There are many ways to help companies save money on customer support. However, not all of these strategies are good for business. Some methods can reduce service quality, eventually costing a company more.
According to NewVoiceMedia, a company that works with customer support and service departments in 128 countries, companies lose $62 billion every year because of poor customer service experiences.
Most consumers who encounter a poor customer experience are more likely to switch to another company that–hopefully–offers a better experience.
The consequences of this are pretty obvious: if you deliver a poor customer support experience, another business will get your customers.
The secret to effectively saving money on customer support is to cut costs without undermining quality.
The Importance of Saving Money as a Business
Saving money is good because you can use it somewhere else in the company. Look at your business to identify areas where you can cut a few expenditures instead of trimming down the department’s budget.
Saving money also allows you to reward your staff. Your employees are perhaps the most critical aspect of your business, and thus you should reward them when you’re able. There are many ways to do that, but what they’ll appreciate the most is a financial reward. Rewarding your employees for all their hard work is crucial. So why not reward your employees with a raise or bonus when you can? They put in a lot of hard work to scale your business, so it’s crucial to offer them incentives that may make a significant difference in their lives.
Further, it’s a no-brainer that as margins are squeezed in harsh marketplace conditions, cutting costs and saving money could be a significant way to maintain or improve your company’s performance. However, there’s a delicate balancing between keeping costs to a minimum and maintaining exceptional levels of customer support.
Balancing this tight rope requires careful consideration because excessive cost-cutting may amount to a major surgery that can cause a high mortality rate. Although falling margins need action, a loss of existing customers might be fatal. The holy grail is offering exceptional customer support for the lowest cost. In the next section, we’ll discuss six ways companies can effectively cut customer support costs.
6 Strategies to Save Money on Customer Support in 2022
1. Hire the Right Customer Support Agents and Keep Them Happy
To trim recurring calls, you must hire employees who can give your customers the right message the first time.
Good customer support agents aren’t just accommodating; they’re also intelligent employees who can convey information in a way that it’s easy for customers to understand. In addition, these employees are well-trained and help customers avoid future problems, reducing the number of incoming calls.
During the hiring process, look for people who are attentive, patient, and have excellent communication skills. In addition, employees with excellent customer support skills can improve your customer support team’s productivity while lowering operational costs.
After you’ve hired the right employees, you must keep your agents happy. Employees who feel appreciated and valued give their best every day. Give them the autonomy to please your customers. It’ll save time, improving customer satisfaction while making your employees feel appreciated. In addition, making your employees feel valued reduces employee turnover rates, ultimately keeping your operational costs.
2. Automate Services
Tony Johnson notes that “Sometimes ultra-personalized experiences are valued, but other times customers need quick service above all.” So, by leveraging new technologies, you can deliver higher levels of customer support at a fraction of the cost. Take chatbots, for instance. Chatbots Magazine reports companies can cut down customer support costs by up to 30% if they implement conversational solutions, such as virtual assistants or chatbots.
Using chatbots in your company enables your customers who have simple problems or quick questions to get their responses instantly.
Also, this enables your customer support agents to spend time on more complicated matters, which reduces the number of customer support reps you need to hire.
Establish how to incorporate chatbots into your customer support department, and you’ll be happy you did.
3. Use Outsourced Employees
Research shows that companies can save up to 60% in operational costs by outsourcing customer support. In addition, you can cut expenses such as insurance and facility costs and vacation pay by outsourcing customer support agents. Also, you will save on training expenses because another company will spend money, time, and resources on training employees.
By letting outsourced reps handle mundane tasks, such as payroll, data entry, or answering simple questions, your customer support agent will have more time to deal with more important tasks.
4. Use Social Media
Research shows that 80% of consumers use social media to engage with businesses. This means that your clients are more likely to ask for support through social media than ever before.
Thus, companies must be prepared to chat with their target audience across several social media platforms. Also, companies must be ready to deliver customer support through these platforms.
Delivering customer support via social media is critical because 60% of consumers who raise an issue via social media expect an answer within an hour. It might seem like a ton of pressure to get things done right swiftly, but social media’s speed offers an efficient way to provide customer service.
Since social media moves quickly and customers expect answers to their questions instantly, it also means that customer queries and complaints can be resolved promptly by using reps who can respond via messaging or online chat.
Leveraging social media to provide customer support is a cost-effective way to improve the efficiency and quality of your customer support while building a solid brand reputation.
5. Provide Self-Service Customer Support
One fundamental way companies can save money on customer support is to offer customers self-service alternatives, reducing the pressure off of live customer support reps.
Self-service options are a crucial part of the entire customer support proposition. These “guidance” systems give customers the information they require to solve minor problems, right at their fingertips, any time.
By offering easy-to-use and accessible services, such as knowledge base pages, FAQ documents, and chatbots, you can empower your customers to solve common and simple questions on their own, any time of the day or night. That saves money by saving your customer support agents and your customers time, which is a win-win situation.
6. Offer Proactive Customer Support
Transitioning from reactive to proactive customer support is one of the best strategies for trimming customer support costs. Proactive customer support enables you to solve problems long before your customers reach out with questions or complaints.
Here are some tips for cutting customer support costs by being proactive:
- Leverage social media for important updates and announcements. Nearly 47% of consumers follow their favorite brands on social media to stay updated on company news. This makes social media an essential public platform for delivering proactive customer support. For example, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies took to social media to share information about business hours or how they were handling this unprecedented obstacle.
- Send emails. Besides social media, you can leverage email to notify your customers about scheduled outages, maintenance, or unexpected downtime. Unlike social media, where all the people following your business can see your updates, you can leverage email to target a particular segment of your target audience.
- Keep your customers in the loop. One of the most common customer support questions is, “What is the status of my customer support ticket?” To reduce such questions, always keep your customers updated about their ongoing issues or tickets. For example, send them automated emails or text messages to inform them about their ticket or issue’s progress.
The secret to saving money on customer support isn’t to avoid spending, but to strategically invest in measures that will pay off in the long run.
Try putting the six tips discussed above into practice to give your customer support spending some structure. Most probably, you’ll realize that by making educated spending decisions, you’ll eventually increase your company’s bottom line.
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a powerful software that can help your customer support team offer an outstanding customer experience to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn rates. In addition, the software is ideal for visual communication as it provides a native experience with a GIF maker, screen recorder, webcam recorder, all with or without annotations. These tools can transform how you respond to customer questions and help you offer exceptional support, improving efficiency.
Save Money on Customer Support Using Zight (formerly CloudApp)
For example, the sales team at G2 Crowd made over $7 million in sales by relying on Zight (formerly CloudApp) to create tailored HD videos for customers. The entire team at G2 Crowd also saved 88 hours per week by leveraging Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s visual content. That’s because personalized videos boost engagement rates while saving time by reaching out to customers with a video instead of wordy emails that create room for confusion. Not only do personalized videos grab customers’ attention better than regular emails, but these videos sell even when your sales team isn’t around.
