3 Ways to Deliver a Great Customer Support Experience

When you think about customer support, you tend to think about cost savings for the company. But how often do you think about customer experience?

For too many companies, a focus on customer experience ends when the customer is won. The reality is, it’s only the beginning. If the experience you deliver your customers is poor, they will leave you. And it’s easier than ever for an unhappy customer to move to the next company.

If there’s one area of the company where many could improve the customer experience, it’s customer support. So what are the 3 approaches to improving customer support?

1. Increase satisfaction. Unhappy customers aren’t loyal, and they aren’t advocates for your products or brand. If it takes too long to answer a question or solve a problem, customers get frustrated. If you offer self-service tools and they are too difficult to use or understand, customers get frustrated. So how do you improve customer satisfaction? Give your self-service tools and support reps a complete view of the customer. When you can see all the customer’s interactions with you across channels, you can help solve their issues and answer their questions faster.
2. Reduce Churn. Unhappy customers have no problem walking away, and revenue drops as a result. To keep that from happening you need an intent-driven sales process; one that can look at all your customer data and derive insights that help you offer the right products and services at the right time.
3. Leverage Customer Data. Customers who feel their needs are understood and valued will stay, especially when you demonstrate that understanding through a personalized experience across the channels they interact with you in. To deliver a personalized experience you need to leverage all the customer data you store across your business systems to get a full view of the customer. 

How Cognitive Search Improves the Customer Support Experience

All three approaches to improving customer experience in the support department happen with the help of cognitive search solutions. Cognitive search enables a complete view of the customer across all interaction channels - email, chat, social media, support tickets, web. It also pulls together a view of the products and services the customer has with you today and enables you to provide a personalized experience to each customer.

Context is critical in customer support. You need to answer their questions and help them solve their problems as quickly as possible when they need them solved. No hunting and pecking, no asking the same questions over and over, and no need to bring in additional resources for simple problems.

This is the value that cognitive search brings to customer support experiences.

Want to learn more? Download our new ebook Why You Need Cognitive Search to Scale and Optimize Customer Support.