the tasks more difficult to handle.

All this can bring down the productivity of the team quite dramatically.

As a customer support professional, your moods and actions are often influenced by the tone and tenor of the customer you are speaking with. Understanding consumer behavior and the psychology of an angry customer can require a lot of effort. Not surprisingly, then, customer support professionals often experience burnout at a much higher rate than people in other departments.

Some studies show that young customer support professionals rarely work more than a year in their jobs. This leads to a direct financial loss for the company and the costs of rehiring, training, and finding the right talent are huge. Besides this, burnt-out employees also contribute to poor productivity and dissatisfied customers.

It is hence important for companies to spot distress among customer support teams’ early on and help them reduce burnout before they turnover. But how to identify if the productivity of your team is dropping?

Look for signs such as increased leaves, disinterest in events and activities, even the fun ones, bad temper, change in language, falling ill more often, and failing to hit goals and targets. Some SaaS tools can help monitor the team morale.

These signs are a common indication of draining motivation in teams.

How to Improve the Productivity of your Customer Support Team?

Some productivity-drainers can be negated with SaaS tools and technology. Other factors may need to be resolved with introspection into how and why things are done the way they are. 

Here is a short guide on how you can improve the efficiency and output of your customer support teams.

Automation

Customer support involves several repetitive tasks that can be seamlessly automated with SaaS tools. This leaves time and energy for employees to take on more meaningful work that can enhance customer service. For example, if a company has invested in AI SaaS platform today like a chatbot, they can handle routine tasks like answering queries that require cookie-cutter responses. But SaaS tools with AI are even capable of providing complex responses too.

This allows employees to spend more time with queries that need more deliberation. Below we’ll talk more about this type of SaaS tool.

Here are some pointers to consider while automating your customer support department. 

Self-help: Maintain a knowledge management repository, including common FAQs, brand guidelines, latest product information, and security policies ready. This may come in handy for first-level assistance. 

Schedule rule-based sequences

A critical component of customer service is to gather feedback from customers proactively even before they have experienced a negative experience with your product or service. SaaS tools like Delighted (save 15% with NachoNacho) make this happen seamlessly. 

A lot of this can be one through rule-based sequences. For example, you may send a message two days after a new customer has come onboard and ask them for feedback for how their initial experience is. 

Or, you could message a customer who has not logged in more than 30 days to check if they have any concerns. 

This way, you could fix issues even before they become a major point of friction causing your customer to churn.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and AI can often come in handy when automating certain parts of customer support and experience management. 

The common issues customers face have to do with complex product features, pricing details, and order status. Once you have the demographics from feedback forms or surveys, you may map them with your product orders and create groups, and then use AI to analyze why they like something, don’t like something, and what they would like to buy next.

Improving process

For a customer support team, the standard practice is to listen to the customers on multiple platforms, maintain each request with a ticket and assign it a unique number to track status. If the requests are not easily solved, they are handed over to the right person or department for resolution..

Now, this process can be made more efficient to improve the productivity of the team. How?

Start with small changes like training all the employees on a standard protocol practice, using CRM solutions to document interactions and information, and preparing a plan of action for complex demands. 

Get data driven. Use SaaS tools like QuestionPro (Get 10,000 responses for free) to set up NPS surveys and customer feedback forms to assess where exactly your customer support team is faltering. And use the feedback to implement real changes.

This could be empowering your agents to make decisions without having to wait for their superiors, or capturing customer problems succinctly so that they do not have to repeat the issue with different members of your team involved in the resolution process. 

Improving training

Enhancing the quality of training processes has a direct impact on the productivity of employees. Nothing trains an employee like in real-life situations. 

There are two ways to achieve this. First, let new recruits shadow best-performing agents to understand how they navigate various situations at work. Second, extensive training should be carried out with the help of recorded interactions to help agents assess the best path forward under each circumstance. Implementing different types of mentoring can further enhance these training methods.

There are however a few challenges that companies face with respect to training agents effectively. Customer support agents in a lot of modern workplaces operate remotely – either as an offshore unit, or independently from home. 

While e-learning solutions can help impart training quite effectively, they may still not be effective enough in certain industries. This is why it’s very important to use a modern customer support SaaS tool

This is a strategic call for the business to make. It is important to realize that customer support is not a cost center, but instead can be an effective profit center for a business if implemented correctly. 

So, instead of looking at finding the most cost-effective solution through offshoring, one may consider hiring agents that work from the HQ if that can make support more efficient. 

This strategy also allows businesses to let regular employees take support calls routinely. This builds an entire ecosystem of employees who are well-versed with the needs of the customers and help the organization operate with a customer-first mindset.

Tracking the correct metrics and implementing the right goals

In improving the customer support team’s performance, identifying the shortcomings and working on them can only happen if you have the right metrics.

Identify the right KPIs that move the needle regarding customer happiness and track them with SaaS tools. Being data-driven helps your organization stop relying on gut feelings and instead make decisions based on ground realities. 

Here is a short list of KPIs that act as levers regarding customer support and experience management.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is the holy grail of customer experience management. This is survey based and seeks customer feedback on a scale of 1 to 10 on how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend or colleague. 

Response time: This is the time taken to respond to all tickets divided by the total tickets generated. The objective is to bring response time down while also ensuring high NPS scores. 

Ticket backlog: This is the sum total of all unresolved tickets, both at the agent-level and the organization level.

Self-service adoption: This is the time it takes for customers to get their issues resolved through chatbots, live chat, knowledge base, or other automated solutions. The adoption rate is calculated as a percentage of the total tickets generated.

First contact resolution rate: The objective of any customer support team is to resolve issues in a frictionless manner without intervention from other stakeholders. Higher the first contact resolution rate, the more effective your team performance is.

Using the best customer support SaaS tools for you

The right customer support SaaS can make or break your organizational productivity. The tool’s usability, third-party integration, experience management features, and team management can be critical to ensuring high productivity within your team. 

Some of the most popular customer support SaaS for improving productivity include

Engaging employees

Employee engagement activities are the core of any well-performing team. They allow employees to gauge each other’s weaknesses and strengths. In times of urgency, each member should know who to delegate the task to for overall customer satisfaction. Here are some winning strategies.

Create anonymous feedback forms and work on employee suggestions. Celebrate team and individual performance achievements with awards, online certificates, and gifts. Plan team trips to help them rejuvenate. Support their hobbies by arranging workshops. Allow employees to use the latest customer support SaaS tools to ease their workload and achieve more in less time. Plan cross-functional department discussions to increase their knowledge base.

The process of improving productivity in customer support teams is not a sprint, it is a marathon. You must constantly work on it to avoid financial losses in the long run.

Wrapping up

A productive customer support team promises to bring various benefits for an enterprise. Improved efficiency leads to higher resolution rates that have a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

Satisfied customers always come back for more and advocate for the brand. This drives new business for your enterprise through positive word-of-mouth. Not only this, but a well-organized support team can improve the growth and health of your business. But without the right motivation and strategy, productivity could take a dip. These 5 tips will allow you to take steps towards improving the productivity of your customer support team and ensure you don’t hit and miss.

Make sure you follow this comprehensive approach to enable your customer support team to operate at peak efficiency.


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