In the digital world where every service and product is just one click away, customers want more.
This growing need is generally fulfilled by offering excellent customer support.
However, good customer support doesn’t always come with a huge price tag. Sometimes, good planning can help you offer top-notch customer support as well.
Access to digital marketing introduced us to many strategies that can be applied to improve customer service experience, including automating inclusive customer support. This refers to providing support, with the help of technology, that is accessible and caters to all individuals, regardless of their needs, backgrounds, and cultural nuances.
If you are running a business and want to offer Automating Inclusive Customer support with a limited budget, here is everything to know.
How to Build an Automated Inclusive Customer Support
· Pick an Inspiration
To start planning for automated and inclusive customer support, it is important to set your goal and some benchmarks. For instance, in this case, you have three main goals:
- Building a customer support
- Making it inclusive
- Making an automated process
To achieve each goal, you now need to set a benchmark. This benchmark will help you learn about the best features you can offer, set a tone, type of responses, and the kind of service you need to offer via customer support.
To start, let us look at the first goal, set a benchmark for this, and learn about the features that you should offer.
Building a Customer Support
To plan your customer support program, keep in mind that every brand has a different goal and feature for their customer support department.
Some companies just stick to the usual complaint management while others take it a few steps further by using customer support for online bill payment, technical guidance, complaint management, package inquiries, service inquiries, etc.
Apart from the features, some brands also focus on the availability of their customer support service i.e. 24/7 availability. Spectrum is a very good example of this as it offers all these features.
Making It Inclusive
The inclusivity of any customer support makes it more welcoming and gives it a more global feel. For instance, airlines offer their services to everyone regardless of ethnicity, culture, and social background. This is the reason these companies offer customer support in multiple languages.
This is not just limited to airlines; other industries are also following suit. For instance, if we consider the above-mentioned example, Spectrum also offers customer support in multiple languages. Their Spectrum servicio al cliente is dedicated to Spanish customers so they can inquire and seek guidance about the services and upgrades in Spanish.
Making an Automated Process
Customer support for a small business can become quite a challenge especially when the brand has a limited budget. Since most businesses consider customer support as a supplementary service, sparing a budget for it becomes a challenge for them.
In this case, automation can be very helpful. Most companies set their greeting message on automation while others keep their follow-up message on automation. Both strategies work wonders as they help reduce the overall response time and ensure a seamless communication system. For instance, tech brands like Hubspot have an automated live chat experience that offers similar services.
· Choose a Platform
Now that you know what feature you are adding to your customer support, what the goal for your customer support is, and how you want to present your brand, it’s time to select the platform.
Selecting a platform will not just impact the tone of the brand but will also set the foundation of the relationship with the customer. For instance, brands that primarily offer customer service via phone calls have a very passive communication approach, which means they only offer help when the customer reaches out to them.
Similarly, brands that offer social media for customer support want to set a very informal relationship with their customers. On the contrary, brands that offer customer support via an Omni channel approach want to appear more reliable and approachable.
· Customize Basic Responses
After choosing the platform for customer support, it is time to set some ground rules for the responses. Based on the brand persona, target audience, and the relationship of the brand with the client, the basic response can vary.
Brands targeting younger audiences like to keep their tone very casual. This eventually helps them trim their response accordingly. On the contrary, luxury brands trying to appeal to a more mature audience pick a very formal tone.
For instance, Duolingo is one of the best online learning platforms that mainly targets the younger audience. The brand uses social media as its main communication platform and opts for a very casual tone for communication. Their greeting messages have a touch of humor and most of the replies are very crisp with a touch of humor.
For your brand, you can simply use any AI tool and get the responses ready.
· Automate Channels
It’s time to get started with automation.
Businesses that serve a much wider audience generally opt for a 360-degree, Omni channel experience involving email, phone, social media, and text services. However, these preferences can vary from brand to brand.
To give you a perspective, let us look at some common communication channels and ways to automate responses on these channels:
- Social Media: nearly all social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have in-built response automation options.
- Email: although Gmail has a basic email automation service, this is not ideal for business. In the case of email, HubSpot and MailChimp are good options.
- Phone: f you want to automate simple responses on phone calls, Zendesk is a very good option.
- Text: SimplyText, Textmagic, and SlickText are some of the best dashboards for automating text services for any brand.
· Build a Solid Follow-up System
Once everything is done, make sure that you have a solid follow-up plan in place. You can use the above-mentioned automation tools to set email, text, and call situations for each event.
Most of the dashboards have an “if and then” command system, however, some dashboards come with pre-sets and templates as well.
Top Brands Setting Standards in Customer Support Department
- Apple
- Chick-fil-A
- Starbucks
- Zappos
- Disney
- Lush
