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🧀What’s growing: Cheesed-off consumers.

While businesses are feeling smug about savings, 64% of people surveyed are done with “customer service” chatbots, according to a 2024 Gartner survey.

Their top pet peeve? Jumping through hoops to speak to a real person, and getting stuck in endless loops of ‘How can I help?’ and ‘Did this answer your question?’

You can’t help. And no, it didn’t.

Customer service is expensive. And it’s hard to get right.

There’s more to lose than to gain.

Customers are getting… Difficult. 

You know what we mean – you ARE these customers at times. What made us so impatient? Amazon?

Whatever it is, 75% of Customer Service (CS) managers report receiving more customer service tickets than ever before, according to a Hubspot report.

You don’t need it to be instantaneous, omnichannel, personalized and human to nail it, but you DO need a solid system to keep them coming back.

Here’s how you build that 👇

1. What good support looks like, according to data

Forrester took years of research and boiled down great support to three things:

1. It answers all of the customer’s questions.

2. It resolves all of those problems on the first contact.

3. Reps can solve a problem without needing to ask for permission.

2. Good support for a low cost is more than possible

Here are a few tips

• Self-serve as the core. Customers can answer most questions on their own, but it’s easy to get help when they need it.

• Outsource. Hire fractional agents during peak hours.

• Triage with AI. Create tiers of problem urgency to help distribute your efforts.

3. What that might look like

As a rule of thumb, you should have smart-serve and automation for lower urgency, lower touch problems, and humans involved when things get tricky and emotional. 

Here's how to map it out:

Once you’ve chosen your toolbox, it’s time to:

4. Build that self-service hub

This is an opportunity to improve customer retention AND get organic traffic. 

• Find your (real) competitors

• Check their reviews for real customer input

• Write down the keywords

Then build content around it! If you want to optimize for traffic:

• Make sure you write the right kind of content with this

• Write SEO-optimized content faster with Content Shake AI

Don’t forget you get 2 weeks free with Semrush! 🥳 

Plus: it pays for itself

More customers = more support requests = rising costs.

But according to Harris Interactive, 9 out of 10 consumers say they’re willing to pay higher prices when a company has great customer service. Use your data to improve support over time, and you might just increase your revenue enough for an in-house team.

38%.

How often companies underestimate the frequency of their customers' poor experiences (Khoros.com).

Yep. Because customer aren’t always going to log a complaint when things go wrong. 50% of them will just switch to a competitor after the first issue (Zendesk benchmark data).  

This week’s edition by our manager, Owen Mulhern.

DO

Use LLMs to understand the “voice of the customer”. That is, what they are really trying to tell you. Save transcripts, feed them into an LLM and extract patterns in order to improve both your customer service AND product/service. 

Zapier and UiPath offer excellent no-code options for setting up an end-to-end customer service system that does this. 

DON’T

Just throw AI tools at your customer service team and expect them to feel good about the added productivity. HBR reports that it actually makes employees feel attacked and more likely to pretend using the tools, sticking to their old ways instead. 

The fix: have your IT/tech team interface with your customer-facing teams a little more to help them understand the tools and win them over. 

This week’s issue was written by Amy Hawthorne and edited by Catherine Solbrig.