11 Ways to Effectively Reduce Customer Support Load
You can improve customer satisfaction by taking the time to reduce customer support load, which includes reporting bugs, canceling accounts, and seeking assistance to complete tasks.
Addressing this burden enhances the customer experience, leading to greater overall satisfaction.
In this article, we will learn how to effectively reduce the load on your customer support team with 11 effective tactics.
TL;DR
- Product complexity, new features and updates, and poor onboarding can lead to high customer support loads.
- Reducing customer support loads can enhance the customer experience, increase customer retention, reduce customers churn, and build customer loyalty.
11 ways to effectively reduce customer support load include:
- Personalize the user onboarding according to different segments’ JTBDs to minimize the number of unresolved issues.
- Analyze customer support interactions to identify repeating issues. Then create tooltips and interactive walkthroughs based on them to offer proactive support.
- Use a resource center with different content types, such as documents, guides, and video tutorials, so existing customers can self-serve.
- Show different modules based on user segments to provide relevant help and reduce information overload.
- Track how the content in your resource center is performing so you can make the necessary changes to improve customer experience.
- Use a chatbot to help answer any frequently asked questions.
- Allocate tickets to the right customer service team member using NLP and AI to reduce ticket resolution time.
- Analyze and identify areas of friction with product usage analytics and use in-app guidance to fix these issues and improve customer experience.
- Use customer feedback after every support team interaction to help improve the performance of your customer support representatives.
- Create a community forum where other users can help answer customer questions.
- Use customer support tools to reduce your support team’s need for human intervention.
- Userpilot provides multiple tools, such as a resource center, in-app guidance, and segmentation, to reduce support load. Book a demo to learn more!
What are the causes of customer support loads?
Various factors can impact customer support load, such as:
- Product complexity: Users may require more guidance and support if a product is difficult to understand.
- Product launches and updates: If introducing new features or updates isn’t done well, it will increase the questions and issues customers face.
- Improper onboarding: Poor onboarding will result in more unanswered questions for customers, leading to an increase in customer support tickets.
Why is it important to reduce the load on your customer support team?
Reducing the load on your customer support team is crucial. Here are some key benefits to minimizing the workload on your company representative:
- Enhance customer experience: Using methods to reduce the load on customer support will mean users get responses to their questions quicker, enhancing their experience.
- Increase customer retention and minimize churn: When you reduce the load on your customer team, the ticket resolution time decreases. And when customers receive prompt and effective support, they are more likely to have a positive experience and develop a sense of loyalty toward your brand. This reduces the likelihood of them seeking alternatives or switching to competitors.
- Reduce customer service costs: Reducing the support team load means fewer support resources are needed.
- Improve operational efficiency: By reducing the load, you can streamline business processes to help the support team complete their tasks faster.
- Foster customer loyalty: The smaller the load on the support team means customers with pressing issues can be dealt with swiftly. Faster response times create loyal customers.
How to reduce customer support load? – 11 Effective Strategies
By employing these 11 effective strategies, you’ll streamline support processes, minimize customer inquiries, and provide efficient assistance, improving customer experience and operational efficiency.
1. Optimize your user onboarding efforts for new customers
If done right, user onboarding is capable of resolving any arising issues by personalizing the user experience. This will ultimately decrease the need to connect with your customer support team.
By learning about customer JTBDs and crafting the journey that will lead them to the features needed to complete their goals, you will create a personalized user experience.
Here is what your minimum viable onboarding should look like…
2. Offer proactive and contextual support to minimize support ticket volume
Offering proactive support at the correct times will help to reduce support tickets. You can review repeated issues or product analytics to see frequent friction points.
You can then use in-app guidance such as tooltips or interactive walkthroughs to help users before they get stuck so they don’t need to reach out for help.
3. Create a knowledge base to promote customer self-service options
A resource center provides easy access to a self-service location where customers can find answers to any problems without going through support.
You should provide various content types (such as help docs, video tutorials, and guides) to cater to users’ learning preferences.
4. Use segmentation to personalize in-app support and improve customer satisfaction
When designing a resource center, you can create different modules for segments at various stages of the customer journey.
This way, you will not risk overloading your users with more information than necessary, and it will be easier for them to find answers to their questions regarding their goals.
5. Analyze user interactions with your resource center to improve accordingly
Your resource center analytics can provide helpful insights to optimize the content within. You can track which resources get the most views, what queries are being searched the most, and the average engagement rate.
Measuring these metrics can help you make improvements and track the changes’ efficiency.
An example of this could be that video tutorials have a higher engagement rate than text-based articles. Knowing this, you can double down on creating more video content.
Another example could be that a particular feature gets a high search volume, suggesting that users need help understanding how to use it correctly. You could then implement more in-app guidance and measure how that impacts search queries.
6. Use a chatbot to automatically answer frequent customer support tickets
Chatbots are a great way of responding to users’ questions without relying on human interaction. You can train your chatbots to respond to frequently asked questions.
Chatbots can also respond to customer queries 24/7 and to multiple users simultaneously. They make a perfect customer support tool to answer straightforward questions, freeing the support team to deal with more tricky issues.
7. Use NLP to allocate tickets to the right customer service representatives and reduce customer support ticket resolution time
Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help allocate tickets to the right customer service representative by analyzing the text content.
NLP, a branch of AI, can interpret human language, extracting key information such as customer problems, urgency, and keywords or phrases.
It then categorizes that information to allocate the customer ticket to the right person. This correct allocation means that customer requests get dealt with by the right person, reducing ticket resolution time. Overall, this reduces the customer support load.
8. Identify where users get stuck and improve customer experience
Using product usage analytics can help to understand where users get stuck and need assistance. You can then make necessary changes and improvements to automate support for these interactions to reduce unnecessary tickets.
You can create custom events that trigger in-app guidance, such as tooltips or interactive walkthroughs, on any recognized interactions with which users have trouble.
9. Improve the performance of the customer support team by collecting customer feedback after each interaction
You can use customer feedback to educate the customer support team on resolving tickets faster.
After every user interaction with customer support, you can trigger an in-app survey to rate the performance of the customer agent.
The different ratings will help you in two ways. Those customer support interactions with positive ratings can inspire training material to help support agents provide a similar service.
You can look into the lower ratings to see if you need to create new guides or provide more training for the support agent who dealt with the customer issue.
10. Provide users with a platform where they can engage with other users to discuss their questions
You can use the power of community forums to leverage a broader form of support. Introducing users to a network of people who use your product means it’s not only your customer support team assisting users.
Other users in the community can help answer questions or offer advice and tips. Not only does a community help to reduce customer support load, but it also builds positive customer relationships.
11. Reduce customer service costs with customer support tools
Customer support tools can enhance your support agents or offload customer requests via automation. They can also help to save money. A range of tools can provide further assistance to users.
The following are some customer support tools you can use:
- Chatbots to help answer any simple and repetitive questions users might have.
- User onboarding tools help teach users how to use your product correctly.
- Automation tools can streamline and manage customer ticket flows.
- Social media support tools help to centralize customer messaging across multiple social media platforms.
These tools can help to improve your customer support, help reduce customer response times, or take care of simple tickets. All of which help to reduce customer service costs.
Top 3 tools to reduce support load and provide excellent customer service
Many customer support tools can help you reduce support load and provide a positive customer experience. Here are three powerful tools you can use.
Userpilot – for in-app guidance and self-service options
Userpilot is a product adoption platform with features that can help reduce the load on your customer service team.
It allows you to provide in-app guidance (such as tooltips and interactive walkthroughs) and self-service options, all of which you can implement code-free.
Some of the key features of Userpilot are:
- Resource center: A single location where you can offer users multiple modules that support different content types, such as FAQs, tutorial videos, checklists, and articles.
- Group resources: You can combine sets of resources into themes making navigation for users simple.
- Segmentation: You can use segmentation to display relevant modules to each user.
- Integrations: Userpilot supports integrations for chatbots and embedded knowledge bases and allows users to search in-app and connect to support platforms such as Zendesk.
- Userpilot also offers search functionality, localization, analytics, and much more.
LiveAgent- for instantly answering customer questions
LiveAgent is a comprehensive customer support software that enables you to personalize customer conversations and interactions.
It provides a ticketing system that efficiently manages customer inquiries from various support channels, including email, live chat, social media, and phone.
LiveAgent also offers valuable features like real-time chat translation, call center integration, and automation tools, enhancing the overall support experience for businesses and customers.
Zendesk – for creating a help desk and answering support tickets
Zendesk is a leading customer support software that primarily focuses on support ticketing. It offers a platform for managing customer inquiries, resolving issues, and providing efficient support.
Zendesk excels in providing omnichannel support, allowing you to engage your customers across various channels, including voice, email, social media, and more.
With its comprehensive features, Zendesk enables you to deliver seamless and consistent customer support experiences.
Conclusion
Reducing the load on your customer support team is essential for improving customer satisfaction and lowering the cost of the customer support team.
Using effective strategies and customer support tools like Userpilot, LiveAgent, and Zendesk, you can streamline your support processes and improve the user experience with your product.
Want help reducing customer support load? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can ease your customer support load.
