Why Multi-Channel?
The concept behind multi-channel support is you being where your customers are. if I’m a customer, I should have as many options to reach out to you as possible. As a customer I should be able to call you if necessary. I should be able to chat with you, e-mail you, tweet at you, and more because when I have a problem as a customer, I don’t want to have to go and track down your phone number if that’s the only way to get in contact with you, I should be able to have easy access to you.
Typically, if a customer is trying to contact you for support, they’re coming from a place of inherent negativity. They have a problem, and they’re trying to find a solution. So, you don’t want to add another barrier between the problem and trying to find the solution or the place they’ll get it. You want to give them a direct line to you.
You should be able to handle as many of these channels as possible. Ideally, you should be able to be in the middle of all those channels
part of multi-channel support is just knowing your customer. If I come to you, you should probably know who I am. If I’ve already been giving you money. Seventy-three percent of customers say valuing their time is the most important part of customer service. So, when they call you or chat with you or whatever, they shouldn’t have to do it a bunch of different times to get to their solution. They should be able to make this as quickly as possible. Most customers would like to have no problem, but if they do, make it fast.
Ideally, the first contact shouldn’t even have to happen. The best contact is the shortest contact, even better than that is no contact. When they have a problem, they should be able to solve the issues on their own. That’s self-service. This is one of the biggest Trends in support right now. It’s growing very popular, and we have the tools within the desk for you to build a self-service platform.
When a customer has an issue, they can work on the issues personally, they don’t have to reach out to you because they have the right tools for the solution. This means when you are looking at your support process as a whole, you can say, okay, where do I need to work on? This is where we are losing customers; where are people falling out of the cycle? you can address all those things.
Less Friction
Friction is the idea that every time a customer is transferred under Comcast, there’s a little bit of friction, every time they have to put a customer on hold, a little bit of friction? Every interaction that has to switch or change, or if they’re moving a customer around to handle things, that’s a little bit of friction. Ideally, a customer should be able to get in there and solve things quickly. The reason self-service is so popular is because there’s no friction.
Hierarchy of Customer Relations
The customer is usually at the bottom when they have a problem, they have to go up and talk to an agent, but if it gets worse, they go to a manager.
So, as a customer. I’m probably going to their website to buy a shirt or contract them for some design service. It would only make sense that wherever they bought your product, is usually where they’d go for support. If I’m buying a product from a website, I’m probably going to go to this website to get help. It would help if you made it as easy as possible once they get there to use whatever channel they prefer.
Your contact link should be pretty obvious; however, if they don’t want to call you, there should be a chat option available for quick and instant help. People don’t want to have to reach out to customer service if they don’t have to.
With Zoho there’s the option to create a customer portal, which can be customized to look like your business page. You can have your logo, your brand, and your business’s colors.
You can make this specific link exclusively for your customers, or you can just put it up as a link so anyone can go through it. with this link customers can look at your FAQ, check out your forms, etc. Customers can also search through and use the information they get from the self-service section. They should also have chat access. Customers should also be able to call, e-mail or just submit a ticket. For customers that like to solve things on their own they can move to a knowledge base section of our page, where information such as frequently asked questions are located.
Eight Main Sections of Desk
Tickets
This is where most agents spend their time. This is ideally where agents are mostly working in and handling things.
KB
KB stands for knowledge-based. This is where you add and edit articles within the knowledge base of articles and frequently asked questions
Customers
This is a list of all the customers that you’ve interacted with. It’s similar to a Rolodex, revealing all your contact info
Tasks
Tasks can be assigned explicitly to agents. A supervisor can assign an agent to a task that says solve these two tickets by the end of the day.
Reports
remember the tools to improve – reports are the things that’ll do
Community
This is your forum section
Social
Remember the multi-channel feature, and this is where it comes in handy. For example, United Airlines some customers might go on Twitter and say you’re the worst, I’ll never fly you again. Having robots automatically responds to them and says, we’re sorry to hear this is the function of multi-channel.
Chat
You still have a live chat function if you don’t integrate sales IQ to desk. It just doesn’t have as much functionality, and there will be sessions about sales IQ.
