Intercom believes the future of customer support is conversational, do you agree?
The objective of this post is to thing together in the comments of ways to improve customer support experience
Quick context
Lately, I've been thinking about the future of customer support. Intercom claims that it will be conversational. Nothing surprising considering their core feature is live chat.
Nevertheless, among my research I found out that :
- 31% of customer service professionals report that their departments or teams are viewed as a cost center of their companies. (Hubspot, 2020)
- 23% of customers prefer interacting through chat or direct message when asking a quick question (Super Office)
My problem with the future of customer support being conversational
Most SAAS owners for example believe it's a really cool thing to have a live chat to help your customer and thus improving customer experience (CX). But is it really cool ?
Depending of the size of your team, I actually thing it's a bad move because you will simply never be able to fulfill users expectations most of the times.
This is why we often end up with poor live chat experience such as long delay replies or bad answers because agents are not enough qualified.
Live chat should be the last resort
There is a tons of way out there to prevent you and/or your team to interact with users with a live chat. Most people favor self-help. This is where to invest for better CX.
I am not saying live chat is a bad thing, I actually thing it's awesome but only if you implement it in such a way that your customers use it after self-help options.
What would you like as a customer support solution for your customers ?
Customer support software is a crowded space : Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Crisp and so much more. They all are doing really well.
But can we find another way to address the problem ?
Below is what I don't like with the existing solutions, what about you ?
- the customer support experience is not enough tailor-made for each user
- agents most often don't know the answers for my problems
- teams take too long in corresponding between them to deliver the right answer under 10 minutes
- the experience of issuing a ticket is not great enough imo
- it takes time as a solo founder or a small team to create a knowledge base
