If your business wants to touch the heights of long-term success, it has to learn to keep its customers for as long as possible. And the best way to retain customers is by helping them whenever they need it.
That said, providing excellent customer support is the only way to build trustful relationships with your customers. But you see, not all customer support departments are made equal, some are better than the others — that’s why some businesses retain their customers better than the others.
In this article, we discuss the top elements of a solid customer support department. Implement these things in your customer support now to make it at least twice as much better.
Live answering, 24/7/365
You have to ensure you’re available to your customers whenever they need you. And that’s not possible if you’re taking weekends and public holidays off. You must make sure your support team is available to take calls at every hour.
If you do this, your customers will appreciate that you’re always there for them. Furthermore, being available at all times is a great way to get more clients as you’ll always be there to answer the queries of interested individuals who have questions about your offerings while your competition will not.
Escalations
Even though your customer support agents may be there to help your customers with potential issues, they are not industry experts. In some cases, the support agents won’t have enough information to carry out the support session anymore. That’s when an expert is needed.
Your customer support team should have the capabilities to forward customer calls to relevant higher-level people when needed. Furthermore, it should be possible to make the phone call jump between different departments for optimum integration.
Message taking
Not every customer will prefer to call you directly. Many of them prefer sending in a text message or email and waiting for a response. If your CS department doesn’t have message-taking capabilities, such customers won’t have anyone to entertain their queries.
To make sure such customers don’t return empty-handed, you must have message-taking support in your customer support department. Whenever a customer sends you a message and needs help, an agent should be available to reply as soon as possible.
Scheduling
Customer support is not a one-time task. Some customers need a single question answered; such calls will only need to be entertained once. But many clients have complex problems that need to be addressed over a span of multiple support sessions.
That’s where scheduling comes into play.
Your customer support department must have the capabilities to schedule calls and support sessions with customers. It must be ensured that scheduled calls are conducted and entertained on time — nothing should be delayed.
Bilingual answering in English & Spanish
Even though English is considered the international language of the world, it’s often not very widely entertained in many parts of the world. To make sure your customers get the best support experience possible, you must serve them in the language they know the best — and in this case: Spanish.
Your customer support department should be perfectly fluent in Spanish, or any other language based on your area of operation. Communicating in a native language will let your customers develop a sense of deeper connection.
A final word
So, there you have it. These are all the features your customer support department should have if your business wants to excel in retaining customers. However, we do understand not every company can afford to have such a large array of features in their CS department, especially smaller and medium-sized firms.
That’s where we come in. As a professional phone answering service and customer support contractor, we can take care of your customer support needs from the beginning to the end.
And yes, we have all the features mentioned in this article (plus many, many more!)
