Customer Service Best Practices - Overview

Now that spring is in the air and we’ve all had a bit of time to recover from the holidays, we’ll be kicking off a series of blog posts on Customer Service and Helpdesk Best Practices!

We often get a lot of questions about best practices for helpdesk setups and so we’ll be doing some very detailed posts on those as well, specifically for Zendesk. Other topics we’ll cover include the following:

Core Competency, Priorities & Policies

Before even thinking about your customer support infrastructure, think about your company’s core competency and how it relates to customer experience. All industries are different when it comes to customer support and they often merit different approaches.

While it’s tempting to want to offer 24/7 multichannel support, it’s worth thinking about who your customers are and what their needs (and expectations) are!

Systems & Tracking

It is important to have a customer service CRM that will allow you to seamlessly scale. The top priorities on the customer-facing front are setting up processes to surface high priority tickets, make sure tickets never get lost and to work in pro-active touch points when possible.

On the back end, it’s all about tracking and understanding quantitatively what your customers are saying and asking for. You’re collecting a large amount of incredibly valuable data from your customers, which is awesome! We’ll talk about how to make sure you’re breaking this out qualitatively, rather than anecdotally.

Staffing

We’ll preface this by saying that outsourcing (even to HiOperator!) isn’t always the best option! There are lots of pros and cons either way.

At the end of the day, customer service agents are there to add a personal touch to your brand and fix things when other systems and processes fail. Often, customer support at its core is repeating the same handful of tasks, while maintaining empathy, urgency and accuracy. If you have an in-house team that has lots to offer outside of customer support, it may be worth considering an outside provider who can help augment your team and scale for unpredictable incoming volume. This will allow your talented in house team to handle escalations and high priority customers and focus on the growth of the business.