Customer Support (not CSM) 2021 and beyond

Nicholas Ciambrello

Hi All!

With 2020 finally ending (not soon enough lol) our company is looking at making our plans for 2021 and beyond for the Customer Support team. I know this is a community around CSM but here at SEMrush our CSS and CSMs work very closely. 

One of the questions my CRO is asking as we plan is where do we see support going? What trends do we see happening (more live chats and email then phones?) 

My question for the community here is what articles, webinars, videos have you researched as you all plan for 2021 as well? Any insights/takeaways you can add to those resources would be an awesome add.

Thank you everyone and best of luck to everyone going through their own 2021 planning!

David Ellin

@Nicholas Ciambrello, SuccessCOACHING will soon be publishing their CS predictions for 2021. You'll likely gain some great insights and ideas from that article. You can find the 2020 article online.

Specific to support, what you do depends on the "touch" factor you want to provide your customers. If you have a long tail of smaller customers, you may want to see how bots and AI can help your support efforts. Chat Bots, for example, can lower our costs, speed information to your customers, and increase satisfaction. Be careful, though, if configured poorly, ChatBots can make support painful for customers. I'd suggest always giving customers an out to talk with someone (either via phone or chat). You can also consider other self-service options such as visual IVR, access to knowledgebase, access to a community, etc.

If your support is all high touch (everyone can communicate with a human), consider the knowledgebase you're providing to your support team. Is it complete? Can they sort quickly to find what they need fast? Are you keeping current on answers to common issues (that might be shared across customers)? Are you minimizing the number of applications your support folks have to navigate to support a customer?

Hope these ideas help.

David

David Ellin
Senior Customer Success Consultant, Centric Leadership Strategies

Nicholas Ciambrello

Awesome thank you for the reply! Yes SuccessCOACHING is always producing good content. Ill keep an eye out for that!

As for all your other comments and suggestions (these are great btw) we have dabbled with Chatbots, but the visual IVR is that like a just in time outreach but specific for support? Just watched a demo on five9 not sure I completely follow it but seems like a really interesting concept to change support from reactive to proactive.

I really like the concept from TurboTax where they have that call for help button and when you press it you start a video call with the support rep... Havent seen that anywhere but the IVRs seem like its something similar, with todays world changing because of Covid I can see that being more important.

Anyways you gave me a lot to think about I might reply again once I digest some of your questions you posed better. Thanks again for the insight!

David Ellin

Visual IVR is not outreach. What happens is that when a customer calls support, the system asks the customer if they want to use their visual self-help tool. If yes, it sends them a text with a link to the Visual IVR. What makes it different than a normal IVR, is that the prompts appear on the customer's mobile phone screen instead of the customer just hearing the information.

What's the benefit? I've implemented Visual IVR for several clients and in every case, the containment rate (customers who stayed in the IVR to complete their inquiry versus opting out to speak to a live agent) was higher than with a traditional IVR.