Remote Customer Support: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Support Efforts
Customer Support has changed drastically over the last few years.
From new customer support technologies to the rise of outsourcing.
As a result, you might be considering providing support to your customers remotely, rather than at your business locations or at their homes.
Why should you go remote? And what are some ways to nail your remote support operations?
Let’s break it all down.
Why Should You Provide Remote Customer Support?
Remote customer support comes with its pros and cons.
After all, there’s no objectively best way to offer customer support as a business. There are only options that work better for certain businesses.
Remote Customer Support brings the following advantages
- Allows you to serve customers regardless of their physical location
- Easy to scale, you can service more customers just by adding more reps
- Allows you to service more customers, faster, due to quick transitions from assisting one customer to the next
- By going digital, it allows for more efficient recordkeeping on common issues, repeat requests, unresolved requests, and more.
- Allows you to expand your support hours by having remote teams working from different time zones.
- Depending on your industry, your customers might prefer it over in-location customer support.
Remote Customer Support Tips
So you’ve decided to take your customer support team remote.
Here are a few tips to implement while transitioning to remote support.
Use Cloud-based Tools
With your team being potentially spread out across several locations, you’ll want to make sure that your communication and support tools are accessible from anywhere.
Implementing cloud-based tools will allow your team to create and share information about support cases without worrying about local data backups.
These will then create shared databases of valuable information for your teams that can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
Setup an internal knowledge base
With multiple teams working from different locations, you want to avoid situations where your team is scrambling to solve a customer issue.
An internal knowledge base will get rid of the need of reaching out to other team members when a rep doesn’t know the answer to a question or issue.
This will reduce your bottleneck and will make it so your remote staff doesn’t feel left in the dark when they need help.
Use a Live Chat for Customer Support
Live chat is key to improving the quality of your remote support efforts.
After all, live chat is fast, easy and allows you to support multiple users at the same time.
Additionally, it helps in creating text records of every issue that is reported to your team.
Want to learn more? We’ve written a detailed guide on the benefits of providing customer support via live chat.
Establish new Customer Support KPIs
We’ve talked about customer support KPIs before.
These are still very important when transitioning to remote customer support. We’d even say they are even more important.
When you transition to remote customer support, it inherently changes the core of your customer support offering.
As a result, you will want to establish new KPIs that measure the new aspects of your offering, be it the use of live chat, use of new support platforms and more.
Take Advantage of Time Zones
When going remote, the whole world becomes your stage.
As a result, taking advantage of timezones around the world is a no brainer.
This will allow you to expand your customer support hours and potentially offer 24/7 support.
After all, it’s always 9 o’clock somewhere!
Speed is important, but...
Taking your support operations remotely might make you hyper-focus on service speed. Don’t get us wrong, speed is very important when it comes to remote customer support.
No one wants to be stuck waiting on the phone or a chat queue.
However, speed is not the end-all-be-all. Speed won’t matter if your customer support is not efficient, accurate and actually helpful.
When introducing new KPIs to track at your company, avoid hyper-focusing on speed and remember to also focus on quality of support.
Closing Thoughts
Taking your operations remotely can seem like a pretty daunting task.
However, it is easier than you’d think. And by following these tips and tricks it will only be easier.
Which one will you implement first?