The better you know your customers, the more thoroughly you can delight them by understanding their business goals and how they use your product to accomplish those goals. When you look at your customers from all angles to get a complete, 360-degree view, you gain insights that help you provide the highest level of service.
It’s best to approach the insights that data provides by thinking strategically. Data, on its own, is just useless information. That seems like one of those “well, duh!†statements. But think about how many reports are never acted upon; those are missed opportunities to change a course of action for a better outcome. Challenge yourself to think like a scientist, looking at all the data available to you and how you can use it for positive change.
Here are a couple of ways you can approach data from your customer support software to get a full, 360-degree of your customer and, in turn, provide them with the highest level of service.
Incident view approach: How your customer interacts with your product
Some of the information readily available for you from a single customer is the frequency of tickets, timing of incidents, product versions, and descriptions of the issue. PhaseWare’s Tracker Suite provides this information, plus much more. However, starting with even a few metrics can yield a great deal of insight.
Customer view approach: What is your customer trying to accomplish?
Equally important as the incident view is the customer view. This data includes things like basic customer information (who they are, what their business does), ticket history, emails, chat transcripts, self-help searches, and product/documentation downloads.
Combine these approaches for a full picture. This is where having a single interface becomes very powerful, as long as you take the time to “connect the dots.†Do certain keyword searches turn up more frequently in any predictable pattern? Is there a relationship between issues related to, for example, a monthly report your client runs and an increase in tickets related to printing reports?
From a quality assurance standpoint, finding such relationships gives you the opportunity to discover potential problems, such as compatibility issues. From a customer experience perspective, it gives you the chance to proactively help your client. When you know your client will be running the report soon (based off historical data), and he or she consistently has issues running the report, how about a call a couple of days in advance in which one of your customer support representatives (CSRs) does a little one-on-one training or helps the customer test their printer to ensure it’s configured correctly to print the report?
Taking the concept further, when you know your customer well, you can truly understand the urgency of issues. If you have a customer dealing with regulatory issues or some other deadline-driven industry, having a 360-degree view of their business alerts you to the priority you should give them, allowing you to plan accordingly. Maybe it’s something as simple as ensuring that you have all hands on deck during a certain time during the month or quarter to support the ticket volume without customers having to suffer long response and resolution times.
The payoff for your efforts
It is common knowledge that you have to work hard to retain your B2B customers. A survey of 290 executives in B2B industries found that 68% of respondents said customers are less loyal than they used to be. Considering the financial impact of losing even one client and the cost of finding new clients, the benefit of using 360-degree customer data far outweighs the extra work it takes to analyze the data and, most importantly, use it to delight your customers.
Having a 360-degree view of your customer is essential to your customer support success. Having the right tools to put together a complete view of your customer is more important than it ever has been. Get the right tools to get the job done – with PhaseWare.
