The Evolution of Customer Support

Hello LinkedIn fam!

Happy Wednesday????how’s everyone doing?

It is one of those weeks or let’s say days where we have been receiving a lot of customer queries, support and demos. I have always heard the term “CUSTOMER IS THE KING” and I totally agree with it.

Customer is for sure the king and in today’s fast-paced world, I know how challenging it can be to provide top-notch and personalised customer service.?

In the early days of my startup when the user base was small it was relatively easy to maintain customer relations and that too personalised ones!??

To be honest I love having personalised relationships with customers rather than those where AI acts as an agent. I do still remember having late-night calls, walking users through our product and making sure they were getting the most out of it.

But, eventually, the user base increased, and the volume of requests, demos and support also started increasing & eventually became overwhelming. And being a small team we struggled to keep up, which led to a longer response time and frustrations by the customers.

That’s when I started having those sinking feelings in my stomach when I was not able to give personalised attention to my customers anymore.?

While I was evaluating our customer support process and looking at the analytics I remembered a quote that still sticks out to me “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department; it should be the entire company” Tony Hsieh?

Isn’t that true? We built something for the customers, We solve the problems that customers face so why lack when it comes to giving personalised attention and service to them?

That’s when I knew I had to solve this problem, help other founders and also leave a smile on every customer’s face who used mine or any of the other products.

But HOW?

In my process of doing so, I have used a lot of CRM and helpdesk tools, but they always failed somewhere or the other. Either my data was not centralised properly or the messages which I wanted to send out weren’t the way I wanted them to be.?

And the common problem that I faced while doing this was the PERSONALISED FEATURE!!!

This was missing from all of the tools that I used, isn’t that sad??

Consistency, Personalisation & Being Kind are the most important factors to me at least when it comes to customer service or customer support teams.?

What’s your ideal customer support team? Comment down below????

Now, while working on the research and also understanding & analyzing the feedback I was in tons of disjointed customer data, and a thought struck me that rather than finding solutions, tailoring the teams, and setting up new processes. Why don’t I build a solution tailored specifically for our customers or a specific use case?

And that’s how I started my work on Zixflow :)?

As a business, we deal with multiple sets of people who need to be treated differently, and Zixflow does that on the go. Using lists and collections, I can now build any customer flow and customize it for my teams, and personalize it for customers the way I want.

That was my whole vision when I thought about Zixflow , to cater to each customer's needs.?

Late nights and early mornings started becoming a thing for me and my development team to build a solid foundation SaaS platform that would cater to needs like consistency, personalization and engagement with the clients.?

Now, hear me out Zixflow is not just a personalized communication platform but you can also:

• Automate Repetitive Tasks:?

One of the biggest game-changers of Zixflow is automating your repetitive tasks. I know we have all been there routing tickets, writing follow-up emails or digging through information about the client.?

So, Zixflow helps you automate your follow-up communication with your customers. This means Consistency is on point :) But wait, here's an exciting thing: you have different modes of communication that you can access. So don’t give me an excuse and say I talk to my client through WhatsApp! Not to worry we got you covered.

• Centralized Customer Data:

Now we needed a way to ensure consistency across all our customer data & interactions.

Of Course, as a customer support agent or a startup, you don’t want to mess up your initial stages of customer interaction & make sure you remember every single problem that the customer faces, also one of the pain points I measured while I was researching and evaluating was that making customers repeat their stories again and again to different agents is frustrating.

That’s where Zixflow comes to your rescue!! Everyone in the team needs to be on the same page & with a centralized repository of customer information our team had the full visibility of every customer interaction they had till DATE!! Isn’t that amazing?

You can access all the information and past interactions with the customers to give them a seamless experience. Now if this isn’t cool I don’t know what is!

• Consistent Omni Channel Messaging:

Now If you have read my newsletter already, where I spoke about Mastering the 5 W’s of sales, I mentioned that spamming your potential customers or your existing customers is not right. You need to understand the various channels of communication while also keeping in mind that you are not getting on their nerves!

Remember, If your customer doesn’t respond through a mode of communication even after giving 2 tries, Put a stop to it! And reach them out through a different mode of communication. This makes sure that you are not spamming them but also you are making them your top priority by reaching out to them via various channels. And guess what? All of this can be done through Zixflow!!!

All you need to do is choose a mode of communication + use our AI Wizard which can help you create personalized messages and you are pretty good to go.

The impact of making these changes in my business and also building such a tool was a profound game changer for me.?

But we didn’t stop there, remember tools are there to help you out and ease out your tasks but you always need to make sure you continuously improve your customer team, understand the feedback & analyze customer data to ensure that your customers are having a top-notch service.?

Advice for the day: Prioritize customer service from day one. Build it in your company’s DNA??

Now that’s a wrap for this week’s edition!

But wait, there’s more! I want to hear from you. What are your biggest customer service challenges??

Drop them in the comment section below, and let’s tackle them together????

See you in the next one!

Prem Saini