May Success Spotlight: Reducing Ticket Volume While Improving CX
The Customer Success Spotlight is a monthly blog post offering industry insights, best practices, and benchmarks for customer service professionals based on commonly asked questions. This month we sat down with the entire Helpshift Customer Success team to learn some tips and tricks about how companies can improve their customer experience while reducing their ticket volume.
“The best support experience you can provide is the one that never happens.” These words are straight from the mouth of McKenna Morey, Customer Success Manager at Helpshift. Yes, in a perfect world, we would love our customers to have flawless, issue-free experiences with our brands.
But even though we don’t live in that perfect world, we should still strive to deliver support experiences that require minimal interactions to resolve.
This mindset puts both the agent and customer experience at the forefront because it means that agents spend less time on repetitive tasks and customers can return to enjoying your service or product.
Support organizations can tackle both goals – reducing ticket volume while improving user experience – by leveraging the three tips outlined below: driving self-service, leveraging Helpshift APIs, and leveling up with QuickSearch Bot.
1. Driving self-service
Technology today is advanced enough to handle routine inquiries automatically. That said, why still allow valuable agents to act like robots and answer questions as simple as “How do I reset my password?”
Not only does that force customers to wait around for simple answers, but agents are more likely to become disengaged and leave because of these mundane tasks. For simple questions like this, encourage customers to self-serve via a robust knowledge base.
Helpshift FAQs, for example, are cached on devices, available offline and don’t require a developer to make updates. That means it’s a great way to communicate changes quickly to users.
Additional benefits of optimizing your FAQs to drive self-service include:
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- Faster resolution time
- Reduced ticket volume
- Improved user experience
Here’s how you can direct more traffic to self-serve:
Evaluate your data
Look at the type of issues that are coming in and see which ones can be easily answered by FAQs.
Speak your user’s language
While your support organization may want to say, “How do I reset my password?”— a user may search “I forgot my password”. In order to capture the various ways that a user may search for an answer, do some research and see how your users are writing in, and use that to guide the titles and keywords of your FAQs.
Optimize for mobile
Especially on mobile phones, reading long form text can be difficult – and most of your users won’t put in the effort to read through it. Optimize your FAQs and make them easily digestible by keeping them short and incorporating images and videos.
Once you optimize your FAQs, you need to maintain them and iterate by using analytics to see which have the most views, dislikes and likes. Based on that, you can adjust content to meet the changing needs of your users.
2. Leveraging Helpshift APIs
In order to help your support organization run as smoothly as possible, there are two Helpshift APIs that we especially recommend:
1. “Contact us” placement
With this API, you can encourage the user to self-serve first by making the contact us button visible only after viewing at least one FAQ.
2. Set minimum character # to 5
One issue that we see commonly is people sending messages that just say “hi” and that is a wasted interaction. You can set minimum characters so issues below the five character threshold don’t go through and you can thereby prevent redundant tickets.
3. Level Up with AI-Powered QuickSearch Bot
QuickSearch Bot provides a modern, conversational experience by instantly responding to your user with content from your knowledge base, using Natural Language Processing to effortlessly resolve tickets. If the suggested article is not adequate, the bot immediately hands off the issue to an agent to avoid any potential user frustration.
Utilizing QuickSearch Bot is a great way to reduce issue volume by up to 95 percent without having to rely on a developer, and a great conversational interface that your users will appreciate.
Get started with QuickSearch Bot today.
These are just a few guidelines to help you get started. We understand every customer is different, so if you want to understand how this applies to your specific industry and get custom tailored tips for your organization, email us at [email protected].
