Customer Support on the Web – What to Include
When you need directions, you head to your favorite online map site and find the shortest route from here to there. When you can’t remember the whoshisface actor in whatchamacallit movie, you head to the Internet Movie Database for a search. But when you need help with a specific product or service, you head to an individual company's website where you can find answers to all of your questions – most of the time.
Have you ever gone to a company’s website and gotten so lost in the maze of their navigation that you never found the information that brought you to the site in the first place? We don’t want you and your business to end up in the same trap, which leads to frustrated customers that may lose faith in your company. Be sure to include all of the following on your website to offer the best customer support possible!
Mid-February 2012 Updates
We've rolled out a few important updates recently that you'll now notice in your FuseDesk Application. Specifically auto-responders are now auto-filed, pages load faster, and new cases are created better.
Auto Responders: Tired of those pesky "Out of Office", "Auto Reply" and "Verification" messages? FuseDesk now filters for the most common auto responders and automatically files these messages making the time you spend reviewing Unassigned emails all the more productive.
Fear not, the messages are never deleted. You can always find these message under the Advanced Search.
Page Loading: Did you notice that we got a bit faster as of late? It wasn't your imagination! FuseDesk now lets your browser keep a local cached copy of your templates, reps and departments so that we spend less time loading them up on every page request. This is a dramatic speed improvement, especially if your Infusionsoft application has a lot of templates.
How to Use Social Media to Deliver Stellar Customer Service (Guest Post by Ali Brown)
You're probably familiar with this scenario: You log onto Facebook, post a cool factoid of the day for your community to process during their morning coffee break. And, by 3pm, among the dozens of comments and likes your post has generated, there it is - a random comment along the lines of: "I ordered my product last week, but I haven’t received it yet!" or "I tried to order one of your products but the order won’t go through."
As business owners, we must accept the fact that our online presence opens us up to 24-hour customer service requests. They come in as emails, Facebook wall posts, Tweets, and even instant chats on Facebook and Google. And, if you’re not prepared for these requests, you could risk harming valuable customer relationships in front of your entire community—a community full of existing or potential customers. It’s critical that you and your team maintain a high standard when handling customer service issues via social media
And that’s what today’s article is all about.
The Importance of Internal Customer Support
In the words of South Park’s Terrance and Phillip, maybe your coworkers are “not your buddy, friend,” and “not your friend, guy,” but they do deserve the same level of respect as your customers. It’s important to not only serve those on the outside that patronize your company, but to serve your “internal customers” as well.
As you can probably imagine, this is particularly crucial for those who work in customer support! Your colleagues may have just as many questions as your clients and they are just as important – if not more important – to help.
The Stuff of Ideal Customer Support Reps
Little girls are made of sugar and spice; little boys of snips and snails (say what now?), but what are good customer support representatives made of?
If you've been in the business awhile, you know that dedicated customer service and support reps are hard to come by. If your new hire isn’t a "people-person," you’ll be interviewing again for the position in just a few weeks. Someone who gets agitated easily will end up screaming into a phone, sending out unhelpful emails, pawning work off on someone else or even worse – not responding to your customers altogether.
So how do you know when you’re interviewing a great rep? Here’s what we at FuseDesk think the best customer support reps are made of.
Become a Leader in Customer Support
Some companies are really killing it in the world of customer support and satisfaction. Publicly striving to be the online service leader, retailer Zappos.com is well on their way. Their endeavors in the world of customer service are inspiring and we could all take a lesson from what they've achieved.
Get'er Done ASAP
One of Zappos' philosophies is to deliver orders as quickly as possible so their customers' wait time is minimal. Because let's face it, no one likes waiting in line for groceries; traffic jams are the pits, and even Sonic the Hedgehog in old-school Sega games would tap his foot if left idle for too long.
Whether or not you're in the business of retail, if you apply this speedy philosophy to your online help desk, you'll really reap the rewards. Wait too long to respond to an email and you risk the possibility that a customer will find a solution to their inquiry on their own. This eliminates their dependency on you, diminishes your value, and could even lose you some business.