4 tech hacks to save time doing customer service

You may know that I used to be a VP Technology in a middle sized business. One of my roles was to automate repetitive tasks as much as I could to optimize HR as much as possible. As a result, the humans we hired were doing more fulfilling tasks and less repetitive works.

Here’s 4 hacks I developped to save time doing customer service work using technologies and automation:

Hack #1: Don’t explain, redirect

Explaining to a customer how to retrieve a lost password by phone or email can be a difficult thing. Simply redirect the customer to the right place.

So, instead of saying: “Click on ‘Connect’ on the upper right corner and then on ‘Forgot password’. And then write your email address to get a new password by email…”

You would only have to say : “Go to website.com/password and follow the instructions.”

Only make sure that the instructions on the page are clear and easy to understand!

Hack #2: Choose email support over phone support

You know how much easier it is to answer an email than to answer a customer’s phone call.

Finding ways to answer non-urgent inquiries by email rather than by phone is a good idea to save time and energy. Limiting the number of non-urgent phone calls you receive will decrease the number of phone calls and the waiting time… Making your customer happier.

How can I do this? There are many ways:

1. After a purchase, send your customers an email to which they can directly answer to ask a question.
2. Create email addresses named after the type of inquiries you to want receive to these specific addresses. Don’t forget to list them on your website’s “Contact us” section: warranty@website.com, repairs@website.com, buyingadvices@website.com, marketing@website.com, etc.
3. In your phone waiting message, say something like: “If you have any questions about our warranty, go to website.com/warranty or write en email to warranty@website.com.”
4. Send you receipts by email rather than printed by mail. Always make sure that your customers can reply to the emails they receive so they can ask questions.

An important thing to remember: always answer within 24h. If not, your clients will call you and you will have to answer their questions twice (and look bad doing it)!

Hack #3: Send your answers by email

If your customer asks you a question by phone that will take some time to get answered and could be answered by email, ask for its address (if you don’t have it already in your CRM) and promise to send your answer or follow up by email.

This will spare the client some waiting time (and waiting messages…) and will save you a lot of time, because instead of asking other questions by phone afterwards, they will do it by email.

Hack #4: Have a full CRM + Helpdesk app

This solution is more complicated to implement and more expensive. On the other end, it will save you a lot of time on the long run. Your customer service employees will get the client’s informations, transaction’s history (thanks to the CRM) and all the other conversations they had with other agents (thanks to the Helpdesk app). With no confusion, get things done faster and customer satisfied.

You can build an in-house CRM or use Salesforce, Zoho or SugarCRM. Zendesk is a great Helpdesk app.

Do you think you could use one of these hacks to rock your customer service?

David for MistereCommerce.com.