When a customer has to contact a help desk they are probably experiencing some kind of problem. Sometimes, we have people contacting our help desk to tell us how much they love us, but the majority of people who contact actually need some kind of help with something.

Every business should have some sort of help desk. If you sell products online or offline, people are always going to need help no matter what so you need to be prepared for it.

Below are 4 essentials to ensuring that you are taking care of your customers and potential customers effectively without taking too much time out of your day.

Note: The last essential listed will be the icing on the cake and the one extra that will set you a part from most people who are selling products to customers.

4 Essentials For Fast & Effective Customer Service

Let’s talk about what you need in place to have an effective support system in place (even if it’s just you who is doing all the support).

1) A Place to Direct People

It could be as simple as setting up an email address that is specific to handling support. It should be separate from your personal email address if you are going to use the email route. I know very high level marketers who use the good ol’ reliable Gmail email for their support. There needs to be a way that you can track incoming “tickets” and there needs to be a clear distinction between open and closed tickets. You can rig gmail so that it does this for you.

You can also have more of an established system like Zendesk that has several built in support functions (because that’s what it’s made for).

2) Add Automation

The more automation you can have in your business, the better. Although, don’t overdo it like we’ve seen some do in the past. 

Once you get to working your support desk for a while, you will see the same tickets and questions appearing. It will save you and your team tons of time to create automations or macros on how you can get answers to people in no time at all.

All this means is that instead of typing the same support message back to the customer, you simply need to press a few buttons and it leads them back to the perfect response that answers their question or helps them solve their problem.

Tip: Your speed of return will immensely impress your customers. 

You can create automation in Gmail by using something called Canned Responses. Here’s a great wikihow on exactly how to create canned responses.

If you are using Zendesk, they call the automation Macros. For example, if people get confused on how to access a product you are selling, create a macro on the exact step by step directions. Name the macro and you are done. Zendesk lets you clone macros to make other macros very quickly.

3) Have a Support Page

Instead of leading people right to your help desk for them to open a ticket or send you an email, many marketers have what is known as a Knowledge Base that supports a customer before they actually open a ticket. Having this in place might save you a heck of a lot of time answering support tickets or even pressing buttons for automation. This page should include a Frequently Asked Questions and a Should Ask Questions. Your Should Ask Questions are questions your customers should be asking but may not even know it yet. You should know your customers problems better than they know do.

4) The Extra Step: Follow Up

Follow up is the extra step that not too many small business owners ever do. Only the cream of the crop are really doing this. Now, I am not saying that you should or have to do this with everyone. You can be selective with whom you choose to use the followup strategy on. If you only wanted to do this with your top paying customers, that would be perfectly fine.

Basically, what you are essentially doing is getting back to the person a few days after you have helped them and asking them if they are still ok or need further assistance. First of all, this will shock the shit out of the customer. They will be amazed that you cared so much and you wanted to check back in to see how they were doing. WOW. My support team has won over so many people who may have visited our help desk dissatisfied for one reason or another.  After the follow up message, they are extremely happy and feeling super about doing business with you.

Tip: You can actually use automation for your follow up. After you apply the automation, you can customize the message and include a personal note, add the person’s name or just say “Happy Monday”.

Don’t overdo the follow up method and don’t use this all the time. Use it sparingly because you don’t want to increase your customer service a ton because your costs will go up. Adding this step might also spark further questions and small talk with the customer, so that is why you might want to restrict it to your top paying customers…but that doesn’t mean you should neglect your lower and middle tier paying customers because they could of course turn into top paying customers. 🙂

Adding this additional gesture is super effective mostly because nobody is really doing it. It makes the person feel special and it makes them feel like you personally care about them and you are checking up on their progress. Try it and see how much you brighten up someone’s day.

That’s it. Another optional step would have some kind of support staff to help you answer tickets and questions. This person (or people) would have to be well trained. Don’t overlook the importance of this position. While it’s probably not the highest paying job in the world, it is extremely important to find someone good and who takes this job seriously and UNDERSTANDS they are dealing with people who have actually paid you money and people who you want to pay you more money in the future!! This person should have strong communication skills. If they are dealing with your customers, you want them to communicate clearly and effectively.

Let’s Hear From You

=> Are there any other essentials for customer service that you can add to the list?