Three Customer Support Hacks to Grow Your Business

This morning, I received a call from my friend after a very long time. He asked me, “How are you doing?”

How Did I Respond?

I responded thus, “It is so awesome to get a call from you. How are you doing? Where are you? Let us catch up this evening if you are in Chennai.”

How can I help you? This is the standard response that we give when a customer calls us. I was wondering, what if we respond the way we react to our friends?

Wouldn’t That Make the Experience Better?

Here is a great story that Derek Sivers shared about how CD baby leveraged every support interaction to deepen their customer relationships.

If someone would call, saying, “I’d like to talk with someone about selling my music through you, we’d say:

“Sure, I can help. What’s your name? Cool. Got a website? Can I see it? Is that you on the home page there? Very cool. Is that a real Les Paul? Awesome. Here, let me listen to a bit of the music. Nice, I like what you’re doing. Very Syncopated. Great groove. Anyway…so…what would you like to know?”

I can tell you from my own experience of being a self-promoting musician for 15 years that it’s so hard to get anyone to listen to your music. So when someone takes even a couple of minutes to listen to you, it’s so touching that you remember it for life.

— Derek Sivers, founder and former president of CD Baby.  

CD Baby was one of the most storied online music sites in the history of the web. This personalization is what has helped them have loyal customers and content contributors.

Let me give you another example.

I regularly buy from online marketplaces. I often add products to my cart, and then I move them to my wish list.

I move the products to the wish list for a few reasons. Either the shipping cost is high or the product cost is high. I most likely forget about the ones that I put in the wish list after some time.

Suddenly, I receive an email from the marketplace stating that they have waived off the shipping cost and are offering the product at a 20% discount.

Would I Buy It Now?

There definitely is a 50% chance that I will take them up on the offer.

Even a waiver on the shipping cost or a discount on the product costs would have had a 25% chance of me taking them up on the offer.

Isn’t This a Great Way to Provide Offers to Your Customers?

Here is our own example.

In customer support, most organizations often worry about providing the best possible resolutions for customer problems.

But, what do they do about it?

A survey of 75000 customers run by the customer contact council found that even more than delighting customers, what drives customer loyalty most is reducing the amount of work the customer has to do.

This is what we do. We provide cloud contact center technology to our customers. We haven’t had any churns in the past 5+ years, and most accounts continue to grow.

What Is the Reason?

We mainly reduce the amount of work the customers have to do. Here are a few reasons for that:

• Our UI is intuitive.
• Our reports are simple, easy to configure and extract
• We do all our customizations free of cost to our customers
• We have one of the best redundancy and disaster recovery platform – we promise more than 99% uptime
• 95% of customer issues are addressed immediately
• We offer our customers a per-minute pricing – we bundle the platform, telephony, reports, intelligence, and customizations

This is why most of our customers remain loyal to us.

Customer support definitely pays off, more so when your organization is involved in proactive customer engagement.

There are studies that show that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase business profits by 25% to 95%.

Guess, it is time to make your customers happy, and grow your business. After all, customer support shouldn’t be looked at as a cost center.