In 2021, customer success is largely determined by how dialled-in a business’ support system is. It is now very common for support teams to become overwhelmed with the number of enquiries and drown in a sea of support tickets. The same questions and difficulties keep on coming up, your support team is wasting valuable time on problems that the client could easily solve themselves... if only they knew how. The truth is that customers need your help and if they don’t get it, what’s stopping them from leaving your company for a competitor that gives them the right level of support?

It is true that training staff and customers is an expensive undertaking, but it cannot be ignored. Many support teams are forced to ask themselves, how do we scale our support and maintain quality at the same time?

At Marble, we have accumulated a lot of experience talking to hundreds of customer success leaders across a huge range of different service industries. Yet, we see the same frustrations shared among them all. Their employees are overwhelmed with repetitive tasks and become unable to focus their attention on novel problems, let alone create solutions to solve them. Let’s explore some of the common reasons behind this problem.

‍1 - Ineffective Onboarding Processes when a new client begins service

‍The most sensitive period of the client to service provider relationship is at the very beginning.

A poor, or even worse a non-existent, onboarding process leads to customer ignorance, confusion and frustration. Customers that don’t understand your product don’t remain customers for long. In this case, the problem is clearly a lack of clear interaction between new customers and support teams, people need to feel that they are being helped and looked after at the beginning stages of the relationship.

‍2 - Lack of, or badly organized, support content

‍For some companies, there is no onboarding nor any training content in any capacity! In this case, the first priority is to build out training modules and organize them well from the start so that you don’t need to reorganize in the future.

But most companies find themselves in the position of already have training content, yet lack the organization and structure necessary for it to be effective from the customer point of view.

Common problems include: too much training content, too many contact points that confuse the customer and no clear course progression.

When educational information is not concentrated in one easily accessible place then how do you expect the customer to easily navigate to the solution to their problem. Most people want to quickly resolve their own problems, so let’s help them!

‍3 - Customer Support and Training Scalability‍

the training we have now is not scalable

So you have a team of 3 support staff and they are all perfect. They’re polite, charming, attentive and know how to resolve almost any issue. That’s great, but there is just one problem. There are only 3 of them.Too much face-to-face and manual interaction with clients just is not scalable. Customers waiting too long for support, lose patience. However, simply adding more staff to try and combat this can actually cause more problems, adding more complexity to the managerial role and significantly increasing company expenses.It is necessary to multiply your staff digitally with efficient online customer training programs.

‍4 - “It is only easy or simple when you know how to use it.”

‍Of course, your product is simple - but this doesn’t mean everyone will understand it immediately. It is fundamental that companies don’t assume prior knowledge or ability on the client’s part.

Time and care must be taken to really understand client difficulties and build client-focused training that helps them clarify their doubts. Customer’s expectations are shattered when they find it difficult to use your platform after being told how easy it is….then they leave. “It is only easy or simple when you know how to use it.”

‍5 - Analytics, data - Tracking learner progress, where do people get stuck?

‍Probably the area that is most neglected when it comes to customer support is getting hold of good quality data.

The metrics will shine a light on blind spots so that you stop running your customer success department blindfolded. The only way companies can improve their customer success is through accurate measurement and data collection.

If this data is used to make improvements in the service as a whole you can expect more engagement, more participation, and higher customer retention.

‍Conclusion

We are afraid of starting activities as we don’t understand how much time it’ll take and how to do customer education, think that it can be overwhelming.

As you can see from what one of our clients said above, fixing customer education can seem like a monumental task. But, with the right system and technology in place, setting up your first course can take as little as 15 minutes.

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