Sometimes, no matter how good your product is, your success depends on the assistance you provide to your users. The success of your product or, often, profits depend on the word of mouth.
A happy user is more likely to bring you customers than your marketing efforts.
Ten years ago, Dell struggled to fix their reputation for having a bad customer support. The bad image of their customer support team made a negative perception in the minds of the customers and reduced the number of potential customers. People rarely purchased their computers, all because they outsourced their customer support team cheaply. But sure enough, when they invested in a good customer service team, they saw immediate changes.
According to Kayako, 95% people who had a bad customer support experience said they told others about it, causing a quick negative impact. 57% of customers who have once had a bad impression are unlikely to return and buy product of the same brand.
On the positive side, 77% are likely to buy a product when they hear a positive review from their friends and 75% are likely to spread the word if they get a good customer support experience. Almost 81% people buy a product due to this positive influence, and this should be a reason enough to invest in building a good customer support team.
Hence to ensure that your users remain happy and to retain them, you need a strong customer support team. Here are the three steps to build a strong customer support team:
- Find the right candidate: To search for the right candidate, you need to first define what skills you would be looking for in an ideal customer support candidate. There is only a slight difference between the skillset required to be a customer support representative and customer service representative.
A customer support candidate has to promptly reply to the queries of the customer. Normally, customers put their queries through two channels: chatbots or emails. Both need to be addressed in a said time, even if it means telling them that you would need time to resolve it.
A customer service person needs to go one step further and work on providing a solution to the customers. Hence, apart from good knowledge of the industry and technical skills, the candidate needs to possess good communication skills. They should know how to persuade the customers and address their queries promptly yet patiently. Accuracy and strong problem-solving skills are more focused upon while hiring a customer support representative.
- Hire the right candidate: Most of the managers and employers are busy addressing their customers themselves and do not have time to recruit. To find the right candidate, you need to know whom to trust with such an important role. Apart from the skills mentioned above, emotional intelligence is said to be one of the most important aspect to be focused upon while hiring a candidate for the support role.
Also, you need to put an effort and thought while designing a good job description and stating the experience. You can invite candidates from your professional network as there are more chances of finding a reliable candidate. Also, you can nurture your interns as per the requirements of your organization.
To hire the right candidate, all you need to do now is assess correctly and interview. To do so, use imocha’s online skill assessment test where you would have to only select the skills you need and conduct a quick assessment online. Instead of selecting a regular aptitude test and modifying it, you can take customer service aptitude test especially designed for assessing candidates who can be successful customer service representatives. While assessing, you need to understand the level of expertise you are expecting in a candidate to determine the level of difficulty of the test. During the interview, you need to now only focus on their EQ and their promptness in giving answers.
- Design your team: In a customer support team, ideally there are three levels on any organization. The level 1 consists of customer service representatives who reply to the customers over an email or chatbot. Their role is to only address and communicate with the customers. The level 2 consists of customer support representative or manager. They are techies who give solutions to the customers by making desired changes in the products to address their needs.
The third level consists of experts who are techies who do not necessarily connect with customers but understand the needs and modify the software as per the needs of the customers. These people usually are product designers who are tech experts and keep evolving their product to stay competent.