The global economy is shrinking by 3.3%, which is on par with the recession that took place during WW2. Your focus should be on retaining customers during this contraction, and digital strategies provide a simple solution.
No matter the economic climate, businesses need to provide quality customer service in order to survive. In difficult times, however, providing exceptional customer service can be expensive. Yet, support is necessary no matter the climate, so what can you do to appease your bottom line and customer needs?
Here are three tips to provide recession-proof customer support without breaking the bank: hire remote customer service reps, use chatbots and other automated systems whenever possible, and create a comprehensive self-help system that customers can access from your website.
How a Recession Affects Customer Support
A recession can have a major impact on customer support in a number of ways. First, during a recession, people are generally more worried about their financial situation and less likely to make big purchases. This means that they may be more likely to contact customer support with questions or concerns before making a purchase.
Additionally, as businesses tighten their belts during a recession, they may be more likely to cut back on customer support staff or close call centers altogether. Reducing your support team can negatively impact sales, customer satisfaction, and business growth.
It’s important to put into play recession-proof customer support practices now to protect your business from any future volatility in the economy.
How to Provide Recession-Proof Customer Support
1. Better Organize Your Team
Digitization of the workforce allows for incredible connectivity among departments and data collection, but it can also fragment organizing and storing documentation.
An incredible 86% of support workers are unable to find the answer to a customer’s question, and 33% of customers want an answer in just one interaction. This is the key to customer retention during economic downturns: organizing your workforce to better serve the customers, you have to avoid the devastating loss if they leave.
Technical solutions are available to help organize your documentation, employee management, response efforts, and more. By using a tool that connects all of your storage locations and allows your team to search amongst every file (and every file type), you can eliminate that fragmentation and give customers the answers they need.
Korra helps businesses defragment by providing one simple AI-powered search tool with connections to all your stored locations. Locally or online, and no matter the file type, Korra finds it, reads it, and presents an answer and the document(s) location to better serve your team.
2. Use Automated Systems Whenever Possible
Chatbots are computer programs that can mimic human conversation, and they can be used to help customers with their purchases or dealings. It’s quite common to see a live chat option when visiting a site or seeing Facebook Messenger as a support option. While these can eventually link customers with a rep, the functionality is automated first.
Consumers prefer self-service, which is why chatbots and knowledge bases are so popular. The information is available for them to resolve their issues. Providing an automated knowledge discovery service is essential to your business’ retention goals. Statistically, a bump of 5% in customer retention will yield up to 95% more in profits.
Allow automation to play a significant role in recession-proofing your business. You’ll see gains in customer satisfaction, retention, and cash flow.
3. Create a Comprehensive Self-Help System
Creating a comprehensive self-help system is another way to provide recession-proof customer service. A self-help system can include a variety of resources, such as articles, videos, or FAQs, that customers can access from your website. This can help customers to solve common problems on their own, which can save them time and money (and you, as well).
By providing a self-help system, businesses can avoid the need to provide one-on-one customer support for every issue. Additionally, customers who are able to solve their own problems are more likely to be satisfied with your product or service overall.
A self-help system can be a valuable asset to any business, but it’s especially important during times of economic uncertainty. By taking the time to create a comprehensive self-help system now, you can protect your business from any potential downturn in the future.
The #1 Tool to Recession-Proof Your Customer Support
Even in difficult times, customers still need help and support with their purchases and dealings. You need a tool that can help reduce and spread your support team, automate the query-answer flow, and provide a comprehensive self-service solution. Korra checks all the boxes.
The previous method was to write countless pages of how-tos and problem-solution pages for any possible scenario in the form of a knowledge base, video tutorials, and FAQs.
Korra removes the friction and cost of providing solutions by giving customers a direct answer to their specific problem based on the documentation, files, and pages your business already has. It then presents the answer as an easy-to-use, navigable video stream that highlights specific phrases in a PDF or a timestamp on a video you uploaded to Vimeo.
Optimize your support team, automate the support experience, and offer next-level self-service support options for your customers to recession-proof your customer support department. Try Korra for free today and experience the future of help.