Business Practices | | Published May 28, 2013

Why a Collaborative Customer Support Model Works Best

The most effective help desk teams know that collaborative customer support service is the best way to achieve customer service success. Customer service is challenging. A help desk fields so many different questions; some super simple and some a tad more difficult. Customer support requires a vast knowledge that can be called upon at any given moment.

It’s Monday morning and you haven’t even had your first cup of coffee yet when your phone rings. A customer is calling up with a complaint that is rather complex and you have barely started your week. It would appear it is going to be a long one, both for you and for the customer!

That is unless you have the means for collaboration with team members to assist with finding a solution to the problem. When a company has stellar customer support, there’s bound to be less continued complaints and customer dissatisfaction. Great customer support can result in more sales if all the reviews, talk, and “word of mouth” is focused on how great your business is.

Work as a Team

This is why a collaborative customer support model is so important. If you are tackling a problem by yourself, you may become overwhelmed or make a mistake. Not that you are prone to errors – but with so many customers to help, a customer with a big issue can really throw a monkey wrench into the works.

If there are multiple team members working on one problem though, you get an “assembly line” efficiency not found in other methods. Suddenly a big problem is turned into a handful of small problems which are easier to tackle.

One trick to this system of customer support is for everyone to take on a specific element of customer service. You can’t have everyone specialize in exchanges and no one in fixing errors – one person has to take on exchanges, another repairs, yet another refunds, and so on and so forth. This may mean involving people in your customer support who don’t normally take on that role.

Collaborative customer support may be challenging, of course, depending on how many people you have. What you want is the best possible option for when a customer repeatedly calls or emails back. One slip-up and your customer ends up getting lackluster service and demanding their money back.

On the Same Page

The main trick to a collaborative support model is for everyone to work as a team. To do that, everyone must be on the same page. This is sometimes easier said than done, especially over the course of multiple phone calls or emails.

If you don’t have a proper help desk system set up, you can get confused fairly quickly. Worse, so will your customer, which gives them a greater chance of leaving you and going someplace else. Quickly word will spread around that your customer service isn’t exactly up to par.

The best way to circumvent this issue is to use a collaborative customer support system. A system that lets your help desk representatives take extensive notes so there is no stone left unturned and no hidden problems that might resurface in the future.

Using a collaborative help desk ensures that when that customer calls on Monday morning and you take down their grievance there will be no confusion later on in the week when they call back and reach another customer support agent. We have all been on the receiving end of having to explain our situation repeatedly and that is never fun. Take that awful situation away from your customers by getting all your customer service pros on the same page!

TeamSupport.com is an easy to use web support software with superior technology and features that provide a collaborative and complete customer service experience. Learn more about how TeamSupport can get your help desk team to collaborate here.