How To Continuously Improve Customer Support
Why is continuously improving customer support so important these days? Because customers have come to expect the stuff they pay for to get better over time. It’s why iterative product development has become table stakes. And you need to take the same approach with your customer support.
But if you think the answer is just to invest heavily in training – be warned, it ain’t that simple.
At ModSquad we've built our fair share of customer support programs and helped businesses achieve some pretty tasty results in the process. (Spotify achieved a 92% CSAT on our with us, for example). In our experience, relying on training as the main lever to pull when continuously improving customer support is likely going to see your support program clock up some hefty costs. There are broader considerations you need to think about.
Whether you’re building your customer support program in-house or working with an outsourcing partner, you're going to need to think very carefully about:
In this article we're going to explore each of these areas in detail giving you practical and actionable tips including some of the lessons that we've seen others learn the hard way.
Let’s do this…
Why is it Important to Continuously Improve Customer Support?
It’s important to continuously improve customer support because you’d be hard-pressed to name something that changes faster than customer expectations.
That’s not because customers are capricious or entitled, but because customers have become used to benefitting from frictionless experiences everywhere.
From hyper-personalized streaming services to impossibly-fast delivery services – we just expect businesses to be as clued in when we need assistance as they are when we’re looking to make a purchase.
Think that’s overblown? 90% of customers said getting an immediate response was important for customer support, according to data from HubSpot. And according to Salesforce, 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences.
If you don't have a plan for how you'll continuously improve customer support…you won’t just lose revenue. You might struggle to compete at all.
OK, on with the strategies…
1. Really Understand your Customer Needs
If you want to meet customer expectations – let alone develop a continuously improving customer support program – you need a really clear idea of what your customers’ needs are.
Sounds simple? You’d be surprised how many businesses rush ahead with agent training or automation before they really understand the problems they need to solve.
“You need to really understand customer needs before you try and cater to them, otherwise you’re always playing catch up. And even beyond that, if you want to continuously improve your customer support program you need to understand the outcomes you want to create first”
So where can you find the data on customers' needs? Well, there’s no better place to start than by going directly to the source: your customers.
You’ll also want to speak to your support agents and sales teams – and then do some serious strategizing.
Steps to understand your customers better:
- Active customer listening: Feedback forms, surveys, and pulse checks will go a long way to capturing real-life customer sentiment. Make sure your teams are encouraged and empowered to actively listen during customer interactions and share their findings with the wider organization.
- Listen to agents and capture feedback: As mentioned in the previous point – your support teams are a great source of customer information. They preside over the most uncut version of customer sentiment there is. But this experience isn't worth a hill of beans if they don’t ask for their feedback. So create channels for them to share their feedback with other agents and have a plan for how you’ll act on any key insights you glean.
- Listen to your sales team: Sales might seem a strange place to gather customer feedback – it isn’t if you consider that this is about continuously improving customer support. Sales might not interact with current customers, but they have direct access to the expectations of prospective ones. Are your sales team constantly fielding questions about whether you offer a particular support feature you currently don’t? Is it impacting their purchasing decision? Getting to know the needs of your next newest customers is just as important as knowing the needs of the current stock.
- Develop detailed customer personas: Use the data from surveys, interviews, and sales records and create detailed customer personas. These should reflect different customer types, their pain points, and the specific support needs they have.
2. Gather Customer Feedback Regularly
As we mentioned in section one, your customers are (unsurprisingly) one of the best sources of information about how to effectively improve customer support.
So why cover it again? Because many businesses out there think customer feedback gathering is something you do once in a blue moon.
This is a surefire way to keep your customer support program lagging behind those of your competitors.
Actively seeking feedback from the people who matter most (yes, that’s your customers) will give you the level of insight you need to keep your customer support program evolving with customer expectations.
“Understanding how to meet customer needs is a big challenge, but the feedback customers provide is one of the fastest ways to spot gaps in the support you provide.”
By giving your agents a space to share the insights they've gleaned from customers while dealing with them on the frontlines, you can accelerate this process.
But great customer support programs combine this agent input with other feedback gathered from things like:
- Surveys: Post-interaction surveys or follow-up emails help you get direct feedback on specific experiences – fast. To avoid survey abandonment, make them simple and short, but with opportunities for open-ended comments and qualitative feedback too. You never know what program-improving pearls of wisdom a customer might be harboring.
- Social media monitoring: Customers often take to social media channels to air their views, complaints, suggestions – and when you’re really lucky, compliments. Social media listening tools can help you gather this feedback and spot trends in customer sentiment without burning hours of your support team’s time in the process.
- Follow-up calls or emails: Yes, even the humble call or email can help you gather vital info. Just so long as the follow up is personalized and that the information you’re requesting isn’t too onerous for a customer to deliver.
Remember: You actually need to use the data you collect for it to be effective. Feedback analysis can reveal patterns in customer concerns, product issues, or areas where your support agents aren’t delivering the goods.
Want to learn more about creating a customer support strategy that allows you to make the most of the customer sentiment data you’re capturing? Our page on How to Create a Customer Support Strategy has you covered.
3. Rethink your Hiring Processes
Heard that the key to delivering continuously improving customer support programs is to hire agents and invest in training them to be great?
Be warned – this isn’t always the case.
It's understandable why this approach has gained so much traction – but in many cases, hiring agents with little experience (or interest) in your industry often amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a pig – as the saying goes.
Our top tip? Rethink your approach to training. Hire agents with expertise and interest in your field from the start, and replace training with the much more efficient alternatives of orientation and onboarding.
It’s why at ModSquad we hire ‘Mods’ that are already customer support experts and give them the freedom to pick the accounts they work on. This increased staff-to-product-fit allows you to move from meeting customer needs to forging connections with your customers and community.
All of which is going to help you drive quality, get a more in-depth knowledge of customer needs, and ultimately allow you to improve your customer support program in the most impactful way.
Watch the banana skin: If you’re about to embark on this sort of rethink – we recommend you read the next section first.
4. Use a Data-driven Approach
To orchestrate a continuously improving customer support program, you need to make data-driven decisions.
That starts with asking the right questions – which in the world of customer support, means asking “what’s the outcome we’re looking to create here?” rather than “what tasks do we need covered?”.
The task-oriented approach has plagued the customer support outsourcing world for what feels like centuries. Businesses say they need agents, and they go out and hire some or enlist an outsourcer who says ‘sure, how many?’. When their CSAT goes down, or call wait times go up, they simply add more agents.
This approach locks you into a zero-sum game where quality is always linked to cost.
Instead, start with the outcome you want to achieve and then measure and optimize your way to that result. For example, start with an outcome like “I want a CSAT of 90%”.
From there, you need to analyze your customer support data, which will – amongst other things – allow you to identify the number of live support agents you need at peak times, AND how many at non-peak times.
Now you have this, you need to implement a model dynamic enough to allow you to scale up and down depending on when it makes most business sense to do so.
But that’s just the tip of a monumental data-driven iceberg. Because working with a data-obsessed outsourcer like ModSquad, you can also feed historical and real-time customer support data into AI models which will highlight areas for further optimization.
This could be gaining a deeper insight into maximizing the value your customer support teams create per hour, or automatically reviewing and scoring customer interactions.
All of which is going to allow you to become a continuous customer support improvement machine.
5. Utilize Technology and Automation – the Right Way
If you want a continuously improving customer support program, you need to deploy technology and automation in the most impactful ways possible.
This might seem like table stakes – after all, just about every business is using chatbots right? They are, but a lot of folks out there are doing it…wrong. In fact, according to data from Forrester, perceptions of customer experience quality have dropped for a third year in a row (and all to time lows).
The driving force behind these results is that the use of customer support technology has primarily been seen as a cost-saving exercise rather than a way to drive innovation or quality – let alone continuous improvement.
So how can you deploy technology and automation the right way? In our experience here are the most impactful places to deploy AI:
- AI-powered chatbots for optimizing support: AI chatbots integrated into multichannel strategies reduce wait times and improve customer satisfaction with instant, smart responses.
- AI Agent Assist for efficiency: AI provides real-time recommendations during calls and summarizes conversations, saving agents time on post-call tasks.
- Real-time language translation for scalability: Advanced AI translation increases support scalability and efficiency for global teams while minimizing costs.
- Advanced analytics for improvement: AI-driven analytics provide insights from customer data, helping businesses make better decisions to improve support.
- Agile scheduling for staffing optimization: AI-enhanced forecasting allows dynamic staffing adjustments, reducing wait times and cutting costs.
- AI-driven QA for support quality: AI automates quality assessments, ensuring consistent, high-quality customer interactions and continuous improvement.
For a deeper dive into the power of automation, check out Customer Support Automation: How to Automate Your Support and Save Time.
6. Build a Self-service Knowledge Base
Another way to ensure you have a continuously approving customer support program is to enable your customers to self-serve the answers to their problems.
It's important to note that this goes far beyond a simple FAQ hidden in some dusty corner of your website. This is about a series of content pieces that empower your customer to solve acute problems they might face.
Unconvinced on the importance of self service content? According to HubSpot, 55% of customers prefer to go through a self-service channel than wait in a calling queue. And an incredible 78% of service leaders believe their customers aren’t afraid to take on problem resolution themselves according to data from Foundry.
How to build an effective knowledge base:
- Comprehensive guides: Back up FAQs with troubleshooting guides, and detailed product documentation.
- Searchable content: Ensure your knowledge base is easy to navigate, with a robust search function that directs users to relevant content.
- Regular updates: Remember, this is about continuous improvement which means you need to keep your self-service content up to date with the latest information, features, and product changes.
Getting your self-service game in order is especially important if your customer base is predominately made up from Gen Z-ers or Millennials. According to research from Gartner, Gen Z (39%) and Millennials (38%) are more likely to give up on solving a problem if they can’t find answers on their own.
This makes the importance of understanding and catering to individual customer needs abundantly clear. Especially in terms of how you’ll cater to the Different Types of Customer Support Models and Tiers.
7. Measure Better Things
Measurement is crucial because it can also help you close the gap between how well you think you're meeting your customers' needs, and how well you are actually meeting them. For example, according to one study 79% of call center managers thought they were meeting or exceeding customer expectations for response times, but just 45% of consumers agreed.
So, in no uncertain terms, it’s crucial to measure the effectiveness of your customer support efforts. Now, in terms of which metrics to measure, it’s going to be specific to you, your business, your customers' needs, and the industry you operate in. But to get you started, here are some fundamentals that we recommend you consider.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend your product or service to their peers.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue your business is predicted to generate from a given customer over the entire time they are your customer.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric that assesses how satisfied customers are with your product, service, or brand overall.
- Customer churn rate measures the number of customers that leave your business over a given period.
- First contact resolution rate (FCR) measures how many customers can solve their problem, issue, or inquiry within a single interaction with your customer support program.
- Customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to find a solution to their problem or inquiry.
And don’t forget, you need to have a plan for how you're going to use this data to drive support program improvement. You’ll also need to regularly review the metrics you're measuring to ensure you're keeping up with changing customer expectations.
Want a more detailed look into customer support metrics? Check out our page on the customer support performance metrics and KPIs – that actually matter.
8. Use a Better Outsourcing Partner
If you're looking to orchestrate a continuously improving customer support program, and you're working with an outsourcing partner to do so, you will need to find a different breed of outsourcer to the traditional run-of-the-mill guys.
Our approach, SourceUp, is about delivering what your customers want whenever and wherever they want. We help you identify the outcomes you want to create first and then work backward to give you a data-driven customer support program that delivers the most impact from both AI and your human agents.
Our approach has three pillars:
- Use data for insight across the customer journey
- Use AI to automate where you can
- Use human experts to resolve issues that AI can’t
We help you implement real-time language translation, virtual agents, and AI assistants where they provide the most value. And give you access to advanced analytics, intelligent scheduling, and AI-assisted scheduling.
We also know that a truly data-driven approach doesn’t lock you into rigid contracts, so we use a flexible staffing model that allows you to scale up or down as needed without sacrificing quality.
We only recruit the top 1% of talent and let our team choose projects they’re passionate about – so you get the maximum value from human touch points.