Your support process can be complex at the best of times, and much more so during seasons such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. Spanning over entire months, your business sees a real boom in sales during this time. However, it can take a toll on your support process. So how can you optimize your support process so that your agents are fully able to handle the added ticket volume? These time-tested suggestions can be a boon to your support system and can steer your marketing efforts toward long-term success.
What Others Do
Most businesses either hire temporary agents to help with the extra workload or provide existing employees with incentives to do more. While these solutions do work, there are some smart support hacks to help optimize your support process and achieve the same, if not higher, the level of success.
What You Can Do
To begin with, get to know your present and prospective customer base in conjunction with your products or services. Consider integrating your customer management system with your Zendesk Help Center so that you have a centralized information repository or access point, so that end to end support is much more feasible. When your support software is well integrated, your agents are in a better position to provide support, from simple queries to more complex problems. Additionally, keep your Zendesk knowledge base up to date so that your customers are self-taught.
Imagine this scenario: A customer has an issue and tries to find a solution to the problem online. Rather than waiting for one of your support staff to assist him, your customer will greatly appreciate it if he could find an immediate solution on your Zendesk Help Center through well-written and easily available articles. Apart from keeping your customers happy by offering them proactive solutions, you also reduce your ticket volume.
While the world would be a better place if every customer could use the solutions in your knowledge base, the reality is that more often than not, a ticket is submitted. So if your customer goes ahead and submits a ticket, ensure that you set realistic response times so that your customers don't end up getting frustrated with seeming delays. Also, ensure that you clearly identify the available channel to resolve the ticket so that they are aware of what to expect out of their query.
Handling The Ticket Effectively
Once tickets are assigned to agents, ensure that the tickets are sorted, categorized and assigned properly. Integrate all your software to save your agents' time, and pull your customers' information into your Zendesk Help Center so that agents can resolve issues faster and with less frustration.
Optimize your support process for the perfect balance of agent and customer interaction. Rather than handling this manually and putting your agents through the pain of corresponding directly for every status change, consider using canned responses and automations for certain scenarios to keep your customer aware of the status of his ticket.
What Next?
Holiday seasons and high sales periods can be quite stressful for your support staff. The best way you can keep them motivated to continue to offer the best support possible is to reward them for their hard work. Consider gamifying your Zendesk Help Center so that agents are rewarded when problems are solved, and goals are achieved. Or, you can set team goals and offer rewards as these goals are met individually or collectively. While this helps in boosting your agents' morale, rewards also play a key role in optimizing your support process, especially when workloads are high and support is redundant.
