6 tips for boosting customer support productivity

Over the last decade there’s been a significant shift from customer support being provided by phone calls alone, to text-based channels; namely emails and support chats.  

This change has already increased the effectiveness of support, allowing fewer agents to serve more customers, faster, resulting in greater happiness for both customers and companies.

But there is still great pressure on customer support teams to further increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and boost overall productivity.

So, how do you reduce time and cost spent on your customer support, whilst boosting productivity and customer happiness at the same time? Although that sounds impossible, with the right tools and processes it’s completely achievable.

We work with many top customer service teams and here are some of their tips for boosting customer support efficiency and customer happiness at the same time.

1. Get a customer support ticketing system

Start-ups normally start with email to answer support queries, but once you get to a certain number of enquiries – using email alone to manage your customer support becomes unmanageable. So you’ll need to put in place some sort of ticketing system. There are plenty to choose from including Zendesk, Help Scout and Freshdesk.

2. Collect, analyse and learn from your data  

As Jon Thorne – Skyscanner’s Director of User Satisfaction – recommends in our interview: How Skyscanner improved CSAT and productivity, you’ll need to look at your data to pin point where improvements can be made. Look at what products, services, languages, geographies, partners, features, app versions etc – are generating the most support requests. This will allow you to implement changes that will have the maximum impact on your customer support efficiency and overall customer happiness.

3. Build brilliant self-help resources

Not all enquiries can be ‘serve-served’ but a lot of them can. The benefit of building a better self-help offering is two fold; it makes your users happier as they can find answers to their questions immediately, therefore they don’t have to contact and wait for answers from support. And secondly, it makes your staff happier, as the need to spend less time on repetitive replies and more time helping people who really need it.

4. Get an AI writing assistant

Using AI to improve your writing efficiency, quality and overall productivity is a growing trend. Such tools use predictive text engines and can significantly cut down on your reply times, eliminate unprofessional spelling and grammatical errors, and ensure consistent, on-brand communication across your whole team or company.

5. Create easily accessible answer templates

Inevitably, you’re going to get asked the same customer questions, a lot. Having pre-written responses that are easily findable by your support agents will reduce the need to write the same responses, again and again. It’s good to personalise each response so users don’t feel like they are talking to a robot.

6. Help users to help other users

Enabling your super users to help out other users is a great way to boost your community and customer support offering. There are various platforms that enable this including forums like Discourse, messaging apps like Slack or Discord, or other social media platforms. It’s a good idea to monitor these areas with official support staff too, and remember to reward users who spend their time helping others, which gives them further incentive to provide fast, accurate support.

Learn more about our AI writing assistant solution can boost your customer service support productivity.

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