ETA Expert Insights: Three Keys to Customer Support Success

By Jenn Reichenbacher, SVP Marketing, Payment Processing, Paysafe and Chair of the ETA Retail Technology Committee.

Great customer support is critical to a successful business – anything less won’t cut it these days. Take companies outside of our industry for example, like Disney, Publix, and Ritz-Carlton. These companies are consistently recognized for their customer-centric focus. These companies value excellent customer service. According to Bain & Company, it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer versus keep an existing one.

There’s no question that technology continues to evolve the landscape in and around customer service. Ten years ago, the industry was focused on supporting small and medium sized businesses with a few products including terminals and e-commerce. Today, it’s supporting business management solutions, point-of-sale (POS), inventory, payroll, reporting, marketing, reputation management, customer acquisition, loyalty, and much more.

These numerous and more complex solutions are changing the landscape of our customer support. In response, many companies now have specialized teams focused on core groups of products or bifurcated support, separating traditional customer service from technical support. With more products and more complexity comes different questions and more of them.

Customers also have different expectations of how they would like to access customer service. It wasn’t that long ago that the only way to access customer support was via telephone, but today customers want choices. They want support online, in apps, SMS, chat, phone, social, email, and more. Online portals are a must-have as it’s likely a consumer’s first instinct is to search online when they have a question or issue. They must be easy to use, accurate, and mobile optimized, and they can’t be the only option. Chat is also growing in popularity as an effective medium with a good amount of the first-level support being provided by ‘bots’ or virtual assistants.

We are supporting more products with increased complexity, with more customers, and, in many cases,  less human capital.

Customer expectations are high, and our customers are our best asset. So, what are the top three keys to delighting our customers?

• Develop and maintain a killer customer portal. Simplified UX/UI, mobile-optimization, security and accurate data are key, but it’s equally as important to have easy to digest, searchable and indexed self-service resources like FAQs, how-to videos and resource guides.
• Incentivize the right behaviors, internally and externally. So often, customer support is viewed internally as the responsibility of one department or team; that could not be further from the truth. Customer support is everyone’s responsibility: executives, operations, marketing, legal, finance, and more. Make sure teams are aligned, goals are set (and measured, of course), and individuals are armed with the tools and resources they need to do their jobs and do them well. Externally, align your strategy around the customer journey you want to drive. If you want your customers to register for the customer portal in the first 30 days, then ensure that portal registration and the value for the merchant are clearly identified and embedded into the onboarding and welcome experience.
• Say “thank you”. It seems so simple, but we oftentimes forget to thank our customers for choosing us, thank them for their business and thank them for staying with us.

Set goals, measure your success, refine processes as needed, stay focused on the customers’ needs and you’ll watch revenues grow. A two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by ten percent (Source: Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy).

Above all, remember the eternal words of American businessman Sam Walton: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”