Garima Behal
January 17, 2022
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8 min
The deal is sealed, the sale made, the product/service consumed, the price paid. The transaction is all but over. Except one thing. Businesses are not built on one-time sales. They rely on repeat purchases and on old loyalists bringing in new customers.
What helps achieve that is the right after-sales experience. This is why most enterprises work with specialized customer support and success teams. Customers expect resolution of their issues within hours, if not minutes. 24/7 customer support across multiple formats such as email, phone calls, chat etc. is the norm rather than the exception.
What does it mean for service teams? Often, a sense of complete chaos and overwhelm. With customer info residing in a number of tools and channels, reps have to juggle multiple resources within the span of a single day.
Better, faster customer service management, however, is only a step away with these twelve OSlash shortcuts.
- Create and access tickets instantly using o/support/{ticket-id}
No matter whether you use Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, or another support tool, creating and accessing tickets will probably be the one thing your reps find themselves doing for most of their day.
Customer care can be tricky. It takes a lot of patience, understanding, and mental resources to pacify customers facing issues with the product or service. Reps can lower their cognitive load by making it easier to create tickets using the shortcut o/support/{ticket-id} which directly leads them to the page where they can log a new issue.
They don’t have to perform the additional three or four steps to get to this page from the complex dashboard of the CRM tool every time a call, chat, or email comes in. All this contributes massively to faster resolution times.
Quick tip: You can also create a shortcut to the list of pending issues in your CS software at o/backlog for quick access.
- Retrieve o/faq and o/policies at lightning speed
Customers want quick answers. Reps want to close tickets sooner. All of this is a breeze when relevant information resides at the fingertips of those who need it.
This is made possible by creating and maintaining a single source of truth for shared company resources, such as corporate policies, and product or service FAQs. You can easily use a text editor like Notion or Google Docs for this. And create shortcuts such as o/faq and o/policies to help reps retrieve the right answers even faster - virtually at lightning speeds.
No need to keep unanswered emails marked for later, or to keep an impatient customer waiting at the other end of the call or chat!
- Know your product inside out with o/product-updates
Your customer service team may not necessarily have all the latest product updates handy as your engineering or design or even marketing teams do. But, they are the bridge between product features and user experience. Hence, it is imperative that they have a complete understanding of the product.
A good idea would be to document all product updates centrally - say in a product management tool like Trello, Asana, and the like - and make the source page freely accessible to those who need to consult it regularly.
This encourages a culture of openness and transparency in the company, makes it easier to track the stages where the product development is currently at, and also enables service reps to do their jobs better.
Want to go one step further? Creating a shortcut o/product-updates will make sure your team members needn’t bother anyone else for the link to the latest updates and can intuitively navigate to it.
- Diagnose and fix user problems quickly using o/bug-tracker
In a Hubspot survey of nearly 300 people, 69% said that the main reason they were impressed with a customer experience was that the service team was quick to respond.
The sooner the service team identifies the issue, the more quickly they can offer a solution. If they had a readymade list of all reported bugs, and an overview of their resolution status, they could not just diagnose the problem correctly, but also report an undetected bug that helps improve the product.
All the teams in the organization can collectively report and keep track of product issues in a common spreadsheet or Airtable located at o/bug-tracker.
- Personalize resolution with insights from o/customer-data
With the ‘customer is king’ philosophy witnessing strong revival in times of intense competition, you want to position yourselves as the best solution that’s out there, right? And differentiation remains the key.
Customers like being treated as if they’re special. And it’s quite effortless to craft a unique experience for each of your users considering the many data points available to a company today.
Simply set the shortcut o/customer-data to retrieve relevant customer data from your customer database in one click and personalize issue resolution without much additional effort.
- Onboard reps faster through o/training
For the customer, support reps are usually the face of a company. So it is crucial to train them well and build a positive company image in the minds of the users.
Because customer service is more an art than science, the reps must be highly skilled not only in the technical aspects, but also in soft skills such as empathetic listening, problem-solving, professional communication, and so on.
Having them go through a designated training can help them align these skills with the organization’s procedures and standards.
They can be supported by making these trainings intuitively accessible at o/training so that they don’t have to jump through hoops to locate them when needed.
- Roster shifts smoothly using o/schedule
For large customer support teams, staying on the same page about their teammates’ availability can be a challenge.
To avoid heaps of emails and messages going back and forth over shift scheduling, it makes sense to roster shifts centrally and make a shortcut o/schedule where everyone has an overview of the timetable. The shortcut links directly to the roster on your scheduling/timesheet software such as Deputy, QuickBooks, or ZoomShift etc.
- Empower your users with an extensive knowledge base at o/help
It is possible that your reps may not have the bandwidth to provide on-demand support to every customer at all times. This is where self-service troubleshooting guides can come to your company’s rescue.
With automated support (such as chatbots and quick email replies), you can guide the users to the right resources to fix simple issues on their own.
Knowledge bases can address some of the most common questions customers have, by providing help articles, video tutorials, webinars, demos, and FAQ. Make sure your team knows to regularly update them and add to the base for it to stay useful. A collection to update the info quickly and seamlessly at o/help (containing shortcuts like o/help/faq, o/help/webinar etc.) can prove particularly advantageous.
- Track social mentions seamlessly with o/mentions
With social media fast becoming a popular method for users to directly engage with, complain to, and even call out brands, many companies have taken their customer support channels to platforms like Twitter. Users can simply tweet their issues by mentioning the company’s handle and be assured of a timely response.
But with hundreds of mentions a day, it can sometimes be impossible to keep track of all the concerns voiced by the users. To leave no customer unheard and no issue pending, you can create a shortcut o/mentions that leads to your Twitter mentions and solve user-problems in real time.
After all, one satisfied user on social media can bring in many new users for the company via word of mouth.
- Benchmark response times and success rates using o/reports
Because customer service is so critical to the financial, operational, and reputational success of a company, it’s necessary to measure the results of service efforts.
Most companies look at benchmarks like the first-call resolution (FCR), first response time, average resolution time, average resolution rate, and naturally, customer satisfaction (often measured by the Net promoter Score or NPS).
It can be quite helpful to have these metrics available at a glance to plan the service processes and outcomes more efficiently. Creating a shortcut o/reports to Google Sheets where you document all such numbers can come in extremely handy for the decision-makers here.
- Measure and improve customer satisfaction based on o/feedback
The best way to know if your customers are satisfied is to hear the verdict from the horse’s mouth.
Most organizations have automated customer satisfaction surveys lined up to go out as soon as a complaint is resolved. Apps like Google Forms, Typeform, Limesurvey, Survey Monkey, and more make the process even more convenient by offering templates and readymade questions to measure satisfaction scores.
The shortcut o/feedback can point everyone to the consolidated results of the latest survey and act as a guide map for continuing with or improving existing processes.
