How Good is Your Customer Support? - 12 Questions to Ask Yourself
By: Steven J Davidson
The purpose in this article is to motivate you, the small business owner to inspect and rethink your approach to customer support. According to a leading organization on help desk support, each phone call that comes into your customer support department costs somewhere between $35-85 per call. And if the call requires research and response, you can double or triple that amount. Add to this the damage that poor customer service delivers to customer retention, and the cost escalates considerably. Therefore, multiply the inbound calls and emails your company receives each day and reality arrives at the bottom line.
If you are receiving 3-4 customer support issues a day, obviously this is easily handled, because in most cases you are getting most of them direct, and handling them yourself. But if your customer support department has grown to 3 or more customer support personnel you can no longer depend on flying by the seat of your pants for excellent customer support. Examine some of the following questions and apply them to your own customer support department for results.
Have you attempted to obtain customer service from your own company?
How many auto attendants did you have to persevere before you actually got a live person on the phone?
Did you get voice mail?
How soon did someone get back to you?
Was the phone number easy to find on your website?
Was the email address available for support on the home page?
Is Chat available?
Are you using an ASP Help Desk Software for tracking tickets?
Did the email address provide an auto-responder to reassure the client that their email has been received and is being processed?
How long did it take for resolution?
Once resolved, was the customer satisfied with the answer or solution?
How do you know? Without follow up, you do not.
How many nuisance calls are your agents handling that could be handled on the front end of your website, or through additional training and information?
I am constantly surprised at some of the major sites on the internet that do everything they can to "discourage" customers from actually calling them. In a tough economy, every touch that we can extend to a customer is good pr, not effort wasted. Hiding the phone number or email address for support sends a message to both your current clients as well as prospective ones.
Providing your clients with a library of knowledge based information or articles is an easy way to instill confidence in your client and take heat off the help desk agents. And your webmaster can build this into your website with proper design and affordable tools available.
Also, a simple follow up each month from your marketing or support people can head off and greatly improve customer service. Many organizations today actually install the customer support department under the marketing arm of the organization to insure improvement in this area. After all, increasing sales and improving the bottom line is what it is all about, right?
About the Author:
Cynergy Help Desk Software has been delivering quality software for 10 years to companies all over the world, both large and small. For more information go to: http://www.cynergysoftware.com/asp-help-desk-software
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