Customer Support Tips

Use the following guide to when providing customer support to help ensure your support is effective and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty for your products.

• The primary objective of your customer service is to resolve problems, answer inquiries and generally to make your customer's experience of buying your product as easy, clear and smooth as possible. At a lower level, it is an opportunity to gain insight into the concerns and opinions of customers and, as already mentioned, a chance to tailor your product or service.
• Be honest. The number one rule is to not make promises to customers unless you know you can deliver upon them. Often customers come through to you for support whenever they have already encountered problems with your product or service. To promise to remedy the situation, say by sending an update, and then fail to do so will leave customers angry and dissatisfied. If you can't solve the problem immediately, say so. Customers will tend to be more forgiving if you level with them.
• Be friendly and polite in your dealings with your customers. Ensure they feel valued by your business and that their complaints or views are genuinely taken into consideration. Courtesy costs nothing and will go a long way to building up a sound and long-term relationship with your customers.
• Use your customer service to help you to refine and hone your service or product. When customers regularly call to ask questions about the assembly instructions you provide with a certain product, for example, you should take this as a signal that the instructions are not adequately detailed or clear for all of your customers. This gives you the opportunity to provide better instructions next time, improving the customer experience as you go along and reducing the number of Help Desk tickets you receive on that particular aspect of the product or service.
• There's no point in getting into a heated argument with your customers where it can be avoided.
• Don't use jargon or try to blind your customers with technical speak. You will know more about the product than they do and you should seek to simplify and explain what's happening in plain, clear language. If the customer feels he is being patronized or talked down to they will be much less likely to buy from you in the future.
• Try to structure ticket updates from customers as best you can. Customers will often add lengthy Help Desk tickets with a issues and grievances. Once this is done, an experienced developer will break the problem down into specific points and summarize these back to the customer to clarify the exact nature of the complaint and to show that you are aware of what the problems are. Go through the points one by one and offer resolutions there and then. Be clear about the actions: what the customer needs to do and what you have promised to do.