Excellent customer experience is key to retaining clients and making sure they keep coming back. This means that providing the best customer support experience possible should be one of your main priorities.
Whether your business is large or small, it’s possible to provide a top-notch customer support experience by setting up an effective workflow for it.
Read on to learn how we have set up customer support at Rock to make sure that every customer can get in touch with us within seconds.
Why does good quality customer support matter?
Before jumping on the workflow we created to connect with our users, it’s important to highlight why your team should care about good customer support.
Let’s have a look at 4 reasons why providing good support matters to your business.
1. Customer retention
If your customers are happy with your support, they are more likely to stay with you. Also, keep in mind that it’s much cheaper to keep existing customers than to constantly look for new ones! In fact, studies have shown that retaining current customers can be up to 5 times cheaper than acquiring a new one.
2. Feedback and user suggestions
When you provide quick and high-quality customer support, your customers feel that you are listening to their needs.
In these situations, they often open up about their feedback and suggestions about your product or service. This is a great opportunity to hear directly from customers and improve your product or service based on their needs.
At Rock, we use our Customer Support channel for feedback and bug reporting, too. Direct contact with our customers allows us to quickly flag bugs. In addition, we capture the most requested features and new ideas based on feedback.
By listening to our users we make improvements to our platform which bring actual value to them. This allows us to build together with our community and users, and prioritize the most urgent and requested improvements or new features to the platform.
3. More upselling opportunities
Attending customer support inquiries in a personalized manner allows you to get in touch with your clients and learn more about their business, problems, and overall workflows. As you learn more about how clients operate, it will sometimes happen that you notice workflow issues that can be fixed with paid functionality.
We can make them aware of the existence of certain features, and explain how they work in detail.It’s a great chance for users to learn about more advanced options which can help them to facilitate their work even more efficiently.
4. Reviews and referrals
When you connect to your customers and provide help, it’s easier to reach out to them whenever you’re looking for reviews, referrals, or other types of support from their side.If you leave a good impression with your support they will be willing to help you too.
When you're regularly chatting with users, it's quick and simple to send them a Capterra, Crozdesk, or Google play store/ App Store (if they have a mobile app) link. This way they can make their thoughts available to other teams.
Sometimes this can lead to a direct referral, especially since the quick connect space allows for additional invites.
The challenge of providing good customer support
Handling customer support is no easy endeavor though. Especially, if your team is small and you don’t have a dedicated person who is available to attend to customer requests and outreach.
When this is the case, teams often share the work which leads to disconnected flows and longer waiting times. Here are a few of the challenges that we experienced while building our customer support workflow.
1. Expensive customer support tools
Smaller teams often lack the budget for dedicated customer support chats or software. Dedicated tools are often focused on big enterprises and too expensive for smaller teams.
As a result, small teams are left to manage their customer support queries with outdated systems or channels. These platforms often don’t provide enough functionality, think of email or social media as your main contact point.
2. Outdated channels for customer support
As mentioned above, options like emails or social media aren’t the best for handling customer support queries. Email threads often become messy, with many people in ‘cc’ and nobody clearly taking charge.
They easily get lost, there is no clear structure, customers might write a few emails at once and you might not be sure which thread to follow. This, of course, costs time and causes frustration from both sides.
Alternatively, on social media, many messages might need to be redirected to internal channels. It delays how fast you can provide support to your customers. Sometimes, timing can be really crucial!
3. Customer expectations are growing
Customers are expecting faster and more personalized responses. As many companies work on improving their customer support management, it becomes a competitive field. There is pressure to make sure that your business doesn’t fall behind.
Teams should focus on providing white-glove customer support in order to keep the customer happy. But how do you set this up alongside all other priorities that come with managing a small team?
How to use Rock as a free shared customer support chat in 6 steps
Rock is an all-in-one messaging and task management tool. It can easily be transformed into a live customer support chat which can be managed by multiple people.
Curious how? Here’s how we are currently leveraging our own platform to provide a white-glove customer support experience to all of our users. Our system can be set up in 6 simple steps.
1. Create a shared email account
Create a dedicated email account that you will use for your customer support on Rock. It can be an account from your company’s email domain. If you don’t have your own domain you can also create a new group account, for example, Acme-support@gmail.com.
You can learn more about creating your own groups here.
2. Sign up with the account to Rock
Use that new account to sign up on Rock for free. This account will be shared with everyone who is involved in providing customer support. If you’re a 1-person business or the only one providing support, you can create a personal account.
Create a username that reflects the purpose of your account. If you’re one person managing customer support, it might make sense to add a personal touch and use your own name. If it’s a team it might be a good idea to go for a more general name, for instance, Acme Support.
Adding a profile picture can be helpful too! Again, it can be a personalized option to create a more human-like experience for your clients. However, you might want to go for a logo of your company.
As the next step, make sure to integrate your preferred cloud storage providers. For instance, you can connect your Google Drive or DropBox folders with Rock. It’s super handy if you often need to share resources or documents with your customers so you can quickly add them to a support space when relevant.
Finally, don’t forget to integrate your favorite video conferencing platform. We offer integrations with Zoom, Google Meet, Jitsi, and Loom. This integration will speed things up whenever a direct video call with your customers is needed. You will be able to set up a call with your customers in a few seconds.
3. Set up the Quick Connect of the email account
Set the Quick Connect link with a welcome message and select a template of a space that will be created between you and your customers. When creating your Quick Connect link, make sure that you add a welcome message which is short and sweet.
For example, you can use something like: ‘Hi there, thank you for reaching out to Rock Support. Someone from the team will be with you as soon as possible. To help you with any question, please provide us with as much detail as possible.’
Also, when creating the Quick Connect link you can choose a template of a space that is going to be created every time your customers join you on Rock. We have prepared a specific template for customer support spaces. You should check it out!
Bonus, if you upgrade the account to PRO you can customize the Quick Connect link, like space.new/[yourbusinessname]-support which looks even more professional.
4. Add the Quick Connect link where relevant
Now you have your Quick Connect link which will serve as a bridge between you and your customers who need support. Add that link where relevant:
- Your website
- Email signatures
- Social channels and other external platforms you might be listed
Also, it’s possible to transform your Quick Connect link into a QR code. This can be used in more visual locations such as your website or if you have one, even a physical store. Your customers can scan the code and get in touch with you with their questions within seconds.
For example, we add a CTA at the bottom of every help center article, in order to help users if they were not able to find the information they were looking for.
5. Ready, set, go!
By clicking on your Quick Connect link or scanning the QR code, your customers will have a quick, free and direct way to reach out to you on Rock. Every time a new customer contacts you via Quick Connect, a new space will be created on your Rock customer support account and you will be notified.
You can handle all customer questions within that account and make sure nothing falls through the cracks! If you need to include a specific colleague in any of those user conversations, you can easily do that by adding them to a space (all spaces are group spaces).
Also, your customers can easily add their colleagues too, if needed.
6. Optional: Share the account with other team members
You can always add your colleagues to your Customer Support account on Rock. This is relevant if you want to give a more personalized experience to your customers and share customer accounts across your team.
Also, you can quickly switch between your personal Rock account and the Customer Support account. Our colleagues at Rock who are responsible for customer support queries easily switch several times per day to catch up on new questions or spaces opened.
Because every team member can read the past conversation, nothing is lost. This means that a new team member can quickly catch up and provide support to the user within seconds.
Advantages of using Rock for your customer support
Why should you use Rock for handling your customer support communication? We tested it ourselves and can give you several reasons why it’s the best choice for keeping your customer support queries at bay.
1. All in one place
Emails can feel messy and outdated when it comes to customer support. Long email threads can cause confusion, especially if you need to involve new team members.
Eventually, information easily gets lost in the noise. Rock provides a more seamless experience because you have all your customer support chats and information well structured in one place.
Everyone who joins the team has a great overview of what conversations and customers were involved in previously.
2. Free functionality across the board
Rock’s free version allows you to facilitate all the steps mentioned in this article and create a high-quality customer support workflow. You don’t have to worry about expensive customer support chats and tools tailored for big businesses!
3. Faster than outdated systems
It’s way faster to answer your customer questions via Rock than when using emails or social media. You don’t have to keep an eye on several different channels at all times. Instead, you switch between Rock accounts in a matter of seconds. Direct chats with users give a faster and more personalized experience.
4. Asynchronous & shared
If you handle your customer support between a few team members, it’s very easy to take over conversations from your colleagues with a shared Rock customer support account.
You don’t need to ask any questions internally because you have a great overview of what has been discussed between a customer and your colleague who handled the communication before you.
If you work asynchronously, you can share the customer support work within the team easier and nobody is obliged to always be online to answer questions. You can divide your responsibilities seamlessly with your colleagues and adapt an asynchronous work approach easier!
For example, one person takes care of the customer support account in the morning and another person in the afternoon.
Implementing a white-glove customer support experience for any business
You can implement a similar workflow with your clients, partners, or other stakeholders. It’s an easy and professional way for others to get in touch with you. At the same time, you keep all your communication structured!
Just like for customer support matters, you can create an account for any other workflow which requires communication between you and other parties. You can customize your Quick Connect welcome message which reflects your audience. Add that link where relevant and make it a super quick way to engage with you!
These accounts can be individual as well as shared between different team members. It all depends on your preference.Rock certainly allows you to build your own workflows and keep everything in one place.
Do you have a specific workflow in mind and want to see how Rock could help you build it? Reach out to our team in our dedicated customer support channel or join the Future of Rock community and let us know your thoughts!
