Did you know businesses worldwide lose around $75 billion every year due to poor customer support? That’s true for SaaS companies too.
You might have developed the best software in your niche, but if you’re not helping your customers learn its usage, how will you generate revenue? That’s why customer service is an imperative aspect in the IT sector.
However, customer support often eats up most of your time, leaving little to none for other business activities. Fortunately, this is the era of help desks and knowledge bases. Even better, HelpSpace is a hybrid of both, making it a perfect customer service solution for IT companies.
Importance Of A Customer Support Software For IT Companies
Customer support is undeniably the Holy Grail of every business. A ClickFox study found customer service to be the best way to build customer loyalty, accounting for 33% of the total impact.
However, you can’t ensure exceptional customer support if you’re still using traditional ways like Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails. Instead, you need a more robust system in the form of customer service software to sustainably deal with customer support requests.
Since such software allows you to organize and visualize all your customer requests in one place, it makes responding to queries easier and quicker. Here’s why IT companies need to hop on the bandwagon of using customer support software.
Never Miss A Query
If you’re still using the good old Gmail or Outlook, many of your customer queries are bound to fall through the cracks. A missed email means the customer is never catered to.
Although this is an inconvenience in other industries, too, it’s a much bigger deal if you’re a SaaS company since your customers depend on you to solve their problems.
On the other hand, if you’re using customer support software like HelpSpace, you can assign different queries to specific agents and see them all in one place so that no customer request is even overlooked or missed.
The incoming requests in HelpSpace are called ‘tickets,’ and you can see them in a unified inbox. Moreover, the software lets you collaborate on requests, ensuring efficient teamwork for customer support.
Higher Efficiency
A customer support software lets you deal with customer requests efficiently. For instance, let’s say you have just rolled out an update for your software. Instead of responding to every customer’s query about the update separately, you can use HelpSpace’s particular features.
HelpSpace Docs allow you to offer your customers self-service support. Basically, you can write the answers to common queries and simply direct the customers to them instead of typing the same responses repeatedly.
Help Center: The Help Center is where your customers will find all the answers. Let’s say you’ve made some additions or improvements in the new software update. You can readily answer the common questions and add them to the Help Center.
Documentations: You can also write full-fledged documents, such as the functioning and features of your new software update or a How-to-Use guide for new customers.
Blog: HelpSpace also lets you write blog posts to streamline customer support. For instance, if you’re a video communication Saas company, you can write blogs about using your software for teaching during the pandemic and holding virtual meetings, etc.
Automation
A customer support software like HelpSpace also broadens the horizon for automating customer service. You can personalize your inbox and filter the incoming messages accordingly.
For example, you can assign a certain team to specific queries. Continuing with the same video communication SaaS company example, you might have a separate team for responding to chat-related queries.
Likewise, you can have some agents working on video lagging issues while others help customers with miscellaneous things, like video backgrounds, sound effects, emojis, etc.
Since you have the liberty to write documents and blogs, you don’t always have to respond to each customer in detail. If it’s a common query, direct them to your blog or the Help Center.
HelpSpace conveniently allows you to search for relevant Docs in the reply editor and attach the link directly.
Reporting-Based Improvements
You can’t get an idea of how well your customer support is doing with the run-of-the-mill systems. Instead, you need software that shows you analytics reflecting the efficacy of your customer support.
HelpSpace lets you visualize the performance of your customer support team, allowing you to make improvements by studying data. For example, the Report summary tells you how proactive your team is - the number of tickets opened, pending, and closed.
Therefore, you can use this information to determine where you lack in customer support and which aspects need improvements.
Why HelpSpace?
Here’s the thing about customer service; it can either be human-centric or issue-centric.
Human-centric: A human-centric customer support refers to a humanized model where every customer gets individual support. For instance, Customer A is having trouble navigating your new update.
Issue-centric: In this model, companies don’t individually regard customers as entities and instead categorize them under similar ‘issues’. For instance, a number of customers are having trouble with the new ‘mute’ functionality you’ve introduced in your video communication software. Instead of dealing with customers individually, you collectively serve everyone having the same problem.
The beauty of HelpSpace is that you can conform it to your customer service model. If you prefer a human-centric approach, you can benefit from HelpSpace’s ticket-management system.
Find all queries in one place, respond to them immediately, or assign them to separate agents or teams.
On the contrary, if you intend to offer issue-centric support, you can use the Docs or Help Center, where you resolve the common issues, allowing customers to DIY the support.
Conclusion
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that customer support is the backbone of the IT industry since the familiarity with tech and software isn’t as widespread as other business sectors. From setup and installation to usage and upgrades, your customers will need help every step of the way.
The old-school customer support solutions can only do so much since customer service has come far from mere emails. With HelpSpace’s advanced and customer-centric features, you can ensure the provision of self-service and individual support for each customer.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash