Why Customer Support Strategy Trumps Customer Support Tactics

As your company scales, it will naturally serve more customers. While a three-person start-up can manage customer support on a case-by-case basis, this isn’t the case for an enterprise-level company. Customers have increasingly high expectations of service and it's up to future-focused companies to match them. A customer support strategy, coupled with the right tools to implement it (and the help of a well-trained team) is an essential part of doing so. 

Here’s why a support desk strategy is a non-negotiable step when providing a delightful, frictionless customer experience. We’ll also touch on how HubSpot Service Hub and the Huble Digital team can help you develop and implement one:

Why you need a support desk strategy

Customer support shouldn’t be an afterthought; it should be included in every customer experience journey. Why? Because after-sales service plays a significant role in transforming someone from a once-off customer into a regular patron and then into a brand ambassador. How you help customers solve challenges after signing up plays an integral part in building trusting relationships with them — and it’s exactly what a support desk is for.  

Planning guarantees operational efficiency

To ensure your customers get a consistent, high-quality experience everyone on your support team should know exactly how to deal with new tickets and support requests — what to do, how to process them, and how to resolve them at minimal cost to the company. By implementing a strategy that includes training and change management, you can guarantee a key part of the customer journey runs efficiently.   

Agile strategies match customer expectations

Today’s customers are less patient, more sceptical of brand promises and have higher expectations of service delivery. Backing quality products and services with a customer support strategy that leverages all the help that technology provides is fast becoming the only way to meet customer expectations. A strategy that’s regularly reviewed and updated based on data-driven insights also paves the way for your team, and brand, to exceed those expectations.

A strategy safeguards your customer experience

The clear directive that a strategy can provide helps service teams manage, connect with and truly understand your customers. With the forward planning and user insights of a sound strategy, you can also provide ways for your customers to help themselves — a surefire way to improve efficiency and deliver customer delight.

Read why delighted customers lead to sustainable business growth in our blog post, Customer Happiness Squared Equals Growth to Infinity.

How HubSpot Service Hub can help

HubSpot has a set of support desk tools — HubSpot Service Hub — that help you build meaningful relationships with your customers. Here’s a brief overview:

Conversations

A universal inbox combines multichannel communication into one dashboard. Whether someone’s reached out via email, chat, phone or social media — customer support teams can collaborate at scale, with a clear understanding of every conversation that’s been had to date. 

Help Desk and Ticketing

As you reach more customers as your business scales, support requests can slip through the cracks. A watertight customer support strategy needs to be backed up by tools that ensure this doesn’t happen. Service Hub’s help desk and ticketing system let you track, collaborate on and deliver on every single request that’s been logged.

Knowledge Base

Service Hub makes it easy to help customers help themselves. Its Knowledge Base tool spots trends in ticketing requests and helps you turn common tickets into “How To” or FAQ articles that automatically index on Google. A reporting dashboard also shows how effectively each article deflects a topic-related ticket. 

Customer Feedback

Regular customer feedback helps you identify common frustrations they may have, and also makes it easier to identify your biggest brand promoters. Service Hub helps you create, collect and analyse customer surveys, giving you the insights you need to remove common frictions and turn positive feedback into customer marketing campaigns built around, for example, case studies.

For more on its functionality and potential to help you grow, check out this HubSpot blog post: Introducing HubSpot Service Hub. Or, dive a little deeper with How Hubspot Service Hub Helps You Deliver Superb Customer Care.  

What’s the role of an agency in all this?

Turning your customers into brand promoters with a savvy customer support strategy can be more technical and demanding than you first imagine. A full-service digital business consultancy like Huble Digital has the collective skills to marry a refined strategy with the latest Service Technology setup and onboarding training to ensure consistent, efficient implementation. 

Our team consults with businesses to identify their needs and goals, to develop customer support strategies that address those needs. These are then mapped to the Service Technology solution — ensuring, for instance, Service Hub is configured to best serve each client’s unique business context. Once it’s all set up, our team runs change management and training to ensure staff know how to use the tools at their disposal, to their best advantage. 

With ongoing support, they then ensure everything keeps running smoothly, software and configurations remain up-to-date, and that teams are getting the right reports for meaningful insights to drive sustainable improvements. 

In short, we ensure that everything we do for our clients has their customers at its core. And we treat support services as an essential part of the customer experience. Contact a Huble Digital consultant today, or browse our Service and CX page and uncover how we can help you realise consistent customer delight and operational efficiency, with the best tools — and a smart customer support strategy.