How to build a functional customer service department
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A modern customer service department is a place where good work organisation plays first fiddle. An overloaded department will be neither effective nor functional, and organisational chaos unfortunately helps unresolved tickets pile up. So how do you build a functional customer service department, and what does that actually mean? Let us explain.
What does a functional customer service department look like?
Practical work organisation
A functional customer service department is one where the flow of work is guaranteed by practical organisation and clear procedures. In those conditions every agent knows the scope of their responsibilities and knows how to carry them out, so every new problem gets solved properly.
What should a functional customer service department be marked by? The answers can differ depending on which aspects of everyday customer service you emphasise in your company. Other factors that can influence it include the size of your team, your working hours and the communication habits that prevail in your organisation.
A variety of needs
This flexibility in the needs and expectations of business owners means that different solutions can suit individual companies to a different degree. What works in a large pharmaceutical company, for example, will not necessarily suit a small local transport firm. So although there is no universal recipe for creating a functional customer service department, there are solutions that can be adapted to the needs of different businesses.
The right platform
Choosing the right platform for a customer service department can therefore seem difficult at first. If you want to build a functional department, well-chosen tools are undoubtedly the foundation of good work organisation. That matters especially when you manage several communication channels, for example social media and email. In that case things like answering customer questions quickly, exchanging information between agents and keeping customer data and history in order can turn out to be troublesome.
Different communication channels – how do you manage them?
For a customer service department to be fully functional, comprehensive management of all communication channels should be an essential part of it. The Smartsupp platform meets the expectations of even the most demanding business owners – it handles different communication channels at once, with a shared database. So you do not have to buy several different programs or integrate them with each other.
How can Smartsupp support your customer service department? See for yourself right now.
Chatbot
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation. Chatbots are used as digital assistants in many different situations, including online customer service, sales and marketing.
These automated programs are often used to handle simple tasks such as:
updating order status
recommending products that meet the customer's needs
welcoming users
Chatbots are also used to monitor and continuously improve customer service. Smartsupp provides a lot of useful information, such as the number of visitors who were shown the chatbot, the number of users who were sent a message through the chatbot and much more. Based on that data you can decide whether this is the right time to hire new staff or introduce new technology such as live chat.
Whatever the goal, all chatbots have one thing in common: they use various technologies to interpret the user's intent from what they write and to respond the way human agents would.
A centralised inbox
Managing customer service in a modern business should be orderly and well organised.
Smartsupp lets you reply to messages quickly and easily. Your team can serve customers from a centralised inbox, which leads to faster response times and higher user satisfaction. How is that possible? Every message that arrives at the customer service department is easily available in one place – whether it is a message from Facebook Messenger, an email inbox or an online store. In our dashboard, agents have easy access to all messages and to the important information about the users visiting your site.
What is more, thanks to a high degree of automation across the whole process, customer service staff do not have to assign conversations themselves, which saves them time and avoids possible mistakes or oversights.
Smartsupp has features that allow quick collection of feedback on the quality of service. They are based on clear graphics in the form of emoticons – "faces" with different expressions, each corresponding to a different level of satisfaction. The survey is short, so the customer can give you feedback within a few seconds, with no need to log in, register or go to another site.
Live chat
Another communication channel that can make up a functional customer service department is live chat. Live chat is readily chosen by customers who care about a fast, efficient conversation – an exchange on chat is more dynamic and less formal than an exchange of emails, and it does not require calling a hotline. That way they can get the information they want within a matter of seconds.
If you want your chat to stand out for how well it works, it is important to configure it properly. The Smartsupp platform lets you choose the colours, the size and position of the chat window and the content of the welcome messages, among other things. Paying attention to detail is, contrary to appearances, very important – clear messages and a tidy window mean that customers have no trouble using live chat.
Did you know that live chat can work even outside your working hours? That is possible thanks to the support of the Smartsupp chatbot, which answers incoming messages automatically. A chatbot is therefore a great solution for a functional customer service department, because it can also take work off your staff in their daily duties and let them focus fully on customers.
Video recordings
Unlike other chat providers used in customer service departments, Smartsupp provides recordings of visitor activity sessions on your site. With those recordings it is easier to see where customers struggle to make a buying decision, and at which moment they leave the store even when they have products in the basket. A remarkable advantage of following customer activity sessions is that making changes and improvements to deliver a smoother online shopping experience becomes faster and more effective. On top of that, video recordings are like an extra pair of eyes, which will certainly come in handy when you are maximising the sales potential of your site – perhaps the recordings will help you spot what was not obvious at the very beginning.
It is a great feature that follows how visitors interact with your online store, and not only that, providing plenty of valuable data for growing your business and increasing sales.
Summary
Creating a functional customer service department may seem like a difficult challenge. But there is no need to worry in advance. The Smartsupp platform will help you meet it with a range of tools that are simple to use. Whatever the size of your company, your industry or your experience, you will always find something for you at Smartsupp.
Do you want to see for yourself how Smartsupp can support you? Sign up, create an account on the free trial and see that excellent customer service is within reach.