There’s no denying it – customer support provides immense value for any business. There are quite a few tools, tricks and tips and processes that can help customer support teams do a great job. However, we often neglect one major aspect of every modern business – content.
Besides getting new leads through SEO and helping your marketing team, your content can actually be of great help for your customer support, and in some cases, even replace it to an extent.
Here are some great reasons why your content actually helps your customer support agents.
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According to recent research, 73% of customers prefer using the company’s website to solve a problem, rather than reaching out using chat, email or phone. When looking for a way to solve their problem, they will instinctively go for that FAQ button, which you will hopefully have prominently placed on your website.
Frequently asked questions are designed to provide clear answers to the most common inquiries from your customers. For example, if a customer is interested in purchasing a phone number but is researching scary numbers to call, your FAQ should directly address this topic. The content should offer detailed information about these numbers and explain the reasoning behind them in a way that’s easy to understand.
When your FAQs are well-organized and written effectively, customers can resolve most of their concerns independently, without needing to contact support.
However, doing FAQs right takes time and dedication. You need to analyze the requests that you get through your entire customer service software, including your live chat, email and phone and compile a list of questions that tend to repeat themselves often.
This is where using a call center CRM becomes invaluable. It helps you track and categorize customer interactions across all channels, making it easier to identify recurring questions. By integrating a robust call centre crm software, your team can streamline FAQ creation based on real customer data, improving self-service options and reducing support load.
Then sit down and write questions followed by answers. Note that in this case, you want to use simple language and explain the answer in plain English that everyone can understand. Moreover, group similar questions together and sort them according to a topic so that they are easier to find. A well-structured FAQ can significantly reduce the workload on your campaign calling center by addressing common inquiries proactively.
Great call center software such as CloudTalk combined with a well-writen FAQ is enough to power any customer support team.
Your customer support team usually has very little time to explain things. The average length of any call in a call center is just above 5 minutes.
While that is enough to troubleshoot most issues, it won’t give you enough time to explain how your product works and what its biggest benefits are. This is where content comes in play.
For example, Ahrefs is one of the most popular tools for digital marketing and SEO out there. The reason why people love their content so much is the fact that each post explains something about their product.
For example, this post is about doing a content audit and it includes step-by-step instructions on how to get it done. If you already use Ahrefs and pay for it, this is massive help because a customer support agent would take an hour to explain all of this.
On the other hand, if you don’t have an Ahrefs account, a piece of content like this will definitely persuade you to grab your credit card. Since customers can see the detailed steps and the results you can achieve, this type of content will prove as a major asset for both customer support and sales teams.
This leads us to our next point.
The problem with most customer calls is that usually agents explain everything on the spot, with the customer handling your product. In the world of SaaS, that means fumbling around with an app while being on the call at the same time. Even the most tech-savvy customers could get confused.
Blog content lets your customers sit down, grab a cup of coffee and go through your instructions on how to do something on their own, freeing up your agents’ time.
If you provide your customer support reps with this kind of content, along with live chat for customer support, they will have assets for solving problems which are not urgent and require more involvement and time from your customers.
Think of FAQs as a Cliffsnotes version of the real thing – a knowledge base. This is a detailed guide on how to use your product, covered from the moment of signup all the way to practical use cases.
One way to empower your customer support team is to create a knowledge base using knowledge base software that covers every aspect of your product in detail. You can also provide your support team with a knowledge base platform that will allow them to instantly access any file they need at the moment. That way, if they want to save some time or merely provide a self-service option to a customer, they can simply refer them to a knowledge base post.
One great thing about knowledge bases is that unlike video content, they are future-proof. As you come up with new design for your product or change a feature, you can update the text and images in a matter of minutes and they are ready to be used.
Another aspect that makes them a superb customer support tool is that they can actually be used for training your customer support staff as well. As you’re preparing someone for a customer support role, they can use them as learning materials and they can refer to them if they ever get stuck when a customer asks a difficult question.
Everyone loves to make their customers happy. However, we all know the pain of dealing with a difficult customer that is impossible to please. Even for the most experienced agents, handling these customers is not an easy task.
Instead of going through a rollercoaster of insults, the customer support rep can simply refer the difficult customer to a piece of content that solves their problem. That way, they provide the solution while avoiding confrontation and possible problems. In fact, building a custom AI chatbot can make this even easier by automatically delivering helpful responses and guiding users to the right resources.
Note that while this is a handy solution to a problem, it should not be your default method.
Content marketing is one of the top marketing tactics in today’s world. However, besides bringing in new visitors and leads, it can also have one more amazing purpose – helping out your customer support team do a better job. With a great combination of FAQs, blog post and knowledge base entries, your customer support team will be equipped to handle any customer that comes their way.