To succeed in business, quality products and excellent customer service is a must.
To provide that excellent customer service, your customer service representatives need to be knowledgeable toward the issues a customer mentions in a conversation with the representative.
Over time, you may realize that there are some questions that keep coming up again and again, such as how to integrate your software product into a specific web server. Instead of having your representatives repeatedly taking calls on this issue and occupying precious phone lines or taking up valuable time answering emails and online chats about the same issue over and over, it might be advantageous to create a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) page on your website and point customers to that page. Conversely, you could put that FAQ in an email and have customers who need help with that specific issue to click on an autoresponder link to have that email sent to their email address so they can solve the issue on their own.
This way, your customer service representatives can deal with more isolated incidents that occur infrequently that an FAQ cannot handle effectively.
To determine whether you should create an FAQ, see if specific issues come up several times a day or several times over the course of a week; analyze the phone records to see if the issues are the same ones over and over again. If so, then you likely have a good reason to create an FAQ and post it on your website or set up an autoresponder and put it in the email. You should also integrate this with your customer support page on your website, on your online web chat, and in your automated phone menu to ensure that your customers can quickly find the information they are seeking.
For more information on how customer service can affect profits, check out “Customer Service Profits.”
