Did you know only 19% of customers believe that online customer support exceeds their expectations? With the internet making it possible for companies to respond even faster, people have grown accustomed to quicker response times.
In turn, it means that every business – especially eCommerce businesses – will need to cater to this expectation and find the best way to be accessible to their customers online. But every business is different, so different types of support will be required. In some instances, you can depend on one channel, but more likely than not you’ll need to opt for numerous support channels to create a consistent communications journey for your customer – otherwise known as omnichannel customer service.
Using a service management tool like Jira Service Management can do wonders in helping you organize your workflow as well as integrate with numerous support channels. But first, it starts with finding the right omnichannel support for your eCommerce business.
Which tools suit your eCommerce business?
Many new support channels appear daily, and the trick is to tailor one to fit your business needs. But before you decide what channels suit your business, there are three critical factors to consider:
- What does your ideal support team look like?
- Who are the customers you’re targeting?
- What industry does your eCommerce business fall under?
1. What does your ideal support team look like?
To determine what channels you should use, you need to ensure your team is well-equipped to handle it, which depends on a few factors:
The type of team and size of team
Will it be a team of agents dedicated to customer support? Or will it be a team that handles sales but also manages the support channels? This can vary depending on how large or small your business is and the demand for your products.
The size of your team also plays a significant role. If you don’t have enough people on the team, then choosing many different support channels might not be a good idea – especially if a lot of inquiries keep coming in.
The skill set the team members have
Because different support channels can require different skills, it’s possible your team might not be ready to handle each type. For this, you would need to do one of two things: choose the channels your team is comfortable with or know that your team might require training. You might even have to switch some roles around so that everyone is comfortable.
Your budget for support tools
Another thing to consider is the allotted budget for your customer support team. Opening your support to different channels can be costly. Not to mention, your team might require training to be able to use the tools you want, which also costs time and money.
2. Who are the customers you’re targeting?
Figuring out your target audience is essential, but determining user behavior is especially important because it’ll help you narrow down what types of support channels your users might need. For example, is your eCommerce business a B2B or a B2C business? If it’s both, then which one is your support team being tasked to respond to – customers or businesses?
3. What industry does your eCommerce business fall under?
Another contributing factor is your business’s industry and what it typically needs. For example, MagView, a medical company, wanted to create a solid workflow to hasten the communication of feedback from customers to their IT and development teams. In their case, they discovered that online chat rooms to conduct Q&A sessions were the best way to share information with their customers.
Your industry might have different requirements, maybe a more hands-on approach, or a less hands-on approach. This is something only you would know.
How to find the right support channel for your business
Once you’ve determined the factors above, it’s time to think through the various types of omnichannel support that are best for you.
Service desk: Creating a service desk for your business can be one of the most basic but essential ways to communicate with your clients. It’s particularly handy for B2B businesses but works for B2C as well. In reality, it can encompass everything else on this list since it’s a help desk portal for customers to find you through different support channels. While the service desk is the external portal, it can become the main platform for bringing all the channels together on the backend, depending upon your business needs.
Email: Many businesses also create and provide a dedicated support email for people to send their inquiries or requests to you.
Chatbots: During recent years, chatbots have helped limit the number of tickets and messages agents have to respond to. A chatbot can provide answers to common inquiries and limit the amount of time your support team spends on responding. It’ll also give your team the opportunity to filter out specific inquiries and send them directly to the right team fast.
Social media platforms: Social media apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, not only showcase services and help expand businesses, but they also help serve as a means of communication between a company and its customers. With messaging options available, customers can easily inquire about things straight from the page or profile provided. You can send them an automated response based on what action you want them to take – shooting you an email, submitting a ticket, or sorting through common FAQs to see if it answers their questions.
Messaging apps: Apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, and KakaoTalk fall into this category and allow customers to message you or partake in a video call. WhatsApp, in particular, has designed its own ‘business account’ program to tackle the growing need for customer support.
FAQ page: Providing pages of answers for frequently asked questions can help reduce the number of inquiries coming in. Like chatbots, it can be a win-win as customers will also get a faster response to their questions without having to wait.
Knowledge base: Similar to an FAQ page, a knowledge base or support page helps provide answers to frequently asked questions. However, knowledge bases are more detailed and usually serve as lengthy how-to pages to give customers step-by-step instructions on the services your business provides.
Phone: As one of the most traditional means of customer support available, having a call center or a dedicated support number is something almost all businesses provide. It’s about communicating with your customers quickly and verbally.
What is Jira Service Management?
Jira Service Management is built on the Jira platform, which connects customers, support, and development. With the ability to collaborate, organizations can rapidly respond to support requests and continually improve the customer experience.
Jira Service Management helps businesses deliver great service to external customers, fast via various features like:
- A branded portal: create a customer portal, all through a point-and-click interface, with no code required.
- Optimized queue: bring together requests from different channels, while being able to triage and track them with ease.
- Goal-oriented SLAs: use SLAs to measure the service experience your team is providing, plus keep track of customer satisfaction with CSAT reporting.
How can Jira Service Management help you strike the right customer support balance?
By now, you probably have a solid idea of your business requirements, as well as an idea of the various support channels available to your business. It’s possible that you’ve determined you need to include quite a few channels and while it might seem like a lot to tackle, Jira Service Management can help you ease into an optimized support workflow.
Jira Service Management, along with the integration of relevant apps to further your Jira instance, can help you gain the insights you need to provide the best support for your customers – even from your mobile phone. One example of this is the Mobile for Jira app.
Mobile for Jira will help you make the most of your Jira experience by giving you access to your Jira boards and dashboards on your mobile phone, while providing you with the ability to customize how you view Jira issues.
Beyond easier Jira viewing and issue customization, the addition of third-party apps with Jira Service Management can help you optimize your workflow and automatically convert all of the inquiries you get on separate channels into Jira tickets or other relevant tickets that can be easily handled by your team in one place.
And to further deepen your understanding of which customer support channels work best for you, you can tap into creating a report in Jira. By doing so, you’ll able to see which channels are getting the most inquiries and which ones aren’t. This performance insight can help you decide if you should eliminate any unnecessary channels.
Dedicated support is vital for any business to thrive. And with the help of Jira Service Management and the slew of apps that integrate into it, you’ll be able to set up proper and effective support channels for your business, allowing your support team to work as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Learn more about Jira Service Management and how it can help you field customer support requests for your eCommerce business using the customer service management template.
Already using Jira Service Management? Check out the Atlassian Marketplace to see which apps can help customize your Jira Service Management instance to make it even more streamlined and effective.
This is a guest post written by Aliaa El-Nashar, a senior content writer at Infosysta Apps. Infosysta is an Atlassian Silver Marketplace Partner that creates various apps for Jira.