Is replying to customers 4 hours daily a waste of time?
Hello
I spend about 15-30 hours per week, replying to customers , maybe 20% buy a product, 40% are already a customer , others are just asking but they don't buy anything.
I heared that great founders talk to customer all the time.
Isn't a wasted time? Can I automate customer service?and how to do it?
Thanks
It depends what you're talking to them about.
If you're answering the same old customer support questions again and again then generally no, it'd be better to find a way to automate that or improve your product so people don't ask those questions in the first place.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you're talking to customers to find out crucial information you need to improve and grow your business, then keep it up! This includes things like why people pay for your software, why other people don't pay for your software, customers' top worries and desires, where they spend their money, who they listen to and where they find out about things, etc.
I'd recommend the latter over the former (at least mid- to longterm). For every support request you receive, there are probably 5+ (prospective) customers who are wondering the same thing but couldn't be bothered to fill out a support request...
Maybe build a FAQ, or improve the UX based on the feedback you get so that it's more intuitive?
Which industry are you in? How mature is your business?
Spending this much time on customers in a business' infancy can be incredibly valuable because you learn more about your customers and how to shape you business.
But if you are doing this in a mature business, maybe you should analyze if and how you can unload yourself from this intense work, especially if your learning has plateaued.
Customer support begins with great product development. Great products aren't just easy to use, they teach customers, and help them when they get stuck.
If that's not enough, maybe you have a complex product or customers with varying competency, a support function will unload work from you to dedicated support staff. This doesn't just mean signing up for Zendesk or another helpdesk provider. Rather, you need to analyze your customers' experiences and figuring out what kind of support they need and what kind of support you can afford to offer.
Based on your description of your support work, you are doing both sales and tech support. Sales is a huge priority because that's how you will make money. Hiring salespeople is a huge undertaking and honestly separated from support, so you need to treat it as its own sales function.
That's why you need to analyze your customers' behaviors to figure out what they need help with. Start with the phone calls and emails you get.
Here's an incomplete list of how a support function can be implemented:
Documentation, guides and FAQs: depending on your product, sharing information about your product can save you tons of support calls and emails. But docs can be difficult to understand and might not cover specific user problems.
Phone Support: expensive to offer but perceived as the fastest support option. Good for time sensitive products or sales calls; some people just like being guided through buying a certain product plan or product.
Email Support: can be organized and integrated like nothing else but can be perceived as slow and bureaucratic. You need to pay attention to how the helpdesk software is implemented so it's not bloated, difficult or slow (most are).
Chat: less expensive than phone support and much faster than email, and easier to use than most email based support systems. Needs to be near real time to actually work, otherwise customers will be pissed. Also, a good option for sales, especially if you have international customers.
Wow , thanks for your great help. I use intercom it's expensive but worth it.
I'm the founder of Palar (https://palar.support), and you may want to consider a solution like ours or Upwork and Hioperator depending on your industry.
are the questions repeating themselves?
do you see a pattern?
if so, use that to improve the landing page
Yes. Many are the same
There are a couple ways to offload some of these questions.
Use chatbots. The best sites use chatbots that serve as great customer success/sales reps on the site. They aren't in your face or sales-y but always nearby to answer a question right away. If you're getting a lot of the same sales/marketing questions about your product consider building out chatbots.
Use live chat knowledge base integrations. Both Drift and Intercom have integrations that allow you to automatically recommend knowledgebase articles in live-chat as the first line of defense. If most of your questions are support related you're going to want to invest in building out these support articles and automatically pulling them into live chat.
If you've got a B2B product a material swath of your prospects are always going to have questions and need guidance in the buying process. Big B2B businesses hire BDRs/SDRs and Account Executives to manage these conversations with the market and convert them into customers.
If you have a more low-touch self-sign up product you may have fewer sales conversations as a percentage of all conversations because you have a large number of free users looking for support. So these types of companies end up investing in a lot of support resources instead.
Hope these thoughts help. Let me know if you have any questions.
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With nearly every niche becoming not only filled but saturated, and fierce competition, one of the only remaining differentiators for you will always be customer support. If you're early phase, I'd say go for it, do as much as you have to (I wish I had to do 4 hours of customer support every day...).
There are a lot of factors of course, but I think people would generally appreciate communication with someone from the top part in the company hierarchy, in your case the actual top.
When you will run out of time to do that, you'll have to find people to do that for you, but for now do as much of it as you can afford.
Most help desk software/solutions have templates for FAQs. You can re-use these by building your own FAQs for the site, but if people don't read them (don't expect them to), you have an email version of it to reply with.
Templatizing your replies just a little should save you a decent amount of time.
It will be a good idea to create a good documentation page on Architecture + working of your product as well as a shiny marketing centered documentation with stats and performance values etc.
If the customer is a technical person you can direct them to the first page I mentioned and same goes to the non technical person.
FAQ page will be useful as well.
You can also make use survey/feedback sites to keep in touch with people who are already using your product.
A luxury problem, well dome :)
First of all, as you have often the same questions to answer: Categorize them, tag them, write them on pieces of paper and stack cent coins for each individual request, anything that works to get a clear picture.
For the most common requests you then think about how to answer them, how to make the answer accessible to the customers.
This can be a FAQ, but it can also be a video to show a process or steps the user has to take. Make sure the quality is superb (audio especially).
If you think customers would benefit from a forum where they can interact not just with you, think about adding something like https://discourse.org
Definitely have a FAQ section and even a blog or as I call it, "TidBits" (informational section that just keeps people up to date with how to actually use your service). On every paid project I've made, I use Tawk.to and keep it on from about 11 AM to 12 AM everyday.
I measure my success or ease of using the product by the amount of times someone uses that chat. In the beginning, everyone was using the chat. Nowadays, I get one or two people a week. It lets me know I've done good.. as if I don't hear from people.. they were able to figure it out themselves.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago