Few years ago, I was setting up an eCommerce for one of my clients. I was hoping just installing WooCommerce will give me everything that my client asked for. But unfortunately that’s not the case. I needed to install a few more WooCommerce extensions and plugins to actually make it an efficient online store. 

Now we know what WordPress plugins are. But extension can be a bit confusing.

In simple words, extensions, also known as addons, are plugins for plugins to extend functionality. 

10 Best WooCommerce extensions and plugins 

Here I am listing the must-have WooCommerce plugins and extensions for any online store. But besides this, you might need a few other extensions as well for your unique need. For your better understanding, I have categorized these and suggested one best plugin or extension for each. 

Categories are, 

1. Store management 

You need to keep your online store organized. Like a physical store, it can really messy during the rush hour. So you need a feature inventory tracking, stock control, and a smooth backend workflow. A well-structured system prevents stock shortages and unnecessary waste and keeps the operations more efficient. 

Extension: ATUM Stock Manager for WooCommerce 
ATUM is a FREE WooCommerce inventory management plugin, offering powerful control over your WooCommerce stock, suppliers, SKUs, prices, and more—all within the familiar WordPress interface. It has some good features like Stock Central and real-time Dashboard Statistics. It enables managing your WooCommerce inventory has never been easier or more efficient. 

2. Customer management 

A good customer relationship leads to repeat sales and increased revenue. Keeping track of customer data, automating marketing, and offering personalized reach out improves the customer experience. 

Plugin: FluentCRM 
FluentCRM is a self-hosted email marketing automation plugin for WordPress that seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce and manages leads, customers, email campaigns, and more. It tracks WooCommerce abandoned carts, and can trigger automated email sequences, manage learners and affiliates, and monitor user activities. 

3. Content and SEO 

We all know content is the key, that’s also true for an online shop. An optimized store appears more on search and leads to more visitors and improves search rankings. Clear product descriptions, structured metadata, and proper on-page optimization ensure better search impression. 

Plugin: Yoast WooCommerce SEO 
WooCommerce pairs easily with Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin. It unlocks extra tools and features like product-specific SEO content analysis, best practice technical SEO for eCommerce, and the ability to generate titles and meta descriptions for your products automatically. 

4. Customer experience 

A simple, user-friendly and familiar store layout encourages customers to explore more. That leads to purchasing more. Offering flexible product customization, clear navigation, and customized recommendations creates a better shopping experience. 

Extension: WooCommerce Product Options 
WooCommerce Product Options lets you easily add customizable product fields like checkboxes, text fields, and file uploads. With features like live previews, conditional logic, and flexible pricing, you can adjust prices based on customer selections. You can also upsell related products, offer upgrades, and more. 

5. Marketing and analytics 

Tracking customer activity is a must. It helps to make and refine marketing strategies that lead to better sales performance. You need to be able to list products on external platforms, showcase customer reviews and analyze your store data for better product placement. 

Extension: Google for WooCommerce 
Google for WooCommerce makes it easy to connect your WooCommerce store to Google Merchant Center, showcasing your products across Google Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and the Display Network. Drive traffic and sales to your store, either for free or with ads. You can analyze the data from Google Analytics and make a better placement strategy as well.

Plugin: WP Social Ninja

WP Social Ninja is the all-in-one WordPress social tool. This powerful plugin seamlessly brings social feeds, user reviews, and chat widgets right into your website, acting like a social Swiss knife for your brand. It can automatically showcase your latest social reviews, display real-time feeds from multiple platforms, and enable instant chat support with messenger integrations—all in one sleek solution.

6. Payment gateways 

A checkout process with multiple payment methods gives customers more freedom to purchase. And that means less abundant cart. A secure, trusted, fast transactions reduce drop-offs and keeps customers happy. 

Extension: Square for WooCommerce 
The Square plugin for WooCommerce allows you to securely accept payments, synchronize sales, and manage inventory and product data between WooCommerce and Square POS. It ensures PCI and SAQ A-level compliant, and supports the Square payment, Apple Pay®, Google Pay, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and Pre-Orders. You will have a customizable payment form, and allow customers to save payment methods. 

7. Product customize and add-Ons 

You have to give your customers more ways to personalize the orders. This is a great way to increase sales potential. Additional customization options enhance the shopping experience and improve customer retention. 

Extension: YITH WooCommerce Product Add-Ons 
YITH Product Add-ons lets you add customizable options to your product pages. You can create endless blocks of options, such as radio buttons, checkboxes, text boxes, and drop-down menus, for any product or category. It lets you set prices for each option, offer discounts, or allow free options.  

8. Security and backup 

It’s common to get attacked by hackers to a growing store. So, securing the store is the first priority that also protects customer data. Check the security on a regular basis and back up the store to prevent probable business damage. 

Extension: Security for WooCommerce 
Security for WooCommerce helps prevent fraud by blocking transactions from VPNs, proxies, and countries you don’t sell to. It also offers features like limiting access to the cart and checkout, and securing downloadable products. You can also set time-based order restrictions, scan for malware, and enhance security with 2FA protection.  

9. Support and customer service 

A responsive, fast, brand-aligned customer support system builds trust and brand reputation. A feature-packed help desk setup ensures faster responses and improves First Response Time (FRT). 

Plugin: Fluent Support 
Fluent Support is an all-in-one customer support solution that centralizes your support system with multiple business email piping, automated workflows, and efficient ticket management with advanced conditional search. 

It features customizable support portals by Gutenberg block, ticket segmentation by product, tags or inbox, priority setting, and detailed reporting to track agent performance and heatmap to find busy support days. 

The plugin includes productivity tools like saved replies, and agent permissions. For power users, REST API and tons of webhooks. It’s fully GDPR-ready and self-hosted, Fluent Support also includes AI-powered features to craft responses, analyze tone, and improve communication. 

10. Accounting and reporting 

You need to track every penny in a business. Pro level of financial tracking keeps business operations organized and potentially grows. So, WooCommerce automating data syncing with accounting tools saves time and reduces errors, of course, it’s another must-have. 

Extension: QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce 
QuickBooks Sync automates your WooCommerce store accounting by syncing orders, payments, customers, products, inventory, and more with QuickBooks. This plugin saves time and reduces errors with a two-way sync that updates data every 5 minutes. It has a friendly user interface and is powerful enough for advanced stores. 

Wrapping up 

Starting a successful online store goes beyond JUST installing WooCommerce. The combination of right extensions and plugins can turn your basic store into a powerful business tool. You might get a few tools like store management or payment system out of the box in Woo, but we all know that’s not for a growing business. 

Every business is different, so while these plugins are a great starting point, you may need others that fit your specific niche as well. In the meantime, I hope the list of the best WooCommerce extensions helps you to start efficiently. It’s about more than just adding features—it’s about building a store that can compete. 

The post Best WooCommerce Extensions and Plugins to Consider in 2025 appeared first on Fluent Support.

You spend months and dollars bringing a customer to your doorstep, only for them to walk out after one purchase. Frustrating, right?

That’s where CLM comes in, saving days of work and, more importantly, your revenue becomes consistent. 

CLM isn’t just another buzzword; it’s the secret spice to grow your business sustainably. It’s more than just getting new customers in the door; it’s about creating relationships that actually last. It might sound complicated? But don’t worry; we are going to walk you through. 

CLM is the roadmap for how your customers interact with your brand, from awareness to becoming loyal customers. Mainly six stages of this process: 

1. Awareness: When someone first stumbles upon your brand. 
2. Engagement: When they start showing interest and checking you out. 
3. Conversion: When they finally decide to buy. 
4. Retention: When they stick around for more. 
5. Loyalty: When they grow trust in the brand and return regularly. 
6. Advocacy: When they’re so impressed, they tell everyone about you. 

We will explain a bit more on each topic. But first, we have to answer this vital question. 

Why does CLM even matter? 

The short answer is that if you nurture your current customer, they will bring more customers. Now the long answer. 

More Revenue: A happy customer with your brand spends more and buys more often. 

Better Reputation: They’ll share their positive experiences in the public review section, on social media, and even recommend it to others in person. 

Smoother Experiences: When you know a customer’s need, you can really tailor the service; that sets you apart from competitors. 

Lower Costs: It’s cheaper to keep a customer than find a new one. 

Let’s break down the customer lifecycle 

As we mentioned the six stages previously, let’s break it down in an elaborative manner. 

1. Awareness: make them notice you 

First impressions are everything in the awareness stage. If you are in a crowd, how do you make someone notice you? And this is the challenge every business faces. You need to place the business where your potential buyer already spends time, like online. 

So, the obvious thing to do is run targeted ads on platforms like Google or social media. It should target the right person, not just a random noncustomer. You need to optimize your content using SEO strategies so your blogs, videos, and website appear prominently in search results. 

Lastly, use testimonials, case studies, and reviews from your current customers to grow trust with new visitors. 

2. Engagement: keep them interested 

You grabbed the attention; now it’s time to keep them engaged and build trust. The best way to keep them engaged is to offer value upfront. Try to create an environment where your visitors can feel heard and appreciated. 

You could offer free resources first, like a product trial, to give them a short period of experience. These will showcase your expertise. This will encourage you to revisit it as a go-to resource in a targeted niche. 

This is the point you have to be accessible. Its cloud be through social media, live chat, or email. and do not keep them waiting for too long. 

Finally, add a personal touch to every interaction. Use their name, note their preferences, and write to align with their interests. Slowly, you will build a meaningful relationship. 

3. Conversion: close the deal 

This phase, visitors are interested now. It’s time to show them some guide to seamlessly reach the final step: hit the buy button. The business with that customer began. 

Always simplify the checkout process. Short and less clicks, but detailed and clear. A clean and simple design can significantly reduce frustrations and increase conversions. 

From time to time, you need to create a sense of urgency, like a limited time offer, to act quickly rather than abandoning the cart. 

Building trust is non-negotiable. Secure payment options, money-back guarantees, and authentic customer reviews remove any doubts. 

4. Retention: keep them coming back 

It took too much time and money to get a customer and build trust—a relationship. Don’t let the relationship fade away after the first sale. Work on this to convert them into loyal customers. 

Rewarding loyalty is a great starting point. It could be customers’ points for every purchase or receiving exclusive discounts and early access to your latest products. These perks make them feel valued and encourage them to return. 

Stay connected. Or anyone can soap in and take them away. A simple follow-up email, a thoughtful product update, or even a simple greeting can go a long way in showing appreciation for being with your company. 

The power of feedback is a must. Asking customers for their opinions through surveys or reviews not only makes them feel heard but also provides invaluable insights to refine the service. 

5. Loyalty: strengthen the bond 

A loyal customer always chooses your brand over competitors because of the trust and satisfaction with your company. And the fun thing is that every time your product or service meets an achievement, it gives more confidence to the customer for your brand. 

To make this bond stronger, offering exclusive benefits can make a profitable impact. And we have already talked about the gifts you can give them for being loyal. 

This should be consistent. Not just a one-time thing. Like regular personalized newsletters, timely updates, or thoughtfully crafted offers. Just to keep the interaction alive. 

6. Advocacy: turn them into fans 

This is the next step in customer loyalty. Customer becomes an active marketer of your brands for free. 

You can promote user-generated content. Encourage your customers to share photos, stories, and experiences featuring your products. Not only does this allow them to showcase their love for your brand, but it also creates authentic content that builds trust. 

An affiliate program is a good platform for these brand advocates. A brand-loyal user as an affiliate can convert more customers easily than you can think of. You should celebrate the success of your advocates by highlighting their story and case study as well. 

Tools that make CLM easier 

Now you might think this is just too much to handle. But here is the thing: you don’t have to do all this manually. There are a lot of tools available. But here are some tools that can make your life way easier 

• Fluent Support: An OpenAI-powered helpdesk system built for WordPress. Fluent Support enables teams to streamline customer support and integrate ticket management directly into their website. 
  
  Its AI features help agents respond to customer queries faster and with precision. Additionally, its automation and dynamic ticketing system are perfect for any business industry. 

• FluentCRM: A robust email marketing solution for WordPress. FluentCRM allows you to manage email campaigns, track user behavior, and automate email sequences right in WordPress. 

• Google Analytics: Understand your audience by analyzing their behavior—like which pages they visit and where they leave. 

• Zapier: Automate repetitive tasks across apps to save time while keeping workflows intact. 

As we said, there is a lot to this list. These are just what you can consider right away to start the CLM process. 

Get started with customer lifecycle management 

Now that are on the same page. Now let’s get started with the process. 

1. Map It Out: Pinpoint all the stages and touchpoints in your customer’s journey. Visualize the whole customer journey, mapping where they start and where you want them to go. 
2. Track Success: Set clear goals, like improving engagement rates or customer retention. Put these numbers on a KPI to track. 
3. Segment Your Customers: Not all are the same. Different customers have different needs. Personalize your approach by grouping based on different characteristics. 
4. Keep Improving: Use data and feedback to refine your strategy. You have to keep reviewing what’s working and what’s not. 

Wrapping up 

Companies that master the CLM can see a noticeable increase in profitability from returning customers. And not to mention that you earn a good reputation in the market in the process. 

So, in the end, would you rather constantly chase new customers or build deeper, everlasting relationships with the ones you already have? I hope you get the answer now. So, when will you start the customer lifecycle management for your business? 

The post Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM): Is This Vital For Business?  appeared first on Fluent Support.

It’s more than just managing queries or sending emails—it’s about creating a cohesive, seamless experience that makes customers feel valued at every touchpoint.

The process involves several moving parts: sales teams, support agents, marketing execs, and even product developers. All these elements need to come together with a shared goal— ideally that of delighting the customer. 

To coordinate this dance of complexity, businesses need the right tools. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and help desk systems come into play.

Integrating them is a great first step, but it takes more than just having these tools. 

Think of it like having the best ingredients for a recipe but not knowing how to cook. Without a well-thought-out approach, even the most sophisticated tools can fall short.

Building customer relations is a long game—it takes time, effort, and a dedicated mindset that prioritizes customer experience. 

From the first interaction with a potential lead to resolving an issue for a loyal customer, every interaction counts. Especially when a single misstep can damage your customers’ trust. 

What is a help desk?

In broad terms, a help desk is any tool that lets you keep track of your customer service and support interactions. Ideally, it contains the history of your previous conversations, and a dedicated system to track ongoing conversations.

In its basicest form, even a simple email inbox can function as a help desk. But, as all things business, a dedicated solution is always better. So, when it comes to customer support, an integrated help desk is the go-to for most serious businesses.

What is a CRM?

CRM or customer relation management refers to both the department and the tools. Basically any platform you use to track customer relations and engagements with your business is a CRM.

CRM’s are actually one of the oldest tech solutions that businesses have adopted into their stack. Over the years the systems have made miles of progress, taking the scope of CRM to new heights.

Why integrate help desk and CRM?

Not to understate or anything, but integrating a help desk and CRM brings 4 major benefits for your business. 

Engaged relationships 

Engagement is the currency in this digital world. Taking someone’s money is not enough. You need their attention too!

Customers willingly engage with businesses that they support or prefer. So, when a customer is open to that, it’s your job to nurture that enthusiasm. 

Integrated CRM and Help Desks can make this easier. Simply by bringing all your interactions, including presales, post-purchase service and intermediate onboarding in one place.

This helps you plan out your engagement efforts and keep the customers hooked to your brand.  

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction isn’t just about selling a good product or service. It takes a lot more.

For starters, it takes attention to detail, empathy and planning. At a minimum. Then there’s speedy support, fast resolutions and meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

All of this is improved by integrating help desks and CRM tools. Being able to track all your interactions will keep you ahead of every customer touch point. So you know exactly what it’ll take to delight a customer to the point of satisfaction.  

Higher retention and less Churn

Satisfaction alone doesn’t mean much unless it fosters loyalty. Loyal customers are much less likely to switch from your business. Loyalty and Satisfaction is the golden standard for increasing retention rates, driving churn down.

Easier analysis

Evaluation is how you make improvements to your business efforts. Customers can interact with your business in so many ways. There’s the email inbox, social media channels, service desk, community forums etc. 

Having all these interactions gathered into a neat integrated system makes it easier to identify where your strategies are performing and where they can do better.

CRM and Help desk integration benefits

For the purpose of this blog, let’s check out how an integrated help desk and CRM augment your workflow. Integrating your help desk with a CRM might sound technical, but it’s quite straightforward. Most CRMs either have built-in support desks or offer easy integrations with third-party help desk tools. In this article, we’ll focus on how Fluent Support works with FluentCRM, a powerful marketing automation tool, to streamline customer management.

A unified view for customer profiles

One of the biggest advantages of linking Fluent Support with FluentCRM is the ability to access complete customer profiles in one place. Each customer has a dedicated profile in FluentCRM that holds all their data, from basic details to  email campaigns and ticket history from Fluent Support.

This means that sales or support teams can simply log into FluentCRM and see everything they need to know about a customer, without switching tools. 

Every ticket a customer creates gets automatically logged in their FluentCRM profile. So, your sales or service reps can view past support tickets directly from FluentCRM without needing to access the support desk. This feature is especially effective if you prefer to keep teams separated yet still want them to have access to crucial information.

Similarly, Fluent Support displays basic customer information directly within each ticket. This data is pulled from FluentCRM profiles, so support agents can see details like tags or lists associated with a contact. This helps them understand who they are dealing with right away.

Automatic tagging and lists

Beyond just viewing information, integrating a CRM and help desk brings more advanced benefits, like automated tagging. FluentCRM uses tags and lists, along with dynamic segments, to categorize and target customers based on specific criteria. This is essential for managing thousands of customer profiles.

Fluent Support enhances this capability by allowing you to tag customers directly from within the support platform. For instance, with Fluent Support’s workflows, you can automatically add tags to customer profiles in FluentCRM based on ticket actions.

Triggering marketing automation

The biggest advantage of combining your help desk and CRM is the ability to run marketing automations based on actions in your help desk. Let’s see how this works with an example.

Imagine you’ve just resolved a customer’s query, and now you want to follow up with them for feedback. Using FluentCRM’s automation features, you can send a follow-up email automatically.

With these automations in place, following up on customer interactions becomes effortless. You can ensure that customers receive timely feedback requests, boosting their engagement and satisfaction.

Integrating other popular CRMs

It’s very much possible that your CRM/Help Desk doesn’t have a spectacular integration like Fluent Support and FluentCRM. But that doesn’t mean you have to get stuck. There’s tons of connector platforms that make these connections possible for businesses of all sizes. 

For this article, we’ll use SureTriggers as a connector to integrate Fluent Support with one of the most popular CRM’s on WordPress, Jetpack CRM.

Jetpack CRM offers a powerful WordPress-based CRM solution, and combining it with Fluent Support creates a comprehensive customer management and support system within WordPress. This integration is ideal for businesses already using WordPress for both their website and CRM.

Benefits of Integrating Fluent Support with Jetpack CRM

Centralized Customer Data 

Based on actions in Fluent Support, you can update your customer profiles in Jetpack CRM. Similarly, you can create tickets and customer profiles in Fluent Support based on events in Jetpack CRM. Allowing you to always keep your systems in sync.

Automated Task Management 

Support tickets can be created automatically from customer activities within Jetpack CRM, such as creating companies, contacts and removing transactions and quotes. This automation reduces the need for manual input, saving time for your support team.

Improved Customer Experience 

By triggering functions in both platforms from each other’s events lets you focus on the overall customer experience, and how each tool helps in building that experience.

Use Cases 

Available Triggers

Example #1

An e-commerce store using Jetpack CRM can sync customer profiles with Fluent Support. If a customer creates a quote, removes transactions or goes through specific events, the Fluent Support profile is updated. 

For WordPress users, combining Jetpack CRM and Fluent Support creates a unified platform for managing customers and providing top-notch support.

Example #2

A digital marketing agency uses Jetpack CRM to manage client quotes, contacts, and invoices. When a client accepts a quote, the agency needs to quickly create a support ticket to initiate onboarding or answer any initial questions. The team also needs a customer profile in Fluent Support to keep track of support interactions. SureTriggers is configured to automate this process by creating a Fluent Support ticket and a customer profile once a quote is accepted in Jetpack CRM.

Trigger: Quote Accepted in Jetpack CRM

The workflow starts as soon as a quote is marked as “accepted” in Jetpack CRM. First, SureTriggers checks if the customer who accepted the quote exists in Fluent Support.

If not, it automatically creates a new customer profile using the contact details from Jetpack CRM, like the client’s name, email, and company information. After creating the customer profile, SureTriggers opens a support ticket in Fluent Support.

The ticket includes details such as the customer’s name, the quote ID, and any relevant comments or requirements noted in Jetpack CRM during the quote acceptance.

A default message can be added, e.g., “Welcome to [Company]! This ticket has been created to help you get started with onboarding or answer any questions regarding the services you’ve requested.”

This setup saves the agency time and prevents missed onboarding requests. As soon as a quote is accepted in Jetpack CRM, the client’s profile and initial support ticket are instantly available in Fluent Support, ensuring a seamless, quick, and organized response for new clients.

Wrapping Up

Integrating Jetpack CRM and Fluent Support through SureTriggers transforms your customer management and support processes into a seamless, streamlined experience. By automatically creating support tickets and profiles the moment a client takes an action, you ensure that every new customer gets the attention they deserve, without any delay. 

This not only saves your team valuable time but also enhances customer satisfaction from day one. Start leveraging SureTriggers to automate and elevate your support workflow, so you can focus on what truly matters—building lasting relationships and growing your business.

The post Integrate Help Desk and CRM: Guide with Steps appeared first on Fluent Support.

In fact, with the growing e-commerce and more personalizing experiences, people are more likely to spend on products or services that improve their lives.

However, capturing the attention of your potential buyers and turning them into loyal customers requires more than just offering a solution.

You have to show them your brand is outstanding in both product and service. To do so, you need to deliver a great customer experience and exceed expectations at every interaction.

Leading companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are great at this because they always find new ways to give extra value with better experiences.

They use Artificial Intelligence in their marketing and services to create more advanced and personalized experiences, which helps them stay ahead of their competitors.

What is AI customer experience?

AI customer experience is the use of Artificial Intelligence such as machine learning, intelligent analytics, Autobots, and smart agents to improve customer interaction. It allows you to offer fast, efficient, personalized, and seamless experiences to users.

Furthermore, generative AI helps you to analyze advanced customer data by applying powerful algorithms to process large volumes of unstructured data, extracting key insights and patterns. 

As a result, you will get a clear image of your dream buyer’s avatar.

These reports can reveal deeper customer behaviors, preferences, and trends. Ultimately allowing businesses to make more informed decisions about marketing, product development, and customer engagement strategies.

Why should businesses need to focus on AI?

In modern business, AI is not just about customer service chatbots or personalized experience. It has the potential to improve how companies collect and analyze data, personalize product features, and improve overall service.

That’s why many businesses across the world are prioritizing machine learning as their key marketing strategy. 

For example, Amazon uses Artificial Intelligence to identify potential customers’ behavior and predict purchasing intent. As a next step, they are utilizing these reports to deliver personalized ads to the right buyer at the right time.

According to Reuters, “Amazon has increased their revenue by 13% ($143.5 billion in revenue in the first three months) in this present year, compared to the same period of the year 2023.” And all these happened because they were able to run more personalized advertisements for the people. 

Moreover, AI is not only transforming business operations but also creating a cycle of better service, increased engagement, and higher customer satisfaction. With its advanced analytical ability to deliver leads in real time, AI is transforming industries across the world.

A study by Accenture shows that “by the year 2035, AI can increase corporate profitability to 39%.”

Now, let’s discuss several phases of practicing Artificial Intelligence to improve customer experience and outsell your competitors.

How can you use AI to improve customer experience and outsell competitors?

We are now at the point where most of the businesses are trying to use AI from every possible aspect to outsell their competitors. But just implementing machine learning in your system is enough to get customers and generate a high volume of sales? 

Yes, you are right! Practicing a transformative technology without having a deeper understanding may not work. The worst case, if you use it in the wrong way then it may backfire on your sales and growth.

To help you understand the powerful use of Artificial Intelligence in customer experience, we will now discuss 3 AI-driven strategies to transform your business.

Fun fact: We’ll help you use AI so efficiently that it gets itself out of the job.

Let’s dive in.

Using AI in research to develop products and improve customer experience

When you go out in the market with a product, you want people to buy and use it. But how many people have the intent to buy? In “Sell Like Crazy”, Sabri Suby demonstrates the 3% rule that “only 3% of a market is actively looking to buy something, while the rest are in different stages of awareness.”

That means the fewer people have buying intent, the more they’ll miss out on seeing the value of your product. So, building a valuable product and finding the best-fit market is essential for any business to stand out. 

However, the process is going to become more data-driven and easier with the continuous advancements in AI.

And here’s how.

1. Analyzing customer data for targeted insights

Knowing your audience is not just about knowing the preferences of one individual. Every potential customer can have different choices. So, what you can do is use AI for data analysis and break down your research into a functional hypothesis.

AI can help you filter your customer data, from purchase history or support tickets, and present you the targeted insights. These insights allow you to target your potential buyers and create personalized experiences that align perfectly with customer preferences. 

2. Predicting market trends with AI analytics

A business always needs to keep up with the market trends to survive and grow. But with the basic human limitations, it’s not always possible. For a long period of time, people have used two methods to predict the market. 

• Fundamental analysis: It includes running competitor analysis, creating industry needs, and overall economic conditions report. 
• Technical analysis: Analysis of the patterns of trading activities and uses statistics to run hypotheses for future needs.

While these methods may have been useful, they also have problems. Too much data and fast-moving marketing are always obstacles for these methods to keep up with. Also, there’s a common saying that people aren’t perfect.

This is where machine learning algorithms are great at doing things that traditional methods struggle with. AI systems can automate large amounts of data and quickly spot market patterns that help you predict the exact market needs. 

3. Personalizing product development based on AI insights

Creating a product that your audience wants is crucial for any business. As machine learning can easily capture how people are using your product, you can decide the best possible features and direction for your business.

For example, Zomato, an Indian food delivery company, noticed that food lovers wanted to try dishes from other cities. To meet this demand, Zomato launched “Intercity Legends,” a service that uses airports and delivery networks to bring customers their favorite foods from different cities. 

Furthermore, Zomato used AI to identify popular dishes and combine them with stories. Like connecting butter chicken to its origins in Old Delhi. This approach helped Zomato create a service that customers were excited to use.

Integrating AI features into the product to elevate the customer experience

As we already discussed AI-driven research for market trends and product development. The second phase of this AI customer experience is the integration of AI features into your product.

As AI-based products are growing rapidly in the online market, personalized product experiences with AI-driven recommendations are essential. With those vital data to customer needs and market trends, you need to synchronize your products with machine learning to enhance usability.

1. Enhancing product usability with AI-powered interfaces

AI-powered interfaces have become increasingly popular among businesses and screenagers. It makes businesses or be more specific towards their customers’ needs, as well as allowing customers to enjoy more personalized experiences. 

For example, Netflix employs artificial intelligence to keep note of what each user watches, what they like, and what they rate highly. Then based on this information, it suggests other shows and movies that users are likely to find interesting. This personalized touch is a big reason why Netflix is such a hit!

2. Boosting Product Efficiency with AI Automation

Customers always prefer fast and seamless experiences, and AI automation takes it to the next level. It is the future of user experience, where tasks are completed effortlessly. 

Imagine controlling your home with just a simple voice command. Google makes it possible with its futuristic AI-based automation. You can control your AC, dim your lights, adjust the thermostat to the perfect temperature, and more. These kinds of seamless experiences can be seen with technologies like Google Home. 

And now, many big brands are also on the verge of introducing these kinds of automation in their products. Because it will allow them to touch the highest point of effortless customer experience.

3. Leveraging AI for Real-Time Customer Insights

Real-time customer insights help businesses to understand and address customer needs quickly. This leads to faster problem resolution and happier customers.

AI enhances these insights in several ways by leveraging advanced technologies to provide deeper and more actionable information.

For instance, chatbots provide instant answers to common questions, while predictive analytics help anticipate future needs. Contextual recommendations give agents useful suggestions based on current issues, and customer journey mapping tracks interactions to improve service.

Enhancing Customer Service with AI for a Better Customer Experience

The final need to improve customer experience is to provide exceptional service. With the enhancing power of AI, customer service is about to take a massive leap forward.

By leveraging AI-driven chatbots, insights, reports, etc. your helpdesk will get a massive boost in customer satisfaction.

But before that, you have to analyze the approaches of AI in customer service to figure out which your business is lacking at the moment. 

1. Use AI-Powered Customer Support to boost agent productivity

AI doesn’t do all the work for your service representatives. But it can help them to provide more personalized customer service.

Providing quick ticket overviews, generative answers, sentiment analysis, etc., can allow your reps more time on complex issues.

For instance, Fluent Support uses AI to summarize customer tickets and analyze their tone. This integration helps agents respond more effectively and efficiently, resulting in a better customer experience.

2. Implementing AI Chatbots for Instant Support

Nowadays, AI chatbots are broadly adopted among online businesses. It enables 24/7 support at a low cost. Through these chatbots, your support team can handle a large amount of customer queries without sacrificing quality or response times.

Furthermore, these chatbots are available to collect all the customer data while interacting which allows you to know your customers’ needs and create future strategies.

3. Utilizing AI for Predictive Customer Service

What if you could resolve your customers’ issues before they even reach out to you? AI makes this possible through predictive customer service. 

By analyzing customer behavior and reporting data, AI can anticipate problems and offer solutions at the same time. This can keep your customers happy and reduce the need for reactive support.

Wrapping up

While AI enhances customer experience, it’s important to remember that overusing AI can also be harmful. You can not fully be dependent on machines to do everything for you. There’s always a fundamental need for human touch. 

A perfect example of this is the movie WALL-E. In this sci-fi, the whole human race has become entirely dependent on AI and automation for their every need. People were physically inactive and socially disconnected. They no longer have to make decisions for themselves, and this over-dependency leads to a decline in their overall well-being.

Similarly, In business, relying wholly on AI can disconnect you from your customers. If AI manages every aspect of your customer’s experience, it can feel impersonal. 

So, it’s crucial to balance automation with human interaction to keep the customer experience personalized and empathetic.

The post 3 Strategies to Use AI for Better Customer Experience appeared first on Fluent Support.

What if there’s an effective way not just to gain customers, but turn them into permanent customers for your brand?

The answer lies in delivering exceptional customer service.

When you take good care of your customers, they’re more likely to recommend your business to others.

This will not only help you to get more profit but also help to create a good relationship with them.

As a result, good customer service strengthens your brand reputation and gives you an advantage over your competitors.

Let’s dive in.

Why do startups need good customer service?

Startup is different from traditional business. It is like an extreme version of a regular business. You expect to invest and lose a massive amount of money before you reach a profit.

This could be years and years of building before any money comes back. However, the potential reward is massive and when you succeed, it can be really really big.

Here’s a graph that shows the journey from investment to return.

If you look at the beginning, you can see a significant drop. This part is called the “valley of death,” where most of the startups fail.

Not exactly uplifting, right?

Yes, you’re right. It is a daunting reality.

About 96% of businesses fall within 10 years in this valley of death. This usually happens because they focus too much on boosting sales and making quick profits. In doing so, they end up investing large amounts of money into these efforts.

But that’s not how it works. Let’s give you an example: Elon Mask spends a specific amount of time on his X (formerly known as Twitter) daily to connect with people and post a wide range of topics, from technology to social issues.

Can you imagine! Someone like Elon Musk interacts directly with everyday people, sharing practical advice on a range of issues.

Sometimes it’s called the “land grab” technique. You provide extraordinary customer service and build the trust of your customers. After that, you own the market.

Elon’s active presence on X not only drives engagement but also inspires and attracts users to remain on the platform, making his influence a key factor in its continued popularity.

Your startup can transform from a small player to a game changer by exceeding customer expectations.

Now, let’s go ahead and discuss 7 key benefits that startups can gain from good customer service and the ways to improve it.

1. Increase customer loyalty

“Customer loyalty means that our users continue to use our services and trust us to provide them with the high-quality product that they have come to expect.”

– Jacob Lokshin, Abelian

In the early stages, every customer interaction matters for a startup. It’s the key factor in building customer loyalty and trust for your business.

Let’s make it easy. How many of you have experienced an exceptional customer experience that you snap a photo with the brand and post it on social media?

It seems silly but many of us really do that. It’s the power of their extraordinary service that turned people from a casual shopper to a brand-loyal ambassador.

It might sound simple. If so, why do millions of businesses go out of the market every year?

Is it because their competitor was that much better at marketing and sales techniques?

Maybe or maybe not. But the real answer lies in delivering top-notch customer service each and every day to gain customers’ loyalty.

At the end of the day, this will be the difference maker between your business’s success and failure.

Here are some benefits your business can gain from customer loyalty.

• Help to create brand attachment: Continuously having good interactions with customers can lead to a strong connection and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
• Increase repeat business: When customers are happy with your service, they’re more likely to return and buy again.
• Give competitive advantage: A good customer relationship can differentiate a company from its competitors, even if prices are higher. 
• Grow trust and convenience: Customers will gain trust in you which makes things more convenient with them.
• Create a positive brand image: Customers will always feel happy with every encounter with your brand.

2. Improve brand reputation

As a startup, the first thing you need to focus on is building a positive brand reputation. But a good reputation doesn’t come in a single day.

Companies with years of experience and quality products failed to build a good reputation in the market. And in most cases, the reason remains the same.

They may have invested millions of money to create quality products but customer service remains unnoticed.

As a result, they have failed to create a connection with their customers.

Imagine you went to a restaurant with your dear ones to enjoy good food and quality time.

But in a matter of moments, you encounter some bad behavior from a staff. It can ruin your mood and spoil plans.

Most of us have encountered this situation at least once in our lives and we always avoid going back to the place afterwards.

If your customers do not have a clear understanding or favorable perception of your brand, they may be unwilling to purchase your services.

Therefore, investing in customer service that accurately represents your startup goals and values is both a wise investment and a smart branding strategy.

3. Lead to higher profit

Most new ventures are constantly chasing new customers. Because their existing ones don’t stay loyal, forcing them to continually find ways to keep their business afloat.

Is it a sustainable strategy to run a business? It actually isn’t.

It’s time you focus on customer lifetime value. Because it’s important to reduce acquisition costs and increase High-Value Purchases.

“Treating your customers like family is the key to recurring customers.”

– Tim Han, Success insider, Author

Now, we are not telling you to turn a blind eye to their red flag and keep on supporting them.

But definitely recommend you go a bit above and beyond to give them special treatment.

In fact, research by PWC shows that “86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.”

So, enhancing your customer support is an absolute must for profitable sales and churn reduction.

Here are some additional financial benefits of good customer service for startups.

• Reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC): It means engaging customers by delivering ongoing value can lower the cost of acquiring new customers.
• High-value purchase intention: Customers are more likely to spend more if they are highly satisfied with a company’s service.
• Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): It represents the total value a customer brings to a business throughout their relationship with the brand.

4. Grow employee satisfaction

“Happy employees are the engines of innovation and customer satisfaction. Their happiness translate directly into competitive advantage.”

– James Lawrence, Happy Companies, CEO

Your employees are the engine that drives your business. It is thus important that they feel well in their workplace.

However, a demotivating business climate not only causes high turnover and employee burnout but also makes it difficult to work efficiently and develop creative solutions. And this directly impacts your profits.

A happy customer base and their positive feedback can help your business to change this climate. They feel motivated and more likely to drive innovation.

As a result, you can get better service and a competitive advantage for your business.

5. Provide a competitive advantage

Why is it important to let your customers know why they should do business with you? Because it highlights your competitive advantage.

This helps reassure customers that they have made the right decision to do business with you.

For example, imagine you’re at a grocery store buying meat. The butcher holds up a steak and says:

– “Look at this! Beautiful piece of meat or what?”

– “Do you know we trim just 1/8 inch of fat around the meat?”

– “You won’t find it anywhere else.”

– “Thanks for shopping with us.”

In the market, products can be similar, but the competitive difference needs to be emphasized. The slightest extra effort helps you stand out from your competitors.

By delivering top-notch service, you’re not only showing that you care about your customers, but you’re also building a strong reputation for your brand.

This consistent focus on positive experiences keeps customers coming back and sets your business apart from the competition.

6. Gain word-of-mouth referrals and reviews

If you need a new product or service, you usually ask your family and friends for advice. Whether it’s about a car, a house, or a doctor, you usually trust their recommendations.

Referrals are one of the most powerful determinants of the future success of your business. It can significantly increase your brand’s reputation.

By providing excellent customer service, you enhance the chance that your brand will be recommended within their friend circle.

However, remember that referrals can also work negatively. Dissatisfied customers may share negative reviews, which can damage your reputation and discourage future customers.

7. Help businesses make better decisions

As a business owner, you have spent countless hours trying to perfect your product or service. But you are likely too close to see your product objectively.

That’s where customer’s opinions can give valuable insights into what you are doing right and what you need to do.

By listening to their concerns, you can easily tailor your offer to your customers’ needs. It benefits your business not only in the short but long-term customer relationships.

Additionally, it can also lead to collaborations and partnerships. The connections may result in new business opportunities, such as joint ventures, that help your business grow and expand.

What startups can do to improve customer service?

As an entrepreneur, nothing compares to the excitement of starting a new business. However, if you want your startup to progress, setting up your customer service program is crucial.

Though creating a great customer experience may not be the most interesting task, doing it from the start can greatly enhance your brand’s reputation.

Here are some key points for startups to keep in mind to improve customer service.

1. Customer-centric culture

Customers always expect your service to be world-class and ready to help at any moment. If your support team makes even a small mistake, they might switch their business elsewhere.

With so many options available to them now, you must go above and beyond every time to satisfy them.

For this reason, you need to build a culture that prioritizes customer satisfaction.

Ensure that all team members understand the importance of providing excellent service and are trained to handle customer interactions with empathy and professionalism.

2. Effective omnichannel solutions

Customers expect consistent information and quality of service across their preferred channels. Over the past few years, this expectation has grown significantly.

Nowadays, Customer service must be available on every platform customers use, whether it’s social media, email, or chat.

A survey report shows that “76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments.” 

Compact support systems with omnichannel setup link channels together, allowing agents to share information seamlessly.

This way, customers don’t need to leave their current activity to get help from your business.

Instead, they can reach out on any channel of their choice and receive an immediate, reliable response.

3. AI-powered support system

A solid customer service strategy includes attention to customers’ pre, mid, and post-sale. Your customer support should cater to your customers at every stage of their buying journey.

A great way to make sure your customers’ queries are always answered in no time is by using an AI-powered agent response.

By using a cutting-edge AI-powered helpdesk, you can handle high ticket volumes and ensure every customer gets a personalized experience by maintaining a good FRT score.

4. Develop a customer journey map

Understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even if you think you have a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase will always be unpredictable, especially at the startup level.

Although you can’t predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is crucial for tracking the key milestones that every customer reaches.

It helps you see the customer’s experience from their perspective and identify opportunities to improve interactions.

Wrapping up

For startups, meeting and exceeding customer expectations every time is important to stay ahead of the competitors. Promise customer service in the initial stages can greatly influence how customers view your brand.

By offering a personalized experience, understanding their needs, and building trust, you can boost loyalty and drive repeat business.

Moreover, these strong customer relationships can lead to future opportunities like referrals, additional offerings, and new collaborations.

Ultimately, startups that prioritize customer relationships are more likely to build a loyal customer base that ensures their long-term success.

The post Customer Service for Startups: 7 Key Points to Stand Out appeared first on Fluent Support.

Support agents can go through these periods as it’s part of their everyday job. However, there are times when the pressure piles up and they end up working through a heavy backlog. Managing existing tickets while taking on new ones can be exhausting and increases the risk of burnout among support agents.

“Burnout happens, but could be mitigated with proper distribution of works and by encouraging agents for the positive reviews they got.”

Md. Kamrul Islam
Head of Technical Support at WPManageNinja LLC

Burnout happens and it’s understandable. But it’s more important to know how to tackle this problem in the earlier phase. Otherwise, you can not deliver the best service and handle your customers with a joyful attitude in the long.

In this blog, we will discuss why burnout is so prevalent in the customer service industry and ways to avoid it.

Why burnout is prevalent in customer service

Customer support is one of the toughest jobs that looks simple from the outside. Support agents interact with all kinds of customers, and not everyone is easy to deal with. It’s almost certain that they’ll encounter an angry customer at least once a day.

Furthermore, the high volume of tickets works as an add-on to this pressure. The combination of high expectations and emotional stress makes burnout a prevalent issue in customer service.

Let’s explore why burnout is so common in customer service.

The pressure to meet customer expectations

Nowadays, customers want their issues fixed right away with perfection. They count on support agents to be knowledgeable, understanding, and quick. This constant demand to meet or exceed customer expectations can create a lot of pressure on support agents.

A report by Salesforce shows that “84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.” 

This means customer support isn’t just about solving problems anymore. It’s about making every interaction a positive one. The daily pressure to keep up these high standards can lead to stress and exhaustion.

Handling a constant flow of tickets

Picture a never-ending line of people asking for help. Before you finish helping one customer, two more need assistance. This is what many support agents deal with every day. The constant flow of requests can be immense, making it hard to keep up.

Here’s a comparison graph of a helpdesk system:

This graph shows the support ticket flow over two different years, showcasing an increase in ticket volume. 

As businesses grow, the pressure on support teams mounts, requiring them to continuously enhance their performance.

Several factors contribute to this increase in ticket volume:

• Agent expertise: If an agent isn’t skilled enough in that specific area, it can slow down the ticket resolution process and create a ticket backlog.
• Technical issues: Bugs or glitches in products can trigger a flood of support requests, as customers seek solutions to their problems.
• New releases: Product launches or updates often bring unexpected challenges, causing a spike in support inquiries.
• Festivals or sales: High-traffic periods like sales or festivals lead to increased customer interactions, resulting in more tickets.

With the ever-growing ticket volume, agents often find themselves stuck in a cycle of constantly reacting to inquiries or issues. This constant pressure can lead to feelings of frustration and helplessness, which can ultimately result in burnout.

The emotional strain of difficult interactions

Customer support isn’t just about solving technical problems. But it’s also about managing the emotions of both, the customer’s and the agent’s. 

Dealing with angry, frustrated, or disappointed customers can be emotionally draining. While some customers are pleasant and understanding, others can be demanding, rude, or even abusive.

According to a UK-based survey, “42% of employees feel emotionally drained from their work.” This emotional exhaustion is a key contributor to burnout, making it harder for them to maintain the positive attitude that’s essential in customer service.

Ways to avoid burnout in customer service, according to support agents

Customer service burnout is inevitable but can be mitigated by proper methods and organizations. 

Let’s take a look at this image mentioned below to find out the ways at a glance.

1. Understand the signs of burnout

As we already know the prevalence of customer service burnout, we have to know what are the signs of burnout to know if our support agents are experiencing it.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), burnout is not a medical condition but an “occupational phenomenon.” While it’s not officially a disease, it can lead to serious medical issues, including anxiety, emotional stress, and other related disorders.

Dr. Tara Narula, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital, has suggested some signs of burnout that lead people to mental stress and disorders. 

Note: One of these signs alone may not indicate burnout. However, if you notice multiple signs in one individual, it could be a cause for concern.

• Fatigue:  A key sign of burnout is exhaustion. When stress builds up, it drains your body and mind, leaving a constant tiredness in your body. 

If an employee seems less energetic or engaged in work, it might be a sign of burnout. Pay attention to their energy levels, especially if it’s a noticeable change from their usual behavior.

• Mental detachment: Feeling mentally disconnected from your job is often a sign of burnout. You might become negative or cynical about your work. In case, someone seems less involved or indifferent to tasks they once cared about, it could indicate burnout. Keep an eye on changes in their focus or enthusiasm, as these are key signs.

• Cynicism/pessimism: People feel they are not professionally efficacious and become negative towards work or colleagues. 

It’s the difference between saying “I had a bad week” and “I’m just not good at this job.” This shift can increase feelings of frustration and make daily responsibilities even harder to manage.

These can apply to any career but there are certain professions like customer support, call center, teachers, medical professionals, etc. So, by recognizing the symptoms of burnout, individuals and organizations can take proactive steps to avoid it.

2. Proper training and coaching: 

Onboarding in customer service isn’t just about learning rules and regulations—it’s about mastering how to satisfy customers effectively. 

New bees in the support team often struggle with calming frustrated customers, which isn’t a skill acquired magically. Without proper training and guidance during their intern period, support agents can experience significant stress, leading to burnout.

• Customer interaction training: Equip your team with the skills to handle various customer scenarios, including managing difficult conversations and intense situations.

Here’s a video that provides more insights into positive customer interactions.

• Technical skills training: Ensure agents are well-versed in the tools and technologies they’ll use daily, enabling them to solve problems efficiently and confidently.

• Stress management training: Teach techniques to manage stress and maintain mental well-being, helping agents stay balanced and focused even under pressure.

• Team-based training: Foster collaboration and support among team members, promoting a cohesive environment where employees feel valued and supported.

3. Expertise-based product sector selection 

A research report from Ipsos reveals that about 64% of Americans feel stressed at work, and 33% believe this stress is negatively impacting their lives. This stress often arises when agents lack proper knowledge about their products. 

Customer support team leaders recommend assigning support agents to products or sectors they are specialized in. This approach can help reduce stress and increase their interest in their work.

4. Organized workloads

Support teams should hold a daily meeting to review the number of tickets or support queries received and distribute them evenly among team members.

Since the volume of support tickets can vary each day, it’s important to actively manage this distribution to avoid overloading any single individual. An organized helpdesk system can assist in balancing workloads effectively.

If your team is regularly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of support tickets flooding the inbox outside of working hours, consider expanding your support network by hiring a global team. By bringing on additional agents, you can distribute the workload more effectively, with your international team handling requests that come in during the night, ensuring continuous coverage and faster response times.

5. Ideal systems and automation

An advanced ticket management system with workflow automation can release agents’ stress. Automation can handle recurring tickets, escalate tickets automatically, and also close if there’s a common issue.

For example, Fluent Support is a feature-rich self-hosted help desk system with AI-powered responses, automated workflow triggers, and 20+ integrations.

6. Know when to pause

“The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.”

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

In The Burnout Society, the famous philosopher Byung-Chul Han warns that constant positivity doesn’t necessarily uplift us; instead, it overwhelms and exhausts us.

In customer service, the pressure to always be upbeat and productive can lead to burnout. It’s important to recognize when you’re feeling saturated and take steps to recharge. So, know when to pause, reflect, and take care of yourself.

“Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

So, while it’s important to stay focused on work, remember to take breaks to restore your body and mind. Constantly working on cases can lead to burnout.

In this case, the 20-20-20 rule can be a great practice. The rule says that for every 20 minutes spent looking at a screen, you take a 20-second break, move around, and look at something 20 feet away, which relaxes the eye muscles for 20 seconds and gives your brain a much-needed respite.

Here are some methods for taking effective breaks:

• Stress-relieving activities
• Colleague interactions
• Focused breathing
• Ergonomic chairs and desks

Therefore, know when to step away and return with a refreshed mind. Use these methods for continuous healing and avoid burnout. 

7. Celebrating wins and positive feedback

Recognizing and celebrating achievements is crucial in customer support. It boosts morale and the value of hard work. Make it a habit to acknowledge both individual and team successes, whether it’s resolving a challenging case or receiving positive feedback from a customer.

Here are a few ways to recognize employees:

• Birthday celebrations
• Employee of the Month awards
• Days off for volunteering
• Hybrid work models

A simple compliment can be the key to preventing someone from feeling overwhelmed and helping them stay motivated, particularly in customer service, where negativity from customer complaints can be prevalent.

Wrapping up

Customer support agents face tough challenges and deal with numerous issues daily, leading to mental exhaustion and burnout.

However, to ensure high-quality service and customer satisfaction, proactive and well-supported customer support agents are crucial.

The success of the entire customer service industry relies on these support agents. Prioritizing their mental health and well-being is essential. If burnout isn’t mitigated, it can negatively impact the company. 

The post 7 Ways to Avoid Burnout in Customer Service appeared first on Fluent Support.

For B2B customer service, this can be a productivity killer, but the worst part is that it’s silent. So, how do we recognize it, build it up, and keep it strong? Before we get the answer to these questions, let us know the definition of the term self-esteem.

Recognizing the Problem

The first step and the obvious step is to know if your B2B customer service team has a self-esteem problem. Here are some signs that you may try to find:

Perception of the Role: Customer service roles are somewhat undervalued in many companies. Often considered less important compared to sales or product development. But if you think a bit, there are the all-rounders in the company.

Lack of Recognition: Achievements in customer service are rarely celebrated to some extent. This can create demotivation in the team.

Limited Career Growth: Many customer service roles lack clear paths for career advancement. As a result, the team might start exploring different paths instead of spending time to improve the skill.

Low Morale: Customer service is not easy work to do. So spending a hectic work load day after day causes a lack of enthusiasm. This can hammer the interaction with customers, making them less productive.

Fear of Escalation: Employees hesitate to escalate issues, make decisions independently, or follow their experienced judgment.

Negative Feedback Sensitivity: Every piece of negative feedback hits hard and lingers longer than it should.

Avoidance of Responsibility: They noticeably avoid taking ownership of errors or even achievements.

If these symptoms sound familiar, your team might be dealing with a self-esteem issue, and your business is at risk.

Building Self-Esteem in Customer Service

Now that we figured out that the customer service team is suffering from low self-esteem, here is what we can do to improve.

Establish a clear goal

Set a few defined scopes from where we can start working to improve team self-esteem.

Onboarding Success: Support teams play a vital role in onboarding customers by addressing issues promptly and accurately, even in some cases proactively. Aim could be to increase the percentage of users who reach the “onboarded” stage, which can be considered a measurable milestone. 

Retention and Growth: Increase the number of customers’ retention and identify opportunities for upselling, scope can be another big point for the team. This team is often the first to spot churn factors and potential business opportunities.

Customer Satisfaction: Tracking and improving Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) can be a milestone at the individual level.

Improve customer service self-esteem

Okay, we have set the milestone. Now let’s go through the improvement steps.

Foster a culture of recognition

Regularly acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of the customer service team. This can be through an internal communications channel, team meetings, or public announcements.

Personal recognition for outstanding service helps boost morale, which impacts team performance. Recognizing employees who go one step further can motivate the entire team.

Provide career development opportunities

Offer training and mentorship programs more than often. By helping new team members catch on, it not only improves their performance but also improves the team’s positive outcomes.

Invest in Technology and Tools

Implement self-service portals and knowledge base systems to empower customers to find solutions by themselves. This reduces the support ticket load on service teams and allows them to focus on more complex issues.

Use a functional support ticket management system for the team. This will give them the leverage to improve first response time (FRT).

Align customer support with customer success and other teams

Encourage collaboration among customer support and other teams like success, marketing, and product. All the teams should work towards common goals like customer retention, satisfaction, and product feedback.

Establish clear lines of communication between the teams. Team meetings and sharing ideas can help ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards the same objectives.

Establishing a supportive environment

A supportive environment is crucial for maintaining a high level of self-esteem. Foster an environment where open and honest communication is encouraged. Inspire team members to share their thoughts, concerns, and ideas without fear of judgment.

Pair less experienced team members with experienced members. This not only builds skills but also helps newer members feel more connected and supported.

Once in a while, good team-building activities can strengthen relationships and improve overall enthusiasm. It’s like hitting the refresh button for your team’s spirit.

Implementing processes that boost confidence

Ensure there are clear and straightforward paths for escalation. Provide easy access to resources like knowledge bases, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides. The more information they have easy access to, the more confident they’ll feel.

Establish regular feedback loops where team members can discuss what’s working and what’s not. This continuous improvement cycle helps maintain high standards and quality service.

Nurturing self-esteem over time

Building self-esteem isn’t a one-time project—it’s an ongoing process. Have regular one-on-one check-ins with team members to discuss their progress, challenges, and lackings.

Encourage and support continuous professional development, even on a personal level. Whether it’s attending workshops, webinars, or pursuing certifications, these opportunities can significantly boost confidence.

Never forget to celebrate team milestones as well as individual achievements.

The Ripple Effect of High Self-Esteem

When your B2B customer service team has high self-esteem, it doesn’t just benefit them—it benefits your entire business. Confident teams provide better service, leading to higher customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Teams with high self-esteem are more efficient and effective in their roles, leading to better overall performance. High self-esteem contributes to a positive workplace culture, which can attract and retain top talent.

Wrapping It Up

With the right strategies and a consistent effort, you can build and maintain a confident, empowered, and high-performing team. Remember, it’s about creating an environment where your team feels valued, supported, and equipped to tackle any challenge. So accept the fact that B2B customer service has a self-esteem problem and make an effort to improve.

The post Does B2B Customer Service Have a Self-Esteem Problem? appeared first on Fluent Support.

Surely you need marketing to reach your target demographics and a sales team to ensure you have consistent sales. But when your customers face problems, where should they go for their solution? What process do you have to use to tackle angry customers? Eventually, this will be a key factor in maintaining your business’s goodwill.

That’s where the customer support team works wonders. Customer support teams handle everything related to customer relations and keep customers’ happiness higher. Building an efficient customer support team is an obvious priority of any customer service strategy.

Building a customer support team from scratch needs a process to build the overall foundation of your customer service. Excellent customer service varies from business to business, and most companies fail to do so because of their lack of understanding of the customer support process.

In this article, we’ll cover why you need a customer support team, what makes a great support team, how to build a customer support team, what tools you should use, and how to optimize these tools for your business needs. Take it as a full-free course on building a customer support team from the beginning. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the process and what structure you should follow based on your business.

Download the full eBook guide on “How to build a customer support team”. This eBook has additional resources for further study.

The form can be filled in the actual website url.

If you already have a customer support team, you can still follow these solid steps to ensure your customer service strategy is on the right path. If you are new, let’s get started with why a customer support team is an essential part of your business.

Why should you build a support team?

A customer support team is a tribe of empathic people who dedicate their time and effort to solving customer problems and helping them achieve success.

Not all businesses need customer support, but it is essential for those whose marketing promise depends on excellent after-sales customer support. After-sales support is a great tool to build long-term customer relations. Even pre-sales support is widely popular among companies nowadays. Pre-sales support helps a customer make their purchase decision, create a seamless customer onboarding process, and help them use your products after payment immediately.

Both pre-sale and after-sale support can be run by one customer support team. Now, as a business, you should ask yourself, “Do I need a customer support team right now?”

It is important to answer this question because often business owners make this mistake, not considering making customer support a priority from the start. Then, when business gets bigger, customer inquiries flood in, and they get overwhelmed with little time to provide solutions to all customers.

No matter what industry you are in, always think ahead a few years. Ask yourself:

• How can a support agent save me time?
• How much time will be saved for me to do things I’m capable of?
• How many expected customer queries will my business get after the official launch?
• Do I need human agents, or are chatbots enough?
• Or do I need human agents in 6 months?
• Can I automate most customer inquiries? If yes, then how can I do it?
• Am I capable of handling these amounts of customer inquiries, or do I need to hire?

These are some initial questions you must ask yourself before launching your business. If you find most answers telling you that you need more hands in handling customers after-sales, it is inevitable that a customer support team is required for your business. Either you are an e-commerce store, agency, service provider, or consultancy, you should invest in customer support from day one.

Now that you know the benefits of investing in customer support, let’s help you define what excellent customer support is for your company.

Define “excellent customer support” for your business

Without a standard, it’s hard to measure success. Before building a customer support team, you need to set your standard for great customer support.

What do you mean by “great”? Or what does “excellent customer support” mean to you by definition?

Most companies provide customer support. But not all are the same. Some differentiate themselves by going the extra mile and going to great lengths for customer satisfaction.

Think outside the box about how you can differentiate your customer support from that of your competitors. What is one thing you are willing to do that your competitors are not thinking of doing?

Decide what type of service quality you are going to provide. And how are you going to ensure the results? Get your whole company behind the idea of your great customer support. It is important to ensure that your other teams understand the value of excellent customer support. It will help develop a company-wide customer-centric mindset and sophisticated team-wise collaboration.

When you clearly define excellent customer support, you can develop guidelines for your support team. You can select specific customer support metrics to measure their success.

We will discuss more guidelines and support metrics later in the structure and process steps. Now let’s dig into how you can make sure your customer support team conveys your brand and company value while interacting with customers every day.

Align your customer support with your brand and company values

We talked a lot about the tone of the brand’s voice in customer service previously. It means how you follow the same tone of voice in your copywriting, whether it’s your company’s website, brand brochure, other marketing materials, or customer service. Your brand tone of voice sets your brand personality. Your brand personality is essential to attracting your target audience.

Every company has values at its core. Values keep the business operations in check. Like when Google founders incorporated Google Inc., they came up with 10 main values Google will always follow. One is, “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”

These company values helped Google set their overall business policy and shape their brand personality.

What are your company’s values? What is your brand’s tone of voice?

When you clarify those two, you can easily implement them into your customer support policies and strategies. If your company wants to be known as a customer-centric company, then your value should reflect that customers are your first priority.

This value should dictate your excellent customer support definition, and your team should deliver on that promise. Remember, a customer service team can only deliver great customer service when, as a company, you make it happen.

Make sure, as a company, all of your teams are onboard about customer service policies and strategies. Customer support should not be a standalone department; it should seamlessly interact with other teams like the marketing and sales teams to provide customers with fast, reliable, and quality solutions.

Consideration for building a support team

How your employees interact with your customers sets the overall perception of the customer. Customers’ perspectives may change in a single interaction, no matter what your team members’ intentions are. Your team members need to understand that from the beginning.

Your customer service team should reflect your brand, your values, and your tone of voice. It takes more than positive interaction to achieve this; companies should have their goals, vision, and mission align with their strategies. Then you can build your customer service team on top of it.

Find out where your customers are and which channels to focus on for customer support.

The best way to provide great support is to know where your customers hang out and be there. Get more data on your customer demographics; analyze what channels they use more and what they are using more to contact you.

Is this your official email address? Your helpdesk portal? Live chat? Or your social media channels?

Many companies make the mistake of providing support on every channel before scaling up their customer support team. Ask yourself first:

• Are you ready to provide customer support on every channel?
• Can your team handle that much pressure?
• Are your team members trained for every channel?
• Is that okay for your team members’ mental health?

The answers are important to ensure your customer support team’s operation and efficiency. Find out what your business and customers need for support. Answer these questions:

• What is the standard of communication for your industry?
• Does your industry need face-to-face, online, or technical support?
• What primary communication tool do your customers use?
• What social media channel is popular with your customer demographics?

If your business serves older demographics, they are more comfortable with phone communication and, often, emails.

Younger generations like live chats, social media like Twitter, or self-help tools like knowledge bases and communities. Young demographics are comfortable using search engines, answer tools like Quora, discussion forms, Facebook groups, and Reddit to find the solutions themselves. Their short attention span requires quick answers.

You can easily cater to them by creating in-depth tutorials, customer support videos, documentation, and knowledge bases. You can also provide help desk and email communication for further communication.

Find out your customer demographics using which social media platforms most, and then start providing support from one or two. Do not spread your customer service team too thin. It will only frighten them; as a result, your customer will get inconsistent support, and customer churn will happen.

Take market data and analyze it. What are your competitors using to serve their customers? It is the easiest way to make sure you are on the right path. Now do whatever it takes to offer better customer service from them. Match the strength of your support team members with their preferred channels to provide quality customer support.

Review legal restrictions and examine necessary requirements

Now that you have decided on your support channels and mediums, it’s time to review legal restrictions and examine the necessary requirements. You should find the answers to these questions:

• Which country does your business cover?
• What rules do they have about customer data collection and use of this data?
• How are you going to follow the country’s law with your terms and conditions?

For example, the European Union demands GDPR compliance for every business. Consult with a legal expert when writing your business’s terms and conditions, disclaimer, use of user data, and other legal documents. Be sure to clearly make any legal requirements visible while onboarding new customers, because you don’t want to leave your customer in the dark about any policy changes in your customer support terms.

Point out potential legal troubles before offering customer service on various mediums and create systems for team members to tackle those when necessary. You can brainstorm different customer service situations and pain points and come up with solutions in advance to train your support team members. So when the actual event happens, they will know what to do or can manage related types of situations on their own.

Hire right people and build your team with right roles

Hiring the right agent for your customer support team is the key to quality support. It is crucial to find the right customer support agents, because they are the only part of your business that has the ability to influence your customers through one-to-one interactions.

Wrong people in any customer service team are the reasons for bad customer experiences. When you build your support team, you will have to appoint the right type of person who is compatible with your company’s values.

What type of person is best for a customer service job? The answers are:

• Empathic
• Active listener
• Problem solver
• Quick learner
• Technically skilled

Your right candidate knows what to do with responsibility and freedom. Empathy is a must-have characteristic you should look for while building your customer service team. If your agents can’t feel them in customer shoes, they will never understand customer fraustations. An empathic agent will actively listen to the customer and provide an exact solution to fulfill their immediate needs. They also know how to say no to customers professionally without upsetting them.

You can appoint support agents in-house or choose virtual support assistants to run your team. It depends on your business size, customer base, and daily incoming customer queries. A small e-commerce store may need 2–3 support agents to handle customers. You can manage it with a few virtual agents covering all time zones. But this can’t be done for a big business with lots of inventory or services and a huge customer base.

Choose which path is right for you and how you can scale if you need more agents to handle future customers. If you choose to build an in-house support team, you’ll need to clarify which roles and responsibilities your customer service team will take on.

You’ll need some essential roles to run customer support or service teams:

Customer support engineers – They are also known as customer service engineers. They handle all technical problems, run tests, diagnose problems, and offer tech solutions for your customers. This role required technical skills, an engineering degree in related fields, and often expertise in the industry the business covers.

Customer support specialist – They are mid-level support staff who are not heavily skilled like support engineers but can handle immediate tech issues, how to solve problems, and help customers with product installations and use. They are more required to have soft skills like active listening, emotional intelligence, and great communicator. Empathy also plays a huge role for customer support specialists.

Customer service managers – Managers are important for big support or service teams. They help you keep your agents motivated. They run the day-to-day operations of support teams and set daily, weekly, or monthly targets. Most times, they take new recruits under their belt and train them to become sophisticated customer support specialists or engineers. A customer service manager may have all the qualities of a service engineer, but it is not necessary to have degrees or expertise in specific fields to fulfill the role. They must know how to handle teams, agents, and customers in difficult situations with highly emotional intelligence. This role needs organizational skills more than technical skills.

Customer success managers – Many service-based and subscription-based businesses are now relying more on this role to provide better customer satisfaction. Customer success manager helps new customers onboard, helps them with product education, provides support when they need it, and builds long-term relationships with personal connections. It is different from support specialists because success managers focus on a few customers rather than providing support to all. Their main target is to deliver proactive support rather than general support. They ensure customers are achieving success through regular product use and stay with the customers as long as they stay active.

Customer onboarding specialist – When a new customer first purchases your products, they will need guidance on how to use it or to complete the purchase properly. Customer onboarding specialists help your user onboard, educate them with the benefits of the features, and guide them to solve one problem at a time. Customer onboarding specialists help you retain customers and stop customer churn after a few weeks of sign-up.

Customer service representative – Most service representatives handle customers primary inquiries offline or online, offer answers to refunds, process changes, and take new orders. They take care of customers’ basic needs, so customers do not need to wait or submit a ticket for further assistance. They minimize customer support specialists workload. Oftentimes, small businesses or startups can operate their support teams with customer service representatives and scale the team when necessary. This role requires fast problem-solving skills and soft skills like resourceful communication, empathy, and ability to handle rude customers.

Customer experience managers – Great customer experiences are the foundation of customer loyalty. Customer experience managers’ job is to find areas to improve, build, and implement strategies to deliver an excellent customer experience. They work closely with customer service managers and customer support specialists to improve customer interactions. Their main focus is to improve efficiency at every customer touch point and increase customer engagement.

Chief Customer Officer (CCO) – This new role is taking the business world by storm. Chief Customer Officer role demands are growing in customer-centric businesses. They are more like a hybrid of customer success managers and customer experience managers. The slight difference between the other two is that CCO is an executive position. They help management create new policies keeping customers’ needs and customer experiences in mind. Their focus is to make the business more customer-centric, increase customer retention, and build long-term customer relations.

These are some of the most popular roles in the support industry. Pick one that suits your needs, and create your customer support team around them.

Train your people and build a foundation from start

It’s essential that you build a strong foundation for your customer service team from the beginning. Most businesses see customer support as a cost center and try to cut their budget. They go for cheap talents for the support team.

It’s a mistake—a dangerous mistake for a business that just invested in a new customer support team.

Go for professionals for certain roles, like customer success managers, customer service managers, or customer support engineers. They are the main part of any support team. You only want experienced people in the field. But don’t feel scared to recruit new people if they meet your criteria and match the soft skills that are needed to run a customer support team. You can always train them and make them efficient with proper education and processes.

Remember, your skilled customer service team can increase customer retention, customer referrals, and quarterly sales. Serving customers with the right people is the key.

Train your new agents to use your products and services. You can tell an agent’s ability by how fast they catch up on using it and learn to do regular use cases. New agents can tag along old representatives to learn day-to-day work. This is to educate them on how to handle customers and teach them about customers’ pain points.

You can create a sandbox to teach new agents different scenarios before putting them into handling new customers. This way, they will gain confidence and cut nervousness during their first customer interaction. Internal documentation or wikis are nice tools to help new agents learn on the go.

Create a solid structure and process for your support team

A solid structure and process can run your customer support operation smoothly. Have a process for training new agents so you can easily train them, manage them, and put them right to work. Consider having a customer service playbook for everyone. In this playbook, you can find a short but understandable explanation and information about:

• Policies,
• Operation process,
• How to contact other team members
• Whom to knock when in trouble?
• Reply with templates to use.
• Examples of common cases and solutions
• Links to troubleshooting guides

If your support agents have to follow certain rules or processes, clarify them in your playbook or training. The more freedom you can give to your support teams, the more efficient they will be in real-life customer interactions.

Most times, the process needs to evolve around the structure of your company. Your customer support department structure needs to be close to your business structure. What is your business structure?

• Is it a small business or a start-up?
• Is it a mid-size company with different products serving different demographics?
• Is it an enterprise-level company serving both B2B or B2C?

Now that you know your business size, find out what type of customer support role you need to fill up your company support department. Start by appointing the right people for these roles and building the team gradually.

Create a customer expectation checklist or customer service commitment to create a seamless process. These checklists or service commitments can be private or you can make them public to boost your brand reputation among your customer base.

Research your market, do a competitor analysis, and find the answers to these questions:

• What is the average handling time in your industry?
• What is your competitor’s customer response time?
• What level of service are your competitors offering?

Now that you have all the answers, think of how you can manage to exceed customer expectations with your definition of customer support, your team, and the process you developed. Explore possibilities, tweak, experiment with what works, and evolve the process.

Create your customer support standard based on the answers to these questions:

• How fast are you going to reply to your customers?
• How will your support team handle different types of customers?
• What will be your refund or return policy?
• When and how do you say no to customers professionally?
• What will your ethical approach be to asking for reviews from customers?
• What should you do when your team is unable to provide support? How do you handle customers in these circumstances?
• What extra mile can an agent go to provide a great customer experience? What will be the limit on spending?
• What customer service metrics will your team follow for daily operations?

When you have a support standard with a solid team structure and process, your customer support team will run on their own without you micromanaging every little aspect.

Remember, the goal is to build a self-sufficient customer support department. So you can focus on other areas of your business.

Now, what tools should you use to run a self-sufficient customer service department?

Invest in the right tools

Customer support tools help your team speed up their work. These tools help with repetitive tasks, automation, team collaboration, and storing customer data like customer conversations, purchases, and more. Customer relationship management tools, or live chats, also play a huge role in customer service operations.

Ask yourself these questions before investing in tools:

• What value do the tools offer? Does it fulfill my needs?
• How fast can my team learn to use these tools? Will it be easy for customers to use?
• Do I need to use extra tools to get the most value out of the tool? Does it support integrations with the right tools?
• Does it make things easier to streamline support agents daily workflow?
• What type of automation does it offer?
• How sophisticated is it in reporting, data presentation, and analytics? Does it offer individual agent reporting?
• Does it offer vanity customer service metrics like waiting time, average handling time, average resolution time, or first response time?
• Can I scale my customer support department with this tool?
• Do I need to upgrade the tools to meet my future expectations?

These questions will help you prioritize what tools you need for your support operations. There are different types of customer support tools:

Chatbots – AI chatbots are now widely popular support trends to serve repetitive questions and answers. This saves agents time. But sometimes you will still need human agents available when an AI bot is unable to answer complex questions. 

Example: Crisp, Live Chat, Messenger.

Knowledge Base tools – These types of tools help you build your documentation or detailed knowledge base. You can create step-by-step detailed answers to frequently asked questions with SEO focus. So when a customer searches for them on any search engine, your answers will come up first. 

Example: Betterdocs

Helpdesk – Helpdesk tools help you serve customer queries from one place; you can source them from different channels and share the same inbox with multiple agents. Helpdesk has automation to automate repetitive tasks and manage daily workflows. It also offers an internal knowledge base and team collaboration tools built within the core helpdesk. You can also integrate other tools easily with a robust helpdesk system.

Example: Fluent Support

CRM tools – Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are useful when you have huge customers and want to collect and store their information. They also track sales, manage marketing, and manage email for businesses.

Example: FluentCRM, Hubspot.

Other Tools – There are other types of tools that may also come in handy for support operations. Like time management tools (Hubstaff), project management or bug reports (FluentBoards, Trello, Asana), learning management systems (LMS) like Learndash and TutorLMS, and internal communication tools (Slack, Telegram, or Discord). You can select these tools depending on your team’s needs.

Many small businesses make the mistake of not prioritizing investing in customer service tools. It is vital to think of these tools when building customer support tools. Not investing in the right tools can damage a customer service team’s time and energy.

You can start your service operation using free tools. There are plenty of them, but most free tools are limited, slow, and unhelpful. Eventually, you’ll need to scale up your support operations, and these free customer service tools will fall short of meeting the standards.

Small improvements in speed can increase customer satisfaction. Feature-rich tools can improve your team’s efficiency and comfort. Better internal tools can speed up smooth collaboration, avoiding collisions and confusion between team members.

Building an efficient support team requires the correct combination of the right people and the proper tools. You have a solid structure, a seamless process, and support agents in place. Now think of what tools the customer service team really needs for their day-to-day work and what tools can help them create a great customer experience for your users.

SaaS vs. self-hosted: which to choose?

Decide which customer support tool you want to use. Does live chat do the work? Or helpdesk is the answer?

Live chats are often used when you wish to serve your customer 24×7. Mostly, this tool is used to smooth customer onboarding or pre-sale support. You can integrate chat bots to answer frequently asked questions, no matter what time it is.

On the other hand, helpdesk unifies your customer communications. It saves all types of conversations, helps you automate repeated tasks, and fosters fast internal communication and team collaboration. Most help desk tools work with knowledge base tools automatically, so you can easily suggest related questions and answers right when customers open a support ticket.

As there are different types of customer support tools, there are also different categories of support tools. These tools have two main categories:

• Saas – Software as a Service (Saas) provides software services over the internet without you installing or hosting them on your system. You only have to visit the service provider, sign up, and start using the service. You don’t need to maintain the hardware or hosting. Your data is hosted and maintained by the cloud service you use.
• Self-hosted – Self-hosted system are open-source apps or premium apps you can buy and download. You manage them on your hardware or in your hosting space. You have to install, maintain, and operate the software to run it for your use. You own the data because it sits on your system or hosting.

There are a few pros and cons to using both SaaS and self-hosted tools. If you have a relatively small, consistent team of 2-3 agents, then you can select SaaS support tools. Because most SaaS support companies price their plans based on how many agents you have, If you don’t mind paying per agent and don’t plan to scale your support operations, you can go for SaaS tools. Some most used SaaS support tools are:

• Zendesk
• FreshDesk
• Helpscout
• Helpcrunch

The disadvantage of using these services is that you don’t own the data. You can’t import or export your data as you wish. You’re at the mercy of your provider’s hand. There are also limitations on how many users, tickets, or agents you can serve or add, how many integrations you can use, and more. Sometimes you have to buy premium add-ons to use certain features. The cost builds up eventually. And if you ever decide to scale up your support team, add more agents, and serve more users, the cost will go up. For a small business, this may seem unjustifiable!

On the other hand, self-hosted apps offer more flexibility. You can expand open-source apps for your own needs and customize them freely. All the data is also accessible to you because it’s hosted by you. If your customers are sensitive about their data and privacy, self-hosted tools are the only answer. Some popular self-hosted tools are:

• Fluent Support
• Awesome Support
• Support Candy
• Chatwoot
• Live Helper Chat

These apps offer to host your customer support data on your own hosting. You can ensure your customers privacy by providing customer support using any of these apps. You can design your privacy policy based on where your business is. You can choose how to backup your data by following those policies. You can offer higher security to your customers to win their trust.

Self-hosting gives you the freedom not to share your data with third parties. Most SaaS tools come short in these situations because customer data protection is now a sensitive issue all over the world. You can scale your customer support department whenever you need to with self-hosted apps.

The best self-hosted customer support tools

Now that we proved self-hosted apps are more flexible than SaaS tools, it’s time to choose the best self-hosted customer support tools. We will compare the tools from the previous list.

Check out this comparison table between Fluent Support, Awesome Support, JS Helpdesk, and Support Candy:

You’ll clearly see that Fluent Support is winning in all categories. Here are some features that make Fluent Support the best self-hosted support tool:

• Fluent Support offers unlimited agents, users, and tickets. You don’t have to stress over limits; install the plugin and start using it. It only takes 5 minutes to set up Fluent Support.
• Fluent Support has a flexible pricing plan. It does not sell premium add-ons like others. All features are included in every pricing plan.
• Fluent Support offers 20+ integrations, including WooCommerce, Learndash, Easy Digital Downloads, Slack, and more.
• It has easy integration with Slack, Telegram, Discord, and Whatsapp. Your agents can attend to tickets and reply right from these messaging apps chatboxes.
• It has seamless integration with the email marketing tool FluentCRM, project management tool FluentBoards, and the custom form plugin Fluent Forms. You can create support forms with Fluent Forms and integrate them with Fluent Support’s backend. You can run email automation using the Fluent Support block inside FluentCRM.
• Fluent Support integrates effortlessly with LMS plugins like Learndash, LifterLMS, TutorLMS, and LearnPress. You can provide customer support to your course students without any hassle. Their purchase details are accessible right into their support tickets.
• It has a superior automation system that can help you automate most repetitive tasks and enable fast ticket replies. Fluent Support Automation helps you serve more customers faster than most of its competitors.
• Fluent Support allows for advanced filtering and sorting. This makes it easier to manage tickets and respond quickly.
• You can create separate inboxes for different businesses. This helps prevent confusion and lets you manage tickets based on products.
• The customizable and custom ticket portal lets you keep your website’s branding. This offers a smooth customer experience.
• Detailed customer profiles give easy access to important information.
• Collision detection alerts you when multiple agents enter the same ticket. This ensures that everyone knows who is handling the query.
• Email piping turns email queries into support tickets. This ensures that no customer query is missed and all are managed in one place.
• It has integration logs, and the activity logs track every action taken by agents in real-time. This provides a complete record of all activities within the support desk.

These are some of the most recognized features of Fluent Support that differentiate it from other self-hosted plugins. You can explore more features here.

Setup Fluent Support in 5 minutes!

Starting with Fluent Support is fairly simple.

If you are using WordPress to build your website, simply install the Fluent Support plugin and activate it. You can use a short code to put the customer support area on any page you want. You can build a custom page for the support-related staff, or you can use the default page provided by the plugin.

Don’t you use WordPress?

No problem; you can set up Fluent Support on your subdomain like WP Manage Ninja does. Their main domain is wpmanageninja.com, but their support portal is hosted in a different sub-domain, support.wpmanageninja.com.

After installation, activate the plugin and set up the settings. In the setting, you can set up two kinds of business inboxes:

• Web-based: You can only offer support through your website. Customers have to log in to submit tickets.
• Email-based: You can offer support using an email. Customers can send email to the email address, and your support agents can reply to the email from your support dashboard. Think of it like a shared inbox.

Research your customers behavior—how they wish to connect with you and what medium they most use to contact you.

Then you can easily choose which route is best for you—web or email?

You may use different platforms for your business, like Shopify, a custom CMS, or any other no-code tools to host your business, but you can use WordPress and Fluent Support to host your customer support department in your subdomain without any hassle.

Learn fluent support in an hour!

Follow this video to set up a web-based Fluent Support business inbox.

Want to offer email support? Set up an email-based customer support portal through email piping. Follow this video:

It showed how to add Gmail to your email inbox in this video. Fluent Support also offers other platforms.

Forward or redirect from an email provider or a host:

• Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite)
• Office 365 Outlook Web Access (OWA)
• Amazon WorkMail
• Zoho Mail
• Yahoo Mail

• Bluehost
• Namecheap
• cPanel
• GoDaddy
• Dreamhost

You can click and follow the individual documentation to start with the setup.

Fluent Support’s whole set of settings is centered in the “Global Settings.” Here is a video walkthrough on how you can set it up.

How do I automate support tasks with Fluent Support?

Automation is a big part of Fluent Support. It is also essential for any customer support operation.

Automation saves time, speeds up daily operations, and helps your customer support department with efficient team collaboration. Fluent support helps you do these using manual and ticket workflow automations.

You can run a manual workflow and set the following actions:

You can run these inside any support ticket manually. But what about repetitive tasks? Or if you want to add tags automatically to a ticket, Or do you want to assign agents to new tickets?

Automatic workflows do that seamlessly!

Use automatic automation to set tasks to be done automatically inside Fluent Support based on certain triggers and using certain actions.

There are 3 triggers: on ticket creation, on customer response, and on ticket closure.

Here are the actions that can be performed based on the triggers:

• Add Response
• Assign Agent
• Add Internal Note
• Close Ticket
• Add Tag(s)
• Remove Tag(s)
• Delete Ticket
• Block Ticket Submitter (Customer)
• Trigger Outgoing Webhook
• Add Bookmarks

Here are some live examples of automatic workflows. You can implement your own use cases based on your needs. Watch this video to get the idea!

Optimize your help desk based on your business needs.

Fluent Support is a flexible help desk. You can optimize it based on your business needs and integrate it with 20+ tools easily. Let’s look into some business categories and use cases for optimization.

E-commerce: Most WordPress e-commerce businesses run on the WooCommerce plugin. Fluent Support offers seamless WooCommerce integrations.

You don’t have to do anything if you have Fluent Support installed on your WooCommerce sites. It will show customers recent purchases right in their support tickets. Your agents don’t have to click anything or open a new window to access this information. This will save them time, and they can attend to more customer queries.

You can also offer custom fields in your support tickets related to your WooCommerce products. So customers can easily select the WooCommerce product related to the support inquiry.

You can set up different products or ticket tags in business settings. Then you can use these tags and products specifically in workflow automation to assign different agents to different product-related support tickets.

Fluent Support’s ‘Internal Notes’ are the best way to collaborate with other agents, and you can see which agents are working on which support tickets using agent collision detection.

Your agents can bookmark tickets while they are working and access them from their bookmarks later. Fluent supports easy integrations with tools like Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord. Your agents can receive and reply to support tickets from their Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp chats. Only Discord integration offers ticket notifications for now. Your agents attend to customers wherever they are, even if they only have mobile and internet access! Fluent Support is fully mobile-responsive and can load support tickets in mobile browsers.

Entrepreneur – Are you an entrepreneur or a solopreneur? Running your business on your own?

Most solopreneurs depend on virtual assistance (VA) to cover their customer support. It is more hassle-free than hiring a full in-house team. Solopreneurs want to live headache-free. Most of their business runs on automation.

That’s why they need tools that can help them automate mostly anything and everything. Fluent Support comes in handy on this.

You can automate all types of customer queries with Fluent Support Workflow settings. You can automatically send repetitive questions answered with saved replies and use knowledge base integration to serve related questions answered right into the customer support forms. Fluent Support offers a shared inbox, so any solopreneurs can add their VA to the system. All you have to give them is access to support staff settings. You can set up customer support for multiple business emails with Fluent Support’s different business inboxes.

Your VAs can manage different products or different types of customers assigned to them from one dashboard. You can communicate with them using ‘Internal Notes’ and assign them tickets. Fluent Support can help you manage your multiple VA’s from one system without wasting time on different tools and emails.

Agency: Running an agency with multiple clients is a hectic operation. How can fluent support help you streamline your agency’s customer support?

Fluent Support offers a modest agency plan for agency owners. You can buy this to offer Fluent Support for multiple clients.

For your own customer support, you can create multiple business inboxes for your multiple clients and assign different agents to manage those business inboxes. If you use Slack for internal communication, you can easily connect it with Fluent Support to serve and manage tickets from Slack quickly!

Course sellers: – Selling courses from your website? Need to offer fast customer support for your buyers?

No worries. Fluent Support has seamless integrations with most LMS systems. It has integration support with LearnDash (10K+ users), TutorLMS (50K+ users), LifterLMS (10K+ users), and LearnPress (100K+ users).

Fluent Support shows your customers recent courses on their support tickets. You can also add custom fields related to your course on support forms. So customers can easily select the course title related to the support queries.

If your course site also has a membership system, Fluent Support offers integrations with the most popular membership systems, like Buddyboss, Paid Membership Pro, Wishlist Members, and Restrict Content Pro. Fluent Support shows your customers membership levels in their support tickets, along with other related information. You can add custom fields related to these membership systems, like the LMS systems.

Build self-service tools and community support.

There is a catchphrase popular in the support industry;

Customers don’t want to wait for solutions. They have the power to find the answers themselves. All you need to do is help them with self-service tools.

Most self-service tools are knowledge bases, AI chatbots, video tutorials, in-depth guides, and often community forums. These take time to build, but if you take the time to invest in them, it can help you tenfold. Self-service tools can reduce customers’ support tickets and save agents time. If you build these with SEO-focused intent, then your customers will find them easily with a search. It will also increase your brand awareness among customers. It can help your existing customers, but it can also reach new customers through the content itself.

Community forums can help you build customer loyalty, brand reputation, and unlimited customer-generated content. As a brand, you can offer a place for your existing customers online. They can hang out, ask questions, and help each other. Your agents can often answer complex questions and engage with customers regularly. Community forums can help you understand customers’ perspectives and generate feature ideas.

You can use the community to shape your brand’s reputation. A community can be a hub for cultivating loyal customers. You can offer rewards, discounts, and other offers for your community members. Engage communities, increase customers’ trust, and make your brand more connected with them on a personal level. Every business should take the time to build a community around their brand. Community forums are also the best tools to grow organic reach. And we all know that word of mouth is the best way to attract new customers!

Gather, measure, and analyze customer feedback and support data.

Customer support data and customer feedback are the most valuable assets of any business. Customer support data will help you understand how your support department is performing, what you are lacking, whether your customers are happy or not, and how you can scale your support department faster.

On the other hand, customer feedback can help you understand customers’ perspectives about your brands, customer experiences, and expectations about your products or services. You should not ignore this data and plan on collecting it from the beginning via customer survey.

You can use different methods and tools to collect this data:

• Your help desk should have the ability to provide various reports about support ticket data, individual agent reports, first response time, average handling time, and other vanity customer service metrics. These metrics will help you understand your customer support department’s performance. For example, Fluent Support has dedicated report tabs for this.
  
• You can set up different surveys to collect customer feedback with tools like Fluent Forms. You can do customer feedback surveys and customer satisfaction surveys to learn more about customer pain points, agent performance, team efficiency, and product usefulness.
  
• You can use direct phone calls to gather feedback from your long-term customers. Older, existing customers are more eager to share feedback than new customers.
  
• You can run automation with helpdesks (like Fluent Support Workflows) to send certain questions in different forms based on different keywords.
  
• You can collect data from your community forums, customer interactions, or run surveys from time to time to gather feedback data.
  
• You can follow your social channels or customer conversations to gather social data from various social networks.

The next step after gathering data is to analyze and measure it. Many customer support data points are easy to measure. Your help desk will do the job. Help desk data will help you understand customer behavior and help you run your customer service department efficiently.

Your customer feedback data will help streamline your customer onboarding, build better products or services, and increase customer retention. This is your customer feedback loop.

Conclusion

Building a customer support team needs thorough planning, clarity, and enough investment. Creating a support system is not a one-time job; it’s running work. As a business owner, you will need to embrace customer support as the main part of your business to become a customer-centric company.

Great customer experience can help you build a brand reputation quickly, and the only way to make it happen is when your whole company is obsessed with customer service. 86% of customers are willing to pay you more if they are satisfied with your customer service.

A fully empowered customer support team has the ability to ensure an excellent customer experience. Build a support department with clear intent, invest in the right tools, and hire the right people to do the job. Listen to your customers, take proactive actions, and motivate your service team. Your customer acquisition cost will reduce, customers will reward you with their loyalty, increased purchases, and high referrals.

The post How To Build A Customer Support Team – Complete Guide appeared first on Fluent Support.

But what exactly is customer value, and how do businesses create it? For this article, we’ll explore the concept of customer value, its importance, and how you can create it. We’ll also delve into macro strategies for developing customer value and how the value of goods or services is determined.

Customer value definition

Customer value refers to the actual benefits a product or service brings compared to the cost required to obtain it. It’s essentially what customers believe they are getting in return for their money, time, or effort.

For example, imagine you’re in the market for a new smartphone. You might consider factors such as the phone’s features, performance, design, and price. If you believe that a particular smartphone offers the best combination of these factors relative to its cost, then you perceive it to have high value. Conversely, if the features don’t validate the price, you’ll consider it as low-value.

Importance of customer value

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way. Understanding and developing customer value is crucial for every business. That’s kind of how you set yourself apart from the competition. Here are some core reasons to develop customer value,

Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty

When customers feel that they’re getting value from a product or service, they’re more likely to be loyal to the brand. More importantly, it helps people trust your brand to deliver exactly what they need. Not to mention it builds trust in your offer and in your brand.

Competitive advantage

As we’ve already said, businesses that consistently deliver superior value can successfully differentiate themselves from competitors while attracting customers. This competitive advantage can go a long way in making your business sustainable.

Revenue growth 

Only satisfied and loyal customers are likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. To drive revenue growth with upselling opportunities, having a solid customer value proposition is key.

Brand reputation 

Positive perceptions of value are the capital of your business. It contributes to a strong brand reputation, enhancing credibility and trust among your customers.

What do customers value most?

Customers value different things depending on their needs, preferences, and circumstances. However, some common factors are worth talking about to ensure a general value.

Quality

Quality can mean many things depending on the product or service. But in general a product’s value needs to include its quality, whether it’s longevity, utility or simply how it feels to hold. Customers want products or services that meet or exceed their expectations in terms of performance, durability, and reliability. But they also care about all these characters coming together to provide a unique experience.

Price

While customers seek value for money, they’re also willing to pay more for products or services that offer unique benefits or superior quality. Now, different products always provide a unique benefit known as the USP. Your USP should ideally be enough to justify the price in and of itself.

Convenience 

Customers appreciate products and services that make their lives easier and more efficient. Here’s why convenience matters:

They value seamless and hassle-free purchasing experiences, whether it’s through online channels, mobile apps, or brick-and-mortar stores. Streamlined checkout processes, flexible payment options, and fast delivery contribute to convenience.

Products and services that are readily available when and where customers need them are highly valued. Anything that saves customers time or effort is also considered convenient. This could include features like one-click ordering, subscription services that automate replenishment, or intuitive user interfaces that minimize the need for learning or assistance.

Customer service 

Exceptional customer service is crucial for standing out in the market. Here’s why it’s integral to the value proposition: responsiveness, helpfulness, personalization, and empathy.

Customers value prompt responses to inquiries, showing that their time is respected and their satisfaction is prioritized. Going above and beyond to assist customers leaves a lasting impression, whether it involves providing personalized recommendations or troubleshooting technical issues. 

Tailoring the customer experience to individual preferences enhances perceived value, such as addressing customers by name and offering personalized product recommendations.

The Four types of customer value

When it comes to understanding what customers really want, it’s all about value. But value isn’t just about the price tag. It’s about what you get out of a product or service, beyond just the basics. So, let’s break it down into four main types of customer value that businesses should know about. Customer value can be categorized into four types,

Functional value

This is all about how well a product or service meets your needs. Think of it as the practical benefits like a phone’s ability to make calls and access the internet.

Emotional value 

This is about the good vibes you get from using something. It’s like feeling excited or satisfied when you use a cool gadget or wear a fancy watch.

Social value

This is about the benefits you get from connecting with others or being part of a certain brand or product. Social media is a prime example, where you can chat with customers and share stuff.

Psychological value

This is the deeper stuff, like how a product or service makes you feel about yourself. For example, using eco-friendly products might make you feel good about helping the environment.

Understanding these different types of value allows businesses to tailor their offerings and messaging to better resonate with their target audience.

Customer value journey (CVJ)

The Customer Value Journey (CVJ) is a strategic framework that outlines the stages through which customers progress in their relationship with a brand. It includes stages such as awareness, engagement, conversion, ascension, and advocacy. By guiding customers through this journey and delivering value at each stage, businesses can foster long-term relationships and loyalty.

The customer value journey is like a roadmap that outlines the stages of the customer’s relationship with the business, from awareness to advocacy. Understanding this journey is essential for businesses to effectively attract, engage, and retain customers.

Awareness 

Customers first become aware of the brand or product through various channels such as advertising, social media, word-of-mouth, or online search.

Consideration

Customers start evaluating their options, comparing different products or services, reading reviews, and seeking recommendations.

Purchase 

Customers make the decision to purchase the product or service, either online or in-store.

Retention 

The goal is to retain customers by providing exceptional customer service, delivering on promises, and continuously engaging with them.

Advocacy

Satisfied customers may become advocates for the brand, recommending it to others and sharing their positive experiences.

How is customer value created?

From product innovation to exceptional customer service, every aspect of the customer experience plays a crucial role in the creation of value. Let’s uncover the secrets behind building meaningful connections and delivering value that truly matters to customers. Here’s howCustomer value is created in a product:

Innovation 

Developing or improving products or services that address unmet needs or provide unique solutions can create value for customers.

Quality 

Maintaining high standards of quality in products, services, and customer experiences is essential for delivering value.

Customization 

Offering customization options allows customers to tailor products or services to their specific preferences, increasing perceived value.

Value-based pricing 

Setting prices based on the perceived value to the customer rather than solely on costs or competition can enhance value perceptions.

We’ll explore several macro strategies to enhance customer value here as well.

Building a customer-centric culture

Creating a customer-centric culture is crucial for businesses. It means everyone, from top management to frontline workers, focuses on understanding and meeting customer needs. Prioritize customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty over solely chasing sales.

Market segmentation and targeting

Segmenting the market helps identify different customer groups with similar needs. By understanding each group’s unique requirements, businesses can tailor products and marketing efforts to better meet those needs.

Product and service innovation

Continuous innovation is vital for staying competitive. Gathering feedback from customers helps identify areas for improvement and new opportunities. Invest in research and development to develop new products or enhance existing ones.

Personalization and customization

Personalization involves tailoring products, services, and marketing messages to individual customers based on their preferences. Leverage customer data to create personalized experiences across various touchpoints.

Brand reputation and trust

Building a strong brand reputation based on trust and reliability is essential. Consistently deliver on promises, engage with customers, and demonstrate transparency in all communications.

Omni-channel experience

Provide a seamless experience across all channels, including physical stores, websites, and social media. Use technology to track customer interactions and personalize the experience accordingly foer an omni-channel presence.

Post-purchase support and engagement

Post-purchase support and engagement are crucial for ensuring customer success and satisfaction. Implement loyalty programs and solicit feedback to demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement.

Community building and advocacy

Foster a sense of community among customers and encourage them to become brand advocates by sharing their positive experiences.

Ethical and social responsibility

Highlight your commitment to ethical business practices and social responsibility initiatives that align with customer values. Communicate transparently about the company’s values and contributions to society.

How is the value of a good or service determined?

Determining the value of a good or service is a multi-faceted process influenced by various factors that shape customers’ perceptions and decisions. One crucial aspect is the perceived benefits that customers expect to derive from the product or service in relation to its cost.

Customers assess the potential advantages, whether they are functional, emotional, social, or psychological, and weigh them against the price tag or any other sacrifices required. The value of products depends on the following,

Perceived benefits 

Customers evaluate the benefits or advantages they expect to receive from a product or service relative to its cost.

Cost or sacrifice 

Customers consider the monetary price, time, effort, or other sacrifices required to obtain and use the product or service.

Comparison to alternatives

Customers compare the value proposition of a product or service to alternative options available in the market.

Subjective factors 

Individual preferences, experiences, and perceptions influence how customers assess the value of a good or service.

Wrapping up

Customer value is a fundamental concept in business that encompasses the perceived benefits customers receive from a product or service. By understanding what customers value most, businesses can develop strategies to create and deliver value effectively.

From macro strategies for developing customer value to understanding the factors that determine the value of goods or services, prioritizing customer value is essential for driving satisfaction, loyalty, and growth.

The post Customer Value: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Fluent Support.

X or formerly known as Twitter is probably the most popular among customers. Especially when they want to get in touch with brands. In this article, we’ll look at how you can provide stellar customer support on Twitter.

Why Twitter?

A staggering 74% of consumers following brands on social media choose Twitter (X) as their got-to platform. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

More than half, 53% to be exact, of surveyed social media users consider how brands publicly address questions or resolve issues as valuable.

Even moreso, a-third (34%) of surveyed Twitter users reported making a purchase after getting a positive customer experience from their brands.

These statistics make it obvious that Twitter isn’t just a platform for socializing; it’s a tool influencing both brand perception and consumer purchasing decisions. Elons digital town square is where your customers are talking about your business. You need to be there to make the most of it.

12 tips for providing customer support on Twitter

When you’re starting off with support on Twitter there’s so much going on. Take these 12 tips to streamline your Twitter support process.

Create a dedicated support presence

The first step in optimizing your Twitter strategy for customer service is to have a dedicated support handle. Your customers need to know exactly which handle to knock with an issue. This also protects your main brand handle from being spammed with radical support claims. Here’s what Fedex Canada did,

Crafting a customer-centric profile

Next, optimize your support handle’s profile. Clearly communicate your purpose and include essential contact information. A well-crafted bio, along with a link to your support portal, ensures that users can easily find the assistance they need.

Real-time monitoring

Twitter is a dynamic platform, and real-time monitoring is the standard. Regularly check mentions and direct messages to ensure no customer is speaking in the wind. Prompt responses not only resolve issues swiftly but also contribute to higher customer satisfaction.

Strategic hashtag use

Boost the discoverability of your support handle by incorporating relevant hashtags. Whether it’s #WordPress or industry-specific tags, strategic hashtag use can extend your reach and attract users seeking assistance.

Proactive engagement: FAQs and tips

Take a proactive approach by sharing frequently asked questions and helpful tips. By providing valuable insights, you not only assist customers  but also position your brand as an authority in the industry.

Personalized and conversational tone

When engaging with users, take a personalized and conversational approach. Try to address users by their name, empathize with their concerns, and provide solutions in a friendly manner. Keep the tone positive and understanding at all times.

Directing users to resources

For common issues, guide customers to relevant knowledge base articles, tutorials, or documentation. Empowering customers with self-help options enhances their experience and reduces dependency on your support team.

Swift acknowledgment and apology

Issues are always there. When they come up acknowledge them promptly. Apologize for any inconvenience and assure customers that you are actively working towards a resolution. Transparency is key in maintaining customer trust.

Retweet positive feedback

Highlighting positive experiences can be a powerful engagement strategy. Retweet positive feedback and success stories to boost morale within your team and demonstrate your commitment towards customer satisfaction.

Monitor competitors for industry insights

Keep an eye on your competitors’ support handles to stay informed about industry trends, customer pain points, and best practices. This gold mine of information can help improve your own support strategy.

Exclusive offers

Your support handle isn’t just about issues though. From time to time you can promote exclusive offers or discounts for users facing challenges. Transforming a negative experience into a positive one is a win for customer support.

Analyze posts for common issues

Complaints on Twitter let you track the repeat issues with your brand. This lets you find the pattern in customer queries while also pointing out the exact point where customers are facing the most issues. Finding this pattern will enable you to improve your offer and help customers.

Wrapping Up

There you have it folks. 12 tips to offer remarkable customer support on Twitter. If you’ve got more things to add let us know in the comments. May your support journey on Twitter be fruitful for you and your customers.

Until next time, happy serving!

The post Customer Support on Twitter (how to make it work) appeared first on Fluent Support.