Managing business-to-business (B2B) customer support takes time and a lot of maintenance. One of the worst things you can do is tell your customers you’re going to resolve their problem a certain way, within a certain timeframe and then do something completely different and take longer than they expected. So how can you take the pressure off B2B customer support? Here are some pointers for handling it the right way in order to retain your clients and exceed their expectations.
- Use appropriate technology: Update your customer service by implementing customer support technology such as SysAid’s helpdesk. A help desk software solution is a great way to prioritise your customers’ needs and keep you on track with their concerns and how they are being handled. You can also scale up this technology as your business grows.
- Train your staff: If you’re going to implement customer support technology, you must make sure that your staff are adequately trained, otherwise, your new technology is pretty much useless. The software alone will not solve all your customer service woes; you will need to customize it to suit your business and your customers. You employees should be trained to do this to save time and money and make the system more efficient.
- Encourage initiative: Now you’ve trained your staff and they are comfortable with the new technology, let them use their initiative instead of following a script with their responses. It doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, B2B customer service is always changing and your staff should be flexible enough to adjust to it.
- Optimize your support with data: With your help desk technology up and running and your customer service agents using it effectively, it’s time to optimize your support practices with data. This means examining crucial metrics including:
- Response time
- Ticket types
- Ticket volumes
- Handling time
- Customer ratings
This will allow you to determine where improvements can be made to increase your level of efficiency. If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea, at this point, to implement an online self-service solution to empower customers to resolve problems in their own time.
- Implement live chat: This is becoming one of the most popular methods of B2B customer support. It’s faster than email and can be more efficient that telephone support because some people feel more comfortable with not speaking in person. Because it has a quick response rate, live chat is an important element in assuring customer satisfaction.
- Spread the word: Now you have all this information about your customers at your fingertips, there’s no need to isolate it within the customer service department. Let your sales staff and employees from other departments in on it too. Once they see how clients are interacting with you, they will be able to use this information to restructure their own strategies more efficiently.
- Strengthen client relations: No group within your company is closer to your clients than your customer support team because they interact with them on a daily basis. These interactions produce an invaluable amount of data which can be analysed to understand which features are requested most often and which are missing. You can use your customer-related data to strengthen your relations with your clients. This is a mine of information that you can use to develop new enhancements for your products, which is crucial for client acquisition and retention.
- Customise your sales process: In these days of customer empowerment, it’s an absolute priority to adopt a personalised approach to content and strategy. This is why it’s important to share your client data with your sales representatives so they know exactly who they’re talking to and how the buyer is progressing through his or her journey.
- Inspire your customers: Build check-in points after a sale so you can make sure that customers feel good about their purchase and they are not feeling confused or regretful. You can use this time to highlight their original intention for the sale and encourage them to embark upon training program if necessary. Keep them inspired with testimonials, success stories, and supplemental tools.
If you’re a B2B company and you are doing a great job of identifying customer concerns and addressing them quickly, you already have a head start on your competition. In order to maintain this, you must handle customer issues on a case-by-case basis and give them the personalised service your clients have come to expect.
