Episode – 023 – 5 Tools to make your customer care shine (and make your clients feel truly special)
Problem: How can you keep your customer happy? How can you make them feel special, unique, and cared for without spending a fortune and staying organized?
Solution: This podcast! 🙂
In this episode, I’m sharing with you 5 of the best customer support online tools. By all means, don’t get overwhelmed and think you need them all, but do try to think about your ideal customer and what would be most useful for her/him.
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Full transcription
Hello and welcome to episode 23 of the Online Business Tech Hub. This is Alessia, your host, tech expert for online coaches and consultants on a mission to rescue my clients from tech disasters. And today I have a really special episode for you because we are going to talk about customer care and especially I want to share with you 5 of the best tools to make your customer care truly shine and make your clients feel really special and unique. So how do we make our clients feel supported, cared for, and special?
Well, there are many ways we can do it, but the thing that we really need to keep in mind is that what we remember, what any of us remember in a business interaction or transaction is how we felt. Okay, so how was the relationship with the person that offered us the service or the product? Did we feel good? Was it a pleasant experience or not? So in this episode, I want to share with you 5 tools that can really help you make a difference and truly make your customer feel cared for and valued.
So the first tool is Fresh Desk. So Fresh Desk is a ticketing service. It’s perfect for avoiding clutter in your inbox. And it’s especially useful if you have a team member, for example, a VA that sorts out your emails because you can assign a tag to a specific email and assign it to a specific person. So you know that it is the responsibility of your team member to sort that email. Okay, you can set up reminders. You can set up deadlines, by when an email should be answered. So it’s a very organized tool that helps you stay on track. You can start with the free plan and you already have unlimited agents, meaning that you can have unlimited team members join your Fresh Desk account.
I find the free plan is already more than enough because it offers you all the basic features, like, for example, an autoresponder. So if someone sends you an email, there can be an automated response that says, thank you for getting in touch with us. I will get back to you as soon as possible. But for example, if you are writing me after 05:00 P.m., please keep in mind that you will probably hear from me after 09:00 a.m. Tomorrow or something like that, so you can really set expectations.
Then another resource, another tool that is extremely useful is a frequently asked question page. This can be on your website. If you have created a FreshDesk account, you can also have it on FreshDesk already with a free plan. They call it a knowledge base. Basically, what is the frequently asked question page? It’s a page where clients and potential clients may find all the information they need about working with you, about procedures, about working hours, about the features of your products or your services. It’s really smart to have this page, especially when you notice that clients keep asking pretty much the same question over and over again. In this case, if you notice the questions are always the same, then you can set up very easily this frequently asked question page. And anytime a client asks a specific question, you can point them there and you don’t have to type in again the answer or if it’s a call. If it happens during the call, you can redirect them to the frequently asked question page so that they can find all the answers they need there. It’s really handy because it’s very easy to consult. You just send the link once and your clients and possible clients can access the basic information they need autonomously.
Another tool that you can use is a welcome package. So a welcome package is something that makes your clients feel special. It’s very useful for you to set expectations and boundaries, and generally speaking, it provides all the information your clients need in order to be working with you. So the welcome package is really useful to build trust with your clients because they can see oftentimes you can create a welcome package, and it’s just a basic PDF so they can see everything they need to know about you about working with you. It will save you and your client a lot of time, because instead of sending a lot of emails like the Ping pong of emails, asking a lot of questions, you’ll give them everything they need to know in one single, very handy document.
A welcome package also helps you set boundaries because you can include your working days, your working hours, how you like to communicate the project process, and how the timeline of your project will look. And you can also add an introduction page where you introduce yourself. You introduce your team members. If you have, you can add all the elements, all the things that you need from the client. So, for example, if you are a graphic designer, you will need to get I don’t know if you need to create a flyer or a graphic for something specific, you probably will need a mood board, the typography, the Hex codes of the colors and so on.
So you can already list there in one handy document, all the information, all the details you need from your clients. You can add the information about how they can reach you and how you can communicate. So it’s really handy. I mean, it’s the first document you send out as soon as a client pays the invoice to start working with you. So they have all the information they need. I find it really handy.
Another tool is Customerly. It’s called Customerly, but generally speaking, it’s a live chat app. This is particularly useful if you have a lot of traffic to your website and clients or possible clients may have a lot of questions. It’s a more direct approach to you and to your team. However, make sure to set very clear boundaries about when to expect a response to the question. Unless you have a person team member that spends his or her time only answering the questions that come through the Live Chat app.
Okay, it’s an excellent way to offer high-quality support very quickly, but it can also become a source of frustration for the clients. As I said, if you don’t have a person that dedicates entirely to the live chat, if you have a lot of traffic and you get a lot of questions, okay, otherwise, if you want to use the Live Chat feature, just make sure that there is an automated response that really sets the boundaries and clear expectations about when to expect an answer.
Last but not least, this is one of my favorite tools is Loom. It is a must. If you need to record quick video tutorials for your clients, I personally use it all of the time. When I need to fix a problem with the software or when I need to show my clients how to do something. I find it very effective because you can create different folders so each of your clients can have their own personal folders. With all the videos you record for them, you can share with your clients the folder so they can access the videos at all time. They can add comments to the video itself so that if they have questions they don’t necessarily need to send you an email, but they can leave a comment below the video. It’s very organized.
You can record your face, your desktop, or both, even with or without sound. I find it also very useful to guide the client through the steps in order to start working with you or how to purchase something. How to sign up to your membership site. For example, you can make a video tutorial so that if the process is maybe a bit more complex, you can add this video tutorial and trust me, your customer will be very happy about it because it’s very handy. It’s also really quick to set up and send the videos.
So in this episode, we talked about 5 different tools that can really help you make your customer care absolutely special so that your clients feel unique and cared for. So just to recap, I want to mention again the tools that we spoke about. We have Fresh Desk, which is a ticketing service, then a frequently asked question page, which can be on your website. Or it can also be on Fresh Desk. If you sign up for Fresh Desk, you can set up a knowledge base page.
A welcome package, which is as simple as a PDF with all the information a customer needs to be working with you. A live chat app, for example, Customerly really handy. If you get a lot of traffic to your website and you often have many questions, and you want to offer possible clients a quick response. And last, but not least, Loom video tool. You can record really quick video tutorials for your clients, and you can also have a conversation within the page with that specific video. So in case your client has questions, you avoid the Ping pong of emails and you keep the communication about that specific video in case the clients, for example, needs verification in that page. So really handy to stay organized and really help your clients.
So that is about it. Now I have shared with you 5 different tools. They are all different. And what I want you to keep in mind is that you don’t have to use them all. You don’t have to have these 5 customer care customer service tools if you’re not ready for it.
So I wanted to share different types of software and tools that you can have, that you can implement, so that you can think about what would be the most important for your clients, for your customers. What can it be? The most useful thing you can share with them? Is it a welcome package? Is it the frequently asked questions page? Is it a ticketing service? Just give a thought about it. Think what could be the most useful element, software, or tool for your clients, and then implement it. But start with one. Don’t set your mind that you want to use all of them. Start with one and then go from there.
All right, that’s about it for today. And I will talk to you next time.
Bye bye.