What does “24/7 support” mean?
24/7 support means that the consumer will be able to receive help and answer inquiries in real time—24/7.
There will almost probably be a demand for 24/7 assistance when your company succeeds – it will expand beyond its initial audience and market.
Indeed, according to Votiko’s Customer Experience Trends Report, nearly half of our customers consider real-time 24/7 assistance to be a critical component of successful customer service. According to Votiko’s research, while the world migrated to distant countries first during the coronavirus pandemic, the use of 24/7 channels such as chat and self-service has increased.
Read on for tips for providing winning 24/7 support.
Advantages of 24/7 support
Unlike increasing throughput on a production line (which is normally quite simple), the transition to 24/7 support is not so straightforward: one day your coverage may be 8, 12, or even 16 hours, the next it may be 24 hours (depending on the number of inquiries). The expense of your business’s support function will increase by 60% to 100% if you do “more of the same.”
So, what’s the big deal?
There are three compelling reasons for this:
To offer assistance in local time zones
Obviously, you’ll want to offer assistance in local time zones.
If your growing market already has a team on the ground, consider yourself fortunate.
Most businesses, on the other hand, must seed new markets by providing excellent service and developing a reputation before they can attract paying customers.
And it matters: according to a European Commission survey, 42% of consumers never buy items or services with sales and support in languages other than their own.
As part of a premium product, provide support.
Support may be included as part of a premium offering, as is common with mid- and high-priced B2B services.
This is relatively simple to handle since support becomes a profit center: clients are willing to pay for the work required to offer it.
In a digital-first era, to exceed customer expectations
The greatest challenge, though, is meeting client expectations.
Customers expect instant service. 24/7 in today’s digital-first environment, and this expectation is unrelated to the price of the product or service offered.
We expect the same level of assistance from a $10-per-month cloud service as we do from a $100-per-month home utility bill or a $1000-per-month high-end B2B business.
When done on a large scale, support is a manageable and predictable business cost. Indeed, today’s smart organizations view it as a business driver: a method to set themselves apart from their competitors and to inject new ideas into the product pipeline.
The problem is keeping expenses low while transitioning from a small business with a single headquarters or customer base to something larger.
And the most successful companies perceive this transformation as an opportunity to improve their support functions for the future, rather than a challenge.
Six tips for giving 24/7 support
1. Improve self-service options
Self-service relieves the burden on your existing workforce, allowing your resources to be put to better use.
A problem that no longer requires assistance is a problem that has been solved – for both you and your customers.
“Self-service has the most impact when built on a win-win philosophy,” according to Fast Company. The primary goal should always be to improve the relationship with the consumer. The benefits to the company include increased efficiency and profits. ”
Aim to make popular customer-facing solutions more visible, accessible, and functional:
Are you highlighting common client questions and how you solve them in customer forums?
To reduce complexity and confusion, are you modifying the flow of your procedures (online or offline)?
Are you educating your users via videos, screenshots, or, in B2B situations, training and webinars?
Are you entirely eliminating “micro-processes”? A password reset or the creation of a new account should not be submitted as a support ticket.
2. Begin by considering the big picture.
Every variation in process between departments, offices, and countries represents a level of complexity.
It’s one of the reasons why large corporations have become cumbersome and inflexible.
By running reliably from Denver to Denmark, SaaS services, in particular, achieve an amazing scale. Scaling up will be a lot easier if you can confidently lay out the client’s processes in advance.
3. Become a master of playbooks.
Playbooks provide a set of processes for your team to follow without compromising flexibility.
Of course, after reading the previous section, you’ll recognize that countries differ significantly – we’re not all the same.
And it’s not only about linguistic and cultural differences: consider the spread of various technologies. The fixed internet in Korea, for example, is a blistering 132MB per second.
There are only 32MB in Italy (and neither are truly outliers), so citizens will use the technologies available to them in a variety of ways.
You desire a balance of a worldwide set of operations with some flexibility for local situations for an optimized support function.
Playbooks are the answer.
“At Brightpearl, we live by playbooks: written protocols as to how we go to market for any given role,” explains Matthew Bruun, Chief Revenue Officer. A playbook describes their approach, whether it’s to service, customer success, or product management. These provide structures and guardrails within which anybody in any capacity knows they can achieve the desired result, while also allowing for course adjustments due to cultural differences. ”
Not only will you be better prepared to deal with international customers with playbooks, but you’ll also be better prepared to roll out new shift patterns, which will likely include—for the first time—agents who are new to the business and may not regularly cross shifts with your more experienced employees.
4. Make use of technology. Everywhere.
According to Gartner, customers will manage 85 percent of their interactions with a company without human interaction by 2020, and this was before rudimentary AI like bots were invented.
Companies in the 1990s wanted to leverage technology to decrease expenses, whether or not their customers wanted to use it. It now determines whether or not a customer has a favorable experience.
Chatbots, for example, can be a fantastic method to provide help 24 hours a day, seven days a week while relieving agents of part of their responsibilities.
However, while 69% of customers want businesses to connect their communication channels in real time, only 38% of organizations actually do so.
Your stack should include technology that allows you to build outstanding customer experiences and connect them across channels and contexts.
5. Match queries and channels to response times that are appropriate.
Recognize what needs to be done right now and what can wait until the morning…
Consumer happiness is determined by customer expectations, which we have more control over than you might imagine.
If your team is overburdened and you’re going to take some time to respond to emails, at the very least, send an automatic response with an acknowledgement of receipt and, ideally, an estimated response time. This will increase your goodwill and promote consumer satisfaction.
However, a more strategic approach would be to correctly allocate your resources to the types of inquiries you receive and the response times users expect, not least because overall performance is poor.
Shep Hyken, the famed service guru, remarked about the 2015 statistics, “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know how awful.”
The average response time for an email was 7 hours and 51 minutes! The average response time on Facebook was one day, three hours, and seven minutes!”
That’s a low bar to clear for savvy businesses.
Live chat help (like phone support) is synchronous, meaning it is a real-time communication.
However, social media and email are asynchronous. You have enough time to triage the problem, manage your resources, and properly convey expectations. If you need to take some time off or allocate additional resources to reclaim control of your income, it’s time well spent.
6. Make use of your entire crew.
puts the customer at the center of your business.
The 24/7 support dilemma is mostly a resource issue.
Support agents are expensive to hire. Unless those agents are already employed by your company.
Remember when there were only three of us and we all answered the phone? ?
A business’s growth period is the same, and while it won’t last forever, everyone has a responsibility to step up to the plate – especially during the holiday rush.
It’s not just a last-ditch effort: there are numerous benefits.
Companies’ personalities alter as they grow (particularly once they pass the 25- and 150-employee level). People become segmented, focusing solely on their fields of study.
However, in today’s world, where the customer is king and where the SaaS economy’s subscription services allow customers to turn off their businesses with a single click, exceeding expectations is everyone’s duty.
“We call it All Hands Support,” explains Chris Savage, CEO of business video platform Wistia. It implies that everyone in the firm takes turns administering the chat widget, answering the phones, and calling customers to check in on them. The advantages of a common support system are immeasurable. Not only can you more quickly automate technical difficulties, but you can also improve your company’s messaging, reduce feature confusion, change pricing elements that don’t work, and clean up flaws in every other customer-facing aspect of business. ”
It doesn’t hurt for everyone in your business to understand the support experience, just as your support team should have a comprehensive awareness of every area of the product.
If your CEO, sales team, or product and engineering specialists work a service shift for a few hours, the benefits of their fresh awareness of customer needs will far surpass the expense of them missing work.
Consider alternatives to 24-hour help.
Offering live support around the clock makes sense for some businesses, such as financial services or healthcare.
Customers, on the other hand, increasingly prefer to engage with companies in the same manner they communicate with friends and family: asynchronously, according to a study. That means that, if necessary, conversations can take place in real time, but that, more often than not, the customer can focus on other things and return to the chat at their own leisure.
Businesses are increasingly using messaging channels to provide customers with the convenience of quick, personal, and asynchronous contact.
