Surely you need marketing to reach your target demographics and a sales team to ensure you have consistent sales. But when your customers face problems, where should they go for their solution? What process do you have to use to tackle angry customers? Eventually, this will be a key factor in maintaining your business’s goodwill.

That’s where the customer support team works wonders. Customer support teams handle everything related to customer relations and keep customers’ happiness higher. Building an efficient customer support team is an obvious priority of any customer service strategy.

Building a customer support team from scratch needs a process to build the overall foundation of your customer service. Excellent customer service varies from business to business, and most companies fail to do so because of their lack of understanding of the customer support process.

In this article, we’ll cover why you need a customer support team, what makes a great support team, how to build a customer support team, what tools you should use, and how to optimize these tools for your business needs. Take it as a full-free course on building a customer support team from the beginning. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the process and what structure you should follow based on your business.

Download the full eBook guide on “How to build a customer support team”. This eBook has additional resources for further study.

The form can be filled in the actual website url.

If you already have a customer support team, you can still follow these solid steps to ensure your customer service strategy is on the right path. If you are new, let’s get started with why a customer support team is an essential part of your business.

Why should you build a support team?

A customer support team is a tribe of empathic people who dedicate their time and effort to solving customer problems and helping them achieve success.

Not all businesses need customer support, but it is essential for those whose marketing promise depends on excellent after-sales customer support. After-sales support is a great tool to build long-term customer relations. Even pre-sales support is widely popular among companies nowadays. Pre-sales support helps a customer make their purchase decision, create a seamless customer onboarding process, and help them use your products after payment immediately.

Both pre-sale and after-sale support can be run by one customer support team. Now, as a business, you should ask yourself, “Do I need a customer support team right now?”

It is important to answer this question because often business owners make this mistake, not considering making customer support a priority from the start. Then, when business gets bigger, customer inquiries flood in, and they get overwhelmed with little time to provide solutions to all customers.

No matter what industry you are in, always think ahead a few years. Ask yourself:

• How can a support agent save me time?
• How much time will be saved for me to do things I’m capable of?
• How many expected customer queries will my business get after the official launch?
• Do I need human agents, or are chatbots enough?
• Or do I need human agents in 6 months?
• Can I automate most customer inquiries? If yes, then how can I do it?
• Am I capable of handling these amounts of customer inquiries, or do I need to hire?

These are some initial questions you must ask yourself before launching your business. If you find most answers telling you that you need more hands in handling customers after-sales, it is inevitable that a customer support team is required for your business. Either you are an e-commerce store, agency, service provider, or consultancy, you should invest in customer support from day one.

Now that you know the benefits of investing in customer support, let’s help you define what excellent customer support is for your company.

Define “excellent customer support” for your business

Without a standard, it’s hard to measure success. Before building a customer support team, you need to set your standard for great customer support.

What do you mean by “great”? Or what does “excellent customer support” mean to you by definition?

Most companies provide customer support. But not all are the same. Some differentiate themselves by going the extra mile and going to great lengths for customer satisfaction.

Think outside the box about how you can differentiate your customer support from that of your competitors. What is one thing you are willing to do that your competitors are not thinking of doing?

Decide what type of service quality you are going to provide. And how are you going to ensure the results? Get your whole company behind the idea of your great customer support. It is important to ensure that your other teams understand the value of excellent customer support. It will help develop a company-wide customer-centric mindset and sophisticated team-wise collaboration.

When you clearly define excellent customer support, you can develop guidelines for your support team. You can select specific customer support metrics to measure their success.

We will discuss more guidelines and support metrics later in the structure and process steps. Now let’s dig into how you can make sure your customer support team conveys your brand and company value while interacting with customers every day.

Align your customer support with your brand and company values

We talked a lot about the tone of the brand’s voice in customer service previously. It means how you follow the same tone of voice in your copywriting, whether it’s your company’s website, brand brochure, other marketing materials, or customer service. Your brand tone of voice sets your brand personality. Your brand personality is essential to attracting your target audience.

Every company has values at its core. Values keep the business operations in check. Like when Google founders incorporated Google Inc., they came up with 10 main values Google will always follow. One is, “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”

These company values helped Google set their overall business policy and shape their brand personality.

What are your company’s values? What is your brand’s tone of voice?

When you clarify those two, you can easily implement them into your customer support policies and strategies. If your company wants to be known as a customer-centric company, then your value should reflect that customers are your first priority.

This value should dictate your excellent customer support definition, and your team should deliver on that promise. Remember, a customer service team can only deliver great customer service when, as a company, you make it happen.

Make sure, as a company, all of your teams are onboard about customer service policies and strategies. Customer support should not be a standalone department; it should seamlessly interact with other teams like the marketing and sales teams to provide customers with fast, reliable, and quality solutions.

Consideration for building a support team

How your employees interact with your customers sets the overall perception of the customer. Customers’ perspectives may change in a single interaction, no matter what your team members’ intentions are. Your team members need to understand that from the beginning.

Your customer service team should reflect your brand, your values, and your tone of voice. It takes more than positive interaction to achieve this; companies should have their goals, vision, and mission align with their strategies. Then you can build your customer service team on top of it.

Find out where your customers are and which channels to focus on for customer support.

The best way to provide great support is to know where your customers hang out and be there. Get more data on your customer demographics; analyze what channels they use more and what they are using more to contact you.

Is this your official email address? Your helpdesk portal? Live chat? Or your social media channels?

Many companies make the mistake of providing support on every channel before scaling up their customer support team. Ask yourself first:

• Are you ready to provide customer support on every channel?
• Can your team handle that much pressure?
• Are your team members trained for every channel?
• Is that okay for your team members’ mental health?

The answers are important to ensure your customer support team’s operation and efficiency. Find out what your business and customers need for support. Answer these questions:

• What is the standard of communication for your industry?
• Does your industry need face-to-face, online, or technical support?
• What primary communication tool do your customers use?
• What social media channel is popular with your customer demographics?

If your business serves older demographics, they are more comfortable with phone communication and, often, emails.

Younger generations like live chats, social media like Twitter, or self-help tools like knowledge bases and communities. Young demographics are comfortable using search engines, answer tools like Quora, discussion forms, Facebook groups, and Reddit to find the solutions themselves. Their short attention span requires quick answers.

You can easily cater to them by creating in-depth tutorials, customer support videos, documentation, and knowledge bases. You can also provide help desk and email communication for further communication.

Find out your customer demographics using which social media platforms most, and then start providing support from one or two. Do not spread your customer service team too thin. It will only frighten them; as a result, your customer will get inconsistent support, and customer churn will happen.

Take market data and analyze it. What are your competitors using to serve their customers? It is the easiest way to make sure you are on the right path. Now do whatever it takes to offer better customer service from them. Match the strength of your support team members with their preferred channels to provide quality customer support.

Review legal restrictions and examine necessary requirements

Now that you have decided on your support channels and mediums, it’s time to review legal restrictions and examine the necessary requirements. You should find the answers to these questions:

• Which country does your business cover?
• What rules do they have about customer data collection and use of this data?
• How are you going to follow the country’s law with your terms and conditions?

For example, the European Union demands GDPR compliance for every business. Consult with a legal expert when writing your business’s terms and conditions, disclaimer, use of user data, and other legal documents. Be sure to clearly make any legal requirements visible while onboarding new customers, because you don’t want to leave your customer in the dark about any policy changes in your customer support terms.

Point out potential legal troubles before offering customer service on various mediums and create systems for team members to tackle those when necessary. You can brainstorm different customer service situations and pain points and come up with solutions in advance to train your support team members. So when the actual event happens, they will know what to do or can manage related types of situations on their own.

Hire right people and build your team with right roles

Hiring the right agent for your customer support team is the key to quality support. It is crucial to find the right customer support agents, because they are the only part of your business that has the ability to influence your customers through one-to-one interactions.

Wrong people in any customer service team are the reasons for bad customer experiences. When you build your support team, you will have to appoint the right type of person who is compatible with your company’s values.

What type of person is best for a customer service job? The answers are:

• Empathic
• Active listener
• Problem solver
• Quick learner
• Technically skilled

Your right candidate knows what to do with responsibility and freedom. Empathy is a must-have characteristic you should look for while building your customer service team. If your agents can’t feel them in customer shoes, they will never understand customer fraustations. An empathic agent will actively listen to the customer and provide an exact solution to fulfill their immediate needs. They also know how to say no to customers professionally without upsetting them.

You can appoint support agents in-house or choose virtual support assistants to run your team. It depends on your business size, customer base, and daily incoming customer queries. A small e-commerce store may need 2–3 support agents to handle customers. You can manage it with a few virtual agents covering all time zones. But this can’t be done for a big business with lots of inventory or services and a huge customer base.

Choose which path is right for you and how you can scale if you need more agents to handle future customers. If you choose to build an in-house support team, you’ll need to clarify which roles and responsibilities your customer service team will take on.

You’ll need some essential roles to run customer support or service teams:

Customer support engineers – They are also known as customer service engineers. They handle all technical problems, run tests, diagnose problems, and offer tech solutions for your customers. This role required technical skills, an engineering degree in related fields, and often expertise in the industry the business covers.

Customer support specialist – They are mid-level support staff who are not heavily skilled like support engineers but can handle immediate tech issues, how to solve problems, and help customers with product installations and use. They are more required to have soft skills like active listening, emotional intelligence, and great communicator. Empathy also plays a huge role for customer support specialists.

Customer service managers – Managers are important for big support or service teams. They help you keep your agents motivated. They run the day-to-day operations of support teams and set daily, weekly, or monthly targets. Most times, they take new recruits under their belt and train them to become sophisticated customer support specialists or engineers. A customer service manager may have all the qualities of a service engineer, but it is not necessary to have degrees or expertise in specific fields to fulfill the role. They must know how to handle teams, agents, and customers in difficult situations with highly emotional intelligence. This role needs organizational skills more than technical skills.

Customer success managers – Many service-based and subscription-based businesses are now relying more on this role to provide better customer satisfaction. Customer success manager helps new customers onboard, helps them with product education, provides support when they need it, and builds long-term relationships with personal connections. It is different from support specialists because success managers focus on a few customers rather than providing support to all. Their main target is to deliver proactive support rather than general support. They ensure customers are achieving success through regular product use and stay with the customers as long as they stay active.

Customer onboarding specialist – When a new customer first purchases your products, they will need guidance on how to use it or to complete the purchase properly. Customer onboarding specialists help your user onboard, educate them with the benefits of the features, and guide them to solve one problem at a time. Customer onboarding specialists help you retain customers and stop customer churn after a few weeks of sign-up.

Customer service representative – Most service representatives handle customers primary inquiries offline or online, offer answers to refunds, process changes, and take new orders. They take care of customers’ basic needs, so customers do not need to wait or submit a ticket for further assistance. They minimize customer support specialists workload. Oftentimes, small businesses or startups can operate their support teams with customer service representatives and scale the team when necessary. This role requires fast problem-solving skills and soft skills like resourceful communication, empathy, and ability to handle rude customers.

Customer experience managers – Great customer experiences are the foundation of customer loyalty. Customer experience managers’ job is to find areas to improve, build, and implement strategies to deliver an excellent customer experience. They work closely with customer service managers and customer support specialists to improve customer interactions. Their main focus is to improve efficiency at every customer touch point and increase customer engagement.

Chief Customer Officer (CCO) – This new role is taking the business world by storm. Chief Customer Officer role demands are growing in customer-centric businesses. They are more like a hybrid of customer success managers and customer experience managers. The slight difference between the other two is that CCO is an executive position. They help management create new policies keeping customers’ needs and customer experiences in mind. Their focus is to make the business more customer-centric, increase customer retention, and build long-term customer relations.

These are some of the most popular roles in the support industry. Pick one that suits your needs, and create your customer support team around them.

Train your people and build a foundation from start

It’s essential that you build a strong foundation for your customer service team from the beginning. Most businesses see customer support as a cost center and try to cut their budget. They go for cheap talents for the support team.

It’s a mistake—a dangerous mistake for a business that just invested in a new customer support team.

Go for professionals for certain roles, like customer success managers, customer service managers, or customer support engineers. They are the main part of any support team. You only want experienced people in the field. But don’t feel scared to recruit new people if they meet your criteria and match the soft skills that are needed to run a customer support team. You can always train them and make them efficient with proper education and processes.

Remember, your skilled customer service team can increase customer retention, customer referrals, and quarterly sales. Serving customers with the right people is the key.

Train your new agents to use your products and services. You can tell an agent’s ability by how fast they catch up on using it and learn to do regular use cases. New agents can tag along old representatives to learn day-to-day work. This is to educate them on how to handle customers and teach them about customers’ pain points.

You can create a sandbox to teach new agents different scenarios before putting them into handling new customers. This way, they will gain confidence and cut nervousness during their first customer interaction. Internal documentation or wikis are nice tools to help new agents learn on the go.

Create a solid structure and process for your support team

A solid structure and process can run your customer support operation smoothly. Have a process for training new agents so you can easily train them, manage them, and put them right to work. Consider having a customer service playbook for everyone. In this playbook, you can find a short but understandable explanation and information about:

• Policies,
• Operation process,
• How to contact other team members
• Whom to knock when in trouble?
• Reply with templates to use.
• Examples of common cases and solutions
• Links to troubleshooting guides

If your support agents have to follow certain rules or processes, clarify them in your playbook or training. The more freedom you can give to your support teams, the more efficient they will be in real-life customer interactions.

Most times, the process needs to evolve around the structure of your company. Your customer support department structure needs to be close to your business structure. What is your business structure?

• Is it a small business or a start-up?
• Is it a mid-size company with different products serving different demographics?
• Is it an enterprise-level company serving both B2B or B2C?

Now that you know your business size, find out what type of customer support role you need to fill up your company support department. Start by appointing the right people for these roles and building the team gradually.

Create a customer expectation checklist or customer service commitment to create a seamless process. These checklists or service commitments can be private or you can make them public to boost your brand reputation among your customer base.

Research your market, do a competitor analysis, and find the answers to these questions:

• What is the average handling time in your industry?
• What is your competitor’s customer response time?
• What level of service are your competitors offering?

Now that you have all the answers, think of how you can manage to exceed customer expectations with your definition of customer support, your team, and the process you developed. Explore possibilities, tweak, experiment with what works, and evolve the process.

Create your customer support standard based on the answers to these questions:

• How fast are you going to reply to your customers?
• How will your support team handle different types of customers?
• What will be your refund or return policy?
• When and how do you say no to customers professionally?
• What will your ethical approach be to asking for reviews from customers?
• What should you do when your team is unable to provide support? How do you handle customers in these circumstances?
• What extra mile can an agent go to provide a great customer experience? What will be the limit on spending?
• What customer service metrics will your team follow for daily operations?

When you have a support standard with a solid team structure and process, your customer support team will run on their own without you micromanaging every little aspect.

Remember, the goal is to build a self-sufficient customer support department. So you can focus on other areas of your business.

Now, what tools should you use to run a self-sufficient customer service department?

Invest in the right tools

Customer support tools help your team speed up their work. These tools help with repetitive tasks, automation, team collaboration, and storing customer data like customer conversations, purchases, and more. Customer relationship management tools, or live chats, also play a huge role in customer service operations.

Ask yourself these questions before investing in tools:

• What value do the tools offer? Does it fulfill my needs?
• How fast can my team learn to use these tools? Will it be easy for customers to use?
• Do I need to use extra tools to get the most value out of the tool? Does it support integrations with the right tools?
• Does it make things easier to streamline support agents daily workflow?
• What type of automation does it offer?
• How sophisticated is it in reporting, data presentation, and analytics? Does it offer individual agent reporting?
• Does it offer vanity customer service metrics like waiting time, average handling time, average resolution time, or first response time?
• Can I scale my customer support department with this tool?
• Do I need to upgrade the tools to meet my future expectations?

These questions will help you prioritize what tools you need for your support operations. There are different types of customer support tools:

Chatbots – AI chatbots are now widely popular support trends to serve repetitive questions and answers. This saves agents time. But sometimes you will still need human agents available when an AI bot is unable to answer complex questions. 

Example: Crisp, Live Chat, Messenger.

Knowledge Base tools – These types of tools help you build your documentation or detailed knowledge base. You can create step-by-step detailed answers to frequently asked questions with SEO focus. So when a customer searches for them on any search engine, your answers will come up first. 

Example: Betterdocs

Helpdesk – Helpdesk tools help you serve customer queries from one place; you can source them from different channels and share the same inbox with multiple agents. Helpdesk has automation to automate repetitive tasks and manage daily workflows. It also offers an internal knowledge base and team collaboration tools built within the core helpdesk. You can also integrate other tools easily with a robust helpdesk system.

Example: Fluent Support

CRM tools – Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are useful when you have huge customers and want to collect and store their information. They also track sales, manage marketing, and manage email for businesses.

Example: FluentCRM, Hubspot.

Other Tools – There are other types of tools that may also come in handy for support operations. Like time management tools (Hubstaff), project management or bug reports (FluentBoards, Trello, Asana), learning management systems (LMS) like Learndash and TutorLMS, and internal communication tools (Slack, Telegram, or Discord). You can select these tools depending on your team’s needs.

Many small businesses make the mistake of not prioritizing investing in customer service tools. It is vital to think of these tools when building customer support tools. Not investing in the right tools can damage a customer service team’s time and energy.

You can start your service operation using free tools. There are plenty of them, but most free tools are limited, slow, and unhelpful. Eventually, you’ll need to scale up your support operations, and these free customer service tools will fall short of meeting the standards.

Small improvements in speed can increase customer satisfaction. Feature-rich tools can improve your team’s efficiency and comfort. Better internal tools can speed up smooth collaboration, avoiding collisions and confusion between team members.

Building an efficient support team requires the correct combination of the right people and the proper tools. You have a solid structure, a seamless process, and support agents in place. Now think of what tools the customer service team really needs for their day-to-day work and what tools can help them create a great customer experience for your users.

SaaS vs. self-hosted: which to choose?

Decide which customer support tool you want to use. Does live chat do the work? Or helpdesk is the answer?

Live chats are often used when you wish to serve your customer 24×7. Mostly, this tool is used to smooth customer onboarding or pre-sale support. You can integrate chat bots to answer frequently asked questions, no matter what time it is.

On the other hand, helpdesk unifies your customer communications. It saves all types of conversations, helps you automate repeated tasks, and fosters fast internal communication and team collaboration. Most help desk tools work with knowledge base tools automatically, so you can easily suggest related questions and answers right when customers open a support ticket.

As there are different types of customer support tools, there are also different categories of support tools. These tools have two main categories:

• Saas – Software as a Service (Saas) provides software services over the internet without you installing or hosting them on your system. You only have to visit the service provider, sign up, and start using the service. You don’t need to maintain the hardware or hosting. Your data is hosted and maintained by the cloud service you use.
• Self-hosted – Self-hosted system are open-source apps or premium apps you can buy and download. You manage them on your hardware or in your hosting space. You have to install, maintain, and operate the software to run it for your use. You own the data because it sits on your system or hosting.

There are a few pros and cons to using both SaaS and self-hosted tools. If you have a relatively small, consistent team of 2-3 agents, then you can select SaaS support tools. Because most SaaS support companies price their plans based on how many agents you have, If you don’t mind paying per agent and don’t plan to scale your support operations, you can go for SaaS tools. Some most used SaaS support tools are:

• Zendesk
• FreshDesk
• Helpscout
• Helpcrunch

The disadvantage of using these services is that you don’t own the data. You can’t import or export your data as you wish. You’re at the mercy of your provider’s hand. There are also limitations on how many users, tickets, or agents you can serve or add, how many integrations you can use, and more. Sometimes you have to buy premium add-ons to use certain features. The cost builds up eventually. And if you ever decide to scale up your support team, add more agents, and serve more users, the cost will go up. For a small business, this may seem unjustifiable!

On the other hand, self-hosted apps offer more flexibility. You can expand open-source apps for your own needs and customize them freely. All the data is also accessible to you because it’s hosted by you. If your customers are sensitive about their data and privacy, self-hosted tools are the only answer. Some popular self-hosted tools are:

• Fluent Support
• Awesome Support
• Support Candy
• Chatwoot
• Live Helper Chat

These apps offer to host your customer support data on your own hosting. You can ensure your customers privacy by providing customer support using any of these apps. You can design your privacy policy based on where your business is. You can choose how to backup your data by following those policies. You can offer higher security to your customers to win their trust.

Self-hosting gives you the freedom not to share your data with third parties. Most SaaS tools come short in these situations because customer data protection is now a sensitive issue all over the world. You can scale your customer support department whenever you need to with self-hosted apps.

The best self-hosted customer support tools

Now that we proved self-hosted apps are more flexible than SaaS tools, it’s time to choose the best self-hosted customer support tools. We will compare the tools from the previous list.

Check out this comparison table between Fluent Support, Awesome Support, JS Helpdesk, and Support Candy:

You’ll clearly see that Fluent Support is winning in all categories. Here are some features that make Fluent Support the best self-hosted support tool:

• Fluent Support offers unlimited agents, users, and tickets. You don’t have to stress over limits; install the plugin and start using it. It only takes 5 minutes to set up Fluent Support.
• Fluent Support has a flexible pricing plan. It does not sell premium add-ons like others. All features are included in every pricing plan.
• Fluent Support offers 20+ integrations, including WooCommerce, Learndash, Easy Digital Downloads, Slack, and more.
• It has easy integration with Slack, Telegram, Discord, and Whatsapp. Your agents can attend to tickets and reply right from these messaging apps chatboxes.
• It has seamless integration with the email marketing tool FluentCRM, project management tool FluentBoards, and the custom form plugin Fluent Forms. You can create support forms with Fluent Forms and integrate them with Fluent Support’s backend. You can run email automation using the Fluent Support block inside FluentCRM.
• Fluent Support integrates effortlessly with LMS plugins like Learndash, LifterLMS, TutorLMS, and LearnPress. You can provide customer support to your course students without any hassle. Their purchase details are accessible right into their support tickets.
• It has a superior automation system that can help you automate most repetitive tasks and enable fast ticket replies. Fluent Support Automation helps you serve more customers faster than most of its competitors.
• Fluent Support allows for advanced filtering and sorting. This makes it easier to manage tickets and respond quickly.
• You can create separate inboxes for different businesses. This helps prevent confusion and lets you manage tickets based on products.
• The customizable and custom ticket portal lets you keep your website’s branding. This offers a smooth customer experience.
• Detailed customer profiles give easy access to important information.
• Collision detection alerts you when multiple agents enter the same ticket. This ensures that everyone knows who is handling the query.
• Email piping turns email queries into support tickets. This ensures that no customer query is missed and all are managed in one place.
• It has integration logs, and the activity logs track every action taken by agents in real-time. This provides a complete record of all activities within the support desk.

These are some of the most recognized features of Fluent Support that differentiate it from other self-hosted plugins. You can explore more features here.

Setup Fluent Support in 5 minutes!

Starting with Fluent Support is fairly simple.

If you are using WordPress to build your website, simply install the Fluent Support plugin and activate it. You can use a short code to put the customer support area on any page you want. You can build a custom page for the support-related staff, or you can use the default page provided by the plugin.

Don’t you use WordPress?

No problem; you can set up Fluent Support on your subdomain like WP Manage Ninja does. Their main domain is wpmanageninja.com, but their support portal is hosted in a different sub-domain, support.wpmanageninja.com.

After installation, activate the plugin and set up the settings. In the setting, you can set up two kinds of business inboxes:

• Web-based: You can only offer support through your website. Customers have to log in to submit tickets.
• Email-based: You can offer support using an email. Customers can send email to the email address, and your support agents can reply to the email from your support dashboard. Think of it like a shared inbox.

Research your customers behavior—how they wish to connect with you and what medium they most use to contact you.

Then you can easily choose which route is best for you—web or email?

You may use different platforms for your business, like Shopify, a custom CMS, or any other no-code tools to host your business, but you can use WordPress and Fluent Support to host your customer support department in your subdomain without any hassle.

Learn fluent support in an hour!

Follow this video to set up a web-based Fluent Support business inbox.

Want to offer email support? Set up an email-based customer support portal through email piping. Follow this video:

It showed how to add Gmail to your email inbox in this video. Fluent Support also offers other platforms.

Forward or redirect from an email provider or a host:

• Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite)
• Office 365 Outlook Web Access (OWA)
• Amazon WorkMail
• Zoho Mail
• Yahoo Mail

• Bluehost
• Namecheap
• cPanel
• GoDaddy
• Dreamhost

You can click and follow the individual documentation to start with the setup.

Fluent Support’s whole set of settings is centered in the “Global Settings.” Here is a video walkthrough on how you can set it up.

How do I automate support tasks with Fluent Support?

Automation is a big part of Fluent Support. It is also essential for any customer support operation.

Automation saves time, speeds up daily operations, and helps your customer support department with efficient team collaboration. Fluent support helps you do these using manual and ticket workflow automations.

You can run a manual workflow and set the following actions:

You can run these inside any support ticket manually. But what about repetitive tasks? Or if you want to add tags automatically to a ticket, Or do you want to assign agents to new tickets?

Automatic workflows do that seamlessly!

Use automatic automation to set tasks to be done automatically inside Fluent Support based on certain triggers and using certain actions.

There are 3 triggers: on ticket creation, on customer response, and on ticket closure.

Here are the actions that can be performed based on the triggers:

• Add Response
• Assign Agent
• Add Internal Note
• Close Ticket
• Add Tag(s)
• Remove Tag(s)
• Delete Ticket
• Block Ticket Submitter (Customer)
• Trigger Outgoing Webhook
• Add Bookmarks

Here are some live examples of automatic workflows. You can implement your own use cases based on your needs. Watch this video to get the idea!

Optimize your help desk based on your business needs.

Fluent Support is a flexible help desk. You can optimize it based on your business needs and integrate it with 20+ tools easily. Let’s look into some business categories and use cases for optimization.

E-commerce: Most WordPress e-commerce businesses run on the WooCommerce plugin. Fluent Support offers seamless WooCommerce integrations.

You don’t have to do anything if you have Fluent Support installed on your WooCommerce sites. It will show customers recent purchases right in their support tickets. Your agents don’t have to click anything or open a new window to access this information. This will save them time, and they can attend to more customer queries.

You can also offer custom fields in your support tickets related to your WooCommerce products. So customers can easily select the WooCommerce product related to the support inquiry.

You can set up different products or ticket tags in business settings. Then you can use these tags and products specifically in workflow automation to assign different agents to different product-related support tickets.

Fluent Support’s ‘Internal Notes’ are the best way to collaborate with other agents, and you can see which agents are working on which support tickets using agent collision detection.

Your agents can bookmark tickets while they are working and access them from their bookmarks later. Fluent supports easy integrations with tools like Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord. Your agents can receive and reply to support tickets from their Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp chats. Only Discord integration offers ticket notifications for now. Your agents attend to customers wherever they are, even if they only have mobile and internet access! Fluent Support is fully mobile-responsive and can load support tickets in mobile browsers.

Entrepreneur – Are you an entrepreneur or a solopreneur? Running your business on your own?

Most solopreneurs depend on virtual assistance (VA) to cover their customer support. It is more hassle-free than hiring a full in-house team. Solopreneurs want to live headache-free. Most of their business runs on automation.

That’s why they need tools that can help them automate mostly anything and everything. Fluent Support comes in handy on this.

You can automate all types of customer queries with Fluent Support Workflow settings. You can automatically send repetitive questions answered with saved replies and use knowledge base integration to serve related questions answered right into the customer support forms. Fluent Support offers a shared inbox, so any solopreneurs can add their VA to the system. All you have to give them is access to support staff settings. You can set up customer support for multiple business emails with Fluent Support’s different business inboxes.

Your VAs can manage different products or different types of customers assigned to them from one dashboard. You can communicate with them using ‘Internal Notes’ and assign them tickets. Fluent Support can help you manage your multiple VA’s from one system without wasting time on different tools and emails.

Agency: Running an agency with multiple clients is a hectic operation. How can fluent support help you streamline your agency’s customer support?

Fluent Support offers a modest agency plan for agency owners. You can buy this to offer Fluent Support for multiple clients.

For your own customer support, you can create multiple business inboxes for your multiple clients and assign different agents to manage those business inboxes. If you use Slack for internal communication, you can easily connect it with Fluent Support to serve and manage tickets from Slack quickly!

Course sellers: – Selling courses from your website? Need to offer fast customer support for your buyers?

No worries. Fluent Support has seamless integrations with most LMS systems. It has integration support with LearnDash (10K+ users), TutorLMS (50K+ users), LifterLMS (10K+ users), and LearnPress (100K+ users).

Fluent Support shows your customers recent courses on their support tickets. You can also add custom fields related to your course on support forms. So customers can easily select the course title related to the support queries.

If your course site also has a membership system, Fluent Support offers integrations with the most popular membership systems, like Buddyboss, Paid Membership Pro, Wishlist Members, and Restrict Content Pro. Fluent Support shows your customers membership levels in their support tickets, along with other related information. You can add custom fields related to these membership systems, like the LMS systems.

Build self-service tools and community support.

There is a catchphrase popular in the support industry;

Customers don’t want to wait for solutions. They have the power to find the answers themselves. All you need to do is help them with self-service tools.

Most self-service tools are knowledge bases, AI chatbots, video tutorials, in-depth guides, and often community forums. These take time to build, but if you take the time to invest in them, it can help you tenfold. Self-service tools can reduce customers’ support tickets and save agents time. If you build these with SEO-focused intent, then your customers will find them easily with a search. It will also increase your brand awareness among customers. It can help your existing customers, but it can also reach new customers through the content itself.

Community forums can help you build customer loyalty, brand reputation, and unlimited customer-generated content. As a brand, you can offer a place for your existing customers online. They can hang out, ask questions, and help each other. Your agents can often answer complex questions and engage with customers regularly. Community forums can help you understand customers’ perspectives and generate feature ideas.

You can use the community to shape your brand’s reputation. A community can be a hub for cultivating loyal customers. You can offer rewards, discounts, and other offers for your community members. Engage communities, increase customers’ trust, and make your brand more connected with them on a personal level. Every business should take the time to build a community around their brand. Community forums are also the best tools to grow organic reach. And we all know that word of mouth is the best way to attract new customers!

Gather, measure, and analyze customer feedback and support data.

Customer support data and customer feedback are the most valuable assets of any business. Customer support data will help you understand how your support department is performing, what you are lacking, whether your customers are happy or not, and how you can scale your support department faster.

On the other hand, customer feedback can help you understand customers’ perspectives about your brands, customer experiences, and expectations about your products or services. You should not ignore this data and plan on collecting it from the beginning via customer survey.

You can use different methods and tools to collect this data:

• Your help desk should have the ability to provide various reports about support ticket data, individual agent reports, first response time, average handling time, and other vanity customer service metrics. These metrics will help you understand your customer support department’s performance. For example, Fluent Support has dedicated report tabs for this.
  
• You can set up different surveys to collect customer feedback with tools like Fluent Forms. You can do customer feedback surveys and customer satisfaction surveys to learn more about customer pain points, agent performance, team efficiency, and product usefulness.
  
• You can use direct phone calls to gather feedback from your long-term customers. Older, existing customers are more eager to share feedback than new customers.
  
• You can run automation with helpdesks (like Fluent Support Workflows) to send certain questions in different forms based on different keywords.
  
• You can collect data from your community forums, customer interactions, or run surveys from time to time to gather feedback data.
  
• You can follow your social channels or customer conversations to gather social data from various social networks.

The next step after gathering data is to analyze and measure it. Many customer support data points are easy to measure. Your help desk will do the job. Help desk data will help you understand customer behavior and help you run your customer service department efficiently.

Your customer feedback data will help streamline your customer onboarding, build better products or services, and increase customer retention. This is your customer feedback loop.

Conclusion

Building a customer support team needs thorough planning, clarity, and enough investment. Creating a support system is not a one-time job; it’s running work. As a business owner, you will need to embrace customer support as the main part of your business to become a customer-centric company.

Great customer experience can help you build a brand reputation quickly, and the only way to make it happen is when your whole company is obsessed with customer service. 86% of customers are willing to pay you more if they are satisfied with your customer service.

A fully empowered customer support team has the ability to ensure an excellent customer experience. Build a support department with clear intent, invest in the right tools, and hire the right people to do the job. Listen to your customers, take proactive actions, and motivate your service team. Your customer acquisition cost will reduce, customers will reward you with their loyalty, increased purchases, and high referrals.

The post How To Build A Customer Support Team – Complete Guide appeared first on Fluent Support.

Before we get into the questions, we have to mention that we are skipping the obvious ones. Such as introducing yourself, or where do you see yourself five years from now? You should be prepared for these as well.

These 10 questions that we listed are going to explore your work-related expertise.

10 Customer Service Interview Questions

Interviews for customer service can be a bit intimidating. But if you have the right interview questions for the support position, then this will not be an issue.

Let’s start with the first question.

What is customer service? What does customer service mean to you?

Possible answers: 

The interaction between the customer and the company is called customer service. In general, customers seek service at different touchpoints. It could start with marketing, sales, and after-sale service.

For me, customer service means solving customer issues. And ensure a great and seamless experience for the customer. As per my expertise, it can deal with technical issues. That may include providing training, troubleshooting, and answering technical questions.

All in all, make the customer as knowledgeable as possible about all technical aspects of the product. So that customers do not feel puzzled when using it.

Tell me about a situation where you had to solve a difficult problem.

Possible answer:

I was working as a technical support specialist for a WordPress plugin development company. During that time, I received a ticket from a customer who was having trouble installing a product. The customer was unable to install the plugin due to a lack of understanding of WordPress.

First, I listened to the customer’s problem and tried to understand the issue. Once I had a better understanding of the problem, I began telling the customer about WordPress and plugins. Even though the customer was cooperative, it wasn’t easy.

I was starting to get frustrated, but I knew that I had to help the customer. So, I decided to take a step back and think about the problem from a different perspective. I came up with a new solution. Instead of explaining how the system works, I focused on the installation issue first.

Eventually, the customer successfully installed the plugin, and then I provided some training material on WordPress for self-training. The customer was happy because he was able to install the plugin and could learn WordPress at his own pace later on.

Describe a time when you made a mistake at work and how you handled it.

Possible answer:

Once, I got a support ticket from a customer. The customer was having trouble updating a WordPress theme automatically. So, I suggested updating the theme manually using FillZilla.

So by maintaining some usual protocol, I started uploading the updated files to the server. About halfway through, the client knocked, saying that the pages they updated from their end were disappearing.

Download the full eBook guide on “How to build a customer support team”. This eBook has additional resources for further study.

The form can be filled in the actual website url.

I realized that the updated theme files did not contain pages that had been added by the customer. And because of the manual update, those pages were deleted.

I immediately apologized for this mistake to the customer. And I assured the client that the damage is 100% recoverable. As I backed up everything beforehand, It didn’t take too much time to recover.

The customer was very understanding and supportive during the process. I worked some extra time on the ticket, solved the issues, and closed the ticket with success.

How can you improve a dissatisfied customer’s experience? Explain this for both known and unknown issues.

Possible answer:

In my experience, the first mistake we make is to start solving the issue immediately. This approach seems very obvious, but it can backfire. Because customers might think you didn’t communicate properly.

So, I would take some time and listen to the customer. This will also help me understand why the customer is not satisfied. I will show empathy during the conversation and ensure a proper solution to the issue.

For known issues, we will work as per the protocol for those issues. And these are usually easy to fix. But with unknown issues, this situation can be a bit tricky. The customer can be even more frustrated because of the uncertainty and delay.

So, the best way to be engaged with customers is to provide updates. Updates on every possible step of the ticket will assure the customer that the team is working on it for a solution.

A clear, step-by-step progression of the issues will make the client more confident. And in some cases, there is a good chance that before getting the solution, the customer will be satisfied.

What’s the One Time You Worked With a Difficult Customer, and How Did You Resolve the Situation?

Possible answer:

I once had a difficult customer who was very angry because a plugin’s output wasn’t showing. The customer was yelling and swearing at me, and they were threatening to cancel and go to the competitors.

I stayed calm and actively listened to the customer’s issues. Then I told them that I understood their frustration. I then asked them to share some information.

Once I had a better understanding of the problem, I realized it was an easy fix. I gave instructions for the solutions, and the solutions worked. The customer started to calm down their anger.

Eventually, the system began to function properly. The customer was very happy that I was able to help them. The customer did apologize for their behavior and gave us a five-star rating for the best support.

How would you handle a customer you knew was wrong?

We all know that the customer is always right. But this is not always true. From time to time, customers can also be wrong. So, you have to handle these customers with special care to de-escalate the situation.

Possible answer:

Once, I got a ticket about an integration issue with our product. The customer was convinced that they were assured of the particular integration during the purchase. But our product had no such integration from the beginning.

The customer was very angry about this and was using harsh words. In this situation, I listen to the issue. I calmed them down. From my end, I started to show all the documents for our products regarding integration.

But the customer was convinced that they asked for a refund for false marketing. At this point, I politely asked for any marketing material, email conversation, or documentation that they received that mentioned such an interaction.

The customer took some time to answer this. After a few hours, they reached us again. This time they are calmed down and share about a miscommunication from their end.

I was immediately assured that this can happen to anyone, and I understand the initial frustration. Afterward, I share a few of the best alternative integrations that can help them with the issues. They were very happy about the alternative suggestions.

What skills should a great customer service representative have?

Possible answer:

I think among all of the qualities, a great customer service representative must have these five qualities.

Communication: Our communication should be top-notch. We should be experts in both verbal and written communication. We should be able to understand customers easily and respond accordingly.

Problem-solving: We need to be critical thinkers and creative solvers. We should identify the customer’s issues quickly and figure out the best solution possible on the go.

Empathy: We should understand the frustration and struggle of a customer. We should be able to empathize with the customer and acknowledge their pain points.

Patience: We should be able to stay calm in any situation. Sometimes customers can get angry or take time to explain their situation. We need to be as calm and patient as possible in those situations.

Product Knowledge: Finally, we should have the most up-to-date knowledge about the product we are providing service for.

What role does empathy play in customer service?

This question could be a follow-up question to the previous question or to any other question. Try to be relatable to the previous one if it’s a follow-up question. As a follow-up question, try not to elaborate too much.

Possible answer:

Communication with empathy is vital. From time to time, customers can get frustrated or even angry. I need to have the ability to understand their frustration. I need to let the customer know that I understand the struggle.

This simple approach with empathy can change the point of view of your customer towards you. As a result, it will create a positive brand perception.

When is the right time to escalate a customer ticket?

This type of question is asked to see if you understand how support works and what to do in a critical situation. So, the answer should be to-the-point and concise.

Possible answer:

First, we have to understand that ticket escalation is the last step we can take. And generally, ticket escalation is not required. But there are definitely situations where escalation is required.

When every possible solution is tried but I am still unable to solve the issue, it is time to escalate a ticket.

A ticket can be escalated in two ways. Either it could be a hierarchical escalation or a functional escalation.

Hierarchical escalation is simply passing the ticket to my supervisor. Functional escalation means passing the ticket to a respected team that can solve the issue effectively and efficiently.

Depending on the situation and urgency of the ticket, upon discussion, I will conduct the escalation.

What Do You Know About Our Product or Our Company?

This question is asked to see your research capability and your product’s understandability. Before you walk in for the interview, spend some time researching the business.

Try to find out how many products they have. What niche they are targeting. What are their main products? And what product are you more concerned about?

Also, spend some time researching their market and targeted customers What is the demography and age group of those customers?

These small details will make a special impression on your employers. Will present you as an interested candidate.

After all, being a customer service agent means being proactive.

Tech support leads’ advice

We have contacted a few industry experts and asked for their advice. And if you are new to customer service, then you should read these.

Md Kamrul Islam

Head of Technical Support
WPManageNinja LLC

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“Develop problem-solving skills, foster empathy, and embrace continuous learning. Your journey to excellence begins with curiosity and dedication.“

Toufiqur Rahman

Lead, Teach Support
JoomShaper

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“To ensure a satisfied customer, you should make an effort to understand the user’s query by paying attention. If you don’t understand, you should inform the user. If you still don’t understand, you can request that they provide you with screenshots or screencast videos. Afterward, you should attempt to diagnose and resolve the issue from your end. Then, explain the process of solving the problem to the user. Once you’ve completed your work, commit it to GitHub and push it. The developer team will review, merge, and release it in the next release while informing the user.

You must convey to the user that you are concerned about their problem. Maintain effective communication so they can comprehend that you are making an effort to help them resolve the issue. If it takes time to resolve the problem, be sure to keep the customer informed or updated. If something is impossible, politely convey to the customer that it’s not feasible. The key is to build trust with the user regarding your company and product and share that responsibility with the support team.”

Khan Rafin Ahmed

Head of Support & Product
WPDeveloper

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“From my years of experience, I firmly believe that soft skills are the most important aspect of the “Customer Support” role. Success in this position heavily depends on your ability to communicate effectively, actively listen, and maintain a positive attitude. While technical skills can be quite handy, without those soft skills, long-term progress in your career can be challenging.

Moreover, emphasize your ability to actively listen, empathize with customers, and provide responses that are clear and concise. Try growing the habit of re-reading customer queries till you have the full grasp of the problem. If you still have confusions, don’t hesitate to ask your colleagues questions even if you feel a bit embarrassed.

Let’s face it, “Customer Support” can be a really stressful job sometimes. So, it’s really crucial to keep a cool head, stay positive and most importantly, be patient. Developing these traits can also benefit you in your real life when dealing with stressful situations. These skills & qualities will go a long way in building positive customer relationships and ensuring success in your role.”

Final thoughts

Well, it’s almost impossible to know what question the interviewer is going to ask. But studying some possible questions will give you some confidence to face the interview.

Be sure before answering any question. Be confident about your answer, and try to use your previous knowledge and experience during the interview. And hope you get the
customer service interview questions and answers PDF for future job prep.

At the end, it does not matter what customer service interview questions you face; your knowledge and smart answers will get you the job. So, best of luck.

The post 10 Customer Service Interview Questions And Answers appeared first on Fluent Support.

When considering choices like a new apartment, job switch, gadget, or vacation, we instinctively seek online information and ask for personal referrals. And it’s no surprise that our decisions are now mostly influenced by these two key factors,

1. Online research.
2. Recommendations from loved ones. (Recommendations carry immense weight)

According to research by BrightLocal, “a striking 91% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews. And, 84% trust them as much as personal referrals.” This highlights the pivotal role customer feedback plays in shaping brand perceptions. 

Surprisingly, even if you excel in branding, content creation, and email marketing, a single negative customer experience can profoundly impact your business, potentially costing valuable prospects. Customers are more likely to share negative experiences, reaching nearly three times as many people as positive ones.

Social media has made sharing recommendations and grievances effortless. By collecting and acting promptly on customer feedback, you can prevent negative experiences, foster satisfaction, and drive organic referrals.

That’s where Net Promoter Score (NPS®) comes into play. So, if you want to learn more about it and take another leap toward customer loyalty and advocacy, keep reading.

Basically, it asks questions like: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company?”

NPS is crucial for businesses of all sizes. It focuses on earning enthusiastic customers and provides a trackable measure over time. Unlike other metrics, NPS captures overall sentiment towards a brand, offering actionable insights for enhancing the customer experience.

Moreover, it can assess employee satisfaction, providing internal insights.

Good Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) can range from -100 to +100. An NPS between 0 and 30 is alright, but there’s definitely room to step up your game. If you hit above 0, that’s a good start, but the real excitement kicks in when you cross the 50 mark. That’s when things get great. 

And if you manage to go beyond 70, well, you’re entering the realm of excellence. However, achieving those numbers is no walk in the park. It’s outstanding and rare.

In New Zealand and Australia, they keep it simple. Anything above 0 is considered “good.” But remember that what’s considered “good,” “bad,” or “neutral” can wildly differ from one industry to another. 

How to calculate Net Promoter Score

To calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS), conduct a customer survey using the questions like:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” 

Categorize respondents based on their scores: 0-6 as Detractors, 7-8 as Passives, and 9-10 as Promoters. 

Exclude Passives from the calculation. Subtract (-) the percentage of Detractor responses from the percentage of Promoter responses to obtain your NPS. The NPS scale ranges from -100 to 100.

NPS online calculation

Try our live NPS calculator and see the results instantly!

Powered by FluentForms

Key Benefits of Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Here are the 5 key benefits of NPS briefly discussed below:

1. Measures customer loyalty and identifies potential churn: NPS evaluates customer likelihood of recommending your product/company. It helps identify customers at risk of churning. That allows you to focus on retaining and empowering existing customers.

2. Tracks change in NPS for overall customer sentiment: Monitoring NPS scores and analyzing the breakdown of scores (promoters, passives, detractors). It provides insights into trends and helps customer success teams measure customer perception.

3. Drives improvements based on customer feedback: Low NPS scores present an opportunity to gather specific comments and evaluate qualitative feedback for product or service enhancements. Addressing issues highlighted by customers can lead to improved experiences and higher NPS.

4. Boosts referral marketing and customer advocacy: NPS indicates the likelihood of earning recommendations from satisfied customers. This can significantly impact business growth. Leveraging referrals through case studies, testimonials, and brand ambassador programs further enhances customer loyalty.

5. Prioritizes engagement with detractors: Detractors, those who give low NPS scores, require special attention. Following up with detractors, understanding their concerns, and addressing issues can prevent churn and negative word-of-mouth.

Promoter, Passive, and Detractor

Promoters are loyal advocates, detractors are unhappy customers, and passives are indifferent or neutral toward your business. Let’s take a quick look at their characteristics and learn how to deal with them.

What are Promoters?

Promoters are the raving fans of your business/product/services. They are the ones who rate your business with a 9 or 10. Think of them as the die-hard followers who spread the word about your brand. For example, when iPhone users can’t stop talking about the latest iPhone releases.

What are Passives?

Passives are the people who fall in the middle category. They are those who rate your business with a 7 or 8. They might not be actively recommending your brand, but they’re not completely disengaged either. 

They’re like the customers who enjoy a decent cup of coffee at a local café but haven’t yet become regulars.

What are Detractors?

Detractors are unhappy customers who score you from 0 to 6. They had a bad experience and are at risk of leaving your brand.

They have the potential to damage your reputation by sharing their negative experiences. It is similar to someone having a terrible hotel stay and leaving scathing reviews online.

How to deal with them?

Here are a few effective strategies to engage with promoters, passives, and detractors.

Dealing with Promoters:

• Maintain high standards and consistent experiences.
• Identify and continue doing the right things to keep them happy.
• Encourage them to become brand ambassadors with referral bonuses.

How to deal with Passives:

• Identify what’s lacking in their experiences.
• Allow them to express themselves through open-ended questions.
• Fill in the missing pieces and provide better experiences.
• Engage them with meaningful interactions and prove your value.

Dealing with Detractors:

• React quickly to identify the reasons behind their bad experiences.
• Incorporate feedback into customer journey mapping.
• Offer perks or bonuses to mitigate their negative experiences.
• Avoid using discounts as bribes; focus on addressing their needs.
• Respond promptly to issues and address their concerns.

Covert Passives and Detractors into Promoters

Discover how to convert passives and detractors into loyal business promoters.

Converting Passives into Promoters

• Get them talking by reaching out with sincere messages.
• Ask direct questions, leaving no space for neutrality.
• Adapt the customer journey based on their feedback.
• Focus on improving your brand and addressing its needs.

Converting Detractors into Promoters

• Use the human touch and open the path to reconciliation.
• React quickly to negative feedback and let customers know you’ve heard them.
• Recognize their concerns, empathize, and prioritize problem-solving.
• Fix their problems, even if it means offering a refund.
• Learn from their feedback to improve the overall CX.
• Build trust and show you have their best interests at heart.
• Be sincere, and honest, And address their concerns promptly.

By learning from mistakes, keeping promises, empathizing, and being honest, you can effectively deal with Promoters, Detractors, and Passives.

Through sincere engagement, quick problem-solving, and continuous improvement, you can convert Detractors and Passives into loyal Promoters.

How to create an NPS calculator in Excel Sheet

An Excel-based NPS calculator streamlines feedback collection, customization, and data analysis. Moreover, it centralizes storage, leverages skills, and integrates for seamless tracking. So, here’s how you can create one for your business:

Open a new Excel spreadsheet.

1. In cell A1, enter the label “Promoters.”
2. In B1, enter the label “Detractors.”
3. In C1, enter the label “Total Responses.”
4. In D1, enter the label “NPS.”
5. In A2, enter the number of promoters (9-10 rating) that you have.
6. In B2, enter the number of detractors (0-6 rating) that you have.
7. In C2, enter the following formula to calculate the total responses: = A2 + B2
8. In D2, enter the following formula to calculate the NPS: = (A2 – B2) / C2 * 100

To format cell D2 as a percentage, select the cell and click the “%” button in the “Number” section of the “Home” tab. The NPS will be automatically calculated in cell D2 based on the number of promoters and detractors in cells A2 and B2. 

You can copy the formulas in cells C2 and D2 for additional calculations if needed. Adjust the cell references if you move the data or expand the calculator.

How to improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) – without focusing on the score

The Net Promoter System ain’t just about getting scores. It’s about digging deep and finding better solutions. Here are 6 steps you can follow to improve your NPS without focusing on the score:

1. Don’t ignore the feedback!

When you get feedback, take action! Reach out to those detractors, and those low scorers. Show them you care. 

To gather additional feedback and steer your efforts towards a customer-centric approach, leverage various techniques like conducting direct interviews, sending follow-up emails, and more.

Get a manager or employee on the case, take their complaints seriously, and work really hard to fix the situation. Even if you can’t fix it, explain why and let them know you care. That’s how you start repairing relationships!

2. Get the whole squad on board

You got to make sure everyone in your organization is down with the NPS game. Get your employees excited about winning over as many promoters as possible. Make it clear what NPS is all about, how it’s tracked, and how it can impact those annual reviews. 

3. Hold regular sessions & meetings to talk about NPS

Fred Reichheld, the NPS mastermind, calls them “huddles.” These short, interactive meetings are where the magic happens. Reaffirm everyone’s commitment to delivering kick-ass customer experiences. This is the place to talk about service escalations, and brainstorm solutions. Make sure everyone’s on the same page. 

4. Feedback = Training fuel

Those NPS surveys are like gold mines. They give you open-ended feedback that can point you to areas where your staff and departments can level up. Use that feedback as a guide to provide targeted training. Teach your employees how to step up their game and deliver an epic customer experience.

5. Find the root cause

When you analyze NPS feedback, you might spot some patterns. Some departments have haters, while others are getting love all day long. That is when you roll up your sleeves and do a thorough root-cause analysis. 

Figure out if it’s the department, the product line, or something else entirely that’s causing those low scores. Get to the bottom of it and fix it. 

6. Measure the Impact and make structural changes

If the data’s telling you there’s a structural problem, then make changes to your products, policies, and messaging where it makes sense. Regularly keep track of your NPS scores and compare them before and after the changes.

NPS survey 

By following these tips, you can effectively analyze your NPS survey data, gain valuable insights, and take targeted actions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

NPS survey analysis: Understanding your Net Promoter Score

Here are some tips to help you make sense of the survey data:

• Understand the NPS analysis: A good NPS score falls between 0 and 100. Below 0 means more unhappy customers, while above 70 indicates strong customer advocacy.

• Examine NPS distribution: Look closely at the distribution of Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. This is important when comparing different business locations or surveying different customer segments.

• Identify effective survey channels: Determine which survey channels work best for your audience. Segment your customers based on demographics or preferences and use the most appropriate channels to increase response rates.

• Focus on customer engagement: Find out which customers engage the most with your surveys. Target those with high response rates. Furthermore, address low response rates to understand the reasons behind their disengagement.

• Analyze feedback sentiment: Use sentiment analysis to get customer opinions based on their comments. Identify potential issues and prioritize negative feedback from Promoters to prevent customer churn.

• Use Text Analysis: Utilize automated text analysis tools to process large volumes of NPS responses. Group feedback into themes to identify common pain points and areas for improvement.

• Take Action on feedback: Actively respond to customer feedback and close the loop on any negative experiences. Share insights across departments to improve product development, customer support, and marketing campaigns.

• Monitor satisfaction at different stages: Segment customer satisfaction data by lifecycle stages. It is to tailor future campaigns and personalize survey templates.

• Analyze engagement metrics: Correlate customer segments with engagement metrics like session frequency, page visits, and click-through rates. Use this information to drive more engagement from Promoters, and re-engage Detractors.

Let’s look at a few examples of NPS survey questions you can ask to gather customer feedback.

Now, let’s learn how to write an NPS email that can get you a great number of responses.

How to write an NPS email that gets responses

Writing a killer NPS email requires more than a quick note and a survey link. It’s a tad more complex. It doesn’t take much extra effort to craft an engaging NPS email. Here are some lowdowns:

• Set clear expectations: Don’t confuse your customers. Keep it short and focused. For instance, start by saying, “Hey there, noticed you’re a daily user. Help us improve by sharing your feedback.”

• Brand it up ditch blandness: A branded email stands out and reinforces your identity. Tools like Refiner make customization a breeze, using your colors and templates.

• Be human: People prefer emails from real folks, not faceless brands. Let your NPS email come from a team member. Adopt a warm, personal tone to foster a genuine connection.

• Keep it Snappy: Short and Sweet wins the race. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Trim the fat, axing anything that doesn’t add value. A/B test and refine for future success.

• Crystal clear: Simple language rocks. Ensure your instructions are easy to grasp. Avoid lengthy explanations about NPS; stick to what matters to your customers.

• Embed or direct? Your call. Some prefer linking to an external survey, but embedding it in the email minimizes friction and boosts engagement. Choose what works best for your audience.

NPS email example

Here’s a quick email example that you can follow to get started.

Keep in mind:

• Segment for relevance.
• Timing matters, don’t rush.
• Add follow-up questions for deeper insights.
• Be clear about the time commitment.
• Show customers they’re valued.
• Optimize for mobile.
• A/B tests one thing at a time.

NPS email best practices

Want to boost your response rates in the next NPS email? Follow these 7 tips to make it happen:

1. Brand your email for impact.
2. Send from a person, not a brand.
3. Keep it short and focused.
4. Use simple and clear language.
5. Choose between embedding or directing to the survey.
6. Consider follow-up questions for deeper insights.
7. Communicate the time commitment upfront.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) software

NPS software allows businesses to collect and analyze feedback from customers using the NPS methodology. Let’s explore the features, pros, and cons of NPS software to help you make an informed decision for your business.

Features of NPS Software

Customization and segmentation

• NPS software enables extensive survey customization, allowing you to incorporate your brand elements such as logos, colors, and fonts.

• It supports audience segmentation, allowing you to target specific customer groups based on factors like demographics, purchase history, or engagement level.

Survey implementation

• NPS software allows you to conduct both relationship and transactional surveys.

• Relationship surveys are sent at regular intervals to gauge overall brand sentiment, while transactional surveys are triggered after specific customer interactions.

• The software includes advanced scheduling logic to avoid survey fatigue and ensure optimal response rates.

Valuable analytics and targeted insights

• NPS software provides clear visualizations and reports to help you understand your NPS metrics.

• It offers quantitative analysis, including response rates, NPS ratings by segment, and customer demographics.

• The software also analyzes qualitative feedback by identifying keywords, themes, and trends, helping you derive actionable insights.

Seamless integration

• NPS software integrates with your existing technology stack, including CRM, customer success tools, help desk software, and chat software.

• It allows for automated workflows and notifications, ensuring timely responses and actions based on customer feedback.

Internal visibility and empowering action

• NPS software provides easily digestible reporting, making data accessible to all departments within your organization.

• It enables instant response and engagement with customers, empowering you to take action on their feedback.

• The software facilitates turning promoters into advocates, engaging passives, and addressing detractors to enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Pros of NPS software

Accurate measurement: NPS software is specifically designed to measure Net Promoter Score accurately, providing you with reliable data to assess customer loyalty and track changes over time.

Automated processes: NPS software automates survey distribution, data collection, and analysis, saving you time and effort compared to manual methods.

Actionable insights: By analyzing qualitative feedback and identifying trends, NPS software helps you gain valuable insights to drive improvements in your customer experience.

Integration and scalability: NPS software seamlessly integrates with your existing systems, allowing for scalability as your business grows.

Enhanced customer engagement: NPS software enables you to engage with customers in real time, closing the feedback loop and fostering stronger relationships.

Cons of NPS Software

Response rate challenges: Depending on the survey distribution channels used, NPS software may face limitations that affect response rates, potentially reducing the amount of actionable feedback obtained.

Workflow management: Some NPS software may require dedicated resources or expertise to manage and optimize the feedback program effectively.

Cost considerations: Specialized NPS software may involve additional costs compared to home-grown or add-on solutions, requiring a budget allocation for implementation and subscription fees.

Remember, while NPS software offers numerous benefits, it’s essential to consider factors such as response rates, workflow management, and costs to choose the best solution for your business.

Go ‘NPS’ and beyond for exponential growth

NPS creates a view of customer loyalty. The absolute score is less important than the trend. We learn from both promoters and detractors.

Jeff Immelt quote on NPS

Don’t just stop at analyzing NPS, or CSAT data. Take it a step further by engaging with them and implementing a referral program.

Open up a dialogue with satisfied customers. Also, encourage them to spread the word about your business. This way, you can keep them satisfied while also acquiring new customers. It’s a win-win situation that can lead to long-term success and growth.

Note: Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

The post What is Net Promoter Score? Your Ultimate Guide to NPS appeared first on Fluent Support.

But why?

Before we get into the mapping, let’s talk about the customer journey. And how vital it is to companies to make the journey as enjoyable as possible.

Obviously, you know about iPhone. Opening an iPhone box is highly satisfying. The box slowly reveals the phone. Creating a “whoosh” sound gives a “WOW” effect. 

It’s not a random design by the packaging department. Apple put a lot of resources into this research. With Steve Jobs himself, a team of experts designed and patented the box design.

It seems too much for a box, or is it? This box ensures the premium feel of the product.

Apple knows this because they know their customer. They have the complete map of the journey that a customer experiences. And that’s the reason we love their products.

Sounds interesting. So, let’s start from the top.

Customer journey stages

Customers go through several stages before they purchase a service or a product. Many steps involve making a customer stay with a business longer.

These steps are more emotional than technical for a customer. We must know the steps first to maintain a positive emotion about your business.

Let us introduce the steps. Here, the block you’ll interact with below represents the emotional steps in a customer’s journey toward making a purchase decision.

Now we are all on the same page. Let’s start mapping the journey. But what do I mean by the journey map?

Benefits of digital customer journey mapping

We talked about Apple’s customer experience. They put significant effort into making the customer or user journey incredible. They were able to do this because of the mapping.

Now, let’s discuss a few more advantages of customer journey mapping.

1. Get a consistent view of their journey

Multiple departments work simultaneously to ensure a smooth path for customers. But if departments have different ideas about the customer journey. It will create confusion for the company as well as customers. But a single journey mapping will omit this confusion.

2. Pinpoint gaps in service or communications

A map will help you to figure out the gaps. Let’s say you are losing your customer from your radar after a sale. They are not getting in touch with you anymore. A map will allow you to investigate more to the right point.

3. Predict buyer behavior

A map will give you a clear visual of your customer’s nature. You can see how your customer interacts with your business and how long they take to purchase.

4. Enhance the customer journey

You can pinpoint the struggles of your customer with your business. By putting clear remarks, you can work on it quickly. Also, it will help to convince your stakeholders to invest more to improve the customer’s journey.

5. Improve Return on Investment (ROI)

You can optimize your investment because of the detailed buyer’s journey. You can set a more effective, accurate investment strategy in the right place. Moreover, you can suggest any reduction in investment.

The customer journey mapping process

So far, we understand the benefits of customer experience mapping. Now let’s dive a bit deeper to explore the process.

The digital customer journey mapping process has 5 steps.

Set a goal

You have to know your market. Based on your market, define the purpose of this mapping. The purpose can be anything. It could be for exploring new opportunities, or it could be for refining the customer experience.

Create personas

You may need either B2C or B2B customer journey map. You cannot create the right journey scenario without creating customer personas. Try to cover all kinds of customers or businesses who interact with you. 

Select touchpoints

Now list all kinds of touch points your customer goes through with your business. It could be social media, blogs, videos, websites, agents, and even referrals. The list must cover every single purchase, even the small ones. 

Current journey map

Then draw the map of the current journey that your customer is going through. Cover every single journey map possible. It may include sales agents, marketers, affiliates, websites, and social media. Your loyal customer may also be included in the list.

Data analysis

Finally, you can analyze data from this map. It can help you find out what the ideal journey pathway should be. It can give you new opportunities. Furthermore, it will provide a clear picture of the gaps.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

Till now, we have talked about the digital customer journey mapping steps and mapping process. Now we will create the map.

We will organize the data from different sources in tabular form.

We have discussed all of these above. So, I’m skipping the details and drawing a demo journey map.

Ways of creating a customer journey map

We have already created the map. But you might ask this question. Is there any customer journey mapping software or tool? Well, there are a lot of ways for this.

UXpressia is the platform dedicated to CX mapping. It has a persona-creating setup for creating multiple fictional and real customer personas from actual data. You do not need any design or spreadsheet tool to use this.

But you can explore a few alternatives if you are handy with other tools. Figma has a template for the mapping. And you can use a template in FigJam. Another whiteboard tool, Miro, has a mapping template for creating the journey map. 

Chart-making software is also ideal for making a map of the customer journey. The lucid chart has a template for digital customer journey mapping.

Say you are someone don’t want to be all technical. You just want a simple template where you can type your customer journey map. Then you can also try Hubsopt’s detailed journey map template.

But the best way is to use a good old-fashioned whiteboard and sticky notes or Sharpie. You can use a simple customer journey mapping template for this. Do the modification and match it with your setup for better output.

Wrap up

70% of customers say they will only shop with a business that personally understands them. Big brands understand their customer.  Because those brands put lots of effort into creating a perfect customer journey map.

Even CX experts say to build a sustainable business, you have to understand the flow of the customer. This gives new ideas and opens new opportunities.

Lastly, digital customer journey mapping is not just “good” anymore if you are growing a business. But it is a must.

The post Explore Digital Customer Journey Mapping: Awareness to Advocacy appeared first on Fluent Support.

So when it’s time to make decisions about your business’s sales targets and strategies it’s crucial to have a sales budget on hand. In this article, we’re going to check out why sales budgets are important, how sales budgeting works, building a sales budget, and the best practices for a proper sales budget.

What is a sales budget?

A sales budget is like a plan for how much a company thinks it’ll sell in a fixed amount of time. The budget shows how many of each product or service the company expects to sell and how much money it will make in return. 

If a company has a lot of different products, it might group them together into bigger categories to make it easier to plan. A sales budget forms the basis of further budgets such as materials and labor budgets. It also feeds into the managerial and executive expense estimates.

In reality, estimates from marketing, sales, customer service, and management all come into play in building an actionable and accurate sales budget.

But the sales budget is much more important than just that. Here’s why,

Why is a sales budget important?

There are quite a few reasons to develop a sales budget, including,

Setting goals

The first thing a sales budget tells you is your goal for the given period of time. It could be a month, a quarter, or a whole year. The idea is to create a budget that reflects your goals for that time period. The more factors your budget takes into account the more achievable the goals will become.

Identifying opportunities and issues

A sales budget helps provide a framework for strategy development. So when your sales (or marketing) strategy doesn’t perform as expected, it’s easier to find the problems and address them in real time. Similarly, it’s easier to identify opportunities for strategies that perform well.

Financial planning

The point of any budget is to simplify financial planning. A sales budget does that for almost every business. As the sales budget feeds into other estimations it’s a crucial part of financial planning for your business. After all, your goals are sales, and anything you spend should feed into the sales growth. A sales budget helps you make these estimates and plan accordingly. These estimates include profitability analysis, calculating customer support costs, and lifetime value of customers as well.

Benchmark

A sales budget is built on your estimate of sales. So it provides a trackable reference for your sales performance. If your sales team is reaching the goals perfectly your estimates are correct and your strategies are working to make them a reality. Similarly, if the team is failing to meet the quotas then you may have overestimated and need to reevaluate your strategies. 

All in all a sales budget gives you the benchmark for tracking your real-time sales performance.

Sales budget: What you’ll need?

A sales budget requires information and data from multiple departments the most important of them being,

Sales forecast

The sales forecast tells you the number of units you can expect to sell in a given time. Usually, the marketing team generates these estimates, and can also be called marketing forecasts too. The forecast tells you exactly how much you can expect to sell based on trends. It also sets the reference point for creating strategies that will increase the projections.

Price per unit

Along with knowing how much you’ll sell, you’ll need to know how much you’ll make from it. This data usually comes from the unit price for products or services you’ll sell. Some companies choose to use unit prices for individual products while others create product clusters and manage the sales budget according to that. 

Total revenue

The total revenue is the total amount that you’ll generate from achieving the sales goal. This data comes from multiplying the unit cost with the total estimated sales. In usual cases, the total revenue is the primary goal that needs to be tracked throughout the sales period.

Sales period

The sales period is the timespan the sales budget is for. If you’re estimating monthly sales then the budget is a monthly sales budget. Similarly, if you calculate quarterly or annual sales the budget turns into quarterly and annual sales budgets respectively.

Beginning balance

Carryover from the previous cycle or year. This number comes directly from the accounts team and signifies the amount to be paid from the last cycle but is paid in the current cycle. This provides a continuity of the whole sales budget across cycles.

Creating a sales budget

Now that we’ve got everything we need to create the sales budget let’s get to the task and see what you need to do.

Determine time span

The first thing you’ll need to define is the period of time the sales budget is going to work with. Time frames will change all the assumptions you’ll make, so it’s crucial to keep the period significant but not too broad. Companies usually create quarterly and annual budgets so that’s the time span they use. You can go for a monthly budget as well.

Inventory

Next up you’ll need to know exactly how much of your product is available for sale. This should also include the pricing and manufacturing cost of your inventory. For businesses dealing in physical goods, this is fairly simple. For service companies and digital products, the inventory needs to provide the highest number of clients you can manage with the existing system without expanding anything.

Analyze historical data

A sales budget is a well-informed estimate. A key part of making this estimate is having data from the previous sales cycles. This data lets you build projections for future sales quotas and budgeting requirements.

Factor trends and current events

The next part of your estimate depends on the current events and trends. A good example is the semiconductor shortage that occurred right after the pandemic. During the pandemic sales of cars and other smart devices went up. Based on those sales companies projected a large number of sales in the post-pandemic year. However, the semiconductor producers were unable to meet the inflated demands. 

Come the following year the sales went down because the pandemic buying spree stopped. Now device and car manufacturers were stuck with too many products and no means of finishing the product without semiconductors and no customers to sell them to either. Reading ahead of trends is a crucial part of creating an accurate sales budget.

Creating the sales budget: Example

Now we can go ahead and create a sales budget for a hypothetical company. The budgets will be quarterly and annual budgets for the company.

A sales budget for the 2nd quarter from March to May

A sales budget for the year

Sales budget: Best practices

So we’ve covered how you can build a sales budget from scratch. Keep the following best practices in mind to make sure your sales budget is as accurate as possible:

• Clearly state your goals, such as raising sales, income, or client base. Use SMART goals to keep them effective.
• List the important actions that will enable you to accomplish these goals.
• Estimate the costs precisely so that you can meet your planned sales budget.
• Regularly coordinate and communicate with the administration, production, sales, and marketing departments.
• Monitor Timing decisions so you can maintain accuracy regardless of unforeseen constraints

What are the limitations of sales budgets?

While sales budgets provide a ton of utility there are some limitations to creating sales budgets too. The first challenge is time and effort. The sales budgeting process is time-consuming and requires significant effort to be actionable.

The second limitation is the fact that it’s based on predictions and estimates, making accuracy a huge challenge.

On top of that, reaching a consensus about the budget is a challenge in and of itself. Different people may have different opinions on the budget, which can make it difficult to get everyone on board with it.

Lastly, for new companies, it can be particularly hard to prepare a sales budget because they don’t have past sales levels and trends to use as a guide.

Wrapping up

That’s all you really need to know to get started with your sales budget for 2023. The years just started and you can still plan up for the 3 upcoming quarters. Using this model you can create a sales budget for any business regardless of scale.

You need to ensure the estimates and goals are based on reality and not on blind assumptions. Keep crushing those goals and see your estimated budget turn into reality.

Until next time, happy serving!

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