5-Step Guide to Reduce Customer Support Friction

The constant evolution of digital technology and a growing customer base that wants seamless and instant results, mean it's now more important than ever for your company to go above and beyond when it comes to customer experience (CX).

One of the most important ways to improve your organization’s CX is to make it easier for customers to do business with you, and to do that it’s essential to reduce the amount of friction in your customer support strategy. 

By reducing friction in your customer support team, you will reduce the chance of your customer feeling frustrated, stressed, angry, or disappointed in your brand.

Advantage Communications has created a five-step guide that will help your business reduce friction across the customer journey:

1 - Provide an omnichannel service

Customers today engage with your company on multiple devices, from laptops, tablets, phones, emails and phone calls. This means an omnichannel approach is absolutely key to the success of your customer service.

Customers want to engage with you instantly on the device that they are using. There’s nothing more frustrating to a customer than when they are forced to find a new way to contact your organization because your company doesn’t support the device or platform that they are using in that very moment.

A study from the Aberdeen Group found that brands which have implemented effective omnichannel engagement programmes keep a staggering 89 percent of their customers - this means an omnichannel strategy is the absolute key to customer retention.

By having multiple channels that your customer can access you on, you can significantly reduce the customer effort and provide frictionless support that prevents them from going out of their way to contact you.

2 - Implement AI

Technology is advancing at a rapid rate, and while it may seem like a long way off for many companies, artificial intelligence (AI) is now able to completely revolutionize a company’s customer service strategy.

Artificial intelligence can do everything from reducing customer effort, anticipating the needs of your customer, automating your organization’s approach to customer support and much much more. Read more about the customer service benefits of AI on our our blog titled ‘3 Ways Contact Center AI can Revolutionize Your Company’s Customer Service’.

3 - Create a self-service platform

We’re sure you’ve heard this phrase before and brushed it off as a cliche, but content really is king. By implementing a self-service strategy, your organization can significantly reduce the number of calls to your customer service representatives, allowing agents to work on more complex tasks and therefore deliver increased value to the consumer.

By creating content on your website such as blogs and FAQs, and even by making use of AI technology such as chatbots, you can empower your customers to access information and learn about solutions without the need of assistance from a live customer service representative.

Not only does this free up your customer service agents to work on more difficult tasks that offer greater value to your customer, you also make it far easier for customers to access the information they need to solve their issues.

4 - Offer a personalized service

The products and services your organization offers are unlikely to be the unique selling point of your business anymore. In a crowded market, customers now value a good experience over everything else and personalized content and customer support is a huge part of creating a satisfied customer.

Through the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software and artificial intelligence, your customer service representatives could gain access to real-time data that empowers them to offer personalized issue resolution and even personalized product offers.

If you want to take personalized service to the next level, is it possible for your organization to implement a single point of contact for each customer?

By allowing a customer to contact the same customer service representative each time they have a query, they will feel a special connection to your company. This agent will be able to provide a seamless and efficient support experience, using the knowledge they have learned from previous experiences with the same customer to resolve any issue in a swift manner.

5 - Consider outsourcing your customer support

Customer support is a complex component of any business, whether large or small, and in most cases it can prove a challenge to get right. Focus too much on customer service and you can be distracted from other key areas of your business, while giving it too little attention will result in dissatisfied customers and the loss of business.

In fact, customer support is such an important part of your business that it is now often a differential between you and your competitors.

For that very reason, many organizations decide that it’s in their best interest to partner with an outsourced call center that has specialized experience in providing a superior customer experience.

Outsourcing your call center will give your business access to expert representatives, innovative technologies, an omnichannel approach to engagement and many more world-class strategies that will improve customer loyalty and boost sales.

Want to learn more about how a contact center will reduce friction in your company’s customer service? Contact Advantage Communications today to find out how we can help.