To keep your users satisfied and ensure that they remain devoted clients for years to come, we’ve put up 7 recommendations for better tech support. Let’s get going.
1. Before outsourcing, consider
You have a fantastic opportunity to shape the general user experience of your product through tech support. However, it would help if you guaranteed that your tech support staff is familiar with the product. This is why you ought to give your selections significant thought before outsourcing the administration of your tech assistance.
Asking yourself the following questions can help you decide whether to outsource tech assistance
- Can you promise that each time, the experience will be the same?
- How can you tell if your customer service agents are knowledgeable about your products?
- Do your clients anticipate speaking with locals and hearing familiar accents?
- Outsourcing can be a terrific method to cut costs if you do it effectively.
If you do it wrong, it might undermine all the hard work you’ve put into creating the product, closing the transaction, and satisfying your customers’ demands up to that point.
2. Give technical assistance the same priority as sales
No company should run totally in compartments. Instead, think about how various aspects of your company interact. And technical support is no exception. Excellent customer service is essential to retaining customers for your marketing and sales teams. And once a new customer has installed (or logged in to) your product, tech support will be their first point of contact.
But offering technical assistance goes beyond merely answering client questions. Additionally, you may use tech support to upsell and cross-sell services and goods to your clients.
For instance, tech support may recommend upgrading to a more expensive plan if a customer has a particular issue they cannot resolve with their current pricing plan. In this manner, you both improve their commitment as a customer and solve their problem with a solution that enables them to keep working.
3. Introduce the five tiers of technical support
Not all businesses have a well-organized tech support system.
It’s typical for small organizations to have their founder or CEO handle all support requests because everyone has to start somewhere.
The needs of your clients must be satisfied promptly and effectively as your company expands, though. The 5 tiers of tech support can weed out the “low-hanging fruit” and simple issues that a more junior team member can handle because it is neither practical nor cost-effective to have your CTO respond to every support ticket in your queue.
Putting the five tiers of technical support into place will keep your customers happy (since they receive prompt service). Still, you’ll boost your profitability more crucially because most customer questions can be answered by someone who makes much less than a CEO or CTO.
4. Manage the conversation outside of your immediate environment
The first place your user may turn if they encounter a problem is on a forum or social media.
As a result, you will need to keep an eye on user dialogues on other platforms.
It is beneficial if you can find the time to follow and participate in internet discussions regarding your product. Not only will it take care of the customer’s immediate issue, but it will also demonstrate to others your concern and persuade them to become clients.
Leading the charge in this area of tech support for early intervention are businesses like Stripe.
5. Make tech support contact simple
Have you concealed the website’s footer’s tech help link? Nobody wants to waste time searching your website for a tech assistance link. Precisely 79% of website visitors agree to leave a page if the contact details are hidden. To prevent this, be available where your clients are and make it simple for them to contact you.
A surefire approach to keep clients pleased and retain them over the long run is to promptly resolve user support concerns and make tech help highly accessible for them.
Apple is a fantastic case in point.
Do you ever have problems finding the “Support” link on the Apple website? Neither do I. Apple has “Support” listed on its primary navigation bar’s home page.
Additionally, users can quickly acquire the assistance they require for their particular product by using Apple’s self-segmentation method. Customers can immediately reach live chat support agents if Apple’s comprehensive knowledge base cannot resolve their issues.
Customers of Apple are never made to feel abandoned or impatient by technological issues. This plays a significant role in the attraction of their brand.
6. Pay attention to your users’ feedback
Any knowledge that your clients divulge to you is worth more than gold.
You may learn a lot from your customers about what features of your product are practical and which are not. By paying attention to the many tech support inquiries that come in, you may learn how to enhance both the functionality and quality of your product as well as, in many situations, create a closed feedback loop between the user and the product. This type of customer’s voice (VOC) data has considerable potential.
While your product team works on fixing the problem, you may stop more emails from being sent by upgrading your login screen with a comment about the problem or a link to your FAQ or knowledge base to help them tackle the same problem.
7. Ensure that you use the appropriate tools for the task
An email is an excellent tool. However, the most excellent tool to manage tech assistance is not Outlook or a general email platform. Instead, think about purchasing the appropriate equipment for the work.
The best technologies can manage inbound questions, support requests, live chat, escalation, and knowledge bases while keeping the rest of your team informed about technological difficulties.
However, maintaining relationships with your clients requires collaboration. To ensure that every time their team members are on the same page, best-in-class businesses use solutions that interface with their more extensive sales and CRM processes.
Conclusion
Technical support is a crucial component of the overall user experience for firms that sell products.
It differs from traditional “customer service” in focusing on product-specific technical difficulties rather than transactional or account-based inquiries.
Because customers are becoming more computer literate, you must offer appropriate technical help. Your customers are now too sophisticated to approach you with simple questions. Instead, it’s more probable that customers will bring complex problems to your tech support team. Thus they must be equipped to manage them.
Focusing on enhancing your tech support is the most important thing you can do right now to retain more consumers for longer. Utilize the advice in this article, pick the appropriate tools, and start prioritizing tech support in your company.
How do you intend to enhance the tech help you already provide?
Feel free to contact us if you need help with Tech Support.
