Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
Table of Contents
- The Role of Customer Support In Business
- Best Practices for Customer Support
- 1. Provide Your Agents with the Right Tools
- AI-powered chatbots
- Virtual assistants
- Conversational AI tools
- 2. Prioritize an Omnichannel Approach
- 3. Create Personalized Interactions
- Using AI chatbots
- CRM integration
- 4. Strive for First Contact Resolution
- 5. Be Transparent
- 6. Provide a Knowledge Base
- Conclusion
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Contrary to expectations, customer experience doesn’t stop after settling a purchase. A positive customer experience is just as important as the product or service itself, and customer support plays a role in that.
In this guide, we’ll discuss six proven tips that you can apply to improve your business’s customer support in 2024.
The Role of Customer Support In Business
The goal of customer support is to help customers solve their issues related to your business’s products and services. It can include after-sales services, handling complaints, credit services, and more.
By doing your customer support correctly, you can achieve the following:
- Retain your customers. This is much cheaper than acquiring or attracting new clients.
- Establish brand loyalty. Existing customers are a larger part of your guaranteed revenue than leads. Loyalty is also a significant purchase driver among many people.
- Understand your customers’ needs. Customer support allows you to glimpse into the problems faced by your customers, which lets you gather valuable feedback. This can be used to improve your products, services, and future marketing efforts.
Best Practices for Customer Support
Clearly enough, customer support is more than just fixing problems; it's about building relationships and fostering customer loyalty. Here are six proven tips that can help you achieve that goal.
1. Provide Your Agents with the Right Tools
Providing your human support team with the right set of tools gets half the job done. But what exactly are these tools that you can use to augment your current customer support flow?
AI-powered chatbots
Automated chat programs that can handle basic inquiries, troubleshoot common issues and answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) 24/7 can take a huge chunk of work from your agents. As such, they can focus on more complex customer interactions that might need decision-making skills.
When creating an AI chatbot for your business, you train it with the information on your website (or any other knowledge base) and integrate it with your metric tools and customer support flow. You must also ensure that clients can freely switch between AI and human support during the conversation.
With that, finding a platform that lets you do these with ease is important. My AskAI is one of the best chatbot service platforms on which you can start.
Virtual assistants
Virtual assistants can be like an extra set of hands for your agents. They can handle basic tasks like scheduling appointments, summarizing customer data, and even suggesting relevant knowledge-base articles.
Conversational AI tools
You can also use other conversational AI tools to understand the intent and context behind the questions of your customers. This way, you gain more in-depth insights into the tone and language of the queries. In turn, you can develop a more natural and engaging response for your client.
Apart from equipping your agents with these tools, it follows that you need to train them on how to leverage them properly. This might incur significant costs for your business, but the improvement of your customer support aspects will be for the long term.
2. Prioritize an Omnichannel Approach
No one likes to receive slow responses, including you. And with the ever-decreasing attention span of people nowadays, paying attention to speed is key when it comes to providing good customer support. Customers value instant responses, highlighting the importance of taking an omnichannel approach.
The term “omnichannel” in customer support means having the ability to provide service across all or multiple channels, including phone, email, and social media. This allows you to provide consistent and quick service regardless of the method of communication.
3. Create Personalized Interactions
The content of each support ticket or session varies per customer. And this is one fact that many businesses fail to realize. They’re used to the traditional blanket approach when it comes to providing support. In other words, they fail to create personalized interactions tailored to the customer.
So, how exactly can you see these so-called “personalized” customer interactions? Utilize technology wisely.
Using AI chatbots
As mentioned before, AI-powered chatbots are of great help in customer support. Aside from their automation and quick-response features, another remarkable aspect that they have is the ability to remember context and information. AI chatbots can remember customer preferences and offer targeted solutions.
CRM integration
Your human agents (and your AI chatbots) can also leverage data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to retrieve the information of the customer you’re interacting with. Use this information to create personalized responses.
4. Strive for First Contact Resolution
Customers dislike repeating themselves and going through multiple interactions to get their issues resolved. By striving to resolve the issue during the first contact, you reduce such hassles and frustration.
FCR also translates to faster problem-solving, effectively building trust and satisfaction among your clients. A high FCR rate can also build confidence in the company's ability to handle future issues with high efficiency.
5. Be Transparent
Transparency goes a long way for both your AI chatbots and human agents. By being transparent about your practices, policies, and limitations, you demonstrate honesty and build trust with customers.
If you’re using AI to handle their tickets as a first line of defense, state that right away. This helps set realistic expectations about wait times and the accuracy of the tool.
Moreover, keeping your customers informed about issues, outages, or delays happening in your business shows that you value their time and respect them enough to keep them in the loop.
6. Provide a Knowledge Base
Customers value their time, so why not let them find the answers themselves with a convenient and informative knowledge base? If you’re not confident in providing prompt responses to support tickets, these knowledge bases will act as a self-service library that they can use to solve problems independently.
When customers can easily find solutions, they also feel more confident using your product or service. This fosters a sense of self-reliance and reduces dependence on support.
You can also integrate your knowledge base with a My AskAI chatbot for improved convenience.
Conclusion
Customer support revolves around three major things: promptness, accuracy, and personalization. While your human agents can provide these things to your customers, it’s undeniable that integrating AI into your customer support produces twice the outcome with half the work.
Start taking small steps to implement AI + human customer support in your business with a powerful AI chatbot from My AskAI today.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
