What After Hours Support Can Mean for your Business
If you are limiting your customer support to only certain hours of the day, you may be doing your business serious damage. With today’s customers living such a hectic lifestyle, they might require assistance at odd times and it’s your duty as a business to ensure they are properly looked after.
In fact, a few forward-looking companies have realized the importance of ubiquitous connectivity and are starting to offer 24-hour support to customers. In order to stay on par with your competition, it’s important that you implement additional support systems as well. Don’t think of it as merely a sunk cost that you’ll never recover. Good support gives your customers accessibility to your company and provides your brand with a human voice. Two aspects that are crucial to companies in the modern era.
I’m sure you’ll agree that 24 hour support is important, but we are all just human, and no-one expects a employees to always be available. So, here are some of the ways in which you can go about in providing assistance to your customers after the usual working hours.
Dial E for Emergencies
In many cases customers just need assurance that there is a human on the other side of a brand.
Having an emergency contact number in place shows your customer base that you are available to help when they are in need. Just the fact that there is number listed on the website assures them of your continued support. Not all situations are emergencies, so there’s a good chance customers’ will refrain from calling the number unless there is a serious problem.
As such, you don’t necessarily need someone manning the lines 24/7. You could simply have the number divert to a senior employee who can deal with the request even when they are away from their desk. The management and relative importance of this line would of course be reliant on the size of your company and the type of service it provides.
Live Chat on the Go
There are many customers who are shy, cannot speak the language, or simply don’t like using telephones. For these individuals having a dedicated live chat solution can be extremely beneficial.
Live chat is the little pop-up box offering assistance when you’re visiting a company’s website. This chat box give customers direct access to the company if they need additional information or if you are struggling to use the website. Check out the one on our website – bottom-right.
Having live chat in place can be really useful when building a relationship with your customers. Not only does it provide a convenient way for them to get a hold of you, it can also increase sales and eliminate customer frustration.
Live chat is a great tool for after-hours support as you can have a virtual or remote assistant manage the chat. Hence, you don’t need your regular employees to stay late. Alternatively, your employees could use a mobile app to talk to customers while they are away from their desks.
If you see that there are periods of the day which tend to be busier, you could create a schedule to ensure there are employees on hand to provide assistance.
Live can act like a personal assistant for your customers, and you’d be surprised at how it could influence your company’s conversion rate.
Self Help or Outsourced Assistance?
Put yourself in the shoes of a frustrated or confused customer. They make the effort to phone the number listed on your website and sit through hours of pan pipe music. Then they hear a recorded message played back with generic responses and inconsequential platitudes. They will naturally start to feel neglected and in the dark about the support that you offer. Instead of wasting a customer’s valuable time by making them wait on the phone, you can use self-help tools or a website FAQ section to clarify general issues. Make sure the customer is able to solve their problems as quickly as possible.
If you want to maintain after hours support but don’t have the resources, you can use companies that are trained at call management. These organization provide real people who can manage your organization after hours support and communication needs.
Before outsourcing, however, you must ensure that the call management company is aware of your company’s voice and tone, as well has having general information about you and the services/products you provide. You can even create a script for the call management company, but we’d advise against this.
Aside from not having to staff the customer support channels all the time, this service has the added benefit of letting your employees or tier 1 support deal with the most critical customer complaints.
Email Marketing Can Be Much More
Another support option is to revamp your bland email marketing campaign. Use this marketing channel as a form of pre-emptive support. Not all customers will go the extra mile to get in touch with you, so it’s a good idea to nudge them in the right direction. By carefully wording the emails you can get your customers to not only perform particular actions, you can also use this as an opportunity to answer common questions.
Email marketing isn’t necessarily ‘live’ after hour support, but having a stock standard ‘after hour’ reply can do wonders. This email could list a few general problems and solutions and stipulate what your operation hours are.
Plan your email marketing in such a way that you don’t smother your customers either. It’s important to maintain the balance between being informative and sounding desperate. Make sure that the tone and content of the email sounds like genuine assistance instead of merely sales.
At the end of the day customer service is all about assurance. Even though they might not be dependent on your after hours service, it’s something that you can offer which will set you apart from your competition. You want to be there for your customers when they need you the most, not only to provide them with assistance but to build a business relationship that they can trust and rely on.
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