How do customer service teams become aware of their customers’ pain points?
You might not know it, but when it comes to finding and obtaining proper customer support, there are many issues a customer could face.
Just think back to the last time you tried to get customer support for one of the products or services you use.
How hard was it?
Did you get stuck waiting for an agent on a chat? Were you possibly unable to find the answer you needed on your own? Maybe you had to repeat your issue multiple times over the course of your journey for support.
In a world where people expect resolutions right when they need them, there are a few things you can do to implement quick fixes for some of the pain points your customers come across when seeking customer support.
Customers find themselves needing help but unable to get it or have a way to help themselves, so check out how you can solve their issues and improve your customer experience in the process.
Customers Can’t Find Answers
People go looking for support when they can’t serve themselves and meet their needs on their own. If there isn’t an answer online or they can’t find one on your website easily, then they need someone to help them out.
An issue arises when you don’t provide customers with the ability to find answers to their questions. It takes a lot longer to connect with an agent, ask a question, and wait for a response than it does to be able to automatically search for something.
So what can you do to help customers find answers?
Our solution: Build your knowledge base!
First thing’s first, do you have one?
A knowledge base should be a thoughtfully built out collection of online articles, documentation, tutorials, or FAQs that allow your customers to independently answer their own questions.
Customers are strapped for time and demand fast, accurate answers as soon as possible. So give them the ability to search through one on their own.
If you do already have a knowledge base (or are working to better yours) here are a few things you can do to improve it for your customers:
- Go Beyond FAQs — Make sure you’re providing knowledge for every aspect of your product or service; from account management to tool diagnostics and everything in between, you’ll want to provide as much knowledge as possible
- Change Formats — Your customers all learn differently so you’ll want to be sure you’re providing content through video as well as articles.
- Optimize for Mobile – We all know the majority of people are searching for things on their phones, so be sure your websites look good both on desktop and mobile; your customer will thank you.
When you have a robust knowledge base built out, you can take helping your customers to the next level by combining your knowledge base with an AI tool that can empower your agents and customers.
With the help of customer support AI, you’ll be able to automate responses to frequently asked questions via email or chat using your most frequented knowledge articles (macros). Gone will be the days of customers being unable to find their answers since your knowledge base will improve and so will the way in which you utilize it.
Resolution Times Are Too High
We mentioned that customers want answers as soon as they ask a question. They expect your support agents to be able to resolve their issues quickly and efficiently and with the most accurate information possible.
One of the biggest issues we hear from support leaders looking for contact center solutions is that they can’t seem to get rid of bottlenecks that cause high wait times for customers.
If your support ticket queues can’t seem to die down or agents are taking too long on one task making it difficult to get to the next, then you have a problem
One thing we hear from support leaders is that their teams have trouble handling incoming tickets because the process they’re currently following has someone manually labeling tickets so that they’re routed to the correct agent for resolution.
Manual labeling or tagging is causing the biggest bottleneck of them all, making it so an individual wastes valuable time and human resources to do a mundane and repetitive task. With someone spending many hours labeling tickets, you’re likely to get incorrectly labeled tickets or have tickets labeled with various tags making it difficult to discern what’s what.
Mislabeled tickets could result in tickets lost, tickets not being sent to the right departments, and lack of escalations would lead to more unhappy customers.
That’s a pretty tricky bottleneck for support teams to push through. What teams facing these issues need is an AI tool that can help get rid of the bottlenecks coming your way.
With customer support AI you’ll be able to automate the ticket labeling process.
Having AI triage your tickets means agents will no longer need to spend countless hours labeling tickets on their own and will be able to actually help resolve the more complex issues coming in from customers.
By removing mundane and repetitive tasks you’ll also be creating a better agent experience for your representatives. Did you know that contact centers have some of the highest attrition rates with up to 45% turnover in some companies?
There’s a reason agents leave their jobs and it’s because being a support rep is hard work. AI for customer support makes their jobs easier and makes things better for your customers.
AI for customer support can also help you and your teams enable omnichannel support which is a must have for support centers. Omnichannel support provides a seamless customer experience across multiple channels. So if a customer chats with an agent who then has to pass the ticket to another agent, information won’t get lost and customers won’t have to repeat their issues.
With AI you can focus on providing your customers fast answers right when they need them and reduce their current wait times.
Customer Needs Fluctuate
It can be difficult to predict how much incoming customer support there will be in a given period of time. Customer needs constantly fluctuate and while it’s normal for some contact centers to increase their hiring during busy seasons and plan for increases in support, that is typically not sustainable in the long run.
Think about it, teams hire more agents for a season and those agents are expected to ramp up and learn to do their jobs quickly and then depart the company after a few months. That’s a pretty costly solution to fluctuation in demand.
What if there was an easier way to manage increases in demand while also considering the lulls that come after?
Customer support AI is your solution here.
With AI for customer support you’ll have a tool in place that can actually make it easier for agents to understand how to do their jobs. Because our AI works based on your data, we learn everything about what your customers need and how you’ve met those needs in the past.
When we know how you’ve worked historically, we can help automatically deflect your more repetitive tickets via email or chat, freeing up agent time to get to more pressing customer needs or resolve issues that require other people or more research.
Customer support AI can also make resolving the more complex issues an easier process for agents by assisting them in finding the best answer for a support ticket. You’ll be providing customers with accurate information each time, and make it easier for agents to know how to do their jobs.
What Comes Next?
When you have the right tools in place, improving any goal is possible. AI for customer support will help you help your teams and your customers at the same time.
Customer pain points are ultimately employee pain points that they now need to work to resolve for both parties.
Make things easier for everyone while investing in your customer experience by implementing customer support AI.
Forethought’s AI solutions will enable better deflection, will automate ticket labeling, and will ultimately make it easier and better for your agents to get their jobs done.
Interested in learning more? Check out what we’ve done for our customers.
