In this virtual era providing effective online customer support always comes at various costs. The cost could be the extra energy spent by your operators/support reps switching back and forth between multiple apps. The cost of these various apps. And the cost of your customers' satisfaction that gets decreased with all the cumbersome support systems that you use. 

For most businesses, providing effective support means losing efficiency in support. But in an ideal world, effective support should be synonymous with efficient support. 

We at SalesIQ have you as well as your customers, in our minds while developing all our features. And you being a SalesIQ user, it is our duty to ensure that you are using our tools to provide the most effective and efficient support possible. In this post, let us look at 7 customer support tips that would help you to do so.

1. Providing an omnichannel experience

Customers love it when it is easy to reach out to your business. And what is better than allowing them to contact you via any of their go-to social media or instant messaging platforms?

Having your support spread across multiple social media and instant messaging channels, such as Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., can be hard to manage and centralize your support on all of these platforms. 

Channels in SalesIQ make this centralization process easy by bringing them under one dashboard and allowing your existing operators to assist visitors on all of these channels directly from SalesIQ. 

2. Contextual assistance can win your customers' hearts. 

Nobody wants to hear the words "Let me transfer you to the concerned department" and wait for a long time till the call or chat is transferred to the concerned department. In fact, performing multiple chat transfers will not only make your operators look weak, but it can also cause your customers to lose your loyalty to your brand. 

With SalesIQ's smart automation features like Chat routing and Visitor routing, you can take the visitor to the concerned department directly based on the page they are on your website, region, operator's expertise, CRM data, and several other conditions that you can define. 

3. Response delay can cost your business more than you think. 

Having your support reps handle multiple chats simultaneously would not only put a lot of pressure on them but having them repeatedly type out responses to each of the ongoing chats would make them quickly lose energy and keep your customers waiting for a long time. 

Canned replies and Smart suggestions in SalesIQ allow you to send instant responses with just two clicks. These responses can be personalized based on the customers' info so you don't have to worry about it sounding robotic.

4. Listening to your customers' feedback can help you improve customer loyalty.

One of the most valuable data for a business is the feedback left by customers. You can grow your support quality exponentially just by addressing the pain points mentioned by your customers as feedback after a chat or call. 

You can take note of this feedback, reflect on your support, and reach back to unhappy customers via follow-ups and apologize for the inconvenience. This would not only help your support to grow but also increase your customer loyalty. 

5. Provide a helping hand to your support reps with chatbots. 

The term Chatbots can be very much related to efficiency. One other way to provide effective support is to aid your operators by implementing chatbots that can take up simple common questions and do all the heavy lifting for your operators. These bots can act as a filtering stage for all incoming chats by addressing all the simple support-based questions and only transferring the ones that need your operators' expertise. 

We at SalesIQ would recommend using our AI-powered chatbot, Answer bot, for these support purposes. 

Hybrid bots using the Autopilot feature can combine the likeness of the Answer bot and the flow-based Zobots to give the best support and engagement bot you can create without any coding knowledge. 

6. Having a do it all kind of dashboard. 

Admins, stop making your operators switch back and forth between 10 or more apps to assist a single customer. We have heard a lot of situations where most operators toggle between tabs and apps to ticket the chat question, find matching resources to the question, view existing customer details, loop them in newsletters, etc. This not only makes your operators confused but can result in many human errors that can result in devastating damages when compounded and cannot be ignored when it comes to customer support. 

In SalesIQ, with Widgets, you can have all your different apps, like CRM, Ticketing app, Campaign app, and enrichment apps, right inside the Operator chat window. And the best thing is the data in these widgets can automatically change based on the visitor when you switch to a different chat. This would result in an efficient and effective support experience. 

7. Do not undervalue your mobile app experience.

If more of your focus goes on your social media and website support, it is easy to overlook your app users. But it is just as essential to have an excellent mobile support experience as on your website. 

SalesIQ's robust mobile SDK, Mobilisten, helps you bring the best support to your customers directly inside your apps. Learn more about Mobilisten. 

Other powerful features that can help to improve your support experience: 

1. Chat monitors to train your new operators with experts. 
   
   
2. Audio calls for a personal touch.
3. Integrating with Zoho Assist for complex troubleshooting.
4. Use Tags to identify chats at a glance. 
   
   

I hope these tips are helpful to you. We love engaging with you, so please feel free to reach out to us and post your thoughts in the comment section. 

Naveen