Your buyers are the core of your business’ success. They are your source of income and their view of your customer service affects brand loyalty, referrals and more.
How you treat your buyers also impacts their desire to stick with your business. You may have good products or services, but if your customer support game isn't up to par, your customers will churn.
In fact, according to Forbes, 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
So, what does good customer support look like?
In this article, we’ll cover that and provide some examples of businesses with great customer support that you can take inspiration from.
What does good customer support look like?
Great customer support is about building and nurturing your relationships with your customers. It requires investing effort into your customers and showing them you value their loyalty and business.
You can do this in various ways including focusing on their feedback, setting up easy-to-use support platforms, providing hands-on and personalized support, being proactive, following up and checking in on them.
Below, we dive a little deeper into what good customer support looks like.
Responsive and easily accessible support
The modern customer values convenience and easy accessibility. 83% of shoppers want to have access to assistance immediately when they contact a business.
So, it’s all about having the most seamless interactions possible. Customers want you to demonstrate that you respect their time and don’t take it for granted.
For the best customer support, you need to ensure that your customers can easily find help when they need it. Tell them how and where to get in touch with you, provide frequent support touchpoints, and be proactive in your support so you can notice issues and reach out to them before they have to reach out to you.
In addition, you must have speedy response times and a good response rate overall. Both contribute to how easy it is for your audience to engage you if they need assistance. They also improve the customer experience.
Quick response times
Response time is how long it takes for you to get back to your customers from when a support ticket first comes in.
In today’s age of convenience and efficiency, customers want answers to their problems now — not in a few hours.
60% of customers want an immediate response within about ten minutes.
To improve your response times and get back to customers faster, your team needs to be efficient. One thing you can do to ensure this happens is to have a standard process and script that your support team can follow to find relevant responses to common customer issues.
You can also implement a help desk tool to help your support team manage customer queries and assign them to agents. This can go a long way towards ensuring that you never miss anything.
Good response rates
Response rates measure the number of times you get back to customers against the total number of queries you receive.
It’s easy to lose track of customer questions or support requests and forget to respond. After all, as a support agent, you are dealing with a ton of different people and tasks. It's hand to keep all those balls up in the air.
However, you need to aim for a 100% response rate. All customers who need your support should get it. According to HubSpot Research, nine out of ten customers see instant responses as vital to good customer service.
Non-responsiveness is a surefire way to make customers feel like you don’t care for them and that they’re just another number.
Use workflow tools and other organizational tools to help you keep track of your to-do list and ensure you answer each and every support request.
Omni-channel support
One way to enhance accessibility and convenience is to create a network of channels that customers can use to get help. You don’t want them to struggle to get support because you only have one overburdened support channel. We’ve all been on the wrong end of a customer support line and had to listen to a terrible jingle for hours, so you also have to make sure you hire the right number of customer support reps.
To enhance support access, make it possible for customers to get support in different ways. Some of the channels you can consider include:
- Social media
- Website forms
- Text messages
- Phone calls
- Chatbots
- Live chats
- Emails
- In-app calls
- Company customer apps
- Forum or discussion boards
Having a range of support touchpoints opens up accessibility and reduces the pressure on you and your team from one channel.
It also improves the customer experience as they can easily find support through a method they prefer. As a result, omni-channel customer support strategies can lead to an 89% customer retention rate. It does mean, however, that you need to dedicate resources to managing all your chosen platforms.
Collect feedback and actively listen
Customer experiences are highly subjective and depend on the individual buyers’ preferences, expectations, and more. The kind of support they expect also varies depending on your industry and business.
Due to this subjectivity, an effective way to nuance the assistance you provide is to get feedback from your audience. With the insight you gather from feedback, you can design support systems and overall experiences that work.
Surveys and customer interviews are good feedback techniques, but so are reviews.
90% of customers say they look for customer reviews before making a purchase. 56% say the business response to a review impacts their buying decision.
Of course, you can never please everybody, but you can create a customer support profile with the standard things they would like from you.
Where possible, take note of things mentioned in the feedback and use them to give each customer a more positive experience.
We've already written about how to write an effective CSAT survey that improves response rates and is easy to score, so make sure you check that out for inspo.
Destroy silos
The last characteristic of good customer support is internal synchronicity.
We get that all businesses must have distinct departments and individuals that fulfill specific roles. However, separating these roles can affect your efficiency and customer support.
For example, a long-time customer may mention a technical issue they have to a sales agent during an upgrade call. In a completely siloed system, the sales agent won’t filter this information to the tech team. That customers’ concern will go unaddressed.
Removing silos improves information flow and the level of service you’re able to provide. When teams from different departments can work together and access the same customer information, you ensure customer needs remain covered on all fronts. Nothing falls through the cracks and you are able to provide comprehensive support.
Good customer support examples
Here are some examples of SaaS companies with good customer support strategies. Seeing what other companies are doing is a great way to see how you can improve your own customer support.
Fullview
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We're all about proactive support at Fullview, which is why we use our session replays product, Fullview Replays, to constantly monitor user sessions and identify customers that have faced an issue or encountered a bug in our system.
Once we identify these users and sessions by watching video-like recordings of them with clearly labelled user steps, warnings and errors, we escalate to a cobrowsing session to quickly and collaboratively solve problems by using screen control to walk them through issues. We also share timestamped links to notable sessions with the rest of our teammates so everyone is in the loop about how our users are experiencing our product.
By doing things this way, we've both sped up resolution time, improved feature adoption and onboarding, and decreased user churn — all thanks to one integrated, efficient and transparent workflow.
LicenceOne
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LicenceOne uses Fullview Cobrowsing to cobrowse with their users to improve engagement rates, onboarding and feature adoption.
Before the switched to a cobrowsing solution like Fullview Cobrowsing, LicenceOne was experiencing several inefficiencies in their customer support workflow. For example, they would first try to direct users with a mix of live chat and screenshots with big red arrows. If that didn’t work, they would shoot them a Google Meet link and ask them to share their screens to guide them through the process, but this created a couple of problems.
One was the fact that it created an additional point of friction, as users needed to leave their web app to join the Google Meet meeting. Two was that It created an inefficient process by forcing the LicenceOne agent to audibly describe where a user should click during this one-sided screen share process.
Once the switched to Fullview Cobrowsing, however, they noticed a 2x increase in user engagement rates and many other benefits besides. You can read more about that in our customer story with LicenceOne.
ChurchDesk
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Much like LicenceOne, ChurchDesk uses Fullview Cobrowsing as an integral part of their customer support workflow.
ChurchDesk is an all-in-one management platform. It helps churches connect with more people, communicate with them more efficiently, build and maintain a website, manage events, and process payments and donations in a seamless, integrated way.
However, the church vertical is notoriously tech-shy, so ChurchDesk sees approachable, simple customer support and communication as a clear differentiator in the space.
They use Fullview Cobrowsing along with phone calls for their customers.
They do this to show them new ways of doing things, make feature adoption and onboarding more seamless, but prevent them from becoming overwhelmed by offering a familiar way of doing things.
Basecamp
Basecamp’s customer support prioritizes research and creative problem-solving. Their support workers have to take two hours away from the support queue daily. This time must go towards gathering data and research about customers, identifying support patterns, etc.
Through this technique, Basecamp does not wait for issues to arise. Instead, they actively identify and try to resolve common patterns and issues that customers face before they even come up.
Hive
It’s easy for customers to get lost and frustrated while looking for your support information online. Hive tackles this issue head-on and increases support visibility and accessibility. They do this by having a support link on all their website pages. Instead of the customer having to search for help across the website, Hive makes this link icon visible on all pages.
The icon also provides various options for assistance. Customers can click on it and choose to have a live chat, ask for a demo, or search their query. The options ease the support process and allow the customer to decide what kind of assistance they would like.
Slack
Slack encourages customers to navigate their support needs independently. It may sound like the opposite of customer support, but a self-service platform is a great thing to include in your aid strategy.
Most websites have FAQ sections where customers can read to see if they can find their issues. This is self-service but it doesn't quite enhance customer service. Consider using an intuitive self-service system such as Slack does. Their portal allows users to search their questions in the FAQ. It also has auto-suggestion to help customers find their queries faster. It’s almost like asking the agent and having them help you find the answer quickly.
Wistia
It’s no surprise that Wistia (a video communication and analytics software) has found a way to use video for customer service.
Wistia uses video to create instructional content to help customers troubleshoot common issues. This provides a visual aide to instructions that would otherwise just be text. It’s easier for customers to understand what they can see being done.
Another way that Wistia uses video is for personalization. Wistia support reps can make customized follow-ups, thank you emails, and instructional videos for each customer.
Conclusion
Good assistance is a key part of customer satisfaction and retention. Buyers want convenience, accessibility, and personalization when it comes to their shopping experience. This extends to brand support, too.
To create an exceptional customer support strategy, you need to improve responsiveness and convenience by reducing response times and increasing response rates. Introducing omni-channel platforms, using different tools like help desk software, self-help portals, cobrowsing and session replays, and eliminating information silos will also help with efficiency and speeder responses.
Finally, don't be afraid to look to other companies around you for inspiration. Learn from their techniques and adapt them for your support success!
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