How to deal with customer requests?
You know that sooner or later it will definitely happen: your visitors/users/customers will ask you for help. So, you’d better think about how you’re going to answer their questions before they give up on your product. There are several popular ways that companies answer users’ questions: a help desk with tickets, a knowledge base with articles, and live chat with support agents. These tools are basically about all the same things: they are aimed at improving customer satisfaction and experience, but they are crucially different in their way of dealing with customer issues and involving employees.
According to Wikipedia, a help desk “enables customer-care operators to keep track of user requests and deal with other customer-care-related issues. It is what makes customer-care service efficient and enterprising.” JitBit, a customer support blog, defines it as “a system that saves incoming customer support requests into one central database.” In other words, when a customer has a question, a ticket is created.
An article from the Atlassian blog describes a knowledge base as a “self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic.” Simply put, it’s a collection of articles made for customers to find answers to their questions themselves 24/7.
Finally, live chat support allows customers to chat with a business in real time. In this case, a human receives and answers the questions.
Help desk for support
A ticketing system is a very popular way to provide support, and for good reason. Serving visitors, users and customers with tickets helps small teams to deal with requests and questions.
Imagine you have only yourself as a support team (and you’re the CEO, by the way). Let’s say you need to deal with, for example, 30 requests a day (30 is not that much; popular services may get thousands). As the CEO, you have financial, operational, and other important questions to solve, and constantly being distracted by customer requests won’t do you any good. A help desk with a ticking system lets you collect requests, aggregate them in one place, and find a specific time for resolving them, with the ability to pass them on to the developers, if necessary.
With a ticketing system, visitors/users/customers send an email to a company address or leave their request through a special service online. After that, they receive an automatic message saying that the request has been received and the ticket will be answered within X time. When the issue is resolved, the person responsible for the ticket sends the answer via email. When customers see that their question has generated a ticket, they don’t expect you to answer right away; they feel reassured that specialists are looking at the problem, and they’ll get an answer within the time specified on the ticket. Such a system saves time dramatically and lets you offer quality support with a small number of people involved.
Nevertheless, there is a tendency towards personalization. Competition between many different companies on the market changes customers’ demands: they now expect better service and better quality products. No one wants to be treated as a ticket; they want to be treated as a person. Moreover, while the ticket is pending, visitors may leave and look for a company or service that can answer their questions immediately.
Best help desk software: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Atlassian.
Knowledge base for support
Recall from the Atlassian article, a knowledge base is a “self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic.” It’s a 100% self-service tool that doesn’t involve communication of any kind. Often, a knowledge base comes as a part of the support process, for example, with a chat or a help desk. It’s a collection of articles with detailed instructions and answers to frequently asked questions. A knowledge base can be created by one or more members from the support team, or any other person who has detailed knowledge of user requests. Also, it’s a living library, so new entries can continually be added.
The main advantage of a knowledge base is that it can be written once (and edited later if necessary), and then used by your customers 24/7. Articles should be able to answer users’ most common questions without involving employees in the support process, so a knowledge base is another great thing for small teams. Because a knowledge base is constantly available online (barring server issues), it eliminates the waiting involved with a ticket system. All in all, a knowledge base allows you to be proactive and provide consistent support, meanwhile reducing phone calls and emails, and helps you keep all useful information in one place.
Nonetheless, using only a knowledge base might not be enough. It’s important to hear what people have to say, and find out what’s not clear for them and what else they want to know about your product.
Best knowledge base software: Intercom, Dashly, Helpscout.
Live chat for support
Have you ever seen that little bubble in the bottom corner or the side of the page? It’s on many websites, and it’s a live chat that allows visitors to have a personal conversation and receive perfect support. When a visitor, user or customer has a question, all they need to do is just ask it right away in the chat. On the other side, an agent is already ready to answer. Live chat is a perfect tool for closing requests on the fly, plus collecting feedback and improving customer loyalty by always being by their side.
When a visitor has a chance to ask questions about the product right away, plus describe their needs and discover payment terms, it increases sales and boosts your credibility. When a user has an opportunity to get answers to their questions or solve problems that stop them from using the product, it increases loyalty. When a customer who has paid for the product receives an answer in a couple of minutes and feels the company’s care, it makes them happier and more likely to stay with the company.
However, live chat imposes obligations on your support processes. People who write messages in chat expect to receive an answer promptly, not in hours, or even minutes. That means you have to have enough people in your support team, otherwise live chat can backfire on you.
Another thing about live chat is that agents have to deal with a lot of repeated questions. Coming back to the previous point about knowledge bases, when users don’t have a place to address their question, they have to ask in chat. The perfect solution is to offer a combination of tools for customer support: live chat plus a knowledge base.
Best knowledge base software: Livechat, Crisp.chat, Drift.
Live chat + Knowledge base for support
Again, personalization is the key to a user’s heart. Nobody likes to be treated like a ticket, and everybody wants to feel special having their very own consultant helping them to solve issues. But agents are still humans and don’t want to keep rewriting all the same answers to the same questions.
The solution is to combine all the best features of a knowledge base and live chat. Create a knowledge base with articles based on frequently asked questions that is available 24/7, even when agents are offline. If users can’t find an answer there,they’re welcome to ask in chat. If the question is one that can be answered with the knowledge base, then agents can just send the needed article right from the conversation window, making the knowledge base a helping hand for live chat support. Moreover, articles in the knowledge base are more detailed and can answer users’ questions more proactively, because the authors of the knowledge base can take the time to craft clear, concise answers before putting the articles online.
Best knowledge base + live chat software: Intercom, Dashly, Customerly.
What’s the bottom line?
- A help desk with a ticketing system is a good option if your team is small.
- A ticketing system ruins personalization, so it will be harder for you to build relationships with customers.
- Users don’t expect tickets to be solved quickly, so it’s better to have some other place where users can find an answer (phone number, email or knowledge base).
- A knowledge base is a good addition to both both a ticket-based help desk and a live chat service, because articles can be carefully written and instantly accessed.
- A knowledge base is available 24/7, so your users can find answers themselves without calling, emailing, creating tickets and writing in chat.
- A knowledge base saves time for your support team because it has answers to all frequently asked questions.
- Live chat is the best solution when you want to provide more personal support and make customers happier.
- Make sure that you have enough agents to answer chat messages promptly (users expect to receive an answer within one minute); otherwise, you should use a ticketing system.
- Use a knowledge base together with live chat to add articles right to the conversation window and save time.
- Remember, nobody knows your product as well as you do, so make sure you do everything possible to help users figure it out.
