How customer feedback can help your support team

Customer feedback is a vital tool that helps you strive for continuous improvement. Feedback can help to steer the decisions you make as a team, and can help you to understand the true pain points your customers are dealing with.

Here’s how to use feedback to your advantage in a customer support department.

Closing the loop

Customer feedback is a goldmine of information that can fuel positive updates to the help content in your knowledgebase or FAQ. Often, support teams are so busy, they often forget to update the knowledgebase. Users lose trust because it goes out of date, and a valuable resource is wasted.

This is a real shame, because the knowledgebase could capture and answer some enquiries before they turn into calls. In terms of time spent, up to date self-help systems can produce great ROI and slash the demand on your phone lines.

If a technical problem recurs repeatedly, make sure a workaround is provided in the knowledgebase so you can quickly direct callers to it. Consider including a rating and comments system so that your customers can feed back on topics they feel are out of date.

Cloud collaboration tools like Basecamp are a great way to pool ideas and brainstorm new FAQ content.

Positive rewards

If a customer reports that a member of staff has done a particularly good job, make sure they are recognised for it. All too often, support staff become disillusioned, but positive feedback can inspire great performance and true loyalty to the customers they serve.

Team dinners, gift cards and afternoons off are all great ways to ensure your team continues to act positively on feedback.

You can even formalise this with an incentive scheme that drives engagement between support staff and the customers they serve. The more helpful your team is, the more open customers will be, and the faster they’ll tell you when you’re doing something right.

You can also record calls on your virtual phone system to monitor how your team is doing.

Take care of your team

Converting a new customer is much more expensive than selling to a customer you’ve already got. In every business, customer support is arguably the most important department. This is the team that will ensure existing customers are happy, and improve your chances of selling to them again. Just one good experience could pay dividends for months to come, so make sure your team is well resourced.

A modern help desk system should lighten the load on your team, with automatic emails inviting feedback when every incident is closed. Consider the wording carefully. You could ask the customer to feed back on the person who’s dealt with the call, or provide more general feedback on their experience.

If you want deep insight into how customers feel, send a survey and collate the results against your team KPIs.

Make your customers smile

Customer support can be a tiring role, and it’s all to easy to get burned out. Use your cloud tools, your business phone system and your knowledgebase to support your team in serving customers better. Creating a positive feedback loop will improve the effectiveness of your team, and make it more likely that customers will spend with you again.