Customer Service
6 tips for great customer support experiences during holidays
Kaitlin Pettersen, global director, customer support at Intercom, shares six tips for using conversational support to proactively and automatically resolve customer queries, making for happier customers and efficient team hours.
December 8, 2020 by Kaitlin Pettersen — Global Customer Support Director, Intercom
The holidays are fast approaching, often resulting in higher support volume for e-commerce teams. This is set to accelerate this holiday season due to COVID-19. So how do support teams stay on top of customer queries, without increasing overhead or sacrificing the customer experience?
The answer is conversational support — the new way to deliver support that bridges the gap between what customers expect and what support teams can deliver. It empowers teams to deliver efficient, personal support through a messenger-first experience.
Here are six tips for using conversational support to proactively and automatically resolve customer queries, so you can unlock happier customers and team hours saved during the holiday season.
Tip 1: Automatically answer common holiday questions
Well-crafted chat bots deliver instant answers 24/7 to the questions customers ask frequently, which may prevent a purchase. They can also help speed up self-service by offering relevant answers based on what customers are typing, before they hit the enter key.
First you'll need to decide which queries to automate with chat bots. Dig into previous years' data and identify what simple, frequent questions eat into your team's bandwidth and automate those. Examples include: "What are your holiday return and exchange policies?" "How do I apply promo codes?" and "What's the deadline for placing an order for guaranteed pre-Christmas delivery?"
Tip 2: Preemptively answer top holiday FAQs before customers have them
Even better than automatically resolving frequent questions is proactively solving issues before they begin. A banner that appears at the top or bottom of your website is a useful way to highlight need-to-know information for customers — including cut-off dates for guaranteed delivery, return policies, and even COVID-19 precautions — so they don't need to contact your team or find the information themselves. You can also use banners to transparently communicate known issues, like shipping delays, which prevents your support team's inbox from filling up. This helps manage customer expectations and avoids unnecessary frustration or confusion.
Tip 3: Proactively help customers on pages where they experience friction
Nearly 74% of U.S. online shopping carts were abandoned last holiday season. One of the best ways to help customers complete their order is by triggering a targeted, proactive message on the checkout page to pre-emptively answer their questions.If customers are on the checkout page for a few minutes, they might have questions about your shipping times or return policy. You can trigger a message that pops up on the page and links to your top FAQs related to purchasing, so they get the relevant information upfront and don't feel the need to message your team.
Tip 4: Empower customers to resolve their own holiday issues
Today's customers overwhelmingly prefer self-service, which lets you reduce time spent on simple issues and improve your bottom line. According to the Harvard Business Review, the cost of a self-service transaction can be measured in pennies, while the average cost of a live service interaction (phone, email) totals more than $7. Messengers and live chat are an ideal channel for self-service. If you're creating an FAQ article to address popular holiday questions, you can highlight the content to customers in a messenger instead of making them search. Some messengers also enable app integrations for customers to go beyond just chatting. For example, they can get faster responses to transactional questions, like, "What's my order status?" without having to talk to your support team, if the messenger combines a chat bot with an app like Shopify,
Tip 5: Manage customer expectations
This is the easiest and perhaps the most important tip to implement. To reduce shopper frustration, proactively communicate response times during the holidays. That way, customers don't have to wait around for a response that might take hours. You can tailor a business messenger to make customers aware of your team's availability and adjust team office hours and expected response times. To bring even more visibility to your team's availability, you can use a chat bot to share your office hours anytime a customer asks a question.
Tip 6: Route complex issues to the right team member ASAP
During the holiday season, both your customers' and your support team's stress levels are often at an all-time high. Emotionally charged and complex customer queries should never be automated and typically require a human touch. Instead only use chat bots to be mindful of your customer's time. Chat bots can automatically collect customer conversation data and route it to a team member to step in with a speedy, empathetic response. The data also helps guide the conversation to a faster, more personal resolution, because agents can see whether the shopper has been in touch before with a similar issue, how many products they've purchased and more. These details help agents better understand the customer to get right to the heart of addressing and resolving their issue.
The holidays are an opportunity to drive revenue, but with that often comes extra demands on support teams. Armed with these conversational support tips, you can empower your team to deliver personal, efficient support at any scale, without increasing your headcount, budget or hours logged.
Kaitlin Pettersen is global director, customer support, at Intercom.
About Kaitlin Pettersen
