How to Build a White-Glove Customer Support Experience
Imagine offering your customers a support experience so seamless it feels tailored just for them. Learn how to exude professionalism and proactive problem-solving in the same way a white-gloved butler provides impeccable service.
Throughout this article, we offer a step-by-step guide on how we set up highly persononalized customer support at Rock. Specifically, we walk you through:
- Why does excellent customer support matter?
- The challenges in building a high-end support workflow
- Step-by-step: How we built our own customer support from the ground up
- Unique advantages of our workflow
Whether your business is large or small, it is possible to provide an experience that feels like a five-star service.
Let's roll out the red carpet and dive into everything you should know to build your very own white-glove customer support workflow!
Why does offering excellent customer support matter?
Well though-out customer support flows aren’t just a nice to have — it's a vital component of business success.
Let’s quickly discuss 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.
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.
🎁 Free resource: By adopting this Checklist Client Onboarding Template, you'll be well on your way to fostering successful, long-lasting client relationships.
2. Feedback and user suggestions
Your customers will feel that you care about their needs when you provide quick and high-quality customer support. As a result, customers give more frequent feedback and suggestions based on their experiences.
Avoid investing time on improvements or changes that don’t impact the customer. A steady stream of customer input allows you to always improve your product or service following their actual needs.
At Rock, we use a dedicated customer support channel to manage feedback and bug reporting in the form of tickets. Direct contact with our customers allows us to quickly flag bugs and capture feature requests.
🎁 Free resource: Retaining customers becomes so much easier when you can organize everything in a single place. Complete tickets, collect feedback and keep customers happy with this Customer Service Template.
3. More upselling opportunities
Attending to customer support inquiries in a personalized manner allows you to learn more about the client business, problems, and workflows. We often notice workflow issues or restrictions that can be fixed certain features in the paid plan.
White-glove support offers users the chance to learn about more advanced reporting, workflow shortcuts or improved documentation. We offer clients in-depth explanations about certain features and the value of incorporating them.
When our users grasp the full value of our unlimited plan, it becomes only logical to upgrade.
4. Reviews and referrals
When you’re well connected to customers it becomes easier to reach out whenever you need some support (reviews, referrals…). Customers are more inclined to invest time in supporting you when they feel valued and satisfied with your service.
Once you’re well-connected, it's quick and simple to ask them for a personalized review on sites like 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 and share their experience with your team so far. You can then also use those reviews for case studies, testimonials….
The challenge of providing good customer support
Ensuring that your customers can access premium support at all times is no easy feat. Especially if your team is small without a dedicated person whose sole responsibility is to attend customers.
When this is the case, teams often share the work which leads to disconnected interactions and longer waiting times.
Initially, we ran into a few issues too. Let’s dive into a few challenges we initially experienced as a small team while building out our customer support.
1. Expensive customer support tools
As a smaller team, we lacked the budget for dedicated customer support software. Dedicated tools are often focused on big enterprises and too expensive for smaller teams.
Additionally, the CS software often offered too functionality that was too advanced for our team. Complexity in tools is an issue because of two main reasons:
- Training: Learning how to use a dedicated tool can take up a lot of time. A new interface and functionality would require one or more team members to learn how to use the platform. Early on we wanted to focus on other priorities instead.
- Functionality overkill: We found that a lot of the tools offered too much functionality. Paying for a full platform feels wasteful when the team only needs 10% of the offered functionality at the time.
🎁 Free resource: Retaining customers becomes so much easier when you can organize everything in a single place. Complete tickets, collect feedback and keep customers happy with this Customer Service Template.
2. Outdated channels for customer support
The default customer support channel when companies get started is a dedicated email address. But we quickly encountered that email threads become messy with many people in ‘cc’ and nobody clearly taking charge.
Important emails easily get lost, there is no clear structure, customers might write a few emails at once and you might not be sure where to follow up.
As a result, we were losing time and frustration increased from both sides.
3. Customer expectations are growing
Larger companies typically have well-established customer service funnels with clear expectations and waiting times. As a result, customers expect the same, if not better, treatment when working with small businesses.
Customer expect you to consider past interactions and feedback. But when conversations are mainly managed through email, it’s easy to get lost.
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? We’ll dive into that in the next section!
🎁 Free resource: By adopting this Checklist Client Onboarding Template, you'll be well on your way to fostering successful, long-lasting client relationships.
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 a group account from your company’s email domain.
If you don’t have your own domain you can also create a dedicated account for which you share the credentials, 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!
Next up, make sure to integrate your preferred cloud storage providers. For instance, you can connect your Google Drive or DropBox folders with Rock.
Cloud integration become useful 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.
Meeting integrations 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.
<QUOTE>: Use a welcome message 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.’
Bonus, if you upgrade to unlimited 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. Add the QR in more visual locations such as your website or if you have one, even a physical store.
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. Every time a new customer contacts you via Quick Connect, a new space will be created on your account and you will be notified.
You can handle all customer questions within that account and make sure nothing falls through the cracks!
When 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. Sharing accounts is relevant if you want to give a more personalized experience to your customers. Just share the password with team members, and all responses will come from the same account.
Users can quickly switch between accounts by toggling account switching in user settings. 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 tell yo why it’s the best choice for providing assistance to your clients.
1. All-in-one customer support functionality
Emails become 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; you have all your customer support chats and information in one place.
Everyone who joins the team gains access to past customer conversations.
2. Faster than outdated systems
It’s way faster to answer your customer questions via Rock compared to using emails. 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.
3. Asynchronous & shared
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 about past conversations because you can access past conversations between a customer and your colleague.
When working asynchronously, you can share the customer support work within the team easier and nobody is obliged to always be online to answer questions.
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
Implement this workflow with your clients, partners, or other stakeholders. It’s an easy and professional way for others to communicate with your team.
Just like for customer support matters, you can create an account for any other workflow which requires communication between you and other parties.
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!
Support accounts can be individual as well as shared between different team members. Workflow configuration depends on your preference.
🎁 Free resource: By adopting this Checklist Client Onboarding Template, you'll be well on your way to fostering successful, long-lasting client relationships.
