how to improve customer service

Congratulations, your startup is taking off. Blogs are writing about you, people are tweeting, the wheels are in motion. 

You don’t have to worry as much about whether your ‘idea’ will ever take off because it is starting to take off. 

Now you have other problems to worry about: You’re getting so many support emails, that they have started to shave off time from growing the business and making the product better. 

In this post, I’ll show you tricks and ways to improve customer service (without having to save time from growing the business).

A bad customer support strategy can literary ruin your business.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

3 Ways to Improve Customer Support

1. Fix UI/UX bugs very early on

As soon as you notice something that’s really confusing users and you’re starting to get emails because of it, act on it IMMEDIATELY. 

Here’s an example: Say you are StoryMixMedia (a company that crowdsources wedding videos by shipping cameras), and you just launched a new redesign of your website. 

You started getting all these support emails, a good percentage of them being repetitive. So you start using a tool like Helpjuice.com, you’re able to not only put and end to those repetitive support emails. 

So it just so happens that. You know what this means, right?

2. Use Knowledge Base Software

HALF of your incoming support requests could have been answered via your Help/FAQ page (see: http://bit.ly/wrf73y). 

But the biggest problem is that your knowledge base solution is rarely updated, or lacks proper search. 

AND, as a result of this, your customers start simply ignoring your knowledge base and emailing you directly. Just check out MySQL’s knowledge base, which has so much data, and their search is pretty horrible…and they’re a database company.

My personal suggestion would be to use some kind of analytics (VisualWebsiteOptimizer, for instance, used to manually store every search when someone would search) and review them every week to figure out which three articles are important to add. 

Not more, not less, but three. It’s like a golden number, it’s not too high, and not too low — you can always add three articles. 

At Helpjuice, we realized this and incorporated it in our weekly analytics email

Which brings us to our next step…

3. Use analytics to save hours and hours

Analytics can make your day horrible, and make it productive, depending on parse and how you use them. 

If you use ticketing system software, track how much time you’re spending and what you’re spending it on. 

If it’s something that could easily be streamlined (like greetings, and kind words that make your customers feel taken care of “If you have ANY questions or would like to talk, feel free to call ….”) try to streamline it with canned responses and macros.

For instance, if you get a question more than once a week, and feel that it’s going to come again, add a draft question in your knowledge base to remind you to actually write the answer to that and post it. 

Just doing this simple step (I LOVE how one of our customers, Adzerk does this exact thing)

Have you had similar experiences, or have a set of rules in YOUR COMPANY? I WANT to hear more! Post it in the comments below

P.S: Don’t forget to check out Helpjuice.com, we’re serious about slicing your support inbox by half and helping you deliver WORLD-CLASS support to your customers.