I’m not the biggest fan of phone support but I totally get that sometimes it’s needed. If I get to my Airbnb spot and no one’s home, I want to be able to call customer support right away instead of waiting on an email. Or if my Internet is down, my ISP’s live chat won’t help at all. There are some businesses and products that need a solid phone support setup.
But what does a good phone setup look like? To do phone support right, it comes down to a few basic things.
Make it easy to find
Don’t hide your phone number beneath lots of text. When a customer needs to use it, they need to be able to find it quickly and easily.
Answer quickly
When a customer calls, you don’t want to keep them waiting. You should be able to answer every call within two rings. If you can’t, you need to bring in more people until you can get to that mark.
Have their info ready
Don’t have a customer repeat their account info multiple times. You should be able to pull up anything you need to know about them in your system quickly and easily. And don’t rely on just one piece of info to find them. They might not have their account ID handy so have a way to look up their account by some other option.
These are just a few things I know I’d want for great phone support. For you teams that do offer phone support, what other tips and tricks would you add?
If a company has a public phone number at all, it should be at the top of every page where it can’t be missed. Why make angry users even more angry by hiding it from them? 🙂
Exactly! It sucks to have to dig through a help site just to find a phone number.