How to Manage Customer Support With Rich Media Content

The quality of support you provide customers can make or break your business. In fact, customers use quality to decide whether or not they’ll come back and buy something from you again. Do a good job consistently and you’ve got a customer for life. Handle it badly and your business will have a hard time growing.

But here’s the thing. Between answering general customer questions and troubleshooting in-depth issues — sometimes across multiple channels— your customer support team gets stretched thin. In the long-term, this effort has a negative effect on customer experience and means you lose customers faster than you can find new ones. In fact, according to a Customer Experience Impact Report by Oracle, poor customer support is responsible for about 70% of customer churn! Usually customer support is provided in response to a customer demand.

Luckily, there’s a way for customer support to be more effective while also reducing the team’s workload. With rich media content, you can automate some of your team’s responses and still offer solid customer support. In some cases, you can even cut the size of your support team since it’s much more efficient.

To help you get started, here’s a look at why rich media content is the answer to improving customer support and how to use it to offer a better customer experience.

Rich media content makes teams more efficient

We live in a hyper-connected society. With access to social media, email, countless apps, and more, everything we need is literally at our fingertips. It’s because of this easy access to companies that when it comes to support, customers expect quick follow-up. That’s why the quicker you respond — ideally within 24 hours — without overloading your support team, the better the customer experience and your chances of keeping customers around longer.

Rich media content is a step up from basic text messages used by lots of businesses. The main benefit is the option to send interactive voice, video, and images messages to connect with customers. As a result, it’s easier for customers to get the information they need quickly—especially when the questions are simple and generic.

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Customers don’t have to wait for a call back, an email response, or a comment on social media, since rich media content means you can automate when your messages are sent.

This easy access to information makes support teams more effective since they end up getting more bandwidth to spend time on more value-added activities like sharing customer insights for new projects, managing customer databases, and updating social media channels.

Another bonus is that rich media content means customers can follow through on actions without having to call into customer support more than once for the same issue. For example, missed deliveries are a big deal for customers. It’s one thing to get an email with a twelve-hour delivery window and another thing to get a rich media message that includes a two-hour window that lets customers confirm they’ll be at home.

With fewer repeat calls for the same issue, your support team spends less time dealing with one type of question and more time helping other customers with new questions and issues.

Also, keep in mind that text messages have a higher open rate than emails— 90% vs 20% — so there’s less chance of customers not seeing a response to their question.

Let’s look at how to incorporate rich media content into your current customer support strategy.

1. Identify the types of questions customers ask the most

A critical first step in figuring out how to incorporate rich media content is to understand what types of questions your team receives every day. Are the majority of questions quick and easy to answer or do they require more time and multiple follow-ups to resolve?

Understanding what types of questions your team receives gives you insight into where they’re spending their time. For example, you might find that response times are slow because the team spends a lot of time answering the same kinds of questions and have less time to spend resolving serious issues.

Let’s say you sell products online and find that the majority of customer inquiries are about order, shipping, and delivery confirmation. These are easy questions to answer, but if support is overwhelmed with them, there’s less time left to help customers with questions about product features or issues. You probably know what a CRM is and that it can store all of this essential information for you.

Over the course of a week or two, review your CRM database to identify question types, response times, and gather support team feedback.

Responses to repetitive questions with short response times can be automated. Since customer details are stored in your CRM, very little effort is needed to merge unique customer information into an automated message template. Another option is to use our interactive customer journey bots. Use this automated feature to respond to customers quickly and improve CX. 

Questions that require more work to provide answers — like questions about product features or how to manage a damaged product — should still be handled by customer support. The idea is that by automating easy to answer questions, the support team has more time to tackle difficult inquiries.

2. Create rich media content for automated responses

Once you’ve identified the types of questions customers ask, create content to match each type. Examples of the type of content to include, based on customer type, are:

• Balance amount and payment confirmation for banking customers
• Scheduling and service notifications for utilities customers
• Flight details and rental information for traveling customers
• Properties for sale or rent for real estate customers

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As you create your list of responses based on common customer questions, think about how to make them interactive. Unlike SMS messages that limit customer responses to yes or no and numbered answers, rich media content lets you add videos, voice, or images to make it easier for customers to not just see information but follow through if needed.

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Keep your responses generic enough so that any customer can receive a rich media message and get their answers without feeling the need to call into customer support for more information.

3. Track results and make improvements

Once your campaigns are set up and running, track how call volume to customer support changes. Are call times down? Is call volume down? The goal is to have the team deal with the more difficult questions without having to spend a lot of time on the more common, easy to answer questions.

Surveying your customers is one way to track how successful your rich media content is. Is satisfaction the same or better? Do customers have feedback about the type of support they’re getting via mobile messaging?

Make changes as needed to make sure your support team is more efficient with their time. You might even be able to create more automated responses over time. Rich media content is flexible so you can design and adjust campaigns to meet your unique needs.

Find out more about how to track customer success: Inbound Contact Center Metrics and How to Track Customer Success

Making rich media content work for you

Derek Sivers, Founder of CD Baby, explains that, “The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you.”

Rich media content is changing how businesses interact with their customers. It’s easier than ever to give customers the information they need, in a timely manner, while making support teams more efficient.

Rich media messaging is more widely used by businesses, and customers are adapting. Experiment with the different types of messages you can send; be mindful of the effect on your support team. Ideally, there’ll be fewer calls to customer support, with rich media content complimenting the efforts of your team.

If you’re ready to get started and learn more about how VoiceSage and rich media content can help manage customer support, book a demo today.