Why Everyone At Your Company Should Understand Customer Support

Typically at SaaS companies, it's only the customer support teams that are involved with customer support and experience. All other teams in the organization depend on the customer support teams to keep the consumers happy.

However, by limiting customer support to the designated teams, your company may be neglecting customer experience, and as a result, harming your customer retention rate. If everyone involved understands what the importance of customer support is, you can drive up customer satisfaction through every interaction your customer has with your company.

After all, the organization works as a whole to create a product, market it, sell it, and then assist customers in any complaints or questions regarding it.

Below, we explain why everyone at your company should understand customer support and how it can help improve the customer experience for your new and existing consumers.

How does CS Impact Customer Retention Rate?

First and foremost, it's vital to understand why successful companies put so much emphasis on customer support and customer satisfaction. The major reason you need to focus on ensuring that your customers have a positive experience is to maintain and improve your customer retention rate.

By elevating your customer retention rate, you can get more value from your customers. Moreover, customer satisfaction is also the key to cultivating a loyal customer base and ensuring customer advocacy.

Here are some reasons you need to get everyone in your organization on board with customer satisfaction.

Customer Acquisition Is Costlier than Customer Retention

Let's take two scenarios. First, you are making efforts to acquire a new customer. That includes catching a prospect at the top of the marketing funnel, taking them through the consideration and conversion stage, and finally getting them to make a purchase.

In the second scenario, you already have a customer. You simply need to retain them and make sure they come back for a repeat purchase.

When compared, the former is more expensive and requires more effort. On the other hand, the latter is possible through good customer support.

When companies increase their customer retention rate by just 5%, they make up to 25% more in profits. That's a five-fold benefit. How does this happen? When customers are already satisfied with your brand, they tend to make larger purchases.

In fact, repeat customers may spend up to 300% more on your products than they did in their initial purchase. Likewise, there's only a 32% chance that a customer that has made one purchase from your company will make a second purchase.

But when a customer makes a second purchase, their chance of making the third one is up to 53%. That indicates the importance of customer satisfaction. If you give your customers a good experience, they'll not only spend more on your brand but will also be more likely to make repeat purchases.

Customer Support Represents Your Brand

While you clearly know what your brand represents, your customers may not. Providing exceptional customer support is a fool-proof way to show your customers what your mission and values are.

You can pump out as much promotional content on social media as you want, but if your company isn't providing quality customer support, your customer retention rate is bound to be low.

People are actually more convinced by the opinions of their friends and family about your brand than what you say about yourself in your About Us section or Instagram page. The importance of customer support is such that 96% of customers say they consider customer support to be an important aspect for cementing their loyalty to a company.

But your customer support team isn't the only department that should partake in this process. Take the example of Buffer. The company claims that it puts so much emphasis on customer support because it doesn't want to go out and tell everyone that Buffer is amazing.

Instead, it wants the customers to do this. When Buffer provides impeccable customer support to its consumers, people go away "feeling happy and wowed, telling their friends about us."

Good Customer Experience Encourages Loyalty

A good customer experience increases the lifetime value of your customers, keeping them loyal to your brand for a long time. In fact, a loyal customer will also help bring more customers to your company.

Research shows that existing customers spend 31% more on your brand as compared to new customers. Plus, they're also 50% more likely to try out a new product you introduce. If you translate this to actual numbers, you'll understand how customer loyalty increases your revenue generation.

Here's why this happens: a prospect has hundreds of your competitors to choose from. If they aren't satisfied with your price point or a product feature, they'll look elsewhere.

But an existing customer that has benefitted from your customer support is more likely to purchase your new product because they had a good experience last time.

But the converse is also true. Customer expectations are higher than ever. If customers have a bad experience, they'll stop doing business with you. 32% of the customers say they'll no longer buy from a brand after one bad experience.

As mentioned earlier, customer acquisition is a lengthy and expensive process. You don't want to lose customers you've acquired after much effort.

Why Should Everyone Be Able to Do Customer Support?

Suppose a scenario in which everyone in your company is familiar with customer support. So, when the queues get too long, or there's high customer demand, everyone can chip in.

When companies grow, the specialization of departments can often create a gap between customer support and other teams. Often, these teams don't realize they need to be familiar with customer support too.

Over time silos develop, as the customer support teams also become specialized. Previously, companies only had an email inbox where customers could send their queries and complaints. Now, there are full-fledged knowledge bases and customer support platforms.

Customers can also use online chatbots to get their queries resolved. What was previously just basic customer knowledge has now evolved into segmentation and personalization. Therefore, there's a lot more to learn about the customers now than there was ten years ago.

So, other teams cannot simply take on customer support when required. Instead, they must be knowledgeable about all aspects of modern customer service.

Otherwise, they may give out wrong information to the customers, provide outdated advice, or make things more complicated for the support teams.

Your non-support teams shouldn't learn about customer support elements for the first time when urgency arises. They should already be familiar with the basics so that they can lessen the load on the support teams when all hands are needed on deck.

How to Involve Everyone in Customer Support?

As a company with specialized departments, you don't want to push out the narrative that everyone can do customer support. In doing so, you'll disregard the efforts made by your support team by devaluing their world.

You're essentially saying that a customer service representative who probably trained for six weeks is the same as a non-support employee who simply took a three-hour intro session.

Instead of doing this, you should create a culture of providing a positive customer experience in the whole organization. Here are some ways to accomplish this.

Share Customer Satisfaction Score With Everyone

CSAT or customer satisfaction score is a key performance indicator that shows how satisfied customers are with your company. Most companies measure CSAT by taking customer surveys.

Respondents mainly mark their answers on a scale that looks like this:

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• Very unsatisfied
  

• Unsatisfied
  

• Neutral
  

• Satisfied
  

• Very satisfied

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Instead of simply sharing the CSAT score with your customer support teams, you should share them with everyone in the company. For instance, you can circulate a newsletter in every department of the company or use a dedicated chat channel to make this information available to every employee.

What will this do?

It will show every employee that they can play their respective role in maintaining or improving the CSAT score.

Conduct Organization-Wide Quality Reviews

When you're conducting quality reviews, make everyone a part of them. Your aim should be to allow all departments in your organization to see the conversations the support team has with the customers. Do note that these departments should not be grading the support team.

They should just take inspiration from the customer conversations. Here are how different departments can learn from quality reviews:

• Engineering Team: The engineering teams are primarily involved in product manufacturing, testing, and maintenance. The customers then use these products. So, if they are facing any troubles during utility or want the product to have certain additional or different features, the engineering teams must know about it. The conversions between customers and support teams will allow the engineering teams to understand how their work subsequently impacts the customers.
  

• HR Specialists: Your HR team should also be familiar with customer complaints and queries. It will help them find good candidates in the future.
  

• Product Team: Like the engineering teams, the product team can also benefit from these reviews by understanding what customers are looking for. Maybe, a feature in the product needs improvement. It's also likely that the majority of customers are requesting a certain feature. The product team can then work on incorporating or improving these respective features.
  

• Content Team: Content marketing has become increasingly important today, especially for online businesses. Your content team can benefit immensely from quality reviews since they'll learn more about the customers' pain points and needs. They can then create relevant content accordingly.

Keep Your Teams Happy

If your employees feel underappreciated, they won't feel happy coming to work. It can eventually impact the way they interact with customers. 69% of employees report they work harder if they're appreciated at their workplaces.

It's also interesting that people who aren't happy with their jobs still try to work hard for customers. However, the reasoning behind this is not their commitment to improving customer service but their internal urge to maintain professionalism and integrity.

Your teams shouldn't have to provide a good customer experience merely because they're afraid of being fired. Instead, they should deem it their duty to do so because they're getting due appreciation from their workplace.

Use a Reliable Customer Support Software

Using customer support software with easy onboarding is another way to involve the whole organization in customer support provision.

Fullview is a great example of such a customer support software. It gives you instant context to support tickets and deliver a scalable customer support experience. Your customer support teams can see the customer's screen and guide them with multiplayer co-browsing, saving any time wasted on confusion.

Plus, they can conduct in-app video calls to help customers through live support. How does it help your other teams?

Fullview records past user sessions and allows session replays. Therefore, your engineering, HR, sales, or marketing teams can view these recorded sessions to understand customer issues retroactively.

Instead of using manual screenshots, you can simply replay the sessions during team meetings to ensure everyone is on board with things that can be improved to facilitate customer satisfaction.

In this way, you can incorporate all departments in the customer support workflow without requiring them to take long learning courses or go through an extensive onboarding process.

Meeting Customer Expectations is Key

Summing up, when you offer good customer support, you increase your chances of creating customer loyalty and improving the customer retention rate. Consequently, this increases your revenue generation and conversion.

Of all the things your company could possibly be known for, impeccable customer support is among the most impactful. In fact, a PWC report study found that customers are ready to pay 9% more on a company that offers good customer support.

But if you want to guarantee customer satisfaction, and drive up your customer retention rate, your customer support might need some help from other departments. To ensure that everyone at your company understands the customer support workflow, share the CSAT score with all departments, involve everyone in quality reviews, and employ user-friendly customer support software.

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