Corporate E-Learning

Technology is always changing – and always improving. Once customer support was only offered by calling a 1-800 number and talking to someone over a line. But these days, customer support can be done over a variety of methods, including text messages and webchats. Your customers are always changing and so is the technology they use, so make sure you’re keeping up with both!

Customer service is a general field that involves assisting customers in a range of issues, such as purchasing, troubleshooting, installation and even disposal of products or services. Customer service is designed to focus on the customer and how they can benefit from your product or service, so it’s important to do your part in the delivery.

Customer support can present a wide variety of challenges, to both the company and the customers. There is always pressure to deliver better customer support, and with that come more challenges all the time. It’s important to anticipate the challenge your company can face in this new age and be ready to face any problems that may come up.

When email was first introduced, it was viewed as an informal and casual way to contact family and friends. It was not seen as a business tool or a professional way to contact clients. But email has come a long way and is now a mainstream method for any forms of contact – both business and personal. But email has now formed its own set of etiquette, so businesses must learn to follow these guidelines in order to keep their emails professional, yet functional, with customers.

SMS (short message service), also known commonly as texting, is not new technology, but it is a newer tool that businesses are starting to use for their customers. Customers can feel as though they are getting one-on-one service from an agent and can do so 24 hours a day. Allowing customers to text your business gives them the freedom to communicate with your agents, even if everyone is tied up to the moment!

Webchats, sometimes simply called live chats, are a tool used to communicate in real time over an internet connection. Webchats can be down over text/typing conversations, often seen as a chat box, or can be done by video, which offers live video chats any time! Whichever method you prefer, both are becoming a popular business tool that can offer better customer support.

What are multi-channel apps? It is defined as using many different methods to reach the customer. Whether it is a webchat in customer service, or a shipping confirmation in the form of a text message to the customer, there are many different customers, with many different methods of communication, for many different reasons. Technology has tuned into these new methods and combined these methods into applications that handle them all.

What are support ticket apps? Those are the apps that allow customer to submit their issues and concerns via internet. Support tickets apps are similar to multichannel apps in that it connects the customer to the company 24/7, but only in the email form. Due to their smaller size and less capability, it is much more economical, especially for a small company, just beginning to implement more IT systems.

Documentation is so very important and so very boring often times. It needs to be accurate, but not overly complicated. It should be written in context, but also detailed enough to be useful. Documentation is essential to an efficient customer support department. This module will cover what to document to be effective, how to prepare the documentation and also how to keep that documentation for future use.

Feedback from the customer is extremely useful to many different departments of the company. Feedback on the product, on the sales rep, on the shipping, and even feedback on the customer support that the customer received after the purchase, are all valuable tools that can easily be collected for later analysis. There are many ways to collect this most valuable asset – data from the customer. There have been many advancements in this area, especially with apps and software.

Be proactive. In customer support that sounds difficult. “Know the customer’s problems before they tell us they have a problem?” Essentially yes. Working to stop problems before they start can cut down on support tickets, customer questions, and frustration on both the company and the customer’s parts. Using research to discover potential problems and correct them is an example of being proactive, as is providing the support to the customer before they are asking for it, gives the customer security in the company that they are putting their money.

Although this workshop is coming to a close, we hope that your journey to Customer Support is just beginning. Please take a moment to review and update your action plan. This will be a key tool to guide your progress in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We wish you the best of luck on the rest of your travels!