The Ultimate Tech Stack for Customer-Centric Support Teams

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91% of consumers say that a positive customer service experience leaves them more likely to make another purchase. Put simply, putting customer satisfaction at the center of your sales processes is a powerful business asset.

We all know what being the focus of someone’s attention feels like. When this is fostered between your support team and the customer, a feeling of connection, mutual understanding, and a shared sense of success blossoms—one where issues are resolved and feed into celebratory moments for support teams and their customers.

No doubt, some of this comes down to old-fashioned human nature—our capacity to quickly connect and empathize with one another.

But some of the magic also stems from how you work and the technology you use. Which is why we’re diving into how you can optimize your support tech stack for great customer-focused outcomes.

What Being Customer-Centric Looks Like for Support Teams

Success takes many forms for support teams. It can be found in hitting an important target, generating revenue, or solving challenges. But while success comes in many shapes and sizes, it stems from a common seed: a deep connection between support teams and their clients.

To build those connections, support teams need three key things:

• The ability to shorten resolution times

• A way to gather and share positive feedback from customers

• Effective ways to deal with unsatisfied customers

So what are the fundamentals of a tech stack that builds on these three areas and truly transforms those crucial customer–support rep connections?

The Perfect Tech Stack for Support Teams

It’s almost impossible to delight a customer without first building an empathetic connection. Because to bring about a memorable resolution, you first need to understand the issue—and only then help solve it.

When it comes to building empathy, nothing is more powerful than the human voice. In every conversation, we make masses of micro-adjustments to our cadence, tone, and more that help us to connect with people on a deeper level.

The power of voice is why a cloud-based calling system should be the starting point for any support team looking to use technology to build closer connections. With that as your foundation, it’s time to start building the ultimate tech stack for customer-centric support teams.

1. Automating Manual Tasks

Less time spent on repetitive admin means more time for support teams to create moments customers will remember. Even simple admin tasks quickly add up to hours lost each week, and with today’s technology, there’s no need for agents to lose this valuable time.

By integrating a cloud-based calling system with your existing CRM and help desk tools, logging information no longer needs to be resource-intensive.

Pop-ups provide critical info on the customer journey before agents are connected, so teams are set up to help. Live note-taking is also possible, with those agent comments instantly linked to the call. Meanwhile, duration, direction, participants, and recordings are logged automatically, making it simple to hand over information when needed.

This also means your team and customers are less likely to repeat themselves—one of the leading frustrations in support scenarios—and instead are more likely to feel a part of a unique interaction.

2. Creating the Perfect Support Playbook

Working in support, you learn to expect the unexpected. A curveball (or three) is par for the course. While this makes for an engaging and rewarding environment, it can make things trickier for newcomers. That’s why it’s important to think about how your technology supports your onboarding experience.

Rather than dusting off the decade-old handbook, instead, prepare your teams with real-world scenarios, using new technology:

• Call Recording is a must-have for building a library of useful training and learning data, and can be set to kick-in automatically

• AI and sentiment analysis let you go deeper, identifying positive, negative, or neutral feedback to learn from for next time

• Call Coaching features meanwhile help new agents by having another member of the team mentor in-call, without the customer being alerted

3. Setting the Support Team Up for Success

It’s harder to create meaningful interactions when customers are waiting on hold. To minimize wait times and maximize success, you need to avoid any lost time to unnecessary call redirecting. Several cloud-based calling features can help:

• Drag and drop IVR can help you answer common questions and quickly route calls using pre-recorded responses.

• Call Routing then enables you to direct customers rapidly to relevant departments, with dial-pad selection making options clear.

• Skills-Based Routing goes a step further, enabling intelligent call direction. For example, the system can recognize a regular customer, who only speaks Spanish, and immediately connect them to an agent suited to those needs.

Once your customer is on the line, you also need features that help agents build empathetic connections quickly:

• Tagging the call, for example, “Finance” or “Tech issues”, can make it simpler to track queries and resolve complex issues.

• Call Assignment enables you to easily direct calls to the teammates best placed to help.

• Warm Transfers allow you to quickly speak to the other agent before the customer is connected, helping you share vital information.

All these features help customers and support reps alike ensure they are always speaking to the right person at the right time, setting everyone up for a successful interaction.

4. Delighting Customers

Even if it’s the first time an individual agent is speaking to a customer, it doesn’t mean they have to go in cold.

Richer conversations can be created with the help of Insight Cards. These display all sorts of contextual information, like the customer’s status, their last interaction, or even what the weather is like in their town.

Not only does this speed-up resolution times, but it also helps agents connect on a genuine level. This creates new opportunities to spark meaningful moments where customers feel the attention is on them.

5. Facilitating Remote Environments

Remote work is here to stay. In the U.S. and the U.K., for example, a five-fold increase in remote working is expected, compared to pre-pandemic.

A cloud-based calling system is a perfect match for this world of hybrid work. You can set up your support team in a few taps, so they’re connected wherever they are. Even distributed support teams aren’t fragmented! Instead, cloud-based calling ensures customers still receive the empathetic, holistic experiences that are the hallmark of a successful interaction.

Human interactions drive support roles. So why not start building tech stacks that help us build emotive connections?

Each customer will come to a call with different needs, expecting a different interaction. But if we lean into the transformative power of the right tech stack, we can’t go wrong by always putting them first; something that will only serve to benefit our teams and our customers.

And once you start optimizing for customer-centricity, you’ll see other measures, like resolution time, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement, rise with the tide.

Discover the modern communication solution that helps support teams create winning customer experiences.

Published on March 16, 2022.