Provide WordPress Customer Service

If provide WordPress customer service, you will surely grow your online success. Once you start attracting customers and manage to convince them to spend their money with your business, the next step is to make sure you keep them happy. Satisfied customers will not only come back to buy from you again but will also refer you to other people, helping you to grow your business. Consider these stats:

• 95% of consumers said good customer service is an important influencer of their brand loyalty;
• 75% of companies believe they are customer-centric, while only 30% of consumers agree with this statement;
• More than 60% of customers have stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service.

Clearly, there is a major divide between perception and reality. So, the question is: how to create an outstanding customer service experience that puts you on the right side of these stats?

Whether you run an eCommerce store or offer web design services, using your site for customer support makes perfect sense. Your website allows users to receive help directly from you but it also provides them with an opportunity to help themselves.

If your site runs on WP, you’re in luck because there’s a wide variety of WordPress support plugins and other tools you can choose from. With that in mind, we’re offering the best tips and tools that will help you provide outstanding customer service in your WordPress business.

FAQs: Answer Questions Before Your Customers Ask Them

You can significantly reduce the time you spend dealing with support queries by being proactive in support and anticipate the most common questions customers have about the products or services you provide. Once you identify these questions, you’ll be able to provide answers and reduce the stress on your customer support department.

The best solution is to put all these questions together in one location and make sure that customers can easily find and search them. By creating a FAQ page or section on your site, you will not only provide answers to the most common questions that your customers have but also answer questions that new users haven’t even thought of yet.

Some of the most important benefits to having a well-crafted FAQ section on your site include:

• Provides one centralized place where customers can find answers to the most common questions, improving the user experience.
• Saves time and money by reducing the number of repetitive emails and calls to your support team.
• Helps establish trust by showing your customers that you understand the challenges they face and how you can help.
• Helps you demonstrate product expertise and strengthen your expert reputation.
• Linking the answers to content pages or blog posts makes getting additional information even easier for the customer.
• Helps convert visitors into customers and improves your visibility in search engines.

If you want to take things one step further, you should consider creating a knowledge base. A knowledge base is a self-serve library that includes information about a certain topic, product, or service. A knowledge base contains articles and tutorials which answer the most common customer questions, similar to FAQs but in a more detailed form. Having a comprehensive knowledge base allows customers to help themselves, reducing the time needed to solve basic issues. What’s more, your knowledge base can be integrated with a live chat tool in order to provide even faster solutions.

Help Desk: Provide Direct Support

No matter how great your knowledge base is, at some point, your customers are going to need direct support from your agents. In this case, a help desk might be the best solution. A help desk allows your customers to seek assistance by providing the details of their issue and then working together with your customer support representatives to find a solution. Whether your help desk offers a dedicated area where customers can create tickets or works via email, customers will be more satisfied knowing they’re getting the help they need.

A help desk plugin can make the job of your agents a lot simpler by automating their processes, organizing information, streamlining workflows, and eliminating many manual processes.

Some of the most important advantages of offering a help desk include:

• Customers are able to provide the details of their problem.
• You will ensure that all customer tickets are addressed timely by prioritizing, labeling, and assigning them to the concerned agents or teams.
• By integrating your help desk ticketing system with your knowledge base, you can address minor issues with minimum intervention by offering links to useful documentation or resources.
• The best help desk ticketing systems allow your customers to rate the support they received and provide detailed reports on the quality of support experience. In this way, you will be able to monitor and improve agent performance.

Live Chat: Ensure Immediate Assistance

No matter how efficient having a help desk solution might be, it does come with certain challenges, one of the most important ones being the delay between communications. In some cases, this can result in simple problems taking more time to resolve. There’s nothing worse than being non-responsive to a customer who’s trying to find out more about your offering, resolve an issue, or get help. Responding quickly to all inquiries is very important, even if it’s only to say that you’re looking into the issue and will be in touch soon. Any kind of response is better than none so that the customer doesn’t feel ignored.

Time-sensitive issues require an immediate fix. In such situations, the customer needs to get in touch with an agent in real-time and get help right there and then. The approach taken by many businesses is to provide a live chat option on their site.

With live chat, you give customers an opportunity to reach you at the exact moment that they have issues or questions. In fact, when asked about their preferences for support channels, 41% of customers say they prefer live chat over social media (3%), email (23%), and phone support (32%). The reason is simple: live chat support is fast, efficient, and convenient. All customers need to do is click a button and get access to a customer support agent. They can interact directly and get help with their problem or answers to their questions.

Here are some of the main benefits of using a live chat tool to provide customer support on your WordPress website:

• Live chat helps to improve the productivity of your customer service team. While a person can only reply to one email or be on one phone call at a time, with live chat they can juggle a few customers at once.
• Live chat reduces repetition for the customers. More than 70% of customers expect an agent to know their details and support history without asking for them. With a good live chat customer service tool, customer support representatives can read the text supplied by the customer while at the same time reviewing other details they have access to.
• Live chat allows support agents to observe a customer’s sentiment and tone and adjust their styles to fit the situation best.
• Live chat helps with customer acquisition and onboarding. According to Forrester, consumers who use chat are 2.8x more likely to convert than those who don’t.
• Live chat lets you provide 24/7 support.

Of course, the main upside of live chat is that customers have access to instant help. However, if you decide to employ this tool, you need to anticipate certain things such as the fact that live chat requires support staff to be available 24/7. In addition, if you don’t have enough employees, growing demand can create long waiting times and bottlenecks.

Forums: Allow Customers to Help Themselves

Creating the most effective support environment for your customers can have numerous benefits for your business. The more channels you’re able to provide for your customers, the more loyalty you will generate across the board. Live chat, email, and phone lines are obligatory, but if you want to set yourself apart, you’ll need to go beyond these formats. One of the best ways to improve your customer service is to offer a customer support forum.

Forums are a very versatile tool in the field of customer support and service. By providing customers with a place to ask questions, learn, and help each other, you can create a support environment that complements your existing teams, providing them with much-needed relief, and at the same time improving their insight into customer issues.

Here are some of the advantages of providing support forums for your customers:

• Customers can find and provide solutions themselves, share their own experience and knowledge with other customers.
• Customers can see how similar problems were solved in the past by searching for keywords related to their issue or browsing through topic-specific areas.
• Your support team can take the role of moderators and only intervene where more in-depth assistance is required.
• Unlike them, however, an online community never takes a break. If you have customers across the globe or in different time zones, they are likely to get an answer faster, improving customer satisfaction.
• When multiple customers come together, they’re bound to generate suggestions and feedback about designs, products, services, and more.

Customer Reviews: Know What Your Customers Are Thinking

Speaking of feedback, have you thought about providing your customers with enough opportunities to express their opinion about your brand and offering? If not, you’re missing out on the most valuable input for your business.

Outstanding customer service often comes down to checking in with your customers on a regular basis and ensuring that they’re happy with the products and services you are offering, as well as the process of ordering, purchasing, etc. By collecting reviews, ratings, and feedback, you can act on the insights shared. Running your company on feedback is the only way to live up to the high standard of being truly customer-centric, or at least achieve optimum market fit for your products or services.

Here’s how collecting customer feedback can help you improve customer service and your business as a whole:

• You can use positive feedback as social proof to encourage new customers to buy from you.
• Learn how your customers are using your products or services.
• Identifying new uses and new markets you might not have considered for your products or services.
• Improve your products and services.
• Measure customer satisfaction.
• Collecting feedback shows customers that you value their opinions.

There are several different ways to approach this. Reviews plugins are the easiest and most efficient way to get valuable feedback from your customers, but you should also make sure that comments are enabled on your website in order to get input right there with the content. If you just want to get a vote on a simple issue, consider using poll plugins, and for more feedback, be sure to add a feedback form to your WP website. You can also use customer surveys and questionnaires, and make it a common practice to ask customers for feedback when they’re completing their orders.

Final Thoughts

Outstanding customer service creates loyal customers who are willing to refer your business to other people. Providing excellent customer service starts with a genuine desire to delight your customers, but you also need to think about different ways you can achieve this.

The tools and plugins described in this article offer different ways to provide customer support. This means that you don’t necessarily need to have a robust and complicated system in order to help your customers. In some cases, having an FAQs section will do the trick, but it is good to know there are other options out there if you need them.

The key is enabling your customers to help themselves first. This way, you will reduce the number of queries, take the stress of your customer support team, and help your agents be more efficient. Whichever of these solutions you select, you can rest assured that you will make life easier for everyone involved.

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