How can you make your support more efficient by adopting Tiered support?

How can you make your support more efficient by adopting Tiered support?

One of the main issues most businesses face is handling support conversations as they expand. As the business scales up, the chat load also increases exponentially. So, it becomes hard for your existing operators to handle all of the chats, hiring new operators also does not come cheap, and training them takes time.

In our last post, we saw insider tips from support reps of SalesIQ themselves. In this post, let us see how you can bring more structure to your support as you expand your business without disrupting your support workflow.
 
"Organizing is what you do before you do something so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up."  
  - A A Milne  
 

What is Tiered support?    

Tiered support is the concept of organizing your support on multiple levels based on your customer's requirements.

Our take on Tiered support   

There are a lot of blogs and posts on tiered support; each has a different opinion on this topic, and many change based on the product they are selling. In this post, you'll see our take on how to approach tiered support using Zoho SalesIQ.
 
 If I have a business, will this be helpful for me? 
 
Yes and no, it depends on the type of business that you have. A large business with a high daily chat volume can gain a lot by adopting Tiered support. A budding business with little chat volume would not.
 
Now, let me explain the reasons clearly; every large business will have a lot of customers who might have the same questions; having your operators attend to all of these customers could not only result in inefficient support, it can also result in exhaustion of your operators.
 
Whereas in a small business, it would be more valuable to connect directly with your visitors. Now, let's take a look at the tiered support stages using SalesIQ. 

Tiered support stages using SalesIQ   

Tier 0: Enabling self-help for visitors  

The first stage of the Tiered support is to make the users find answers to all the commonly occurring issues by themselves. This can be achieved by enabling the knowledge base in your SalesIQ chat window. With the knowledge base enabled, you can display articles and FAQs, and they will be able to get answers to their questions from there.
 
To enable Knowledge base for your brand:
  1. Navigate to Settings > Brands > Your brand name > Configurations.
  2. Switch to the Channels tab in this section. And toggle on the Knowledge base for the desired platform.
If you wish to provide a messenger-first experience for your customers, you can use our AI-powered Answer bot to assist visitors with their basic questions. With the help of natural language processing, the bot will understand the user's intent, provide the right article for your help guide, and make it look like they are conversing with a human operator.
 

Tier 1: Deploying chatbots to provide personalized assistance

The next step in the Tiered support list is to enable advanced bots that can do more than address your visitors' questions. Zobot allows you to perform advanced functions like pushing leads to Zoho CRM, logging support tickets for conversations, adding visitors to newsletter, mailing lists, etc. These bots can be the perfect filter stage to know what the visitor wants. If visitors require a human operator, they can transfer the chat to a human operator.



Tier 2: Allowing customers to reach your human operators  

In this stage, the chats that were transferred by the bots and the chats where the visitors have requested to connect with an operator can be routed to your frontline support.

Issues that are too complex to be solved by the self-service knowledge base and bots can be handled in this stage. Issues with onboarding, account problems, etc., can be better addressed by a human more effectively, and the visitors will feel more satisfied when they know that an actual person is helping them.
 

Tier 3: Routing customers to the operator with the required expertise  

This is the last stage of the Tiered support; at certain times, you might have visitors with higher value support requirements; in such cases, it is wiser to route them directly to the operator with the right expertise. Chat routing can enable you to route chats of desired visitors to the operators or departments you specify.  
 
This final stage can be helpful for the following conditions:
  1. Escalated chats.
  2. Chats that would require the right expertise.
  3. VIP and high-priority chats and calls.
You can implement these four tiers of support using Zoho SalesIQ. Please let us know what support structure you are currently using for your organization in the comments.
 
Regards,
Naveen

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