If you’re selling services and products via a mobile app, customer support should be a key part of your business. Even a small ecommerce store will have a segment of customers who face issues with their orders or have additional questions about the products available.
Businesses offer customer support through different channels. Some online businesses only offer email support while others provide multiple communication channels besides simple email.
If you have an app, you should have a grip over the best customer support practices to grow your business. In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of customer support for your app, and how to manage the same.
Why is customer support crucial for your mobile app?
If you’re just starting a website or an app and plan to sell products and services, customer support is probably the last thing you consider.
Your first priority would be to develop the digital assets needed to sell your products. Next, you’ll probably find ways to market your website or app.
What about customer support? Any business at a nascent stage of its lifecycle is more concerned about orders and sales rather than solving customer problems. This is not uncommon and understandable.
As your business grows, however, customer support becomes important. Here are some reasons it’s crucial for the growth and scalability of your business:
- Customer retention: Retaining customers is a big part of running a business. Every time you lose a customer, you throw away all the effort it took to acquire them in the first place. Robust customer support can help with retention and issue resolution.
- Reviews & ratings: Bad reviews & ratings are a direct result of inadequate customer support. In the long run, bad reviews can affect your ability to grow your online business. A strong customer support system can reduce the number of bad reviews you get.
- Customer acquisition: Acquiring new customers is expensive. With good customer support, you can build loyalty and inspire them to recommend and refer new customers. This can help you optimize customer acquisition costs.
- Feedback: Listening to customers and getting feedback is essential for improving your app’s experience. A good customer support team would convey valuable feedback to the concerned departments and help the website or app improve.
Five essentials to manage your app’s customer support
Customer support is crucial for the long-term growth and success of your mobile app. It is however not easy to create a robust customer support system. Besides the right personnel, you also need to have an internal workflow that reduces response time and enhances customer satisfaction.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss the five essentials to managing your app’s customer support.
#1: Choose the right customer support channels
The first obvious step is to select the right channel for customer support. In some cases, email support may be enough. If not, you may need a more direct form of communication.
Selecting the right channel for customer support is not that difficult. All you need to do is see what other successful apps are doing to address customer issues and queries.
Seems easy, right?
While selecting a channel may be easy, you need to have the resources to serve customers through it. For example, if you’re going to offer chat support via your app, it’s crucial to have a representative to monitor and reply to chats.
You should thus strike a balance between what the industry standard is, and the resources you have available.
#2: Add a FAQ section on the support screen
In many cases, customers face basic issues that don’t require the help of a support representative. These can be issues related to log-in not working or information about refunds and delivery times.
You can address these common questions with a FAQ section that provides information on such queries. This significantly reduces the burden on your customer support team and improves the time it takes to address common issues and queries.
#3: Integrate your FAQ question bank with a chatbot
Many companies integrate their chat software with a question bank. Doing this basically allows your customers to review a set of articles that are scraped based on their query.
This allows your customers to resolve the issue on their own and reduces the load on your customer support team. A lot of chatbots these days can be integrated with a knowledge base. For basic queries that can be answered via a detailed article, you ideally want customers to find solutions on their own and not rely on speaking to a customer support rep.
`#4: Set response time benchmarks
Let’s assume you have a new mobile app and just offer email support. Via email support, your average response time would be somewhere between 16-24 hours.
Once you set this standard, you have to continually meet it. This can be done by prioritizing tickets based on the last time you responded to them.
In your customer support system, set reminders that are triggered when a ticket hasn’t been responded to in a standard timeframe. Over time, your response time will reduce and you can then revise your standard response time again.
#5: Offer support within your app
Many app companies redirect customers to a browser page when they try to contact customer support. This can harm the user experience and make some customers abandon the process midway.
Ideally, your app should have a customer support window within the app. If you’re offering chat support, the chat window should work within the app interface. Similarly, if you offer email support, you should have a contact form on your support screen instead of an email ID that customers would need to copy.
AppMySite: Offer customer chat in your mobile app
Integrating chat software with your app can be a fairly tedious process. If you’re working with a no-code mobile app maker like AppMySite, you can effortlessly integrate your website’s chat software with the app.
This has many benefits. First, you can respond to your app customers from the same interface that you respond to your website customers. Secondly, the entire process is completely code-free. All you have to do is add your website’s chat software credentials to ensure it’s connected to the app.
Within the app, your customers will be able to access the chat option and speak to you directly. A tool like AppMySite essentially converts your WordPress website into an app, making it ideal for non-tech professionals to develop apps from scratch.
In conclusion
Customer support is a key part of running an online business. As mobile app usage grows, it’s only natural that businesses will start giving priority to customer support on mobile apps.
This article explores the importance of customer support for online businesses and how to approach it for app customers. With a robust customer support system, you can scale your business exponentially by reducing acquisition costs and enhancing user retention.
