One of the things you can do to substantially improve customer experience and win loyal customers is offering superb aftersales service. In a competitive market like today, customers need to know that they can rely on your business for support after completing their purchases.
For many businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, having a customer support team or department is often seen as being too expensive and rather unnecessary. That is certainly not the case today. The benefits you get from offering great aftersales service far outweigh the costs of setting up and maintaining a support team.
To make it even better, establishing a capable, customer-oriented support team isn’t as difficult as you think. There are a lot of tools and resources you can now use to simplify the process. In this article, we are going to go through the steps you need to take in order to build your own customer support team.
Set Your Objectives
Similar to establishing other workflows within the business, the process of setting up a customer support team begins with understanding your objectives. There are a few key factors that need to be defined in great detail for the support team to work as intended.
First of all, you need to know what customer service means to your customers; you need to understand what your customers expect from you after making their purchases. This is a crucial insight that will help shape the support team.
You also want to integrate your brand into the aftersales experience. Look at how you can add and integrate key messages (i.e. personalized service, user-friendliness, etc.) into the support experience. The rest of your aftersales experience is easier to shape with these details in mind.
Define Your Support Channels
Now that you have clear objectives to achieve, it is time to look at how you can achieve them every time. The first thing you want to do is figuring out where the customers are and how to best reach them when they need help.
Social media isn’t just a prominent digital marketing instrument. It is also a great way to connect with the customers directly. By offering aftersales service through social media, you can provide a more personalized support experience and keep the support team agile.
Other channels can be used to get closer to customers. When dealing with business customers, for instance, offering phone and email support is the way to go. The channels you choose must always follow the objectives you want to achieve.
Creating a Strong Support Team
Before you start recruiting support officers and training them, there is one more thing to prepare: the platform that will act as the foundation of your aftersales experience. You need to be able to keep track of customer requests and responses for those requests meticulously.
An IT ticketing system works really well for IT-related products and services. The same ticketing system can also be adjusted for use in other fields or for other businesses. Having a capable helpdesk system means the entire support team can work together and jump from one customer to another seamlessly.
You also want a versatile support solution with good tracking features. Simple things like the ability to divide support requests into categories can mean a lot. For example, you can prepare personalized quick responses based on the well-defined categories of support requests.
Now that you have a strong foundation for delivering smooth and positive aftersales experience, it is time to recruit the best customer service officers and establish the support team for your valued customers. It is a worthy investment to make, especially when you consider the benefits of having a capable support team for your business.