The Growth Booth

How To Save Time & Make More Money With Customer Service Technology | The Growth Booth #27

July 11, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 27
The Growth Booth
How To Save Time & Make More Money With Customer Service Technology | The Growth Booth #27
Show Notes Transcript

Did you know you can save time and money for your online business by using a support desk? It’s true… but how do you get started, where can you find some quick wins, and what should you look for in support desk software? 

Welcome to the 27th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

This week Aidan talks with Melissa Contreras, the customer support manager for Blueprint, on all things customer support. Learn insider tips about where to find quick wins with your support processes, discover the surprisingly cheap solution we use across all of our businesses, and why investing in one can be the game-changer your business needs.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:41 What's A Support Desk?

04:22 Knowledge Bases

08:00 Chat Widgets

10:20 How Much Are Support Desks?

11:52 Staff Management

15:32 Episode Sponsor

16:26 What To Look For When Choosing A Support Desk

21:25 Multi-Brand Support

25:04 Access for Support Staff

27:26 Short Codes and Canned Responses

30:01 Final Tips

32:11 Outro


Links Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

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Welcome to episode number 27 of The Growth Booth, where today we're going to be talking about tips and tricks and tools that you can use to streamline customer service, which is incredibly important for any kind of an online business and even offline businesses that have got an online presence need to have a mechanism for making sure that their customers are looked after in the best way possible.

You've got an incredible spectrum of opportunities here. When I got started online way back in the mid-2000, 2005 and 2006, I was just using an email address and it was probably the most inefficient way, but it was still a way to provide customer service. Now, in our company, we've had support desks that we've used since 2008, so we've been using them for over 14 years now. I'm joined here today by our customer support manager, Melissa Contreras, who I met many moons ago when she was building an online business of her own. I couldn't think of a better person to come on here and talk to us here today because she has absolutely transformed what we've done.

She has implemented new tools, new software, new methodologies, and different things that we've been able to do to automate a lot of customer support and in lots of different areas of our business. I think if you agree that a customer needs to be treated well and the customer is really important to business, then it's worth thinking through a little bit about how you could streamline and automate your support operations and make sure that you're giving users, customers, and it could be customers on an e-commerce store, an affiliate store, a product that you may have, making sure you're giving your customers a good experience and think about ways that you can streamline that just so that you can save yourself time and money.

 

AIDAN

Melissa, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to be here with us today.

 

MELISSA

Thank you, Aidan. It's really great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

 

AIDAN

I think we could just get straight into the details here. When we're talking about a support desk, what exactly is a support desk? Some people might not be familiar with what we mean when we talk about support desks.

 

MELISSA

Sure. What we're talking about here is a specific software or it's a specific tool that businesses can use to help manage the customer queries that come in through different channels. It could be email, it could be social media. It’s a way to organize all those queries that are coming in from customers and, hopefully, help you prioritize those queries. As you said, automate them. Automate the way the workflows, the way you respond to them, and maybe even if you have support teams, how to organize those teams and how to get feedback, gather intel from those support tickets, and support queries. That you can get more information about what your customers are thinking, what are the pain points that they're facing, and what are the issues that they're facing. A customer support desk is a tool that can help you do all those things.

 

AIDAN

Before using a customer support desk, what I used to do was have a notepad on my desktop and I would get these common questions coming in and I'd be replying through my email. If someone would send me a question asking about how they return a product that they've purchased through an e-commerce store, for example, I would have these custom answers and I'd open up the notepad, I'd copy that, paste it into the email, then I'd send it off. But that's pretty different from what we do these days. Maybe you could open people's eyes a little bit about some of the ways that we can automate that or at least streamline it with little tricks and so forth.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, sure.

Well, you touched on something that is one of the things that is most helpful about having a support desk as you said about a notepad with all these common questions, then if you have a support desk, you can have a knowledge base. That is something that most help desks are, there is something that is included in their offers, and then it's just a place where it's a repository of information. Typical questions that come in, how do I log in, how do I get whatever feature in this product to work, or just basic troubleshooting that if you had somebody actually physically answering those types of questions again and again and again and again, it just wastes time.

You can better serve people by having them just quickly search for this information, search for that on a knowledge base, quickly get the ransom responded, and then save the agents time, support agent’s time for something that is a bit more involved. That's one of the things that is super. That's level zero. That's the self-service, kind of like a page.

 

AIDAN

When you talk about a knowledge base, are you talking about an additional page that you might add to your website? Let’s use an example. Let's say back in the good old days of e-commerce, we used to have a website that sold train horns. These were obnoxious things that people would put on their car and they would drive down the street and scare old ladies and things like that. They weren't very nice. But anyway, a lot of people used to buy them. And if someone was thinking about buying one of these things, they might have a question. Are you saying that a knowledge base is something like an extra page that we can put on our website and direct people to? Is that sort of how they work?

 

MELISSA

It could be. You could have physically a page on your website with a frequently asked questions on it, with all of that information on it, and it could be just having a search function so people could easily put a few keywords and then the information that's relevant to them would pop up, or you could have all that information, what you would have before on your notepad, you can have all that added into a chat box, for example. That's also something that because nowadays especially, people want speed and they want convenience and getting information, if you have that little widget on the bottom there or wherever it is that can quickly answer questions, that's another way. And then a third way is the actual support desk software on the portal. When you're going to type in the Submit a Support Ticket, for example, you could also have a knowledge base on that portal where these typical questions could be hosted as well.

 

AIDAN

I think there are also ways that you can sort of filter people through to get to ultimately what they're trying to find out about.  I'll give you an example. We've recently set up a new office here in Buenos Aires and I've been installing internet in Argentina, one of the most common support channels now is WhatsApp text messages. This company that I'm getting the internet from has got a WhatsApp account and I can start a conversation with them just by typing “Hello”, and then they all seem to be a multiple choice. “What do you want to find out information about? Is it about your account? Is it about a new installation? Is it administrative stuff and so on and so forth?” and then that can automatically sort of funnel me to where I want to get to and ultimately lead me to either talk to a representative or to one of these knowledge bases.

It's amazing how with all the mobile technology and the way that people are changing how they interact, a lot of these support desks are enabling us to do this kind of thing. Now, if I think back ten years ago, it's just mind-blowing how much it's all changed. You mentioned the little chatbots that sort of pop up in the corner of a website or something. These are almost like standard practice these days. It used to be standard practice to have a phone number, but now people pick up the phone, it's more important to have one of these little chat widgets, which speaking of that, these chat widgets are these sorts of run-of-the-mill things that support desks offer to be able to be installed on websites.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, most of them will have it, maybe not in the basic plan. If you're just starting out and you just want a basic plan, maybe some of those, depending on what company you're working with, will not include it in the basic package that they offer. But certainly, in a mid-level, they will most certainly have some kind of widget.

It's also part of this larger kind of philosophy of being where your customer is. Like you're saying, if you're on WhatsApp, if you're on Instagram, if you're on all these little social media apps or chat widgets, if you can find a way, it's called an omnichannel support desk, customer support service. All of these will ultimately funnel, like you say, into just one shared inbox you will have. When you log in to one of these desks, you will have email tickets, a chat widget, messages, and something from Instagram messages. You have them all linked up into just one long queue that you can then prioritize and then redistribute and find different teams.

 

AIDAN

If you think about the logistics that would be involved in doing this manually, if you wanted to do this manually, you'd have an email account and you'd be logging in there and you'd be replying to people, you'd have a cell phone and you'd be vigorously typing away to answer WhatsApp messages and text message. You might have a telephone that you'd be picking up at the same time. It's just this omnichannel approach is really the way of the future there. I think as people building online marketing businesses, it's really important to know that this technology is out there and that it's accessible. Back in the day, going back 14 years, when we started using support desks, they were actually quite expensive. But nowadays I think they are quite accessible. Do you have, just off the top of your head, a ballpark figure of what some basic customer support desk might cost?

 

MELISSA

Definitely. I mean the one we use, Live Agent, and it just starts off at $15 per agent per month. If you just had a couple of agents, maybe tier one and tier two, and that was it. It was not even $50 a month. You could have just a really good solution for organizing all those queries and for responding to customers in a way that's most effective. Yeah, it's definitely …

 

AIDAN

What do you mean by tier one and tier two? What does that mean?

 

MELISSA

Very basic troubleshooting. What I was mentioning before, is “How can I log in?” just for basic troubleshooting and can be answered by tier one, level one support. It's a step above that knowledge-based service. Once you get into more in-depth support tickets where you need somebody with a bit more experience, maybe more experience in the product or the service that you're offering, or just more experience in handling customers, then that would go to tier two. Sometimes you have subject matter experts, then you might have tier three. It's just a way of organizing. You don't have an agent that's possibly more expensive because they may have more experience answering tickets that somebody else with less training can answer, right?

 

AIDAN

If someone has got an e-commerce store or an affiliate business and they're wondering if they should put a support desk on, one way that they may be able to save themselves some time using a support desk and money is to hire someone to do that low-level support, which might be like “How can I find out when my product is being shipped?” and something like that. Basically, it could be very low-level support or “How can I make a change to my order?”

There might be low-level support and you could hire someone anywhere around the world and just plug them into this without needing to give out important company email account credentials and stuff. I guess they can just log in from anywhere. You could have a virtual assistant in the Philippines or wherever and then you yourself could have an accountant. Maybe you would be the tier two because you're the one that might make some of the harder decisions like whether or not it makes sense to refund someone or to provide a customized solution of some kind.

So yeah, I think this is really good stuff. What else can we do with regard to or how else can these support desks help us from a staff management standpoint? 

 

MELISSA

Okay, so from a staff management standpoint, besides helping you to make sure that those resources are going to the right person, the support desk can also give you metrics so you can see ticket volume, for example, how long each of your agents takes in responding to a ticket. Your customers can also rate your agent, it's always a good idea to have built-in a sort of feedback mechanism and your customers can rate the agent that's helping them. And then you can also see, ”Okay, wow, this person is really good. This person is bringing customers happiness when they deal with so and so” and “Customers aren't so happy when they deal with this other person.” You know who you want to keep and that kind of helps you as well to make sort of decisions with respect to staffing.

 

AIDAN

I guess it would become very apparent who your superstar team members were and maybe where their strengths lie and adjust accordingly.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, and there are also ways. For example, the support desk that we use has a little feature that I love and it's something that tells you when the support agent is live online. It has a little green light that says that they're online, but it also lets you reach out to that person. It's a messaging feature within the support desk. Usually when I have new people that I'm training and I'm keeping an eye on how they're answering and obviously we've trained them previously in general, but then I'm keeping an eye on how they're answering tickets, with this little feature, I can immediately see that person is answering. I can immediately send them a message, or if they just responded, I can see right away. It's a good teaching opportunity right there. Like “It's better to say this…” or “Maybe it would have been a good idea to include this other link…” That's something that Live Agent, for example, has, and when we worked with them and other support that they didn't have, I missed it. It's a little feature that seems like it wouldn't be that important, but actually for me, it helps as a training tool,

 

AIDAN

It really is a good feedback mechanism and a good way that you can chime in and help bring people up to speed. We've been through multiple different support desks over the years. I can't even remember the names of all of them now. Is there anything that comes to mind? This was one thing that you said that you would miss about Live Agent, which is the software we're currently using. If it wasn't there with the other support desks that we use, is there anything that sort of screams out to you? Like that one was tough to use because of such and such, or that one was missing such and such, just to give people an idea of some of the things that they should potentially look for when they are comparing different support desk options.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, okay. When comparing different support, I actually have a few notes on that. When looking for a support desk, so obviously on a very basic level, they will all create support ticket numbers that will help you identify and help you create different queues in different departments and different teams. That's very much a queue. What it is is a way to group tickets together so that they can be prioritized.

For example, you could have a billing queue, you can have an admin queue, you can have a technical queue, and you can have a VIP queue. If you have, for example, a group of customers that you labeled as VIPs. For the customer support desk that you use, it has to have a way to create these different departments, these different queues like you said.

Also, it's important to have a way to assign different roles to the team, to the support agents. You were mentioning just an admin role versus the regular agent role. That's important that you can give access to special parts of the support desk for security purposes as you mentioned, and also not just security, but I guess that's part of security.

If you want to give somebody the ability to change an online support form, for example, or change general settings like labels and things like that, then you want to be able to have different roles and permissions. There's also the ability to add, for example, customer details, when an agent is answering a ticket and you have your name and email. It's really helpful also to have on the side, for example, “What is the latest products that they purchased?” Maybe a little list. Some of them have a little list, which is what some support desks have had that I haven't had, that I've missed, and that's why we've gone back to Live Agent, like a little list on the side of their recent tickets and that kind of these little things that quickly just help you very quickly. Yeah, a little history.

Another thing is labels and tags are important because with labels and tags, even little things like I said, VIP. You have a group of customers in your database that you say is a group of people that I want to offer special VIP level support to. They can be filtered out to a kind of priority type base, a high priority queue and you want your best agents on it and people with a lot of good experience. That's another thing that's important.

Merging tickets and the way tickets are merged, what that means is you'll always have people that submit lots of tickets on the same thing and that can just sometimes clog up your support ticket and then you might have different agents answering the same question, which could be a problem. Definitely, the support has to have some kind of mechanism that prevents two agents from answering the same ticket at the same time and also that you can merge tickets so that you will have all the information on just one thread and keep it organized like that to avoid just having different people giving different information maybe and it just adds to the confusion.

 

AIDAN

Lots of good ideas there. I think one thing I would say is don't choose a support desk just based on price because by spending an extra $10, you might get something that is so much better than something that was $10 cheaper. Especially if you're thinking about building teams. I mean, at any given time, depending on what we've got going on, we could have 30 or 40 different support desk people, agents in different parts of the business, and you need a way to manage them. Hopefully, as your business grows, you'll be able to slot more people in and the support desk will grow with it.

Speaking about that, one of the projects that you've been masterminding in our business recently is consolidating support across different businesses. If someone has got an e-commerce store, for example, maybe they've got an e-commerce store and they need to manage support on that, then maybe they've created some info product for themselves and they need to manage support on that. Maybe they've got a little piece of software or something. They need to manage support on that. How did these support desks manage that consolidation of multiple projects? Is that possible or what does that look like?

 

MELISSA

If that's important to your business, then you do need to look at the features of the support software that you're looking into to make sure it offers. It could be multi-brand support. That's what they call it. For example, if you offer different products and for branding purposes you want each of those to have its own separate support portal where people log in, just different from the main brand of the company, then you could sign up for this. 

It's called multi-branding. What it does is that even though there are these different faces of support for these different products coming in, they're all ending in the same support account. You have this one team that you can then segregate into different departments if you needed to because you might have different products but in the end they're using the same team of developers, for example, or they're just using the same…

 

AIDAN

That would give flexibility.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, for one.

 

 

AIDAN

This is something we've been doing with some of the companies and different projects that I've spoken about in the past on this show.

For example, Float hosting, for example, Cartzy, our e-commerce shopping platform. These are great examples of being two completely distinct projects, but we can manage the support for them in one support portal or support desk if you like, and we can set up multiple tiers of support.

Float Hosting, for example, there are people that are going to try to log into their hosting and they've forgotten their username and password, and that can be one tier of level. There are other people that want to migrate from another host over to Float Hosting and that's something that we can definitely take care of for people and there'll be another team that does that. Then the same thing exists with Cartzy as well, where we've got those multiple levels. But some of the resources, I assume, could be shared between different desks, so if someone was asked how to reset a password on Cartzy, the same person might be able to answer how to reset a password on Float Hosting.

 

MELISSA

Yeah, and it's not only people resources that you're sharing but also, like we said, the knowledge base articles, they could be transferable to the different brands. There's also a feature in the customer support desk, sometimes they're called predefined answers or canned messages, which is just another way to automate your response. You have within your support desk a way to add a quick response that you've already pre-built. It's like a template, basically, that you pre-built and loaded onto a support desk. That also is something that can be shared and can be used for different types of products even if you don't use it as is, but you can just adapt it and the person who's responding can just quickly use that template to respond.

 

AIDAN

What about if someone is thinking about this and they're listening to this and they like the sound of a few of these things, but they start thinking, “Well, if I want to use outsourcing or find a virtual assistant and have them sort of plug into this, I'm concerned about the kind of access they're going to get.” Are there ways to limit the access or really sort of monitor, I guess closely, to make sure the ways that people can sort of dip their toes in the water a little bit and not go all-in on the desk until they're comfortable? Or maybe it's not that they're not comfortable with the support desk, it's that they're worried about giving up control to other people who might not have proven themselves yet. Any ideas about that?

 

MELISSA

Yeah, you can definitely kind of limit the access of the people in your team -  even as far as by department or by queue. You can do it by saying, “I want this person to only respond to login tickets,” if that's what you wanted. For example, I'm just giving an extreme example, but if you wanted this person, you just want to test them and see how they're answering before they ruin your reputation, you can say, “Okay, we're going to have to answer login tickets and see how they do.” Then you can open it up to like a whole department of, for example, of like, admin, if that person is worthy of that responsibility.

 

AIDAN

I'm imagining as well that for people that have got websites potentially in multiple languages, you could have one area of the support desk that might be in Spanish, another area that might be in English, and it could use all the same support desk and it could be managed the same way as someone managing this. You can still track performance, you can make sure that we're doing a good job on support, but again, streamline operations.

I think for me, the real big win here is that you can streamline when you're using a support desk, you can actually save a lot of time and money even though you're going to be spending a little bit of money to get up and running with a support desk. I mean, the whole idea is that it actually saves you time and money.

One thing that I've always thought of from a support standpoint is if I keep getting a question asked to me, then I want to answer it for the last time. What can I do to answer this question for the last time so that I don't have to go through and write out an answer over and over again? That there is the perfect candidate for taking a question and turning it into a knowledge base type article or a video or whatever it might be.

One other thing I wanted to ask you about, and I think this is related to these knowledge bases, but about short codes and ways that you can quickly pre-fill, I guess you could say, prefill a response. Someone asks a question, it's a question you've been asked a hundred times before. Are there buttons you can press or codes you can put in to quickly populate the reply?

 

MELISSA

Yeah. This would be in that realm of the predefined answers that I was just mentioning a while ago. It's either you can have either a full-on answer that is a well-developed answer to something that comes up often that might have a lot of information and many different steps that have to be included in your answer. That could be what we call a predefined answer. But you could also have, if you have a chatbot, for example, little canned messages like “Hi, thank you for reaching out to us. How can we help you?” Even that little thing, just a little snippet of text, just saves the agents of typing that. Maybe they have different chats going on at the same time and they're busy, just putting that and then there's a little button that you press and just put in a keyword. All these desks also have automation. When this chat opens, you can say to add this greeting right away or you also have a way to say “Okay, if you get an email, you create all these rules in the background. If an email from this group of customers comes then send out this email template,” for example. That's just something you don't even have to worry about. It's automatic.

 

AIDAN

Rules and automation, incredible for something like this. That's when you can really start almost having that sort of AI, artificial intelligence response and having the machine doing the answer for you. That's where you can really save a huge amount of time. Obviously, the more support questions you get, the more you're going to be able to do this and sort of ramp things up. I think that's huge. Any final tips or advice?

 

MELISSA

It would be kind of a final tip of advice. It's just to remember that all these things, in the end, are to help make your customer happy. What you want, the objective of all of this is to keep your customers happy. Why? Because happy customers come back and they'll buy from you again. In order to increase the lifetime customer value, you want to provide the best customer support that you can. That doesn't mean it has to be the most expensive. Actually, we've moved from the support desk because that has been more expensive but has had way too many bells and whistles for my liking and just ended up tripping up to support agents and we've gone back to less expensive. But this is just fine. This is a just-what-we-need kind of solution.

In the end, just make sure it offers you a way to organize, to prioritize and to get feedback. Because with that feedback, then like I said, I want this the last time to answer this question. Why is this coming up again and again? That’s feedback for you to say, “Okay, so I can improve my product this way.” You wouldn't have known otherwise possibly. That's also a way for you to, if they give you good feedback, then you can use it as testimonials and refer your business to their friends and that will bring in more business. All of that, keeping that in mind, you'd be crazy just not to make an investment like this.

 

AIDAN

It's amazing. When you look at the numbers, something like 68%, I think it was, of people will revisit a company that provides them with good support. If you provide someone with bad support, then that's a sure-fire way to lose a customer for life. If you're thinking about the lifetime value and you're looking at it through that lens, if you can do a better job with customer support, it's going to pay you off on your bottom line over and over and over again. I think it's one of these sorts of low-hanging fruits that people tend to neglect, which is an enormous opportunity.

Melissa, thank you so much for taking your time here today. We'll include some of your ideas and links to some of the different websites we've mentioned in the show notes.

To everyone listening to this, my final comment would be for you to make sure you check this out. Even if you've got one website, it might make sense for you to start using a support system.

Also, make sure you tune in next week because on The Growth Booth episode number 28, we're going to be talking about reverse engineering, online business success, and some of the things that you can do for yourself to up the chances of you succeeding with real actionable takeaways that you'll be able to get from that as well. Tune in next week. Right now, this is The Growth Booth, episode number 27. Head over to TheGrowthBooth.com and check out number 27 for Show Notes and so much more.

We'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now!